It was at this crisis that Marcus entrusted to his consort, Lucius Veras, the command in the East: a foolish choice, scarcely less foolish than the first folly of making him his consort. For Lucius had neither ability nor morality; he spent his days amidst the pleasant groves, the flowers and the perfumes and the sensuous society of Antioch. He committed the campaign to the care of his generals, the chief of them, Avidius Cassius, a soldier tried and true; whilst he himself frittered away his hours in soft dalliance amidst the ill-famed groves of Daphne, which made Antioch the lodestone of voluptuaries from all parts of the world. Avidius Cassius with Priscus and Martius Veras ended the war within a few years; and Lucius Verus with a heavy heart turned his face towards the West, to celebrate a triumph and receive high titles in Rome for his great achievements. But Rome paid dearly for the conquest; for with the army came the plague which devastated the capital and Italy. In the desolation which surrounded him, the Stoic Emperor recognised the need for something more inspiring than the maxims of his masters, Zeno and Chrysippus. The futility of such chamber philosophy and religion was borne home to him with fearful intensity by the human misery he saw on every side, the stench of the unburied dead, the haggard looks and demoniacal cries of the living. He recognised, then, that a syllogism never soothed an aching heart; that for life’s tragic moments we need a living, breathing, throbbing, thrilling, religion, a religion of the whole man. Hence he called on all the gods, old and new, Roman, Grecian, Eastern and Egyptian, to aid the suffering State. Every altar reeked with the incense of sacrifice; great nobles marched in procession bearing the statues of the gods; noble ladies might be seen, half-naked, standing beneath the platform from which the hot blood of the slain bull poured down upon them, enduring this baptism of the Great Mother, by which they were to be “reborn for eternity”; at eventide a wanderer in the Campus Martius might hear the vesper song of Isis, and entering her shrine might see dark Egyptians holding up the water of the Nile for adoration; or, descending into a subterranean chapel, he might see the slave, the soldier, and the senator, side by side, attending at the strange mystic initiations of Mithra, the Unconquered One, the god of light, the strong young god in Phrygian cap and loose flowing mantle caught by the sculptor in the symbolic slaying of the bull. No extravagance of superstition, however fantastic, was omitted, not even the greatest extravagance of all, the cry of “the Christians to the lions.” If Aurelius had but known; if Rome in its desolation could have seen; if modern Europe and its rulers could but realise the secret healing of Christ’s religion of sorrow, how much the world, laboured and heavy-burdened, would be refreshed! But Marcus did not know this healing. He prayed and he sacrificed: but the plague