INTRODUCTION
endeavoured to learn plays truant.'[1] Marcus had been used from his boyhood to speak and write in Greek; it was as familiar to him, no doubt, as French was to Frederick the Great.
There followed in Marcus' life a momentous breach with mere rhetoric. He had been reading Aristo, the Stoic philosopher. He tells Fronto that he cannot argue on both sides of a question any longer; he is indeed turning from his old tutor to follow Rusticus and philosophy. Fronto rallies him upon the contorted and crabbed stock-in-trade of his new Stoic models, warns him shrewdly of the danger he runs in deserting Latin eloquence, but to no purpose. The young Caesar had made up his mind; for him oratory becomes henceforth a dead letter.[2]
Here and there, in the subsequent centuries, we meet references to a collection of private letters by Marcus, in Greek, which survived, whether genuine or not, to the ninth or the tenth century, the period of the Byzantine renaissance. Thus Philostratus remarks of this correspondence, in distinction from imperial constitutions and rescripts, that: 'besides precision of thought, the strength of Marcus' character is stamped on his words',[3] a summary of the Emperor's style not inapt to parts of his authentic Book. Again in the ninth century, the learned Patriarch Photius,[4] writing to Amphilochius, Bishop of Cyzicus, commends to his attention certain epistolary models,
- ↑ Mihi vero nunc potissimum Graece scribendum est. Quam ob rem, rogas? Volo periculum facere an id quod non didici facilius obsecundct mihi, quoniam quidem illud, quod didici, deserit' id. p. 252.
- ↑ op. cit. p. 143 sq.; 'eloquentiae studium reliquisse, ad philosophiam devertisse' p. 150, cf. p. 75.
- ↑ πρὸς γὰρ τῷ κεκριμένῳ τοῡ λόγου καὶ ἑδραῖον τοῡ ἤθους ἐντετύπωτο τοῖς γράμμασιν Philostr. Dial. vol. ii. p. 258 Kayser (Leipsic). Cf. Philostr. Vit. Soph. 2. 12, p. 243 for what purports to be a private letter of Marcus. There is a fictitious letter in Migne, Patr. Gr. cxv, p. 1233.
- ↑ ἔχεις δ', ἴνα μηδὲ μακρὸν ᾖ σοι τὸ τῆς yυμνασίας στάδιον, τὰς εἰς Φάλαριν ἐκεῖνον, οἶμαι . . . ἀναφερόμενας ἐπιστολάς, καὶ αἶς Βροῡτος ὁ Ῥωμαίων στρατηγὁς ἐπιγράφεται καὶ τὸν ἐν βασιλεῡσι φιλόσοφον Photius Patr. Constantin., Ep. 233 (cii, p. 861 Migne)
