If he was told by the doctor he was going to die next week, he would say, “I don’t care; it doesn’t matter.” This Society of Stoics was started by a Greek philosopher named Zeno. Zeno lived in Athens later than those philosophers, Socrates and Plato, whom you have already heard about. Zeno said that the only way to be good and the only way to be happy was not to care for pleasure and not to mind pain or suffering but calmly to put up with everything, no matter how unpleasant or disagreeable it was, and the Stoics believed him. Even to-day people who bear troubles and pain and hardships without a murmur are called stoics. One of the chief members of the society was a Roman emperor. Rome’s worst emperor, Nero, had been dead a hundred years when there came to the throne this new emperor, who was just as good as Nero was bad. This emperor was named Marcus Aurelius. Although he was so very good and pious, he was not a Christian. Indeed, Marcus Aurelius treated the Christians terribly, as they had been treated terribly by the previous emperors, for he thought them traitors to the empire. At this time most of the Romans had very little religion of any sort. They were not Christians, but neither did they put much faith in their own gods, Jupiter and Juno and the rest. They honored them because they were brought up to honor them and because they thought if they didn’t honor them they might have bad luck, so they took no chances. But instead of believing in such gods, people usually believed in the teachings of some wise man or philosopher and obeyed more or less the rules he made. Zeno was one of these philosophers, and the Stoics were the members of this society. Although Marcus Aurelius was an emperor, he would rather have been a Stoic philosopher or a priest. Although he had to be a soldier and a general, he would rather have been a writer. When he was off, fighting with his army, he carried his writing-materials with him, and he would go to his tent at night and write out his thoughts. These thoughts he called his “Meditations.” Here is one of the things he wrote: When you find you do not want to get up early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself. I am getting up now to do the business of a man. Was I made to do nothing but doze and keep warm under the covers? That was written long years ago, yet your father might have told you the same thing this morning. People read this book of Marcus Aurelius to-day, either in the Greek in which it was written or translated into English. A great many of Marcus Aurelius’ sayings seem almost as if they might have been in the Bible. Indeed, some people keep his book by their bedside as if it were a Bible.