Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to Himself - College of Stoic Philosophers

v MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONINUS cxix
With the Thoughts in our hands he is far more
intelligible and unmistakable to us to-day, than to his own
contemporaries. Silence makes men enigmas to their
fellows. Though by tenacity of moral will he was the
strongest man of his generation, Avidius Cassius took
him for 'a philosophic mule,' interpreting his sufferance
of evil-doers and his leniency to traitors as an index of
stupidity, hypocrisy, and weakness. When, in days of
gloom and terror, death for the fourth time put forth his
hand and took from him his little son, his last but
Commodus, Rome saw only the unmoved face ;
but the
reader of the Thoughts knows how the loss of a dear
child l recurs as the type instance of a poignant grief,
and how twice brooding over Commodus he combines
the desolate citations
Lives are reaped like ears of corn,
One is spared, another shorn.
Though I and both my sons be spurned of God,
There is, be sure, a reason. 2
There are men, often of highly sensitive nature, who
pass for unemotional, because they will not give the rein
to individual passion, but find satisfaction for their
emotions in general rather than in personal affections ;
their very sensitiveness and restraint takes refuge in
reserve. This is the temper
which has animated re-
formers, patriots, philanthropists of the Mazzini, Howard,
or Wilberforce type, the men who have espoused causes
and principles and large enthusiasms of humanity, and
1 i. 8 ; viii. 49 ; ix. 40 ; x. 34, 35 ; xi. 34.
2
vii. 40 ; xi. 6.