Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/352

 Lucilla, his wife Faustina, and their children. Under the rather affected mannerisms which Marcus employed to please Fronto, the leader of a literary revolt from the style of the preceding century, we get a pleasant insight into the life led by the young Caesar in Rome, in his adoptive father's country seats at Lorium and Lanuvium, near the capital, and at the seaside resorts on the Bay of Naples and the Mediterranean coast. The manners of the imperial family resemble those which Pliny has so admirably depicted in his Letters, the same cultured urbanity, love of antiquities and the country-side, devotion to learning and literature, a return especially to the authors of the Republic. Ordered days and nights, simple habits, mild exercise varied by occasional hunting expeditions, a long round of social and political engagements, constant attendance in the Senate, anxious preparation by Marcus of the laboured speeches which he composed under Fronto's careful eye.

Towards the end of this period Marcus was drawn away from Fronto into the influence of Junius Rusticus, a public man whom Antoninus made Prefect of Rome. He was a follower of the Stoic philosophy and introduced his friend and pupil to the teaching of Epictetus. The breach which ensued between Rhetoric and Philosophy is plainly marked in the correspondence, and Fronto rallies his pupil on the subject. In the Meditations the name of Rusticus is introduced before that of Fronto, and it is noticeable that Marcus says nothing of the literary lessons he learnt from his old tutor, dwelling instead on the moral qualities which he had observed in Fronto, especially that natural affection which is preferred to the cold inhumanity of 'our so-called aristocrats'. From this time onwards Marcus clearly devoted himself to an unaffected, candid form of speaking which was the counterpart of the simple life which his Stoic teacher prescribed. 260