"The rottenness of the material substance of every individual thing—water, dust, bones, stench.... And this breathing element is another of the same, changing from this to that....

"Either the gods have no power, or they have power. If they have not, why pray? If they have, why not pray for deliverance from the fear, or the desire, or the pain, which the thing causes, rather than for the withholding or the giving of the particular thing? For certainly, if they can co-operate with men, it is for these purposes they can co-operate. But perhaps thou wilt say, The gods have put all these in my own power. Then is it not better to use what is in thine own power and be free, than to be set on what is not in thy power—a slave and contemptible? And who told thee that the gods do not help us even to what is in our own power?"[[6]]

This handful of short passages all from the same place, with a few omitted, may be taken as representing very fairly the mind of Marcus Aurelius. The world was his to rule, and he felt it a duty to remember how slight a thing it was. This was not the temper of Alexander or of Cæsar,—of men who make mankind, and who, by their belief in men and in the power of their own ideas to lift men to higher planes of life, actually do secure that advance is made,—and that advance not the smallest. Yet he speaks of Alexander as a "tragic actor."[[7]] For a statesman, the attitude of Marcus is little short of betrayal. He worked, he ruled, he endowed, he fought—he was pure, he was conscientious, he was unselfish—but he did not believe, and he was ineffectual. The Germans it might have been beyond any man's power to repel at that day, but even at home Marcus was ineffectual. His wife and his son were by-words. He had almost a morbid horror of defilement from men and women of coarse minds,—a craving too for peace and sympathy; he shrank into himself, condoned, ignored. Among his benefactors he does not mention Hadrian, who really gave him the Empire—and it is easy to see why. In everything the two are a contrast. Hadrian's personal vices and his greatness as a ruler, as a man handling men and moving among ideas[[8]]—these were impossible for Marcus.

Nor was the personal religion of this pure and candid spirit a possible one for mankind. "A genuine eternal Gospel," wrote Renan of this diary of Marcus, "the book of the Thoughts will never grow old, for it affirms no dogma. The Gospel has grown old in certain parts; Science no longer allows us to admit the naïve conception of the supernatural which is its base.... Yet Science might destroy God and the soul, and the book of the Thoughts would remain young in its life and truth." Renan is right; when Science, or anything else, "destroys God and the soul," there is no Gospel but that of Marcus; and yet for men it is impossible; and it is not young—it is senile. Duty without enthusiasm, hope or belief—belief in man, of course, for "God and the soul" are by hypothesis "destroyed"—duty, that is, without object, reason or result, it is a magnificent fancy, and yet one recurs to the criticism that Marcus passed upon the Christians. Is there not a hint of the school about this? Is it not possible that the simpler instincts of men,—instincts with a history as ludicrous as Anthropologists sometimes sketch for us,—may after all come nearer the truth of things than semi-Stoic reflexion? At all events the instincts have ruled the world so far with the co-operation of Reason, and are as yet little inclined to yield their rights to their colleague. They have never done so without disaster.

The world did not accept Marcus as a teacher. Men readily recognized his high character, but for a thousand years and more nobody dreamed of taking him as a guide—nobody, that is, outside the schools. For the world it was faith or unbelief, and the two contemporaries already mentioned represent the two poles to which the thoughts of men gravitated, who were not yet ready for a cleavage with the past.

Lucian

"I am a Syrian from the Euphrates,"[[9]] wrote Lucian of himself; and elsewhere he has a playful protest against a historian of his day, magnificently ignorant of Eastern geography, who "has taken up my native Samosata, and shifted it, citadel, walls and all, into Mesopotamia," and by this new feat of colonization has apparently turned him into a Parthian or Mesopotamian.[[10]] Samosata lay actually in Commagene, and there Lucian spent his boyhood talking Syriac, his native language.[[11]] He was born about 125 A.D. His family were poor, and as soon as he left school, the question of a trade was at once raised, for even a boy's earnings would be welcome. At school he had had a trick of scraping the wax from his tablets and making little figures of animals and men, so his father handed him over to his mother's brother, who was one of a family of statuaries. But a blunder and a breakage resulted in his uncle thrashing him, and he ran home to his mother. It was his first and last day in the sculptor's shop, and he went to bed with tears upon his face. In later life he told the story of a dream which he had that night—a long and somewhat literary dream modelled on Prodicus' fable of the Choice of Herakles. He dreamed that two women appeared to him, one dusty and workmanlike, the other neat, charming and noble. They were Sculpture and Culture, and he chose the latter. He tells the dream, he says, that the young may be helped by his example to pursue the best and devote themselves to Culture, regardless of immediate poverty.[[12]] He was launched somehow on the career of his choice and became a rhetorician. It may be noted however that an instinctive interest in art remained with him, and he is reckoned one of the best art-critics of antiquity.

Rhetoric, he says, "made a Greek of him," went with him from city to city in Greece and Ionia, "sailed the Ionian sea with him and attended him even as far as Gaul, scattering plenty in his path."[[13]] For, as he explains elsewhere, he was among the teachers who could command high fees, and he made a good income in Gaul.[[14]] But, about the age of forty, he resolved "to let the gentlemen of the jury rest in peace—tyrants enough having been arraigned and princes enough eulogized."[[15]] From now onward he wrote dialogues—he had at last found his proper work.

Lucian's Dialogues

Dialogue in former days had been the vehicle of speculation—"had trodden those aerial plains on high above the clouds, where the great Zeus in heaven is borne along on winged car." But it was to do so no more, and in an amusing piece Lucian represents Dialogue personified as bringing a suit against him for outrage. Had Lucian debased Dialogue, by reducing him to the common level of humanity and making him associate with such persons as Aristophanes and Menippus, one a light-hearted mocker at things sacred, the other a barking, snarling dog of a Cynic,—thus turning Dialogue into a literary Centaur, neither fit to walk nor able to soar? Or was Dialogue really a musty, fusty, superannuated creature, and greatly improved now for having a bath and being taught to smile and to go genially in the company of Comedy? Between the attack and the defence, the case is fairly stated.[[16]] Lucian created a new mode in writing—or perhaps he revived it, for it is not very clear how much he owes to his favourite Menippus, the Gadarene Cynic and satirist of four centuries before.