On his way home, he visited lower Egypt and Greece, displaying everywhere the noblest solicitude for the welfare of his vast empire, and drawing forth from his subjects, who were astonished at his goodness, sentiments of the profoundest admiration and regard. At Athens, which this imperial pagan philosopher must have venerated as a pious Jew did the city of Jerusalem, he showed a catholicity of intellect worthy of his great heart, by founding chairs of philosophy for each of the four chief sects—Platonic, Stoic, Peri patetic, and Epicurean. No man ever labored more earnestly to make that heathen faith which he loved so well, and that heathen philosophy which he believed in so truly, a vital and dominant reality. Towards the close of the year 176 A.D., he reached Italy, and celebrated his merciful and bloodless triumph on the 23d of Dec. In the succeeding autumn, lie departed for Germany, where fresh disturbances had broken out among the restless and volatile barbarians. He was again successful in several sanguinary engage xnents; but his originally weak constitution, shattered by perpetual anxiety and fatigue, at length sunk, and he d. either at Vienna or at Sirmium, on the 17th of Mar., 180 A.D., after a reign of twenty years.
Marcus Aurelius A. was the flower of the stoical philosophy. It seems almost inex plicable that so harsh and crabbed a system should have produced as pure and gentle an example of humanity as the records of heathen—we had almost said, Christian history, can show. Perhaps, as a modern philosophic theologian suggests, it was because stoicism was the most solid and practical of the philosophic theories, and the one which most earnestly opposed itself to the rapidly increasing licentiousness of the time, that the chaste heart of the youth was drawn towards it. At twelve years of age, he avowed himself a follower of Zeno, Epictetus, etc. Stoics were his leachers—Diognotus, Apol lonius, and Junius Rusticus; and he to be considered one of the most thoughtful teachers of the school. Oratory he studied under Herodes Atticus and Cornelius Fronto. His love of learning was insatiable. Even after lie had attained to the highest dignity of the state, he did not disdain to attend the school of Sextus of Chteronea. Men of letters were his most intimate friends, and received the highest honors both when alive and dead. His range of studies was extensive, embracing morals, metaphysics, mathematics, jurisprudence, music, poetry, and painting. Nor must we forget that these were culti vated not merely in the spring-time of his life, when enthusiasm was strong, and experi ence had not saddened his thoughts, and when study was his only labor, but during the tumults of perpetual war, and the distraction necessarily arising from the government of so vast an empire. The man who loved peace with his whole soul, died without behold ing it, and yet the everlasting presence of war never tempted him to sink into a mere warrior. He maintained uncorrupted to the end of his noble life his philosophic and philanthropic aspirations. After his decease, which was felt to be a national calamity, every Roman citizen, and many others in distant portions of the empire, procured an image or statue of him, which more than a hundred years after was still found among their household gods. He became almost an object of worship, and was believed to appear in dreams, like the saints of subsequent Christian ages.
There is one feature in his character, however, which it would be dishonest to pass over—his hostility, namely, to Christianity. He was a persecutor of the new religion, and, it is clearly demonstrated, was cognizant, to a certain extent at least, of the atroci ties perpetrated upon its followers. Numerous explanations have been offered of his conduct in this matter. The most popular one is that he for once allowed himself to be led away by evil counselors; but a deeper reason is to be found in that very earnestness with which he clung to the old heathen faith of his ancestors. He believed it to be true, and to be the parent of those philosophies which had sprung up out of the same soil: he saw that a new religion, the character of which had been assiduously, though perhaps unconsciously, misrepresented to him, both as an immoral superstition and a mysterious political conspiracy, was secretly spreading throughout the empire, and that it would hold no commerce with the older religion, but condemned it, generally in the strongest terms. It was, therefore, comparatively easy, even for so humane a ruler, to imagine it
his duty to extirpate this unnaturally hostile sect. Mr. John Stuart Mill finds in this tragical error of the great emperor a most striking warning against the danger of inter fering with the liberty of thought. What he says is so completely in harmony with the above conception of the motives of Marcus Aurelius, and is in itself so eloquent, that no apology is required in quoting the passage: "If ever any one possessed of power had grounds for thinking himself the best and most enlightened among his contemporaries, it was the emperor Marcus Aurelius. Absolute monarch of the whole civilized world, he preserved through life not only the most unblemished justice. but, what was less to be expected from his stoical breeding, the tenderest heart. The few failings which are attributed to him were all on the side of indulgence; while his writings, the highest ethical product of the ancient mind, differ scarcely perceptibly, if they differ at all, from the most characteristic teachings of Christ. This man, a better Christian, in all but the dogmatic sense of the word, than almost any of the ostensibly Christian sovereigns who have since reigned, persecuted Christianity. Placed at the summit of all the previous attainments of humanity, with an open, unfettered intellect, and a character which led him, of himself, to embody in his moral writings the Christian ideal, he yet failed to see that Christianity was to be a good and not an evil to the world, with his duties to which he was so deeply penetrated. Existing society he knew to be in a deplorable state. But such as it was, he saw, or thought he saw, that it was held together, and prevented from being worse, by belief and reverence of the received divinities. As a ruler of mankind, he deemed it his duty not to suffer society to fall in pieces, and saw not how, if its existing ties were removed, any others could be formed which could again knit it together. The new religion aimed openly at dissolving these ties: unless, therefore, it was his duty to adopt that religion, it seemed to be his duty to put it down. Inasmuch, then, as the theology of Christianity did not appear to him true, or of divine origin— inasmuch as this strange history of a crucified God was not credible to him, and a system which purported to rest• entirely upon a foundation to him so wholly unbeliev able could not be foreseen by him to be that renovating agency which, after all abate ments, it has in fact proved to be—the gentlest and most amiable of philosophers and rulers, under a solemn sense of duty, authorized the persecution of Christianity. To my mind, this is one of the most tragical facts in all history. It is a bitter thought, how different a thing the Christianity of the world might have been, if the Christian faith had been adopted as the religion of the empire, under the auspices of Marcus Aurelius, instead of those of Constantine. But it would be equally unjust to him, and false to truth, to deny, that no one plea which Can be urged for punishing anti-Christian teaching, was wanting to Marcus Aurelius for punishing, as he did, the propagation of Christianity. No Christian more firmly believes that atheism is false, and tends to the dissolution of society, than Marcus Aurelius believed the same things of Christianity; he who, of all men then living, might have been thought the most capable of appreciating it. Unless any one who approves of punishment for the promulgation of opinions, flatters himself that he is a wiser and better man than Marcus Auelius—more deeply versed in the wisdom of his time—more elevated in his intellect above it—more earnest in his search for truth, or more single-minded in his devotion to it when found—let him abstain from that assump tion of the joint infallibility of himself and the multitude, which the great A. made with so unfortunate a result."