Amongst the number of appointments made for his own pleasure during this period we must include the return of Aquilia Severa to the position of wife and Empress. Dion relates that, between the divorce of Annia Faustina and the return of the nun to connubial felicity, Antonine took two women to wife; but adds sapiently that even he does not know who they were, or when the marriages took place. Now, as the time between the divorce of Annia and the Emperor’s death cannot greatly have exceeded three months, and as he was obviously desirous of returning to Aquilia Severa from the first, the story of the two odd wives may be dismissed as not proven, another of those terminological inexactitudes which seem to be inseparable from the political amenities of every age; added to which we must remember that Antonine was still so passionately devoted to Hierocles that he would willingly have died rather than be parted from him. The return of the nun was the crowning point in Antonine’s folly. Undoubtedly he was getting more and more worried, was feverishly anxious to repair the damage to his shattered power, was ready to catch at any straw that would give him encouragement and help. In his extremity he turned to the one woman for whom he had ever cared,—if we except his mother, who, poor woman, was of an artfulness so bovine that her support was a much more useful asset in his enemies’ game than to his own position. For Antonine, unfortunately, Aquilia Severa was also worse than useless; she may have cared for him, but her return spelt his ruin and destruction. Not that Antonine was by any means at the end of his resources as yet. If he hesitated, no one knew it. Like Caligula, he must have spent nearly £400,000,000 of our money, and was radiant because he had achieved the impossible. But he was worried, and, again like Caligula, in the nick of time he remembered the sure and certain way to glory. As an Antonine at the head of a conquering army he would again advance against the Marcomanni, the men inhabiting Bavaria and Bohemia, whom Commodus had reduced.