Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/348



The author of these Meditations, M. Aurelius Antoninus, was born in Rome on 26 April 121, and died at Sirmium (Mitrovitz) or Vindobona (Vienna) on the Danube frontier on 17 March  180, leaving to his son Commodus, who had become joint Emperor at the end of  176, the unachieved task of settling the war with the German and Sarmatian peoples along that frontier.

He closes the series of adoptive Emperors, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius, under whom the Mediterranean world enjoyed a period of liberty and material comfort such as has been rarely the good fortune of mankind; 'if a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian ( 89) to the accession of Commodus'. For sufficient reasons Marcus made his young and inexperienced son his successor, and later writers fixed upon this step as the one blot upon his exalted memory.

Caesar Augustus, great-nephew of Julius Caesar, had established an autocracy, under forms of law, after the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 31 and the subsequent overthrow of the children of Pompey. The succession continued in his family, his direct or indirect descendants, until the assassination of Nero in 69. The Flavian Dynasty, based on military command, succeeded under Vespasian and his two sons, Titus and Domitian, and when the younger son's gloomy and savage tyranny closed with his assassination in 89, the writers of the day and public opinion hailed a new era of liberty and enlightenment, an era which lasted about ninety years, closing with the death of Marcus or at least with the end of the second century of our era.

One of the saddest themes in the Meditations is that 256