III Antoninus Pius, A.D. 138–a.d. 161 — Marcus Antoninus, A.D. 161–a.d. 180
After the death of Hadrian, in A.D. 138, for forty-two years the Empire of Rome was ruled by two sovereigns who, pagan though they were, live in the pages of historians of all lands as the most perfect of any known sovereign rulers. They are known as the two Antonines: the first is distinguished by the title given him by his contemporaries, “Pius”; the second, by the best known of his several names, “Marcus Aurelius.”
They were not conquerors, not even great legislators; although under their beneficent, and with one sad exception generally wise rule, the laws of the State, in the case especially of the downtrodden and helpless, were materially improved and supplemented.
Our contemporary pagan literature here, alas! is but scanty; what has come down to us is even more unsatisfactory than what we possess in the contemporary records of Hadrian.
No great writer in prose or poetry arose in these forty-two years; and when in the fifth and following centuries, the era of confusion and universal decay, manuscripts began to be only sparingly copied, the records of this period were neglected, and what attention to literature was given, the copyists of the MSS. devoted to the masterpieces of the Augustan and even of an earlier age, such as the famous prose works of Cicero and Tacitus, of Pliny and of Suetonius; of poets such as Lucretius, Vergil and Ovid, Propertius, Juvenal and Horace.
We possess only abbreviations of the Chronicles of the Antonines, somewhat dry and uninteresting, wanting in details and in picturesque illustration. It is true that no great war—no striking conquest—no terrible intestine disturbances—disfigured these happier reigns, or supplied material which would arrest the attention of the writer and reader. It is mainly from side sources that we learn enough of the character and government of the Antonines to justify the unfeigned admiration which in all times has been given to these two good and great princes.
The title “Pius,” which was bestowed on the elder Antoninus by the Senate at the beginning of his reign, and by which he is universally known, was well deserved. His unfeigned devotion to the ancient Roman religion, his reputation for justice and wisdom, for clemency and sobriety, his stern morality, the high example he ever set in his private and public life—were admirably expressed in this title. His great predecessors—Emperors such as Vespasian and Titus, Trajan and Hadrian, possessed each of them some of these distinguishing characteristics, but only some; the lives of these famous Emperors being all more or less disfigured by regrettable flaws.
But the title “Pius” in the first instance seems to have been given to the first Antonine owing to the universal admiration of his generous and devoted behaviour to his adopted father and predecessor Hadrian, whom he tenderly watched over during his last sad years of ever increasing sickness and terrible life-weariness, and whose memory he protected with a rare and singular chivalry, if we may venture to use a beautiful and significant word which belongs to a later period in the world’s history.
The sources, whence we derive our too scanty knowledge of this almost flawless life, besides the notices and details preserved in the abbreviations of the contemporary chronicles we have spoken of, comprise the comparatively recently recovered letters of Fronto, a famous philosopher and man of letters to whom Antoninus Pius entrusted the principal share in the training of his adopted son and successor known in history as the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, and more especially the noble and touching estimate of his works and days contained in the singular and exquisite little book written by his adopted son Marcus, generally known as his “Meditations.”
We find the following striking words relating to Pius written by Marcus in this little book after the great Emperor, who had trained him so well for his high destiny, had passed away. It was in the form of a soliloquy with himself—with his own soul:
“Life is short; the only fruit of the earth-life is to do good to the men among whom our lot is cast. Ever act as a true pupil of Antoninus (Pius). Call to mind his invariable fixity of purpose in carrying out what was reasonable; remember how calm was his conduct under all circumstances; think of his piety; remember that serene expression of his; his invariable sweetness—his contempt for vainglory; his constant care in sifting the truth; his indifference to unjust reproaches... never suspicious; utterly careless of his own personal comfort; paying little heed to his food or his clothes; indefatigable in work; ever patient and self-denying.... Think (O my soul) of all this, so that when your own hour for departure strikes, it may find you, as it found him, conscious that the life-work had been well done.”
Antoninus Pius had inherited a great fortune; and at the time of his adoption by Hadrian he was well on in middle life, and had filled with dignity and honour many of the high offices of State. When he succeeded to supreme power as the absolute and irresponsible sovereign of the greatest Empire ever under the sceptre of one man; after carefully discharging the many duties of his great position in his magnificent palace overlooking the Roman Forum, its splendid temples and its yet more splendid memories, he loved to retire for a brief season to his ancestral home and farm of Lorium in Etruria.
Antoninus Pius delighted in exchanging the imperial state and wearisome pomp of his Roman court, the artificial pleasures of the theatre and the circus, which gave him no real satisfaction, for the true and healthy joys of the woods and the fields. He enjoyed the harvest and the vintage festivals of the people. He loved the excitement of the chase; he was at once a devoted fisherman and a hunter, though for these things he never neglected the graver duties and the awful responsibilities of his great position. The Fronto letters give us a beautiful picture of his family life at his Lorium farm.
But the great and good Emperor had a deeper and more far-reaching object at heart than simple self-gratification when he cast off the trammels of State and forsook the gay and brilliant court of the great capital for the plain unostentatious life of a country gentleman of the old Roman school.
