The record of the outward life of this admirable man has in it little of striking incident.  He was born at Rome on the 26th of April, in the year 121 of the Christian era.  He was nephew and son-in-law to his predecessor on the throne, Antoninus Pius.  When Antoninus died, he was forty years old, but from the time of his earliest manhood he had assisted in administering public affairs.  Then, after his uncle’s death in 161, for nineteen years he reigned as emperor.  The barbarians were pressing on the Roman frontier, and a great part of Marcus Aurelius’s nineteen years of reign was passed in campaigning.  His absences from Rome were numerous and long.  We hear of him in Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Greece; but, above all, in the countries on the Danube, where the war with the barbarians was going on,—­in Austria, Moravia, Hungary.  In these countries much of his Journal seems to have been written; parts of it are dated from them; and there, a few weeks before his fifty-ninth birthday, he fell sick and died.[209] The record of him on which his fame chiefly rests is the record of his inward life,—­his Journal, or Commentaries, or Meditations, or Thoughts, for by all these names has the work been called.  Perhaps the most interesting of the records of his outward life is that which the first book of this work supplies, where he gives an account of his education, recites the names of those to whom he is indebted for it, and enumerates his obligations to each of them.  It is a refreshing and consoling picture, a priceless treasure for those, who, sick of the “wild and dreamlike trade of blood and guile,” which seems to be nearly the whole of what history has to offer to our view, seek eagerly for that substratum of right thinking and well-doing which in all ages must surely have somewhere existed, for without it the continued life of humanity would have been impossible.  “From my mother I learnt piety and beneficence, and abstinence not only from evil deeds but even from evil thoughts; and further, simplicity in my way of living, far removed from the habits of the rich.”  Let us remember that, the next time we are reading the sixth satire of Juvenal.[210] “From my tutor I learnt” (hear it, ye tutors of princes!) “endurance of labor, and to want little and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people’s affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander.”  The vices and foibles of the Greek sophist or rhetorician—­the Graeculus esuriens[211]—­are in everybody’s mind; but he who reads Marcus Aurelius’s account of his Greek teachers and masters, will understand how it is that, in spite of the vices and foibles of individual Graeculi, the education of the human race owes to Greece a debt which can never be overrated.  The vague and colorless praise of history leaves on the mind hardly any impression of Antoninus Pius:  it is only from the private memoranda of his nephew that we learn what a disciplined, hard-working, gentle, wise, virtuous man he was; a man who, perhaps, interests mankind less than his immortal nephew only because he has left in writing no record of his inner life,—­caret quia vate sacro.[212]