Tracing the thin thread of child progress through these livid days we are brought in touch with the little known but better side of Roman life; for despite the general debauchery of the upper classes and the unwholesome pictures of Juvenal, there is evidence that there were Roman families untouched by the general immorality where women of the type of Marcia or Helvia, addressed in the letters of Seneca, presided over homes in which there was an atmosphere of virtue and self-restraint, and where tales of deeds of the Romans of the earlier days still had their charm and their influence. CHAPTER XVI REFORMS OF HADRIAN—PUNISHMENT OF FATHERS—VALERIUS MAXIMUS—FAVOURITE STREETS IN ROME FOR LEAVING ABANDONED CHILDREN—MUTILATING CHILDREN FOR PROFIT. Never, it has been said, had the human race enjoyed a state of prosperity equal to that under the reign of Hadrian, the successor to Trajan, and like him a philosopher among emperors. From Nerva to Marcus Aurelius—the five emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—there was a reign of philosophy. Indeed they may also be called the emperors of the children for the reforms they accomplished and initiated—working as they did, contrary to the entire law and tradition of their country, and without the inspiration of complete knowledge of the intellectual and spiritual conditions that were governing them. [Illustration: ANTONINUS PIUS, CONSECRATOR OF THE WORLD’S FIRST PROTECTIVE FOUNDATION BENEFIT FOR GIRLS] [Illustration: CONSTANTINE THE GREAT, EMPEROR-PROTECTOR OF THE ROMAN CHILD] To appreciate all that Hadrian did, one must remember that he had Plutarch for a master, Suetonius for his secretary, and Phlegon, his freedman, as amanuensis to write the history of his reign. As a youth he had studied all the philosophic systems including that of Epictetus, and showed an acquisitive spirit. Had he lived in our age of private railway cars probably he would have spent little time at the Capitol: in a time when travel was both disagreeable and dangerous he journeyed back and forth over his great domain, to the dissatisfaction of the Romans, but to his own greater knowledge of his people and consequent greater humanitarianism. Out of that philosophy, that association, and that teaching, out of the character of Hadrian—for, despite the attempts of his biographers, Startianus and Dion Cassius, to make him a cruel and vain tyrant, his whole life shows an abhorrence of bloodshed—there was born a new rule.[350]