Section 894

eoldiers do to Caesar. These hired soldiers swear to regrard tlie safety of C.Tsar (ihove all else ; will not you swear, and swear- inif keep your oath, when you have received such a numher of great boons? And your oath? Let it he this : never to disobey, never to blame, never to find fault with anythin-; he gives to you, never to do or to suffer against your will anythins;^ that is needful. Is this oath like the "oath of the soldiers? Why, they swear to honour no one above Caesar ; you swear to honour no one above yourself.* Or, a<rain, in a passage which recalls 2 Ti 2** even more than 1 Co V^**", he observes (iii. 22. GS>) that the genuine Cynic must not be expected to entangle himself with ordinary duties : * In the present state of things, which resembles an army on active service, the Cynic must be free from all distractions in order to serve God with his entire attention,' instead of being tied down to domestic carea. Nor must you blame the Cynic for being a busybody (ovre nepCfpyo<; ovre iTo\viTpiyfnav'e<mv [iii. 22. 97]), for you might as fairly say that * the general is a busybody, when he is inspecting his troops, examining them, keeping watch over them, and punishing the insubordinate.' Such allusions are scattered over his talk. The most sustained is the well-known paragraph in iii. 24. 31-34, which reiterates the conception of life as a warfare (cf. Job 7^ 14^^, Is 40'-) : ' Don't you know that life is a campaign (oTparet'a TO xP'JMa ecTi.)? One man has to stand sentry, another has to go out as a spy, another has to fight. It is impossible, it is undesirable, that all should be in exactly the same position. And here are you, neglecting the conimands of the general, and grumbling when any ratiier severe duty is imposed upon you. You don't understand what you would have the army become, if it depended on you; if everybody copied you, no one would dig a trench, no one would put up a rampart, no one would keep on the alert, no one would take any risks, everybody would prove useless for campaigning. . . . Every man's life is a sort of campaign, and it is long and varied : you must follow the r61e of a soldier, and do everything at the nod of your general, divining what he wishes done, if possible — for there is no comparison in strength or superiority of character between this general and any other.' Finally, it is possible that a passage in iv. 13. 5 illustrates the misconduct censured by John the Baptist (Lk 3i-*). Epictetus is warning men against loose talk about themselves, and he clinches his advice by this refer- ence to contemporary life : ' A soldier in private dress sits down beside you and starts to abuse the Caesar. Then you join in, assuming that you can trust his fldelity because he began the talk. You say what you think — and then you are arrested and taken to prison.' Even in the later pages of Marcus Aurelius militarj' figures recur, although they are by no means so numerous and distinctive as we might expect, considering that this melancholy and self-conscious philosopher had been for years in command of troops. Once we do get a saying like this : ' Be not ashamed to receive help ; you are bound to do the duty that falls to you like a soldier when a wall is being stormed ; if owing to lameness you cannot scale the battlements alone, cannot this be managed with the help of another?' (vii. 7). But in his metaphors and similes the emperor talks more of doctors and sailors and bees than of soldiers. His pages are a warning against the common idea that a man's vocation may be deduced from his metaphors, or that a man invariably tends to colour his language by the associations of his calling. The really noticeable thing in this military emperor's little book is a couple of disparaging allusions to war ; it is ranked (x. 9) with slavery and the mimes as a deteriorating influence, and (x. 10) military conquerors are frankly described as robbers: 'The spider is proud of catching a fiy, one man is proud of catching a hare, another of netting a fish, another of capturing wild boars, another of seizing Sarmatians,' as the writer had done himself or was doing when he wrote this sentence. ' Are they not robbers, if you look into their principles of action ? ' A century earlier another Stoic philosopher, the Roman knight Musonius Rufus, had done more than write resigned commonplaces about the iniquity of war. With the otficiousness for which the Stoics were sometimes blamed (see above), this eminent teacher of Epictetus had contrived to push himself in among the troops of Vitellius and Vespasian during the strained situation of a.d. 69. Tacitus tells us how he then ' began to lecture the men-at-arms upon the blessings of peace and the hazards of war. Many jeered at him, the majority were impatient with him ; some would have hustled him and trampled on him, had he not given over his ill-timed philosophizing at the warning of the better sort and under threats from others' (Hist. iii. 81). Tacitus, of course, had no sympathy with such a move, and we should perhaps allow for his military sympathies in judging the philosopher. Still, a manlier tone breathes through the sentences of Demetrius of Phalerum (Stobieus, Anthol. viii. 2U), describing how differently Courage and Cowardice speak to a soldier in battle-order. 'Would not Courage bid him stay where he was and keep his place in the ranks? "But I'll he wounded!" "Endure." "But I'll be killed ! " " Die rather than leave your piice.'" The diatribg-harangues are often marked by such military figures, but it 13 needless to quote further frora this field.