We have other letters from a thinker and seer of the next century, which give us as sympathetic an insight into the private life of the Antonines as Cicero and Pliny give us into that of their own contemporaries in the two preceding ones. Nowhere does Marcus Aurelius appear in so human a light as in this correspondence with Fronto, the distinguished master and philosopher, which came to us at a late day out of the silence of ages. It reveals one of the rare friendships of the world, and incidentally throws a pleasant light on the family relations of the wisest and simplest of emperors. History has cast a cloud over the wives of the Antonines--whether justly or not we can never know. In an age of great vices, even virtue is not safe, and the scandal-lover has always delighted to tear fair names. But the testimony of a husband surely ought to count for more than the flippant gossip of the idle voluptuary or the witty sneer of the satirist. Referring to the elder Faustina, Antoninus Pius says: “I would rather spend my life with her in Gyaros than live without her in a palace.” As this desolate abode of the exile was supposed to be very uncomfortable, the compliment was not a light one. It is not in such terms that men write of faithless wives, nor is it in the nature of such women to wear the white veil of innocence for a series of years in the presence of those nearest to them. There was a temple built in her honor which still keeps guard as a church over the Roman forum, a permanent monument to the devotion of this tender husband. A charitable institution for girls, that bore her name, has long since gone the way of all perishable things. In the letters of Aurelius, which cover a wide range of thought and experience, there are constant references to his family. It is difficult to believe the younger Faustina as wicked as men have painted her. One of the most beautiful women of her time, as brilliant and sweet as she was beautiful, the idol of her household, the object of affectionate care on the part of her husband, this gracious woman has been a mystery to successive generations. What if the lightly spoken word of a malicious rival, or a dark insinuation from some impertinent admirer whose vanity she may have wounded, kindled a fire which the ages cannot put out? Such things have been, and may be again. “I thank the gods for giving me a wife so kind, so tender to her children, so simple,” said the philosopher, who kept his soul at a serene altitude above things of sense; but he broke down when his children suffered or died, and mourned this much-loved wife as a saint, giving her divine honors. He also put a gold statue of her in the seat she had been in the habit of occupying at the theater, and had her represented in a bas-relief as borne to heaven, while he gazed after her with longing eyes.