The World

Hadrian had been close to the Verus family since his Spanish childhood. Marcus’ grandfather, another respected proconsul, was one of Hadrian’s trusted friends, a subtle political veteran who is acclaimed on his marble inscription for his skill in ‘juggling the glass ball’ – a perfect definition of politics then and now. ‘From my grandfather Verus,’ wrote Marcus later, ‘I learned a kindly disposition and sweetness of temper.’ Something about the grandson Marcus Verus had struck Hadrian: he nicknamed the boy Verissimus, Most Truthful, a play on his name. Antoninus was also Marcus’ great-uncle. It was an intricate but well-judged web he spun.

In 138, Hadrian – denouncing the murderous ineptitude of medicine: ‘Many doctors have killed the king’ – finally died. Emperor Antoninus Pius moved the two Caesars into the palace and had them tutored by the best teachers. While Lucius was a playboy, Marcus was a philosopher, who used the Greek ideas of Stoicism as a guide to living as trainee emperor. Expected to die like most Romans in his fifties, Antoninus actually ruled for twenty-three stable years. In most previous reigns, the long apprenticeship of Marcus would have been untenable: either emperor or heir would have had to kill the other, but Marcus was neither ambitious nor entitled. Living in Tiberius’ old palace on the Palatine, he warned himself, ‘Don’t be Caesarofied! Don’t be dipped in the purple – for that can happen!’

In 145, Antoninus married his daughter Faustina to Marcus, who was unusually innocent for a young prince surrounded by available slaves: ‘I preserved the flower of manhood, didn’t seek proof of my virility, even deferred the time.’ Faustina became the Augusta, outranking Marcus, who was the Caesar. The cleverness of Hadrian’s web was that it allowed Antoninus to leave the empire to his own daughter.

In 161, the guards asked the dying emperor for his password. ‘Equanimity,’ he said, and died. Equanimity would indeed be Marcus’ ideal. Marcus made Lucius his junior co-emperor – even though he was an inept jackanapes who toured the empire with a circus of actors and clowns. This ancient fratboy even built a tavern inside his villa so he could wassail day and night.

Faustina had spent most of the previous decade pregnant, bearing fourteen children, of whom six died in infancy. Childhood mortality was high: only 50 per cent of Roman females lived to twelve, only 50 per cent of boys lived to seven; smallpox, which probably evolved from a rodent virus in prehistorical Africa, killed many, as did waterborne diseases. Marcus adored his children, describing one daughter as ‘a cloudless sky, a holiday, hope close at hand, a total joy, an excellent and flawless source of pride’. When one of those children died, he attempted a Stoical response: ‘One man prays: “How I may not lose my little child,” but you must pray: “How I may not be afraid to lose him.”’ On death he reflected, ‘Loss is nothing but change.’ In the year of their accession, Faustina gave birth to twin boys. One died at four but the other, Commodus, grew up to be golden-haired, blue-eyed and energetic, the first son born to a ruling princeps since Britannicus. To protect little Commodus, Marcus married one daughter to his co-emperor Lucius and the rest to husbands who would not threaten the succession.

Having survived so much dangerous childbearing, Faustina, passionate and outspoken, grew more distant from the cerebral Marcus and threw herself into affairs with gladiators and actors. Marcus even caught her in flagrante with one, but he was tolerant, though Faustina’s affairs were even mentioned on stage in Rome. When his aides advised him to exile her, he joked, ‘If we send her away, we must also send away her dowry’ – the empire. But Faustina’s intrigues would almost cost Marcus his head.

No Roman emperor so deserved a serene reign of philosophical contemplation, but Marcus was confronted by war on all fronts. From the north-east Germanic tribes galloped south and broke into Italy; in the east the Parthians attacked Syria. Lucius was dispatched to oversee a counter-attack that culminated in the burning of Ctesiphon. At the same time, keen to take advantage of Parthian defeat, Marcus sent an embassy to China.