Beyond these few facts about his early boyhood scarcely anything has been handed down to us of his doings till his seventeenth year. What little we do know we owe to the famous first book of his Meditations. This he wrote one evening in his tent “among the Quadi, at the Granua,” a tributary of the Danube, during a lull in the war against the barbarians of the North. The troubles of his reign had made his later years a martyrdom that sorely tried his Stoic spirit, and on that evening his mind sought rest in thinking of his childhood and early youth. The book was written by an invalid amidst strife and hate and hardship; yet its ever-recurring note is the note of gratitude struck on the chords of love. He recalls with affection all who had been good to him--good in the truest sense; for they had moulded his soul to virtue. “To the gods,” he says, “I am indebted for having good grandfathers, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good associates, good kinsmen, and friends, nearly everything good.” From the example or precept of each he learned some special virtue: from his grandfather Verus “good morals and the government of my temper”; from his director “to be neither of the green nor of the blue party at the games in the circus, not a partisan either of the Palmularius or the Scutarius at the gladiators’ fights; to endure labour and to want little; to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.” Luxury, divorce, and slavery by this time had brought Roman family life to its lowest ebb of morality, and it is pleasing to find the harder and purer ideals of older times still honoured in at least some of the nobler households. Marcus was educated altogether by private teachers in his own home; he did not attend the public schools--a fact which he recalls with gratitude; and he had reason to be grateful. These schools had multiplied under the generous patronage of the Emperors; no expense was spared in securing for them the best possible teachers; but in them the theory of virtue was acquired, if acquired at all, at the cost of its practice. The _pædagogus_ or slave who accompanied each boy to and from school usually taught him a more insinuating and acceptable code of morality than the Stoic asceticism taught at times in the schools; though some even of the teachers seem to have vied with the slaves in the inculcation of immorality; hence these schools were hot-beds of vice and in ill-repute amongst parents who had a care for their children’s virtue. It is scarcely possible that the keen edge of Marcus’ moral nature should not have been blunted in such surroundings; even his passion for perfection could scarcely have kept him unscathed. As it was, he had the best teachers that could be procured, mostly belonging to the Stoic School, and in the first book of the Meditations he traces his development under their direction:--