reason preferred to conceive it; and the life's journey Aurelius had
made so far, though involving much moral and intellectual loneliness,
had been ever in affectionate and helpful contact with other wayfarers,
very unlike himself. Since his days of earliest childhood in the
Lateran gardens, he seemed to himself, blessing the gods for it after
deliberate survey, to have been always surrounded by kinsmen, friends,
servants, of exceptional virtue. From the great Stoic idea, that we
are all fellow-citizens of one city, he had derived a tenderer, a more
equitable estimate than was common among Stoics, of the eternal
shortcomings of men and women. Considerations that might tend to the
sweetening of his temper it was his daily care to store away, with a
kind of philosophic pride in the thought that no one took more
good-naturedly than he the "oversights" of his neighbours. For had not
Plato taught (it was not [220] paradox, but simple truth of experience)
that if people sin, it is because they know no better, and are "under
the necessity of their own ignorance"? Hard to himself, he seemed at
times, doubtless, to decline too softly upon unworthy persons.
Actually, he came thereby upon many a useful instrument. The empress
Faustina he would seem at least to have kept, by a constraining
affection, from becoming altogether what most people have believed her,
and won in her (we must take him at his word in the "Thoughts,"
abundantly confirmed by letters, on both sides, in his correspondence
with Cornelius Fronto) a consolation, the more secure, perhaps, because
misknown of others. Was the secret of her actual blamelessness, after
all, with him who has at least screened her name? At all events, the
one thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, is
her sweetness to himself.

No! The wise, who had made due observation on the trees of the garden,
would not expect to gather grapes of thorns or fig-trees: and he was
the vine, putting forth his genial fruit, by natural law, again and
again, after his kind, whatever use people might make of it. Certainly,
his actual presence never lost its power, and Faustina was glad in it
to-day, the birthday of one of her children, a boy who stood at her
knee holding in his fingers tenderly a tiny silver trumpet, one of his
birthday gifts.--"For my [221] part, unless I conceive my hurt to be
such, I have no hurt at all,"--boasts the would-be apathetic
emperor:--"and how I