those who shall be kings; then, the true Ideal of the State will
become a possibility; but not otherwise. And if the life of Beatific
Vision be indeed possible, if philosophy really "concludes in an
ecstasy," affording full fruition to the entire nature of man; then,
for certain elect souls at least, a mode of life will have been [58]
discovered more desirable than to be a king. By love or fear you
might induce such persons to forgo their privilege; to take upon them
the distasteful task of governing other men, or even of leading them
to victory in battle. But, by the very conditions of its tenure,
their dominion would be wholly a ministry to others: they would have
taken upon them-"the form of a servant": they would be reigning for
the well-being of others rather than their own. The true king, the
righteous king, would be Saint Lewis, exiling himself from the better
land and its perfected company--so real a thing to him, definite and
real as the pictured scenes of his psalter--to take part in or to
arbitrate men's quarrels, about the transitory appearances of things.
In a lower degree (lower, in proportion as the highest Platonic dream
is lower than any Christian vision) the true king would be Marcus
Aurelius, drawn from the meditation of books, to be the ruler of the
Roman people in peace, and still more, in war.

To Aurelius, certainly, the philosophic mood, the visions, however
dim, which this mood brought with it, were sufficiently pleasant to
him, together with the endearments of his home, to make public rule
nothing less than a sacrifice of himself according to Plato's
requirement, now consummated in his setting forth for the campaign on
the Danube. That it was such a sacrifice was to Marius visible fact,
as he saw him [59] ceremoniously lifted into the saddle amid all the
pageantry of an imperial departure, yet with the air less of a
sanguine and self-reliant leader than of one in some way or other