[Sidenote:—­33—­] The Scythian imbroglio, which needed his attention, caused him to give his son a wife, Crispina, sooner than he actually wished.  The Quintilii could not end the war, although there were two of them and they possessed prudence, courage, and considerable experience.  Consequently the rulers themselves were forced to take the field. [Sidenote:  A.D. 178 (a.u. 931)] Marcus also asked the senate for money from the public treasury, not because it had not been placed in the sovereign’s authority, but because Marcus was wont to declare that this and everything else belonged to the senate and the people.  “We,” said he (speaking to the senate), “are so far from having anything of our own that we even live in a house of yours.”  He set out, therefore, after these remarks, and after hurling the bloody spear, that lay in the temple of Bellona, into hostile territory. (I heard this from men who accompanied him). [Sidenote:  A.D. 179] Paternus was given a large detachment and sent to the scene of fighting.  The barbarians held out the entire day, but were all cut down by the Romans.  And Marcus was for the tenth time saluted as imperator.

[Sidenote:  A.D. 180 (a.u. 933)] Had he lived longer, he would have subdued the whole region:  as it was, he passed away on the seventeenth of March, not from the effects of the sickness that he had at the time, but by the connivance of his physicians, as I have heard on good evidence, who wanted to do a favor to Commodus.

[Sidenote:—­34—­] When at the point of death he commended his son to the protection of the soldiers (for he did not wish his death to appear to be his fault); and to the military tribunes, who asked him for the watchword, he said:  “Go to the rising sun:  I am already setting.”  After he was dead he obtained many marks of honor and was set up in gold within the senate-house itself.

So this was the manner of Marcus’s demise, [who besides all other virtues was so godfearing that even on the dies nefasti he sacrificed at home; and he ruled better than any that had ever been in power.  To be sure, he could not display many feats of physical prowess; yet in his own person he made a very strong body out of a very weak one.] Most of his life he passed in the service of beneficence, and therefore he erected on the Capitol a temple to that goddess and called her by a most peculiar name, which had never before been current. [Footnote:  What this name was no one knows.  Sylburgius conjectured that it might be Aequanimitas.] He himself refrained from all offences, [and committed no faults voluntarily:] but the offences of others, particularly those of his wife, he endured, and neither investigated them nor punished them.  In case any person did anything good, he would praise him and use him for the service in which he excelled, but about others he did not trouble himself, [saying:  “It is impossible for one to create such men as one wishes to have, but it is proper to employ those in existence for that