AS a horse when he has run, a dog when he has tackled the game, a bee when it has made honey, so a (good) man when he has done a good act does not call out to others to come and see, but goes on to another act as a vine goes on to produce again its grapes in season.”

  This is Long’s translation of what is perhaps the most remarkable sentence in the writings of Marcus Aurelius. To the question of what is the highest good, the greatest happiness possible for life, the Stoics answered “tranquillity,”—the peaceful repose in itself of the mind great enough to be superior to the inevitable at its worst. But in this sentence the Stoic who has been called “the noblest of the pagans, the crown and flower of Stoicism,” clearly proposes efficiency as the object of life. To work as the vine bears its fruit and then, without stopping for praise or blame, to prepare for new bearing as the natural object and reward of existence,—this is an ideal higher than that of self-repression, for it involves self-expression, the development of all that is positive and noble at the expense of the evil and merely negative forces of life. That the highest possible efficiency is ever to be attained except through the deliberate sacrifice, for the work’s sake, of the peace of a mind at rest in itself,—this is not to be believed for human nature at its average, though it is not to be denied as a possibility. If Polycarp or any martyr who died in the persecutions under Aurelius, died not merely to win a “martyr’s crown,” but for the work’s sake,—for the sake of the efficiency of those after him who, taught by him, were to build, more wisely than they knew, the fabric of the coming centuries, then his loss of personal tranquillity was not important to the sum of things. The always increasing satisfaction of always increasing efficiency, obtained at the expense of all manner of intellectual disturbance and physical discomfort,—this is what Aurelius, in the definitions of his fourth book, seems to contemplate as the highest good. “Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees, working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?” This is his question and it involves a higher thought than any possible for the Stoicism of self-suppression. It is the idea of education, of the evolution of the good in a universe where bee and bird, flower and fruit, men and gods, are vehicles of a universal force of beneficent activity, making for universal goodness and eternal improvement.

  Marcus Annius Verus, as Marcus Aurelius was named originally, was born at Rome April 20th, 121 A.D., from a family of senatorial rank which succeeded to the imperial dignity by Hadrian’s adoption of Antoninus Pius. When Antoninus Pius, the uncle of Aurelius, died in 161 A.D., after succeeding Hadrian on the throne, Aurelius succeeded him, reigning until his own death March 17th, 180 A.D. He did not neglect his work as “Imperator” of the armies of Rome because of his philosophy; and when he died, it was the death of a veteran soldier in camp at Vindobona (now Vienna), far from the comforts of Roman civilization. He has been reproached with persecuting the Christians and defended on the ground that he thought them dangerous anarchists, whose theories were irreconcilable with the authority of his government. It has been asserted also that his wife, the Empress Faustina, was very dissolute, and while this has been denied, it is undeniable that his son, Commodus, for whom the “Meditations” are said to have been written, was one of the weakest and worst of Roman tyrants. While this has been dwelt on with some satisfaction by those who are disposed to condemn the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, it leaves him still “a pagan saint” whose intellect, elevated, pure, and strong, remains to us in his “Meditations” as one of the great and permanent forces of civilization.