“From Diognetus I learned not to busy myself about trifling things, and not to give credit to what was said by miracle-workers and jugglers about incantations and the driving away of demons and such things”--perhaps an allusion to the Christians--“and to have desired a plank bed and whatever else of this kind belongs to the Grecian discipline.” Rusticus, a famous Stoic philosopher--the same who afterwards as Prefect of Rome condemned St. Justin to death,--taught him to avoid sophistry, rhetoric, poetry, and fine-writing, then much in fashion; “not to walk about the house in my outdoor dress, nor to do other things of that kind”; to shun vindictiveness; to read deeply, not superficially; and, greatest benefit of all, he made him acquainted with the discourses of Epictetus. These discourses henceforth became his à Kempis and suggested the writing of his own Meditations. Apollonius--the most rigid of Stoics--impressed on him the great Stoic virtue “to look at nothing else, not even for a moment, except to reason; and to be always the same, in sharp pains, on the occasion of the loss of a child and in long illness.” This last sentence is full of suppressed pathos in view of his long life of ill-health and the early death of most of his children. He seems to struggle against the sense of the tears of things and the mortal woes that touch even the Stoic heart; but he is conscious that here at least he is too much a man to be a sage; for in his letters to Fronto we see the most tender solicitude for his delicate children, a mother’s anxiety as to every sign of their declining or returning health. As Diognetus had taught him austerity; Rusticus, sincerity; Apollonius, self-suppression; so it was a grandson of Plutarch’s, Sextus of Chaeronea, who taught him affection. From Alexander the grammarian, Fronto his tutor and intimate friend, and Alexander the Platonic he learned other graces of thought and manner out of which was woven that inexplicable thing, the character of the perfect gentleman, Nature’s saint. Catulus, though a Stoic, urged him “to love his children truly”; Severus, “to love my kin, to love truth and to love justice”; to know and honour the Stoic heroes and martyrs, Thrasea, Helvidius, Cato, Dion, Brutus; to have as his ideal “a polity administered with equal rights and equal freedom of speech, and a kingly government, which respects most of all the freedom of the governed.” But of all his teachers none can have had so beneficial an effect on his too rigid nature as Maximus. His character is that of the natural man at his best.