The last reflection of the Stoic philosophy that I have observed is in Simplicius’ Commentary on the Enchiridion of Epictetus.  Simplicius was not a Christian, and such a man was not likely to be converted at a time when Christianity was grossly corrupted.  But he was a really religious man, and he concludes his commentary with a prayer to the Deity which no Christian could improve.  From the time of Zeno to Simplicius, a period of about nine hundred years, the Stoic philosophy formed the characters of some of the best and greatest men.  Finally it became extinct, and we hear no more of it till the revival of letters in Italy.  Angelo Poliziano met with two very inaccurate and incomplete manuscripts of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, which he translated into Latin and dedicated to his great patron Lorenzo de’ Medici, in whose collection he had found the book.  Poliziano’s version was printed in the first Bale edition of the Enchiridion, A.D. 1531 (apud And.  Cratandrum).  Poliziano recommends the Enchiridion to Lorenzo as a work well suited to his temper, and useful in the difficulties by which he was surrounded.

Epictetus and Antoninus have had readers ever since they were first printed.  The little book of Antoninus has been the companion of some great men.  Machiavelli’s Art of War and Marcus Antoninus were the two books which were used when he was a young man by Captain John Smith, and he could not have found two writers better fitted to form the character of a soldier and a man.  Smith is almost unknown and forgotten in England, his native country, but not in America, where he saved the young colony of Virginia.  He was great in his heroic mind and his deeds in arms, but greater still in the nobleness of his character.  For a man’s greatness lies not in wealth and station, as the vulgar believe, nor yet in his intellectual capacity, which is often associated with the meanest moral character, the most abject servility to those in high places, and arrogance to the poor and lowly; but a man’s true greatness lies in the consciousness of an honest purpose in life, founded on a just estimate of himself and everything else, on frequent self-examination, and a steady obedience to the rule which he knows to be right, without troubling himself, as the emperor says he should not, about what others may think or say, or whether they do or do not do that which he thinks and says and does.

THE PHILOSOPHY

OF

MARCUS AURELIUS ANTONIUS

It has been said that the Stoic philosophy first showed its real value when it passed from Greece to Rome.  The doctrines of Zeno and his successors were well suited to the gravity and practical good sense of the Romans; and even in the Republican period we have an example of a man, M. Cato Uticensis, who lived the life of a Stoic and died consistently with the opinions which he professed.  He was a man, says