The first Antonine was conscious that the soft, luxurious city life of which Rome was the great example, and which was too faithfully copied in the wealthy provincial centres, was enfeebling the Empire,—the builders and makers of Rome he well knew were the hardy race of men who feared the old gods and who were ready to fight and die for their country, and these men were the peasant-farmers produced by the old rural life of Italy. He would set the fashion himself, and if possible popularize this better and nobler way of living. He would bring back the memories of those great ones who had been the makers of that mighty empire.
It was no mere love of antiquity, no special taste for antiquarian lore, which induced Antoninus Pius to grave upon his coins the immemorial symbols telling of the ancient traditions belonging to the great past of Rome,—symbols many of which have been immortalized in the “haunting and liquid” rhythms of the poet loved in Rome,—Æneas carrying his father; the white sow sacrificed to Juno by the fugitive Æneas on the banks of Tiber; Mars and Rhea Sylvia; the sacred wild fig-tree beneath whose branches the wolf found the children Romulus and Remus; the wolf suckling the baby founders of the Queen City; the augur Nævius and his razor before King Tarquinius Priscus; Horatius who defended the bridge against the hosts of Porsenna. It was not the instinct of a curious and scholarly archæologist, but a deep and far-reaching purpose, which prompted Antoninus Pius to search out and rebuild the little unknown Arcadian village of Pallanteum, the ancient home of Evander, the host of Æneas,—Evander, the founder of the earliest Rome, whose beautiful story is told in the noble epic of Vergil.36 The Emperor would popularize, would bring before his people the glorious memories of the storied past—the wonderful story of Rome—its cherished traditions which told of the old love of the Immortals for Rome.
Antoninus Pius was by no means the first who felt that the greatness of Rome had been built up by that hardy race of men who had lived the simple homely life of rural toil, by men who feared the gods and believed in the rewards and punishments of the Immortals. The great statesman Emperor Augustus more than a century earlier had recognised this, and his poet Vergil had pressed home this truth in his deathless verses.
In the Eclogues, and still more in the Georgics, men were led to reverence the old simple manners and customs; and in the charmed verses of the Æneid the same teaching was enforced with yet greater eloquence and earnestness. “Work and pray” was the conclusion of the Georgics (in primis venerare deos), was the burthen of the poet’s solemn charge.
And it was not only Augustus and his loved poet Vergil who had felt the power of the ancient Roman religion, so sadly ignored if not despised in their day and time, and who had seen that a return to the old Roman way of living and to the primitive simple beliefs and the old austere life alone would help to purify the corrupt and dissolute manners which were weakening, perhaps destroying, the old Roman spirit. Tacitus, the greatest historian Rome had ever given birth to, had also expressed the same beautiful thought. Juvenal the poet-satirist, too, who had lashed with an unsparing pen the luxury, the vices, and the follies of his age, painted as his ideal Roman a Curius, thrice consul, who, despising all state and pomp and luxury, hungry and tired after a day in the fields, preferred “a meal of herbs and bacon served on homely earthenware.”
Juvenal had a true Roman reverence for the old heroes of the Republic, for the Curii, the Fabii, and the Scipios, and their unostentatious way of living. Even Martial felt a strange charm in the antique simplicity of the old republican statesmen and soldiers.
The younger Pliny, courtier, statesman, and polished writer, weary and sated with the brilliant luxurious life of a great noble in the earlier years of the second century, in his wonderful picture of social life in the times of Trajan, shows us how intensely sensible he and his circle were of the purer pleasures and rest to be found in “the stillness of the pine woods, and the cold breeze from the Apennines which blew over his quiet rural home in Tuscany.”
But while Augustus and his famous poets had striven to lead the citizens of the great empire to love and lead the more austere and purer life of the primitive Roman people, it was an open secret that the imperial teacher himself failed to lead the life he professed to love, for Augustus stained his own works and days with grave moral irregularities. The two Antonines, on the other hand, different from Augustus, set themselves as the noblest examples of a pure austere life; no moral stain or flaw was ever suffered to disfigure the life-work of these two patriotic pagan sovereigns.
There was one master-thought deep buried in the heart of Antoninus Pius and of his adopted son and successor Marcus Antoninus. Their whole career was influenced by an intense love of Rome. They would preserve the mighty Empire from the decay which they perceived was fast gaining ground; they would set, by their own example, the vogue of the purer, simpler religious life on which the foundation stories of the Empire had been so securely laid; hence the bitter persecution of the Christian sect which was so striking and painful a feature in the Antonine administration of the Empire,—a persecution evidently active and bitter in the reign of Pius, but which greatly increased in intensity and virulence under the rule of his successor Marcus.
The Antonines were intensely persuaded that all that was great and glorious in the Roman Empire came from the simple and even austere life led by their fathers under the protection of the mighty Immortals—of Jupiter of the Capitol, of Mars the Avenger, of Vesta with her sacred fire, of the great Twin Brethren—of the gods whose temples with their golden roofs were the stately ornaments of the Forum on which the Emperors looked down from their proud home on the Palatine Hill. These were the deities which the great pagan Emperor believed “had cradled the Roman State and still watched over her career.” It was this belief which induced Pius to grave on his coins the sacred memories of the earliest days of this divine protection on which we have been dwelling.