by misfortune in the field, to
the prisoner of war. Others had been merciful and variously indulgent,
upon their own discretion, and upon a random impulse, to some, or
possibly to all of their prisoners; ... but Marcus Aurelius first
resolutely maintained that certain indestructible rights adhered to
every soldier simply as a man, which rights capture by the sword, or any
other accident of war, could do nothing to shake or diminish.... Here is
an immortal act of goodness built upon an immortal basis; for so long as
armies congregate and the sword is the arbiter of international
quarrels, so long will it deserve to be had in remembrance that the
first man who set limits to the empire of wrong, and first translated
within the jurisdiction of man's moral nature that state of war which
had heretofore been consigned by principle no less than by practice to
anarchy, animal violence, and brute force, was also the first
philosopher who sat upon a throne. In this, and in his universal spirit
of forgiveness, we cannot but acknowledge a Christian by
anticipation.... And when we view him from this distant age, as heading
that shining array, the Howards and the Wilberforces, who have since
then, in a practical sense, hearkened to the sighs of 'all prisoners and
captives,' we are ready to suppose him addressed by the great Founder of
Christianity in the words of Scripture, 'Thou art not far from the
kingdom of God.'"[32]

Born to be a thinker rather than an actor, by nature framed for the life
of a recluse, by temperament inclined to private study and
contemplation, this best of emperors and of men by Providential destiny
was doomed to spend the greater part of his days in the tumult of
affairs, and, like a true Roman, died at last a soldier's death in his
camp on the banks of the Danube, where, in after years, another line of
"Roman Emperors," the sovereigns of the "Holy Roman Empire of Germany,"
had their seat. For more than a century after his death, and so long as
Rome retained a remnant of her old vitality, a grateful people adored
him as a saint, and he who "had no bust, picture, or statue of Marcus in
his house was looked upon as a profane and irreligious man." To this
day, beside the equestrian statue named by Merivale, in the heart of
modern Rome, a few steps from her principal thronged thoroughfare, a
column which time has spared still commemorates the last of the Romans.
The Emperor's statue which once surmounted it was d