The correspondence with Fronto, if too effusive for our taste, yet shows both in their best light. It is full of tender references to the “little ones,” their joys and their ailments. Fronto writes to the Emperor: “I have seen the little ones--the pleasantest sight of my life; for they are as like yourself as could possibly be. It has well repaid me for my journey over that slippery road and up those steep rocks: for I behold you, not simply face to face before me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right and to my left. For the rest, I found them, Heaven be thanked, with healthy cheeks and lusty voices. One was holding a slice of white bread, like a king’s son; the other a crust of brown bread, as becomes the offspring of a philosopher. I pray the gods to have both the sower and the seed in their keeping, to watch over this field wherein the ears of corn are so kindly alike. Ah! I heard, too, their pretty voices, so sweet that in the childish prattle of one and the other I seemed to be listening--yes! in that chirping of your pretty chickens--to the limpid and harmonious notes of your own oratory. Take care! You will find me growing independent having those I could love in your place;--love, on the surety of my eyes and ears.” The Emperor replies with equal affection: “I, too, have seen my little ones in your sight of them: as also I saw yourself in reading your letter. It is that charming letter which forces me to write thus.” Alas! Apollonius; what has become of the Stoic ἀπάθεια which you inculcated with such great pains? The spirit indeed was willing, but the flesh was weak; and so the good Emperor cared more for the slender breath of life that kept soul and body together in his little Annius Verus than for all the sublime mysticity of the Weltseele--the world-soul of the Stoic creed. All the sadder was the early death of his children, one after another; one son alone being left to him--Commodus, his successor in the Empire--assuredly not the fittest to survive. “Better that he had never been born,” anyone had said, except he who had most right of all to say it. But for Marcus, whatever was, was right; the gods, if gods there were, determined all things, and they could do no wrong. Commodus, bright, handsome, impulsive, wayward, fond of gladiators and low life, found the teaching of Fronto and his father little to his taste. He was more at home in the circus and the amphitheatre than in the lecture-room; with the actors, the archers and the gladiators and the “smart set,” which Faustina gathered round her, than with the bearded and hooded sophists and rhetoricians who talked ἐγκράτεια (self-restraint) and αὐτάρκεια (self-sufficiency) in the palace gardens.