Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/481

Rh made in the time of his predecessor, Trajan; and his own powers were, doubtless, limited by constitutional forms.

Among his acknowledgments to his teachers and friends, he mentions that he learned from his governor to be neither of the green nor the blue party at the games in the circus (showing that the feud was in active force at the time); also endurance of labor, to want little, to work with his own hands, not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander. "From Rusticus," he says, "I learned not to be led away to sophistic emulation, nor to be writing on speculative matters, nor to deliver little hortatory orations, nor to be showing myself off as a man who practises much discipline." From the same teacher he also learned not to walk about the house in his out-door dress, and, as he says, "to write my letters with simplicity, like the letter Rusticus himself wrote from Sinuessa to my mother."

He appears to have been a Stoic, and thanks one of his tutors for introducing him to Epictetus; but he had none of the harshness, indifference, or self-assertion, that has become associated with the idea of Stoicism—perhaps a little unjustly, although there is always some ground for a good, wholesome prejudice against such a representative word.

For his wife, Faustina, he expresses great admiration. Neither she, however, nor her mother, who had the same name, succeeded in preserving a character unspotted from attack by the historians; and if his wife deserves the criticisms that are extant (of second-rate authority, however, Leslie says), even the Theodora that Prof. Lewis has given us so vivid an account of was hardly more vicious in taste, or reckless in practice. Swinburne has chosen her name as the key-note for a tour de force, and makes it the lay-figure on which to drape forty verses, in each of which the second line rhymes with Faustine. She seems in the poem to be closely related to Poe's Leonore, who was eliminated (the author tells us) out of his personal consciousness in accordance with the logical rules of imaginative and rhythmic art.

His individual view of domestic life must, however, count for much, even in opposition to Swinburne. He says: "I thank the gods that, though it was my mother's fate to die young, she spent the last years of her life with me; that I have such a wife, so obedient, so affectionate, and so simple; and that I had abundance of good nurture for my children."

It is, perhaps, fair enough for the teacher to say that faith is best