at numerous visitors were within, for the
courtyard was crowded with litters and horses [56] in waiting. For the
moment, indeed, all larger cares, even the cares of war, of late so
heavy a pressure, had been forgotten in what was passing with the
little Annius Verus; who for his part had forgotten his toys, lying all
day across the knees of his mother, as a mere child's ear-ache grew
rapidly to alarming sickness with great and manifest agony, only
suspended a little, from time to time, when from very weariness he
passed into a few moments of unconsciousness. The country surgeon
called in, had removed the imposthume with the knife. There had been a
great effort to bear this operation, for the terrified child, hardly
persuaded to submit himself, when his pain was at its worst, and even
more for the parents. At length, amid a company of pupils pressing in
with him, as the custom was, to watch the proceedings in the sick-room,
the eminent Galen had arrived, only to pronounce the thing done visibly
useless, the patient falling now into longer intervals of delirium.
And thus, thrust on one side by the crowd of departing visitors, Marius
was forced into the privacy of a grief, the desolate face of which went
deep into his memory, as he saw the emperor carry the child away--quite
conscious at last, but with a touching expression upon it of weakness
and defeat--pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for
one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its
obscure distress.

NOTES

42. +Transliteration: para tes metros to theosebes. Translation:
"rites deriving from [his] mother."

47. +Transliteration: koinos auto pros tous theous. Translation:
"common to him together with the gods."

49. +Transliteration: Tou aristou apolaue. Translation: "[Always] take
the best."

52. +Not indented in the original.

CHAPTER XIX: THE WILL AS VISION

Paratum cor meum deus! paratum cor meum!

[57] THE emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of
images in memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be
carried, together with the other images, in the great procession of the
Circus, and the addition of the child's name to the Hymn of the Salian
Priests: and so, stifling private grief, without further delay set
forth for the war.

True kingship, as Plato, the old master of Aurelius, had understood it,
was essentially of the nature of a service. If so be, you can discover
a