ENGLISH COMMENTARY
maintain a succession of heirs, only to end with the final epitaph: The Last of his Line.
The names are familiar, some made more familiar by Shakespeare's genius: Octavianus Caesar, great-nephew of Julius, his avenger and heir, the Emperor Augustus; the Empress Livia Augusta, mother of the Emperor Tiberius and of Drusus Germanicus; his daughter, the dissolute and disgraced Julia, wife first of Marcellus, then of Agrippa; his grandsons, Julia's children, the younger Marcellus, Gaius Caesar, Lucius Caesar, destined to be heirs of Augustus, all three untimely dead; his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus; his sister Octavia, married to Mark Antony, so generous a stepmother to Cleopatra's children. There succeed Agrippa, the victor of Actium, once destined by Augustus to be Emperor; the philosopher friend of Augustus, Areius of Alexandria; Maecenas, patron of Propertius, Horace, and Virgil, his Minister of the Interior; finally kinsmen, intimates, members of the household, physicians, soothsayers. The procession passes through the writer's mind, pageant of an age that was gone:
High events as these
Strike those that make them; and their story is
No less in pity than his glory which
Brought them to be lamented.[1]
The chapter is partly corrupt in its text, so that it is not certain whether he goes on to speak of the extinction of the family of Pompeius Magnus, whose sons kept up an unequal struggle with Augustus, or of the destruction of Pompeii, in the reign of Vespasian.
Ch. 32. Life is built up, act by act, into a whole. Obstacles give opportunity for fresh acts, whether of patience or modification of an original aim. These new acts fit into the whole.
Ch. 33. This aphorism is based on what was said of Socrates (i. 16. 9). He was equally able to abstain from life's good things or to enjoy them moderately.
Ch. 34. The parable of the body and its members is here illustrated from Marcus' memory of a field of battle. Man can sever himself from the body politic, but he has the power to restore himself to union. Elsewhere Marcus reminds himself that
- ↑ Antony and Cleopatra. The words of Octavius at the close.
