mode of life more desirable than the being a king, for those who
shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will become a
possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific Vision be
indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an ecstasy,"
affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then, for certain
elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been [58] discovered
more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you might induce
such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them the
distasteful task of governing other men, or even of leading them to
victory in battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure, their
dominion would be wholly a ministry to others: they would have taken
upon them-"the form of a servant": they would be reigning for the
well-being of others rather than their own. The true king, the
righteous king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better
land and its perfected company--so real a thing to him, definite and
real as the pictured scenes of his psalter--to take part in or to
arbitrate men's quarrels, about the transitory appearances of things.
In a lower degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream
is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus
Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books, to be the ruler of the
Roman people in peace, and still more, in war.

To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however dim,
which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to him,
together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule nothing
less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato's requirement, now
consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on the Danube. That
it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact, as he saw him [59]
ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the pageantry of an
imperial departure, yet with the air less of a sanguine and
self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other already defeated.
Through the fortune of the subsequent years, passing and repassing so
inexplicably from side to side, the rumour of which reached him amid
his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always to see that central figure,
with its habitually dejected hue grown now to an expression of positive
suffering, all the stranger from its contrast with the magnificent
armour worn by the emperor on this occasion, as it had been worn by his
predecessor Hadrian.