CHAPTER IX

THE ANTONINES

V.

THE EMPEROR AND THE AGE

It is noteworthy how in this period the coinage that had hitherto reflected so many sides of the public life of Rome and the Empire, limits its range of portrayal. As with a flourish of trumpets the first issues of the reign tell of the ‘providence of the gods’ and ‘the felicity of the age’, and the coins never tire of the story of the devout Emperor guarded by the gods. But, sincerely enough, soon no more is heard of the ‘felicity of the age’. Wars and victories, triumphs, the subjugation of dreaded tribes, the saving of Italy, the safety of its people, lasting peace—these are the themes in almost bewildering abundance. They seem to proclaim almost too loudly some bloodthirsty oriental despot or the greatest warrior of Rome. Their whole thought is centered on the figure, the fame and the legend of the Emperor, though he was of all men the simplest, the farthest removed from the heroic or the divine, from the desire of a legend of glory. Of the concerns and beliefs of the Roman people, of domestic policy the coins give no more than a hint here and there. There is no trace of the panhellenic idea and but few references to the Roman myths, as though the attempts of Hadrian and Antoninus to give them life again were all forgotten. It is now the temple of the Egyptian Thoth that attests the ‘religio Augusti’; the currency of Alexandria is now more closely linked than ever before with the Empire coins, and there is a widespread following of its example. It would seem as though local forms of life were dying out, absorbed by the centralizing purpose of Rome. As citizenship spread more and more throughout the provinces, the peculiar character and the separate position of Rome became less and less distinct. The forces of the peoples within the Empire, that were still so strong under Hadrian, and their spiritual characteristics seem to merge into each other. But a closer view reveals how beneath the apparent uniformity there is an ever stronger growth. There arises a new dangerous power in the spiritual world of the period which seeks and accepts uniformity, but only to be ‘Roman’ as a means of wresting mastery from Rome. It would seem as though the grim days of the plague and the wars had paralyzed the imagination of men and robbed them of gaiety, the love of diversity, the instinct for a real life of their own. The thoughts of men began to seek new forms and new motives. And the Emperor claims to be the centre of the world and of its life. All this cannot be mere chance; it must reveal the deepest movement of the age and the fundamental political shaping of it by the Emperor.

Marcus, as befitted a Roman, was governed by an austere soldier-like unflinching faithfulness till death. To his Stoicism all came foreordained and self-evident. Like many another of his time, he looked down upon the countless peoples and cults, the variety of existence, its ebb and flow, its rise and fall like the waves of a sea, now calm now stormy, and perceived it as a harmony. Misfortune to him was no evil but as divinely ordained as is felicity. The providence of the gods guided the world with immutable mastery. The man and the moment were transient parts of an unending process. “Alexander and his groom are alike, for both pass and perish”, “How many men do not even know thy name, how many will forget it in a moment, but how many who praise thee now will turn to censure thee?” Asia and Europe are but corners of creation, the ocean is but a drop and Athos but a grain in respect of the universe, the whole present a point in eternity. “All is petty, mutable, and transient”. “Friend, thou wast made a citizen of this great commonwealth, what matter to thee if it is for five years only ... Depart content, for he that calls thee hence is content too”'

To Marcus the tenets of Stoicism were a hard-won faith. It was his own: he was not like the gladiator defenseless when he lost his sword, but like the pancratiast that has only to clench his fist to be ready. Thus he had not Hadrian’s playful pity for his soul, but hard words and rebukes when it fails in action to be worthy of his faith. In acts of State he was guided by the laws of the immutable determinism that ruled the world. The depths of his nature were not stirred by the criminal or by his nearest, by dark figure or the bright. All men were to him shadows, gratefully conjured up when he sank into meditation about himself, studied when he must know how to act, to be met with kindliness, to be urged to unity and co-operation, to be taught, chastised and led. Thus he writes his Meditations in Greek, and is at his ease among the Greek philosophers of Alexandria, like them a citizen of the great commonwealth of reasoning men. He is at home in both cultures, Greek and Roman, and to him Rome embodied the idea of austerity, duty and action, but the law of Rome is but a part of the law of the world. Anxious, pedantic almost as he was in his Roman formalism, devoted as he was in the service of Rome, yet he remained in mind aloof.

