Though Marcus must have known from the police authorities the great numbers of the Christians, he understood little of their ideals. It is the tragedy of his noble life. To quote Arnold again: “What an affinity for Christianity had this persecutor of the Christians! The effusion of Christianity, its relieving tears, its happy self-sacrifice, were the very element one feels for which his spirit longed; they were near him, he touched them, he passed them by.... What would he have said to the Sermon on the Mount? ... What would have become of his notions of the _exitiabilis superstitio_ (the deadly superstition), of ‘the obstinacy of the Christians’? Vain question! Yet the greatest charm of Marcus Aurelius is that he makes us ask it. We see him wise, just, self-governed, tender, thankful, blameless; yet with all this agitated, stretching out his arms for something beyond, _tendentemque manus ripae ulterioris amore_.” Of the details of the external life of Marcus Aurelius we know very little. It is his internal life which interests us most, and that is recorded for us by his own hand in his book of Meditations. They are notes, meant probably for no eyes but his own, of his efforts after virtue--the record of his soul. That the ruler of the Roman Empire should have thought such thoughts and, in great part, lived up to them; that at the same time he, who represented the best that paganism could produce, should have fallen far short of the heroism shown by Christian slave-girls; that his life and meditations prove in the concrete how vast is the gulf between the natural and the supernatural: in these facts lie the various fascinations which the Emperor Marcus Aurelius has had for Pagan and Christian, for Atheist and Theist, for the Positivist, who would fain be rid of the supernatural, and the Mystic for whom the supernatural is everything. _The author desires once for all to acknowledge his debt to numerous writers dealing with the life and period of Marcus Aurelius. It is hardly necessary to mention the names of Dill, Pater, and Renan._ CHAPTER II THE BOY STOIC Annius Verus, known to the world by his adopted name as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, was born at Rome in A.D. 121. His father, also Annius Verus, was descended from a Spanish family which a few generations before had settled in Rome. Of him we know little; but what we do know is favourable. Marcus tells us that “from his reputation and remembrance” he learned “modesty and a manly character.” His mother’s memory he always recalled with veneration and love. She it was that taught him “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.”