And so Saint Louis was serene and confident as to his fate and that of the human race, whilst Marcus Aurelius was disquieted and sad-- sad for himself and also for humanity, for his country and for his times: "O, my sole," was his cry, "wherefore art thou troubled, and why am I so vexed ?" We are here brought closer to the fact which has already been foreshadowed, and which characterizes the moral and social condition of the Roman world at this period.

It would be a great error to take the five emperors just spoken of--Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius--as representatives of the society amidst which they lived, and as giving in a certain degree the measure of its enlightenment, its morality, its prosperity, its disposition, and condition in general.

Those five princes were not only picked men, superior in mind and character to the majority of their contemporaries, but they were men almost isolated in their generation; in them there was a resumption of all that had been acquired by Greek and Roman antiquity of enlightenment and virtue, practical wisdom and philosophical morality: they were the heirs and the survivors of the great minds and the great politicians of Athens and Rome, of the Areopagus and the Senate.

They were not in intellectual and moral harmony with the society they governed, and their action upon it served hardly to preserve it partially and temporarily from the evils to which it was committed by its own vices and to break its fall.

When they were thoughtful and modest as Marcus Aurelius was, they were gloomy and disposed to discouragement, for they had a secret foreboding of the uselessness of their efforts.
Nor was their gloom groundless: in spite of their honest plans and of brilliant appearances, the degradation, material as well as moral, of Roman society went on increasing.