Page:Meditations of the Emperor Marcus Antoninus - Volume 1 - Farquharson 1944.pdf/370

 naturally delicate constitution. Benedicta and Theodotus were no doubt slaves. The names, at first sight, suggest that they were Christians, but it seems certain that, at this date, such names were not common among Christians, whereas these and similar names were often borne by pagan servants.

§ 8. Annia Galeria Faustina the younger, or Faustina Augusta as she became in 146, was first cousin to Marcus, being the daughter of Faustina the elder, Marcus' paternal aunt, the wife of Antoninus Pius. She accompanied Marcus to the Danube front and was with him when, after the insurrection of Avidius Cassius, governor of Syria, in 175, he went to the eastern part of the Empire to restore the situation. In 176 she died suddenly of gout at Halala in the Taurus. Marcus made Halala into a colony called Faustinopolis, caused her to be consecrated as Diva Faustina Pia and instituted in her memory a guild of Puellae Faustinianae. Her memory, as is notorious, has been blackened, as her mother's also was, by Dio Cassius and the biographers. The problem is whether we are to believe a tissue of lewd and malignant legends, some of which are obvious fictions (like the story that Commodus, the imperial gladiator, was himself the son of a gladiator), rather than the carefully chosen words of her husband, the evidence of Fronto's correspondence, and the testimony of Antoninus, who in a letter to Fronto of 143 wrote: 'I would sooner live with Faustina in Gyara [an island to which offenders were banished] than without her in the palace.'

It is perhaps worth observing that Guevara's once famous romance, The Dial of Princes, an extraordinary medley of matter in which I cannot find a grain of historical truth, contributed largely to the traditional view, which makes her name a byeword for infidelity. Since Merivale wrote on the subject most historians have agreed to acquit her or at least to return a verdict of not-proven.

The way in which Marcus speaks of her here suggests that she was still living, so that the passage (and presumably the Book) would be dated before 176.



The inscriptions: 'Written among the Quadi on the river Gran' at the close of Book i, and 'Written at Carnuntum' at the 278