Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/349

 of the extinction of famous families, and Marcus touches at least once upon a second topic, the inhumanity of the old Roman nobility, the Patricians so styled. He himself belonged to the new governing aristocracy, recruited largely from the middle class and from colonist stocks in Gaul and Spain and Africa, which came to the front under Vespasian's dynasty. His great-grandfather Verus came from a family originally settled in Baetica, a province of Spain. His grandfather, M. Annius Verus, created a patrician by Vespasian and Titus, was consul for the second time in 121, the year of his grandson's birth. He was Prefect of the City of Rome and afterwards consul for a third time. His father, M. Annius Verus, died young, after becoming praetor. His mother's grandfather, L. Catilius Severus, twice consul and probably Annius Verus' successor as Prefect of Rome, was removed from office by Hadrian at the end of his reign as a suspected candidate for the purple. From Pliny's letters we gather that he was of austere life and literary tastes, and from the Meditations that he took a generous interest in his young kinsman's education. Indeed, there is some evidence that Marcus was at first named after him (Annius) Catilius Severus. His mother, Domitia Lucilla, inherited a large fortune, in part derived from the famous advocate Gnaeus Domitius Afer, the master of the rhetoric teacher and advocate Quintilian. Her house, on the Mons Caelius, close to what is now the Church of St. John Lateran, was a centre of Greek culture, and it was no doubt her influence which inclined her son to Greek letters and philosophy at an early age. Like most cultivated Romans of that day she was familiar with the Greek language, and Tiberius Claudius Atticiis Herodes, the wealthy Athenian orator, stayed in her house in January 143, when he came to Rome to hold the consulship, and appears to have enjoyed her patronage in his early years.