Rome was the capital, the central point of the world; but little indeed of what ancient Rome had meant still clung to the Romans or to their emperor to justify Rome’s claim to be the tyrannical mistress of the world, to compel the Emperor to be no more than the first of the Roman stock. The Syrians Pompeianus and Cassius had, too, the name of Roman, as had countless other provincials, and Pompeianus had deserved and won the highest honors of Rome, and Cassius had presumed to claim the throne of the Roman Emperor. One of his decrees made it less necessary for Roman senatorial families to be rooted in Italian soil, and, after Cassius’ revolt, governors might no longer administer the provinces of their birth. The Empire from being a confederation of peoples in willing allegiance to Rome, was to be the Empire of a united world in which all are Roman citizens, an universal monarchy under an absolute emperor. Now is to be the fulfillment of what Caesar and Claudius planned, and what Marcus himself formulated. “And I conceived an idea of a democratic State, administered according to equality or free speech, and of a monarchy that above all honored the freedom of the governed”. Nor less did the dynastic system which he thrust home in the face of the ruling idea of the choice of the best show how the sovereign powers of the ancient State were forced to serve his strong impulse towards the hereditary principle. The city-state Empire of Rome dissolves before the universalistic conception of Marcus. Thus on his Stoic conception of the world he based the absolute monarchy of Rome—and of the countries of the West. From the teaching of the Stoic Panaetius, passed on by Cicero, Augustus had conceived the idea of the rule of the optimus civis. Now, less than seven generations later, Marcus, almost the last of the Stoics, found Stoic doctrines to arm an attempt to make good the ravages of time. “For me as Antoninus my city and fatherland is Rome, but as man the world. Man is the citizen of the supreme city in which the other cities are as it were houses. In what other universal constitution can the whole race of men have a share?”

Thus Marcus is no longer the first citizen of Rome but of the Great State of reason, the providentially guided controller of the unifying centralized Empire. Thus from his high tower he surveys the multifarious world, unshaken by its crises. Now in ascetic serenity, strangely unmoved by its wild impulses, now quietist and gently understanding, now acting from deeper insight, now making good its breaches with victory, he seems to reconcile its oppositions in himself and to realize its harmony in his belief in its predestined course. He will be just and yet becomes a “robber”. Now he proclaims lasting peace; now he has a whole people destroyed. Now he sacrifices cheerfully all his fine possessions to meet the needs of the pestilence and war. Now he tears whole peoples from their country and plants them elsewhere, as one who roots up ancient forests and turns deserts into smiling fields. For so it is ordained. This devout patient thinker took more names from victories than any of the emperors before him. The ancient simplicity and moderation was past: the Spaniard Marcus was neither of Roman nor Greek stock. His idea of the harmony of the world was intellectual alone, for it rested on a culture that was international: it was the desire for a formula to resolve the confusion of an international Empire. His creative action was ever haunted by doubts. His belief was sprung from culture, not of the soul. To him the attitude of Christian martyrs was beyond understanding: “Of what kind is the soul, that is ready, if it must be released from the body, to be quenched or scattered or to abide together. Though this readiness is to proceed from one’s own judgment, not in mere headlong attack, like the Christians; but with reason and dignity and so as to convince another, without tragic show”. Thus he lived in thought and action, the disciple of a Stoicism that no longer sufficed even for the intellectual needs of his time. Tragic in all contradiction, which he harbored but did not feel as tragic, he saved the Empire from its perils from without, but himself, his own soul, he could not save.

VI.

INTERNAL POLICY