ENGLISH COMMENTARY
of Ends). He had read the story of the past too well to dream that even the great world-power, which he governed, would last beyond its appointed hour. The City of God, of which he is thinking here, is eternal, founded in the heavens.
Of its 'reason and ordinance' again there are two aspects, the temporal and the eternal. For those who saw in Rome the Immortal City, the Roman law, which flourished under the Antonines, partly quickened by the Stoic ideas of natural law and equity, is the expression of this ordered Reason. Marcus must have been aware of this, as we see from his own words, from the language of his legislation and of the great jurists who served him. But here he is thinking of eternal law, that of which human enactments are a mere shadow. He puts before himself the common law, the common Logos, which belong to the commonwealth of gods and men.[1]
Ch. 17. This chapter, evidently conceived as an Epilogue to the Book, has been termed[2] a 'Sursum corda, le dernier mot du Stoïcisme'.
It falls into two parts; the first is prompted by the mention of the Eternal City at the close of ch. 16. By contrast, all mortal life is small and transitory, a pilgrimage in a foreign land, like 'the remembrance of a guest that tarrieth but a day'.[3]
Strictly man's reasonable home is here and now, he must live in the present. The writer has unconsciously passed to the thought of that most reverend City as the place of man's inheritance, 'that imperial palace whence he came', the land of Promise.
The second thought is that the love of wisdom and the cult of the God within is the sole safe-conduct for man, detained for a moment in this swiftly vanishing scene. The maxims of Philosophy are the chart whereby he may steer a true course and await Death with contentment, as Nature's good purpose and his own:
Que l'homme est malheureux qui au monde se fie!
O Dieux, que veritable est la Philosophie,
Qui dit que toute chose à la fin perira,
Et qu'en changeant de forme une autre vestira.[4]
