Bitter as must have been his disappointment at his ill-success with Commodus, there was another which thrust home deeper. Ill-fame had long been gathering round the name of his wife Faustina--the most beautiful woman in the Empire. One of her vivacious temperament, more Parisian than Roman, was assuredly ill-mated with the Stoic Emperor, whose days were spent in introspection; their union was “the great paradox of the age.” She knew no law but the law of the senses: while he was ever guided by the admirable but unamiable call of duty, cold as the beckoning of a star, not soft and warm as the sunlight of devotion. No modern belle of the season had more zest in the life of the moment than she had; whilst he lived always in the shadow of the wings of Death. “Since it is possible that thou mayest depart from life this very moment, regulate every act and thought accordingly.” Every act was to be done “with forethought, as if it were the last of thy life.” Yet, different as they were, by a whole heaven’s breadth in character, it is to the credit of both that they loved one another. The rumours that assailed her name were probably in great part the exaggerations of prurient gossips, though with sufficient foundation to make them credible. Whatever their truth, the Emperor did not hearken to them. Even when they became the property of the stage and he himself was ridiculed in connexion with them, he paid no heed. In the first book of the Meditations, written a few years before the death of Faustina, he thanks the gods that he had such a wife, “so obedient, so affectionate, so simple.” He, too, must have felt at times that Cæsar’s wife should be above suspicion, but his kindly nature was ever disposed to take the most charitable view of things, and he minded little the slanderous tongues of men. “Does a man gather figs from thistles, or grapes from thorns?”--this was the keynote to his philosophy of life--a strange fatalist philosophy it too often was; but it served to lay the gibbering spectres that haunted the palace of the Cæsars. After all, Faustina, associating with sailors and gladiators (even if the worst were true), and Commodus, already giving free reign to his passions over all the paths of license, were but acting in accordance with nature, “just as the fruit trees” or the beasts of the forest. Thus, in the loneliness of his spirit, would Aurelius reason, with an indulgence to the shortcomings (or worse) of others, which we must condemn as weakness. But perhaps it was owing to his tact and consideration that her untamed restlessness carried her to no greater excesses, and that Pater’s words are true, “the one thing quite certain about her, besides her extraordinary beauty, is her sweetness to himself.”