The Emperor Marcus Aurelius

“Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the most beautiful figure in history. He is one of those consoling and hope-inspiring marks which stand for ever to remind our weak and easily discouraged race how high human goodness and perseverance have once been carried and may be carried again. The interest of mankind is peculiarly attracted by examples of signal goodness in high places; for that testimony to the worth of goodness is the most striking which is borne by those to whom all the means of pleasure and self-indulgence lay open, by those who had at their command the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them. Marcus Aurelius was the ruler of the grandest of Empires and he was one of the best of men. Besides him history presents one or two other sovereigns eminent for their goodness, such as Saint Louis and Alfred. But Marcus Aurelius has for us Moderns this great superiority of interest over Saint Louis or Alfred, that he lived and acted in a state of society modern by its essential characteristics, in an epoch akin to our own, in a brilliant centre of civilisation. Trajan talks of ‘our enlightened age’ just as glibly as The Times talks of it. Marcus Aurelius thus becomes for us a man like ourselves, a man in all things tempted as we are. Saint Louis inhabits an atmosphere of medieval Catholicism which the man of the nineteenth century may admire, indeed, and passionately wish to inhabit, but wh