Dio's Rome, Volume 5: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During The Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English FormCassius Dio Cocceianus
History
Dio's Rome, Volume 5: An Historical Narrative Originally Composed in Greek During The Reigns of Septimius Severus, Geta and Caracalla, Macrinus, Elagabalus and Alexander Severus: and Now Presented in English Form
Cassius Dio Cocceianus
Rome -- History
So this was the manner of Marcus's demise, [who besides all other virtues
was so godfearing that even on the dies nefasti he sacrificed at home; and
he ruled better than any that had ever been in power. To be sure, he could
not display many feats of physical prowess; yet in his own person he made
a very strong body out of a very weak one.] Most of his life he passed in
the service of beneficence, and therefore he erected on the Capitol a
temple to that goddess and called her by a most peculiar name, which had
never before been current. [Footnote: What this name was no one knows.
Sylburgius conjectured that it might be _Aequanimitas_.] He himself
refrained from all offences, [and committed no faults voluntarily:] but
the offences of others, particularly those of his wife, he endured, and
neither investigated them nor punished them. In case any person did
anything good, he would praise him and use him for the service in which he
excelled, but about others he did not trouble himself, [saying: "It is
impossible for one to create such men as one wishes to have, but it is
proper to employ those in existence for that in which each of them may be
useful to the commonwealth."] That all his actions were prompted not by
pretence but by real virtue is strikingly clear. He lived fifty-eight
years, ten months, and twenty-two days, and of this time he had spent
considerable as assistant to the previous Antoninus and had himself been
emperor nineteen years and eleven days, yet from first to last he remained
the same and changed not a particle. So truly was he a good man, without
any pretence about him. [Sidenote:--35--] He was vastly helped by his
education being an expert in rhetoric and in philosophical argument. In
the one he had Cornelius Fronto and Claudius Herodes for teachers, and in
the other, Junius Rusticus and Apollonius of Nicomedea, [Footnote: Since
Apollonius was really from Chalcedon, an error may here charged to Dio's
or some one else's account.] both of whom followed Zeno's school. As a
result, great numbers pretended to engage in philosophy, in order that
they might be enriched by the emperor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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