For many years no incident of importance broke the even tenor of Aurelius’s life.  He lived peaceful, happy, prosperous, and beloved, watching without envy the increasing years of his adopted father.  But in the year 161, when Marcus was now forty years old, Antoninus Pius, who had reached the age of seventy-five, caught a fever at Lorium.  Feeling that his end was near, he summoned his friends and the chief men of Rome to his bedside, and there (without saying a word about his other adopted son, who is generally known by the name of Lucius Verus) solemnly recommended Marcus to them as his successor; and then, giving to the captain of the guard the watchword of “Equanimity,” as though his earthly task was over he ordered to be transferred to the bedroom of Marcus the little golden statue of Fortune, which was kept in the private chamber of the Emperors as an omen of public prosperity.

The very first public act of the new Emperor was one of splendid generosity, namely, the admission of his adoptive brother Lucius Verus into the fullest participation of imperial honours, the Tribunitian and proconsular powers, and the titles Caesar and Augustus.  The admission of Lucius Verus to a share of the empire was due to the innate modesty of Marcus.  As he was a devoted student, and cared less for manly exercises, in which Verus excelled, he thought that his adoptive brother would be a better and more useful general than himself, and that he could best serve the State by retaining the civil administration, and entrusting to his brother the management of war.  Verus, however, as soon as he got away from the immediate influence and ennobling society of Marcus, broke loose from all decency, and showed himself to be a weak and worthless personage, as unfit for war as he was for all the nobler duties of peace, and capable of nothing but enormous gluttony and disgraceful self-indulence.  Two things only can be said in his favour; the one, that, though depraved, he was wholly free from cruelty; and the other, that he had the good sense to submit himself entirely to his brother, and to treat him with the gratitude and deference which were his due.

Marcus had a large family by Faustina, and in the first year of his reign his wife bore twins, of whom the one who survived became the wicked and detested Emperor Commodus.  As though the birth of such a child were in itself an omen of ruin, a storm of calamity began at once to burst over the long tranquil State.  An inundation of the Tiber flung down houses and streets over a great part of Rome, swept away multitudes of cattle, spoiled the harvests, devastated the fields, and caused a distress which ended in wide-spread famine.  Men’s minds were terrified by earthquakes, by the burning of cities, and by plagues or noxious insects.  To these miseries, which the Emperors did their best to alleviate, was added the horrors of wars and rumours of wars.  The Partians, under their king Vologeses, defeated and all but destroyed a Roman army, and devastated with impunity the Roman province of Syria.  The wild tribes of the Catti burst over Germany with fire and sword; and the news from Britain was full of insurrection and tumult.  Such were the elements of trouble and discord which overshadowed the reign of Marcus Aurelius from its very beginning down to its weary close.