Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/353

 The reign of Antoninus Pius is almost a blank in history, the literary records being lost. There was little anxiety at home, little trouble abroad, nothing to suggest the tempests which were to break upon his successor. The good Emperor died at his country house at Lorium on 7 March 161, his last act, in the intervals of fever, being to order the statue of Fortuna to be carried to Marcus' room; the watchword he gave was Equanimity, a gentle hint to a successor, a nice allusion to the Stoic creed.

Marcus now took the name M. Aelius Aurelius Antoninus and, associating his brother Lucius as Emperor, gave him the title L. Aelius Aurelius Verus, the dynastic names with his own cognomen Verus. Probably he did this to prevent civil strife, but he was also looking to the East where the power of Parthia was threatening, and desired to send his colleague out with the prestige of emperor. There followed the Parthian and Armenian war, 161–6, in the course of which Marcus sent Lucilla, his eldest child, to be married to Lucius at Ephesus. The conduct of operations was in the hands of Avidius Cassius, who captured Ctesiphon and added a large province in the Euphrates and Tigris valleys to the Roman Empire. Lucius took the titles of Armeniacus, Parthicus Maximus, and Medicus, but had done little to deserve them, spending his time, so gossip said, in sensual pleasures in the famous city of Antioch on the Orontes. The returning legions brought back to Italy and the neighbouring lands a dreadful bubonic plague, which lasted many decades and to which some modern writers have ascribed the decline of the population of the Empire, leaving it a prey to the attack of the barbarians from the north.

Marcus meanwhile had been occupied at home with measures for the well-being of Rome and the Provinces, but now he was called to take the field against the 261