The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Because this nationalist (but not at ali chauvinist) ideal is one of the keys to VirgiPs mind, the reader should be aware of it. But for us it is not the important thing. The Aeneid today is a story, a gallery of characters, and a work of art.

Its story is part of us. We may not have read Virgil, but nonetheless a bell rings if mention is made of Dido or the death of Laocoхn or the Harpies or the Trojan Horse. The personages of the Aeneid, particularly the unhappy Dido and the fiery Turnus, have also remained fresh for two thousand years. Its art, hard to summarize, is not always immediately felt. It is based on a delicate, almost infallible sense of what words can do when carefully, often strangely, combined and juxtaposed and subdued to a powerful rhythm. It is this that has made Virgil among the most quoted of ali poets. And back of the story, the characters, the art, there vibrates VirgiPs own curious sense of life^ melancholy, rather than its tragedy, his famous lacrimae rerum. The Virgilian sadness continues to move us though the Rome he sang has long been dust.

Keep in mind that the Iliad and The Odyssey influenced Virgil decisively. Indeed the Aeneid's first six books are a kind of Odyssey, the last six a kind of Iliad, and Homeric references are legion. But Virgil is not as open as Homer. He requires more effort of the attention, he does not have Homers out- door vigor, and for his masters simplicity and directness he substitutes effects of great subtlety, many, though not ali, lost even in the finest translation.

C.F.

21

MARCUS AURELIUS

121-180 Meditations

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, ruler of the Roman Empire from 161 to his death, is the outstanding example in Western history of Plato^ [12] Philosopher-King. His reign was far from ideal, being marked by wars against the barbarian Germans, by severe economic troubles, by plague, and by the persecution of Christians. It will be remembered not because Marcus was a good emperor (though he was), but because, during the last ten years of his life, by the light of a campfire, resting by the remote Danube after a wearisome day of marching or battle, he set down in Greek his Meditations, addressed only to him- self but by good fortune now the property of us ali.

The charm, the sweetness, the melancholy, the elevation of The Meditations are his own. The moral doctrines are those of the popular philosophy of the time, Stoicism, as systematically

expounded by the Greek slave (later freed) Epictetus (ca. 55-ca. 135). Its ethical content is roughly summed up in Epictetus's two commandments: Endure and Abstain. Stoicism passed through many modifications, but in general it preached a quiet and unmoved acceptance of circumstance. It assumed a beneficent order of Nature. Humanity^ whole duty was to dis­cover how it might live in harmony with this order, and then to do so. Stress was laid on tranquillity of mind (many of our modern inspirational nostrums are merely cheapenings of Stoicism); on service to one's fellows; and on a cosmopolitan, all-embracing social sense that is a precursor of the fully devel- oped Christian idea of the brotherhood of man. Stoicism^ watchwords are Duty, Imperturbability, Will. Its tendency is puritanical, ascetic, quietistic, sometimes even escapist. Though a philosophy peculiarly suited to a time of troubles, its influence has never ceased during almost the whole of two thousand years. It seems to call out to people irrespective of their time and place—see, for example, Thoreau [80].

We find it at its most appealing in the Meditations. This is an easy book to read. We seem to be eavesdropping on the soliloquy of a man almost painfully attached to virtue, with a firm sense of his responsibility, less to his empire than to the Stoic ideal of the perfect man, untouched by passion, generous by nature rather than by calculation, impervious to both ill and good fortune. Says Marcus, in one of the saddest sentences of a book shadowed throughout by melancholy, "Even in a palace life may be lived well."

Through the years the Golden Book of Marcus Aurelius, as it has been called, has been read by vast numbers of ordinary men and women. They have thought of it not as a classic but as a wellspring of consolation and inspiration. It is one of the few books that seem to have helped men and women directly and immediately to live better, to bear with greater dignity and for- titude the burden of being merely human. Aristotle [13] we study. Marcus Aurelius we take to our hearts.

C.F.

PART TWO

SAINT AUGUSTINE

354-430

The Confessions