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Small as these matters appear, they are important when one has to deal with the general public, and not with a small circle of scholars; and it is the general public that the translator of a short masterpiece on morals, such as is the book of Marcus Aurelius, should have in view; his aim should be to make Marcus Aurelius's work as popular as the Imitation, and Marcus Aurelius's name as familiar as Socrates's.
The capability of unbending thus, the genuine cheerfulness which enters at due times into simple amusements, has been found not rarely in the highest and purest minds. For many years no incident of importance broke the even tenor of Aurelius's life. He lived peaceful, happy, prosperous, and beloved, watching without envy the increasing years of his adopted father.
This Cour du Cheval Blanc acquired its name from a plaster cast of Marcus Aurelius's celebrated steed which was originally placed here under a canopy or baldaquin held aloft by colonnettes. The moulds for this work were brought from Venice by Primaticcio and Vignole, but it was never cast in bronze and the statue itself disappeared in 1626.
He had; and yet the change came in 166; after that year Rome stood on the defensive until she fell. It was in that year, you will remember, that King An-tun Aurelius's envoys reached Loyang by way of Bumiah and the sea.
For the Roman statesman, the cause of mistake lay in that character of secret assemblages which the meetings of the Christian community wore, under a State-system as jealous of unauthorized associations as is the State-system of modern France. A Roman of Marcus Aurelius's time and position could not well see the Christians except through the mist of these prejudices.
The vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician the Græculus esuriens are in everybody's mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius's account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual Græculi, the education of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be overrated.
"On what grounds?" asked his Majesty. "On the grounds that he shared his throne with Verus," replied Monsieur, unhesitatingly. The King flushed at this reply, and answered in few words: "Marcus Aurelius's action to his brother may, be called generous; it was none the less inconsiderate.
An old Lyons commentator finds, indeed, in Marcus Aurelius's Greek, something characteristic, something specially firm and imperial; but I think an ordinary mortal will hardly find this: he will find crabbed Greek, without any great charm of distinct physiognomy.
Long is this: that he treats Marcus Aurelius's writings, as he treats all the other remains of Greek and Roman antiquity which he touches, not as a dead and dry matter of learning, but as documents with a side of modern applicability and living interest, and valuable mainly so far as this side in them can be made clear; that as in his notes on Plutarch's Roman Lives he deals with the modern epoch of Cæsar and Cicero, not as food for schoolboys, but as food for men, and men engaged in the current of contemporary life and action, so in his remarks and essays on Marcus Aurelius he treats this truly modern striver and thinker not as a Classical Dictionary hero, but as a present source from which to draw "example of life, and instruction of manners."
It is hardly possible that his glimpse will include even the top of Marcus Aurelius's head where he sits his bronze charger an extremely fat one so majestically in the piazza beyond those brothers, as if conscious of being the most noble equestrian statue which has ridden down to us from antiquity.
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