rests is the record of his inward life,--his _Journal_, or
_Commentaries_, or _Meditations_, or _Thoughts_, for by all these names
has the work been called. Perhaps the most interesting of the records of
his outward life is that which the first book of this work supplies,
where he gives an account of his education, recites the names of those
to whom he is indebted for it, and enumerates his obligations to each of
them. It is a refreshing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure for
those, who, sick of the "wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,"
which seems to be nearly the whole of what history has to offer to our
view, seek eagerly for that substratum of right thinking and well-doing
which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the
continued life of humanity would have been impossible. "From my mother I
learnt piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds
but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of
living, far removed from the habits of the rich." Let us remember that,
the next time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal.[210] "From my
tutor I learnt" (hear it, ye tutors of princes!) "endurance of labor,
and to want little and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with
other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander." The
vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician--the _Graeculus
esuriens_[211]--are in everybody's mind; but he who reads Marcus
Aurelius's account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand
how it is that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual
_Graeculi_, the education of the human race owes to Greece a debt which
can never be overrated. The vague and colorless praise of history leaves
on the mind hardly any impression of Antoninus Pius: it is only from the
private memoranda of his nephew that we learn what a disciplined,
hard-working, gentle, wise, virtuous man he was; a man who, perhaps,
interests mankind less than his immortal nephew only because he has left
in writing no record of his inner life,--_caret quia vate sacro_.[212]

Of the outward life and circumstances of Marcus Aurelius, beyond these
notices which he has himself supplied, there are few of much interest
and importance. There is the fine anecdote of his speech when he heard
of the assassination of the revolted Avidius Cassius,[213] against whom
he was marching; _he was sorry_, he said, _to be deprived of the
ple