In this frame of mind Marius has a memorable interview with the Emperor, who, in order to raise funds for the war, has determined to sell by public auction the accumulated treasures of the Imperial palace, and is feeling with an austere joy the pleasure of a deep philosophical detachment from the world. Marius sees that this kind of renunciation, a renunciation of the very things of the purest quality of beauty that his philosophy had taught him to value, may bring with it a loftier and simpler kind of joy than even the sober and refined enjoyment of them. Aurelius, with a supreme sense of duty, is about to plunge into the uncongenial labours of a great campaign, and Marius sees that in the selfless surrender to what appears the Divine will lay his true generosity of soul. He sees that one of the strongest features of the Emperor’s character is the union of intellectual independence with a tender sympathy for all the manifestations of the popular religious sense, realising, as he does, that men must reach their ideal by very different paths. Marius finds, among the Emperor’s papers committed to him, a document, a species of diary, full of the most intimate self-communings. And in spite of the magnificence of character, the resolute determination, the amazing generosity there revealed, there is a note of heaviness. He sees how “the forced and yet facile optimism, refusing to see evil anywhere, might lack, after all, the secret of genuine cheerfulness. It left in truth a weight upon the spirits; and with that weight unlifted, there could be no real justification of the ways of Heaven to man.” The cheerfulness of demeanour, indeed, to which the Emperor had attained, was not a spontaneous joy breaking out from an inner source of happy faith, but a practised, a deliberate attitude, attained by a rigorous self-restraint. Marius thinks of Cornelius, whose cheerfulness seems of a totally different kind, “united with the bold recognition of evil as a fact in the world,” yet he sees or suspects in Cornelius an irrepressible and impassioned hopefulness. He finds it necessary to go to Praeneste, where the Emperor is staying for a few days with his younger children, and arrives to find the little Annius Verus dying; and here comes one of the beautiful touches through which one comes so close to the humanity of Aurelius:— “He saw the emperor carry the child away—quite conscious at last, but with a touching expression ... of weakness and defeat—pressed close to his bosom, as if he yearned just then for one thing only, to be united, to be absolutely one with it, in its obscure distress.”