As for the external trappings of his rank,—­those gorgeous adjuncts and pompous circumstances which excite the wonder and envy of mankind,—­no man could have shown himself more indifferent to them.  He recognized indeed the necessity of maintaining the dignity of his high position.  “Every moment,” he says, “think steadily as a Roman and a man to do what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and affection, and freedom, and justice” (ii. 5); and again, “Let the Deity which is in thee be the guardian of a living being, manly and of ripe age, and engaged in matters political, and a Roman, and a ruler, who has taken his post like a man waiting for the signal which summons him from life” (iii. 5).  But he did not think it necessary to accept the fulsome honours and degrading adulations which were so dear to many of his predecessors.  He refused the pompous blasphemy of temples and altars, saying that for every true ruler the world was a temple, and all good men were priests.  He declined as much as possible all golden statues and triumphal designations.  All inevitable luxuries and splendour, such as his public duties rendered indispensable, he regarded as a mere hollow show.  Marcus Aurelius felt as deeply as our own Shakespeare seems to have felt the unsubstantiality, the fleeting evanescence of all earthly things:  he would have delighted in the sentiment that,

     “We are such stuff
      As dreams are made on, and our little life
      Is rounded by a sleep.”

“When we have meat before us,” he says, “and such eatables, we receive the impression that this is the dead body of a fish, and this is the dead body of a bird, or of a pig; and, again, that this Falerian is only a little grape-juice, and this purple robe some sheep’s wool dyed with the blood of a shellfish:  such then are these impressions, and they reach the things themselves and penetrate them, and so we see what kind of things they are.  Just in the same way.... where there are things which appear most worthy of our approbation, we ought to lay them bare, and look at their worthlessness, and strip them of all the words by which they are exalted.” (vi. 13.)

“What is worth being valued?  To be received with clapping of hands?  No.  Neither must we value the clapping of tongues, for the praise which comes from the many is a clapping of tongues.” (vi. 16.)

“Asia, Europe, are corners of the universe; all the sea is a drop in the universe; Athos a little clod of the universe; all the present time is a point in eternity.  All things are little, changeable, perishable" (vi. 36.)

And to Marcus too, no less than to Shakespeare, it seemed that—­

     “All the world’s a stage,
      And all the men and women merely players;”

for he writes these remarkable words:—­

“The idle business of show, plays on the stage, flocks of sheep, herds, exercises with spears, a bone cast to little dogs, a bit of bread in fishponds, labourings of ants, and burden-carrying runnings about of frightened little mice, puppets pulled by strings—­this is what life resembles.  It is thy duty then in the midst of such things to show good humour, and not a proud air; to understand however that every man is worth just so much as the things are worth about which he busies himself.”