So, what was contentment in the slave became philanthropy in the emperor.  He would be a benefactor, not by building baths and theatres, but by promoting peace, prosperity, and virtue.  He would endure cheerfully the fatigue of winter campaigns upon the frozen Danube, if the Empire could be saved from violence.  To extend its boundaries, like Julius, he cared nothing; but to preserve what he had was a supreme duty.  His watchword was duty,—­to himself, his country, and God.  He lived only for the happiness of his subjects.  Benevolence became the law of his life.  Self-abnegation destroyed self-indulgence.  For what was he placed by Providence in the highest position in the world, except to benefit the world?  The happiness of one hundred and twenty millions was greater than the joys of any individual existence.  And what were any pleasures which ended in vanity to the sublime placidity of an emancipated soul?  Stoicism, if it did not soar to God and immortality, yet aspired to the freedom and triumph of what is most precious in man.  And it equally despised, with haughty scorn, those things which corrupted and degraded this higher nature,—­the glorious dignity of unfettered intellect.  The accidents of earth were nothing in his eyes,—­neither the purple of kings nor the rags of poverty.  It was the soul, in its transcendent dignity, which alone was to be preserved and purified.

This was the exalted realism which appears in the “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius, and which he had learned from the inspirations of a slave.  Yet such was the inborn, almost supernatural, loftiness of Aurelius, that, had he been the slave and Epictetus the emperor, the same moral wisdom would have shone in the teachings and life of each; for they both were God’s witnesses of truth in an age of wickedness and shame.  It was He who chose them both, and sent them out as teachers of righteousness,—­the one from the humblest cottage, the other from the most magnificent palace of the capital of the world.  In station they were immeasurably apart; in aim and similarity of ideas they were kindred spirits,—­one of the phenomena of the moral history of our race; for the slave, in his physical degradation, had all the freedom and grandeur of an aspiring soul, and the emperor, on his lofty throne, had all the humility and simplicity of a peasant in the lowliest state of poverty and suffering.  Surely circumstances had nothing to do with this marvellous exhibition.  It was either the mind and soul triumphant over and superior to all outward circumstances, or it was God imparting an extraordinary moral power.