fident as to his fate and
that of the human race, whilst Marcus Aurelius was disquieted and sad--
sad for himself and also for humanity, for his country and for his times:
"O, my sole," was his cry, "wherefore art thou troubled, and why am I so
vexed?"

We are here brought closer to the fact which has already been
foreshadowed, and which characterizes the moral and social condition of
the Roman world at this period. It would be a great error to take the
five emperors just spoken of--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and
Marcus Aurelius--as representatives of the society amidst which they
lived, and as giving in a certain degree the measure of its
enlightenment, its morality, its prosperity, its disposition, and
condition in general. Those five princes were not only picked men,
superior in mind and character to the majority of their contemporaries,
but they were men almost isolated in their generation; in them there was
a resumption of all that had been acquired by Greek and Roman antiquity
of enlightenment and virtue, practical wisdom and philosophical morality:
they were the heirs and the survivors of the great minds and the great
politicians of Athens and Rome, of the Areopagus and the Senate. They
were not in intellectual and moral harmony with the society they
governed, and their action upon it served hardly to preserve it partially
and temporarily from the evils to which it was committed by its own vices
and to break its fall. When they were thoughtful and modest as Marcus
Aurelius was, they were gloomy and disposed to discouragement, for they
had a secret foreboding of the uselessness of their efforts.

Nor was their gloom groundless: in spite of their honest plans and
of brilliant appearances, the degradation, material as well as moral,
of Roman society went on increasing. The wars, the luxury, the
dilapidations, and the disturbances of the empire always raised its
expenses much above its receipts. The rough miserliness of Vespasian and
the wise economy of Antoninus Pius were far from sufficient to restore
the balance; the aggravation of imposts was incessant; and the
population, especially the agricultural population, dwindled away more
and more, in Italy itself, the centre of the state. This evil disquieted
the emperors, when they were neither idiots nor madmen; Claudius,
Vespasian, Nerva, and Trajan labored to supply a remedy, and Augustus
himself had set them the example. They established in It