When Marcus reached Antioch the revolt was already ended. One of the assassins, hoping for reward, brought the head of Cassius to the Emperor; but he put him from him with indignation and loathing. His one regret was that he had been deprived of the pleasure of pardoning his enemy. But the good deed was done, if not to Cassius, at any rate to his wife and relatives. Many urged him to wreak his vengeance on them. Faustina, before her death, had insisted that he “should show no mercy to men that showed none to you, nor would have shown any to me or my sons in case they had gained the victory”; she would have had him punish the army also severely as accomplices. Marcus replied that he admired her zeal for their family, but said that he would spare Cassius’ wife and children and son-in-law and commend them to the mercy of the Senate. As to his other relatives: “Why should I speak of pardon to them, who indeed have done no wrong, and are blameless even in purpose.” The Senate granted his requests, and the household of Cassius was amply provided for by the generosity of the Emperor. We are wont to think of the forgiving to seventy times seven times as the peculiar and most characteristic virtue of Christianity as it assuredly is the most beautiful of the natural virtues. Yet it was a virtue familiar to the wise ones of the Stoics, and perhaps not a difficult virtue to those who adopted their philosophy of life. If nothing matters and all is in very truth but vanity of vanities and the soul is steeped in this conviction, the disposition to look on life’s worries, whatever their sources, as but petty and trifling, is natural and spontaneous. For one with the Stoic temperament hard things are but the whetstone of the will, and herein precisely lies the danger of that temperament from the Christian point of view. The Stoic will, if not well-ordered, is a harsh grinding thing which sucks in and crushes the beautiful things of life as grist beneath its wheels. It exults in its strength with a forbidding and unlovely pride, so different from the beautiful diffidence of Christian strength, which loves not the beauty of the creatures less, but the beauty of the Creator more, and with a kind of supernatural Epicureanism renounces the beauty of the fleeting for the sake of the beauty of which it is but an image far removed, the beauty of Him whose beauty is older than the hills and will abide when they have crumbled away.