It was certainly not long before Antonine found that his success had not been as unqualified as he had imagined. Alexander was Caesar by decree of the Senate; Severus by some utterly unconstitutional decree of the army; Antonini filius and Severi Nepos; but here it began and ended. The boy was utterly unresponsive to the affection that Antonine was anxious to lavish upon him; utterly incapable, so the Emperor said, of any sort of training for the position he was destined to occupy. Undoubtedly a great mistake had been made, the boy was a born prig, and the Emperor had given his case away by adopting him at all, by putting him into a position in which his popularity was bound to increase amongst those who did not know him personally. In fact, Antonine arrived at the conclusion before the wine harvest that he had played his aunt’s game and not his own, and in consequence he became moody and uncomfortable. Lampridius’ contrast of the two characters is, as we have said, a caricature drawn for the laudation of the younger, the reprobation of the elder. If only a part is true, it must have been very annoying for the Emperor of seventeen to be saddled, through his own stupidity, with a nincompoop of twelve, a boy who quoted proverbs to a purpose, and the maxims of a detestable crowd of female relatives at every turn. Of course, Lampridius’ likeness of his little hero is stocked with fulsome adulation. One would think, on reading it, that there was at least one person in the world who did not deceive himself when he said that he was without sin, and therefore ready to cast the first stone. The account of his first meeting with the Senate is simply ludicrous; no child, however disgusting, could have displayed the unction and greasiness which is recorded as having slipped off his tongue. Were he one-half as nasty as Lampridius asserts, we can well imagine that the whole devil in Antonine was striving to get hold of his cousin’s prejudices, trying to persuade him to run, dance, play, to wake him up from the self-satisfaction which so ill became his years. All of this, we are told, Antonine did, under the generic terms of corrupting his morals, which is after all the sum total of Antonine’s enormities.