Marcus Aurelius || Aphorisms

Henry Wace attributes his severity as emperor to rivalry between the rising teachers of Christianity and the professors of the school of Stoicism to which the emperor belonged, to a personal bitterness to which he gave expression in his Meditations , and to the occurrence of natural calamities that the populace attributed to the anger of the gods against those who denied them and that the Christians saw as signs of the end of the world.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Aurelius