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For, representing in himself the spiritual supremacy of the Greek intellect and allied in bonds of chivalrous friendship to the world-conqueror of his day, he seems led as it were by the hand of Fate 'to comprehend, as has been said, 'more clearly than the Romans themselves the historical position of Rome, and to discern with greater insight than all other men could those two great resultants of ancient civilisation, the material empire of the city of the seven hills, and the intellectual sovereignty of Hellas.
They are an element in the cosmopolis which was the ideal of the world-conqueror. At the same time the nature of the history of their affairs vitally changes.
I thought how he had sat as cool and impassive under the iron hail of battle, with thousands and thousands of the best and bravest falling around him, the fate of nations hanging on a balanced scale in those fights of giants I thought how he, alone of men, had faced undaunted and self-confident, that greater than Hannibal, or Alexander, that world-conqueror Napoleon I thought how he had quelled the might of my own gallant land, and my blood seemed to thrill coldly in my veins, as it will at the recital of great deeds and noble daring and I knew not altogether whether it was the shudder of dislike, or the thrill of admiration that so shook me.
"Right, Hotep!" Rameses exclaimed. "It was such belief that made a world-conqueror of my grandsire." "Nay, thy pardon, O my Prince. Hotep's counsel will not always hold," Kenkenes objected. "Give me to know wherein it faileth," the prince demanded. "Alas! in a thousand things. In truth a man even draws his breath by the leave of others." "By the puny god, Harpocrates!" the prince cried, scoffing.
No straining is needed in order to fit this great prophetic picture of the world-Conqueror to Jesus.
The burden of his Meditations is self-mastery: a reasoning of himself out of the power of the small and great annoyances of life; this is to stand on the defensive; but the spiritual World-Conqueror must march out, and flash his conquering armies over all the continents of thought. An underlying sadness is to be felt in Aurelius's writings.
The reasons are, however, not altogether strategic; they are chiefly moral, and were not so clearly discernible then. In the face of national feeling, before the march of national regeneration, a single man, world-conqueror though he may have been during a period of national disorganization, is an object of microscopic size.
It is more and more striking that the machinery of publicity is so enormous, so constantly growing and so obviously destined to make the globe small, in relation of the objects, famous or obscure, which cover it, that it procures for the smallest facts and the most casual figures a reverberation to be expected only in the case of a world-conqueror.
The dreaded world-conqueror is no more in God's eyes than a wild beast, which He can ring and lead as He will, and not even as formidable as that, but like a horse or a mule, that can easily be bridled and directed. What majestic assertion lies in these figures and in 'My hook' and 'My bridle! How many conquerors and mighty men since then have been so mastered, and their schemes balked!
Attempts of Caesar to Avert Military Despotism But, if it remains a mere probability that Caesar ought not to be designated a world-conqueror in the same sense as Alexander and Napoleon, it is quite certain that his design was not to rest his new monarchy primarily on the support of the army nor generally to place the military authority above the civil, but to incorporate it with, and as far as possible subordinate it to, the civil commonwealth.
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