From his earliest youth Marcus was distinguished for his sincerity and truthfulness.  His was a docile and a serious nature.  “Hadrian’s bad and sinful habits left him,” says Niebuhr, “when he gazed on the sweetness of that innocent child.  Punning on the boy’s paternal name of Verus, he called him Verissimus, ‘the most true.’” Among the many statues of Marcus extant is one representing him at the tender age of eight years offering sacrifice.  He was even then a priest of Mars.  It was the hand of Marcus alone that threw the crown so carefully and skillfully that it invariably alighted upon the head of the statue of the god.  The entire ritual he knew by heart.  The great Emperor Antoninus Pius lived in the most simple and unostentatious manner; yet even this did not satisfy the exacting, lofty spirit of Marcus.  At twelve years of age he began to practice all the austerities of Stoicism.  He became a veritable ascetic.  He ate most sparingly; slept little, and when he did so it was upon a bed of boards.  Only the repeated entreaties of his mother induced him to spread a few skins upon his couch.  His health was seriously affected for a time; and it was, perhaps, to this extreme privation that his subsequent feebleness was largely due.  His education was of the highest order of excellence.  His tutors, like Nero’s, were the most distinguished teachers of the age; but unlike Nero, the lad was in every way worthy of his instructors.  His letters to his dearly beloved teacher Fronto are still extant, and in a very striking and charming way they illustrate the extreme simplicity of life in the imperial household in the villa of Antoninus Pius at Lorium by the sea.  They also indicate the lad’s deep devotion to his studies and the sincerity of his love for his relatives and friends.

When his predecessor and adoptive father Antoninus felt the approach of death, he gave to the tribune who asked him for the watchword for the night the reply “Equanimity,” directed that the golden statue of Fortune that always stood in the Emperor’s chamber be transferred to that of Marcus Aurelius, and then turned his face and passed away as peacefully as if he had fallen asleep.  The watchword of the father became the life-word of the son, who pronounced upon that father in the ‘Meditations’ one of the noblest eulogies ever written.  “We should,” says Renan, “have known nothing of Antoninus if Marcus Aurelius had not handed down to us that exquisite portrait of his adopted father, in which he seems, by reason of humility, to have applied himself to paint an image superior to what he himself was.  Antoninus resembled a Christ who would not have had an evangel; Marcus Aurelius a Christ who would have written his own.”

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