In fact, the Court was to Marcus a burden; he tells us himself that Philosophy was his mother, Empire only his stepmother; it was only his repose in the one that rendered even tolerable to him the burdens of the other.  Emperor as he was, he thanked the gods for having enabled him to enter into the souls of a Thrasea, an Helvidius, a Cato, a Brutus.  Above all, he seems to have had a horror of ever becoming like some of his predecessors; he writes:—­

“Take care that thou art not made into a Caesar;[68] take care thou art not dyed with this dye.  Keep thyself then simple, good, pure, serious, free from affectation, a friend of justice, a worshipper of the gods, kind, affectionate, strenuous in all proper acts.  Reverence the gods and help men.  Short is life.  There is only one fruit of this terrene life; a pious disposition and social acts.” (iv. 19,)

[Footnote 68:  Marcus here invents what M. Martha justly calls “an admirable barbarism” to express his disgust towards such men—­[Greek:  ora mae apukaidaoosaes]—­“take care not to be Caesarised.”]

It is the same conclusion as that which sorrow forced from another weary and less admirable king:  “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter:  Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.”

But it is time for us to continue the meagre record of the life of Marcus, so far as the bare and gossiping compilations of Dion Cassius,[69] and Capitolinus, and the scattered allusions of other writers can enable us to do so.

[Footnote 69:  As epitomised by Xiphilinus.]

It must have been with a heavy heart that he set out once more for Germany to face the dangerous rising of the Quadi and Marcomanni.  To obtain soldiers sufficient to fill up the vacancies in his army which had been decimated by the plague, he was forced to enrol slaves; and to obtain money he had to sell the ornaments of the palace, and even some of the Empress’s jewels.  Immediately before he started his heart was wrung by the death of his little boy, the twin-brother of Commodus, whose beautiful features are still preserved for us on coins.  Early in the war, as he was trying the depth of a ford, he was assailed by the enemy with a sudden storm of missiles, and was only saved from imminent death by being sheltered beneath the shields of his soldiers.  One battle was fought on the ice of the wintry Danube.  But by far the most celebrated event of the war took place in a great victory over the Quadi which he won in A.D. 174, and which was attributed by the Christians to what is known as the “Miracle of the Thundering Legion.”