ia vate sacro_.

Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these
notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest and
importance. There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard of the
assassination of the revolted Avidius Cassius, against whom he was
marching; _he was sorry_, he said, _to be deprived of the pleasure of
pardoning him_. And there are one or two more anecdotes of him which show
the same spirit. But the great record for the outward life of a man who
has left such a record of his lofty inward aspirations as that which
Marcus Aurelius has left, is the clear consenting voice of all his
contemporaries,--high and low, friend and enemy, pagan and Christian,--in
praise of his sincerity, justice, and goodness. The world's charity does
not err on the side of excess, and here was a man occupying the most
conspicuous station in the world, and professing the highest possible
standard of conduct; yet the world was obliged to declare that he walked
worthily of his profession. Long after his death, his bust was to be seen
in the houses of private men through the wide Roman Empire. It may be the
vulgar part of human nature which busies itself with the semblance and
doings of living sovereigns; it is its nobler part which busies itself
with those of the dead. These busts of Marcus Aurelius, in the homes of
Gaul, Britain, and Italy, bore witness, not to the inmates' frivolous
curiosity about princes and palaces, but to their reverential memory of
the passage of a great man upon the earth.

Two things, however, before one turns from the outward to the inward life
of Marcus Aurelius, force themselves upon one's notice, and demand a word
of comment: he persecuted the Christians, and he had for his son the
vicious and brutal Commodus. The persecution at Lyons, in which Attalus
and Pothinus suffered, the persecution at Smyrna, in which Polycarp
suffered, took place in his reign. Of his humanity, of his tolerance, of
his horror of cruelty and violence, of his wish to refrain from severe
measures against the Christians, of his anxiety to temper the severity of
these measures when they appeared to him indispensable, there is no doubt;
but, on the one hand, it is certain that the letter, attributed to him,
directing that no Christian should be punished for being a Christian, is
spurious; it is almost certain that his alleged answer to the authorities
of Lyons, in which he directs th