affected for a time; and it was, perhaps, to this extreme privation that
his subsequent feebleness was largely due. His education was of the
highest order of excellence. His tutors, like Nero's, were the most
distinguished teachers of the age; but unlike Nero, the lad was in every
way worthy of his instructors. His letters to his dearly beloved teacher
Fronto are still extant, and in a very striking and charming way they
illustrate the extreme simplicity of life in the imperial household in
the villa of Antoninus Pius at Lorium by the sea. They also indicate the
lad's deep devotion to his studies and the sincerity of his love for his
relatives and friends.

When his predecessor and adoptive father Antoninus felt the approach of
death, he gave to the tribune who asked him for the watchword for the
night the reply "Equanimity," directed that the golden statue of Fortune
that always stood in the Emperor's chamber be transferred to that of
Marcus Aurelius, and then turned his face and passed away as peacefully
as if he had fallen asleep. The watchword of the father became the
life-word of the son, who pronounced upon that father in the
'Meditations' one of the noblest eulogies ever written. "We should,"
says Renan, "have known nothing of Antoninus if Marcus Aurelius had not
handed down to us that exquisite portrait of his adopted father, in
which he seems, by reason of humility, to have applied himself to paint
an image superior to what he himself was. Antoninus resembled a Christ
who would not have had an evangel; Marcus Aurelius a Christ who would
have written his own."

* * * * *

It would be impossible here to detail even briefly all the manifold
public services rendered by Marcus Aurelius to the Empire during his