then his minister. He was lame--as a result, it was said, of a cruel punishment in his days of
slavery. He lived and taught at Rome until A.D. 90, when the Emperor Domitian, who had no use
for intellectuals, banished all philosophers. Epictetus thereupon retired to Nicopolis in Epirus,
where, after some years spent in writing and teaching, he died.
Marcus Aurelius ( A.D. 121-180) was at the other end of the social scale. He was the adopted son
of the good Emperor Antoninus Pius, who was his uncle and his father-in-law, whom he
succeeded in A.D. 161, and whose memory he revered. As Emperor, he devoted himself to Stoic
virtue. He had much need of fortitude, for his reign was beset by calamities--earthquakes,
pestilences, long and difficult wars, military insurrections. His Meditations, which are addressed
to himself, and apparently not intended for publication, show that he felt his public duties
burdensome, and that he suffered from a great weariness. His only son Commodus, who
succeeded him, turned out to be one of the worst of the many bad emperors, but successfully
concealed his vicious propensities so long as his father lived. The philosopher's wife Faustina was
accused, perhaps unjustly, of gross immorality, but he never suspected her, and after her death
took trouble about her deification. He persecuted the Christians, because they rejected the State
religion, which he considered politically necessary. In all his actions he was conscientious, but in
most he was unsuccessful. He is a pathetic figure: in a list of mundane desires to be resisted, the
one that he finds most seductive is the wish to retire to a quiet country life. For this, the
opportunity never came. Some of his Meditations are dated from the camp, on distant campaigns,
the hardships of which eventually caused his death.
It is remarkable that Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius are completely at one on all philosophical
questions. This suggests that, although social circumstances affect the philosophy of an age,
individual circumstances have less influence than is sometimes thought upon the philosophy of an
individual. Philosophers are usually men with a certain breadth of mind, who can largely discount
the accidents of their private lives; but even they cannot rise above the larger good or evil of their
time. In bad times they invent consolations; in good times their interests are more purely
intellectual.
Gibbon, whose detailed history begins with the vices of Commodus,