Mr. Long’s preliminary dissertation on “The Philosophy of Antoninus” is thorough and satisfactory, so far as that specific subject is concerned, but presents a very inadequate view of the Stoic philosophy in general, and strikes us as unjust in its incidental disparaging notice (in a footnote) of Seneca, who, after all, will ever be regarded as the greatest literary product of that school.

The book itself to which this essay introduces us is one of the few monuments that remain to us, and by far the best monument that remains to us, of the interior spiritual life of the better class of that Graeco-Roman world of whose exterior life we know so much.  Not to have read it is not to know the deepest mind of the ancients.  Two things in it are prevailingly prominent:  first, a noble nature; secondly, an extreme civilization, already faltering, turned to decline, expecting its fall.  On every page lies the shadow of impending doom; on every page shines forth the great, heroic soul equal to every fate.  The work—­if work it can be called—­is entirely aphoristic, with no apparent plan; in fact, a note-book or diary of thoughts and fancies, set down as they occurred from time to time, and as leisure favored the record.  In its structure, or rather want of structure, and in some of its suggestions, it reminds one of the Book of Ecclesiastes.  Yet the difference between them is immense.  The prevailing tone of Ecclesiastes is skepticism, that of the “Thoughts” is faith.  The one is morbid, the other sane; the one relaxes, the other braces; the one is steeped in despondency and gloom, the other is redolent of manly courage and cheerful trust.  The Emperor, like the Preacher, has much to say about death; but he views the subject from a higher plane, and envisages the final event with a better hope.  He does not think that a living dog is better than a dead lion.

“What, then, is that which is able to conduct a man?  One thing, and only one, philosophy.[33] But this consists in keeping the daemon within a man free from violence and unharmed, superior to pains and pleasures, doing nothing without a purpose, nor yet falsely and with hypocrisy,... and besides accepting all that happens, and all that is allotted, as coming from thence, wherever it is, from whence he himself came, and finally waiting for death with a cheerful mind, as being nothing else than a dissolution of the elements of which every living being is compounded.  But if there is no harm to the elements themselves, in each continually changing into the other, why should a man have any apprehension about the change and dissolution of all the elements?  For it is according to Nature, and nothing is evil which is according to Nature."[34]

“Thou hast embarked, thou hast made the voyage, thou art come to shore; get out.  If, indeed, to another life, there is no want of gods, not even there.  But if to a state without sensation, thou wilt cease to be held by pains and pleasures, and to be a slave to the vessel which is as much inferior as that which serves it is superior; for the one is intelligence and deity, the other is earth and corruption."[35]