A PHILOSOPHICAL EMPEROR. 461 



worlds to conquer, if we move tlie world of the imagination to the 

 ends of truth and beauty; for a greater triumph is ours then, and the 

 soul may leap at the inward shout, " Victory ! victory ! conquest of 

 self!" 



A PHILOSOPHICAL EMPEROR.' 



By CALVEKT VAUX. 



AT our last meeting we listened with keen interest to all Mr. 

 Lewis had to say about the Emperor Justinian ; and his dra- 

 matic presentation of the subject cannot fail to leave a permanent 

 impression on our minds, in regard to the life of this conspicuous 

 example of a bad type of Roman. Selfish and sensuous, remorseless, 

 bloodthirsty, energetic, full of vitality, a barbarian at heart; repulsive 

 in his theories, odious in his practices, true to the woman he chose 

 with an accurate instinct as his mate not as wife or mother, or with 

 any respect for the sex to which she belonged, but rather as an ex- 

 aggerated exception to every idea that was then, and is now, current 

 in regard to what a woman ought to be. There was nothing attrac- 

 tive or genial in the life of either Justinian or Theodora ; and, so far 

 as this forcible sketch allowed us to form an opinion, we were unable 

 to discover any suggestion in the so-called civilization of the period 

 that would be likely to help us in these times. 



Imperial Rome, at the beginning of the Christian era, may of 

 course be viewed from a different standpoint ; and it seems to me 

 worth while to-night to follow the clew that is given us by the writ- 

 ings of another Roman emperor, Marcus Antoninus, who began his 

 reign in the middle of the second century,. 



We do not depend here on any exaggerated history, or on a nar- 

 rative full of misstatements, of the biased and interested kind, that 

 appertain to the work of a contemporary reporter ; but we have the 

 clean words of the man himself, " published, and not published," as 

 Aristotle said of liis own writings to Alexander, who expressed a 

 distaste to having such exquisitely subtile brain-work scattered broad- 

 cast in the common highway, where it might be picked up by any- 

 body. The volume seems to be a commonplace book, made up of 

 notes that have no special connection with each other in the pages on 

 which they happen to stand, but are very definitely related in the 

 sequence of moods that occur to the writer. It would, indeed, be 

 interesting to collate the scattered beads of similar color, and group 

 them together. 



'O 



' " Marcus Aurelius Antoninus," a paper read before the New York " Fraternity 

 Club." 



