“My mother Faustina urged your father [by adoption] Pius, at the time of the secession of Celsus, to feel first for his own family.... You see how young Commodus is, and our son-in-law Pompeianus is older and is abroad. Do not spare men who have not spared you, and would not spare me and the children if they won.”
A later letter of Marcus tells that he has read her exhortation in his villa at Formiæ (on the Gulf of Gaeta). By that time he has heard that Cassius is dead, and he will hear of no further revenge on his family. He will spare his wife and children, and beg the Senate to be moderate in punishing the accomplices, because “there is nothing that so much commends the Emperor of Rome to the nations as clemency.” We know, in fact, that he treated the family of Cassius with great generosity.
The Emperor and Empress then went to the East to complete the work of pacification. In the course of the voyage, in a little village at the foot of Mount Taurus, Faustina met her end in the year 175. As a matter of course she was placed among the gods, but Marcus was not content with the customary honouring of her memory. He gave the village the name of Faustinopolis, founded a fresh charity with the title of “Puellæ Faustinianæ,” and built a beautiful temple at Rome, which, when he died a few years later, was dedicated in their joint names by the Senate. As if to obliterate all the rumours about her infidelity, he went on to ask extraordinary honours for her of the Senate. He set up a special altar, with a silver statue of her, in the temple of Venus, and directed that maidens about to marry should offer sacrifice on it; and he had a golden statue of her placed on her seat in the theatre whenever he attended its performances.
Dio gives two versions of the death of Faustina which were current in his time. Some said that she died of gout, from which she suffered; others held that she put an end to her life in fear lest her complicity with Cassius should be discovered by Marcus in the East. The second theory is superfluous. The natural cause of death seems adequate enough, nor would she be in any serious danger if Marcus heard that Cassius had made her the pretext of his rebellion. Her chief misdeeds were to live after her. Frivolous, and probably licentious, in her early married life, she seems to have settled in sober ways when she became Empress, but we find no influence of hers in the ordering of affairs. Had she only reared healthy children to succeed her husband, she might have contributed worthily to the mighty task of supporting the shaken Empire. Instead, she gave to the Empire Lucilla and Commodus, her two surviving children, and it fell into a fresh degradation.
CHAPTER XI
THE WIVES OF THE SYBARITES
As Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus had been equal in Imperial power, and both were married, we have one more Empress to regard before we pass on to the wives of Commodus; and the account we have already given of Verus will justify us in relegating her to this distinct chapter. Verus had married Lucilla, the eldest daughter of Marcus and Faustina; but the ambiguous repute of her mother will warn us not to expect a painful spectacle of vice in alliance with lofty virtue. Lucilla carries a step further the unhappy disposition which we have suspected in her grandmother, and more palpably detected in her mother. By her union with Lucius Verus vice was once more decked with the Imperial purple and justified in the eyes of Rome. We may briefly consider Lucilla as Empress before we follow her lamentable career under the reign of her brother.
Lucilla was born in the first year of the married life of Marcus and Faustina. Marcus was then a pale and thin-blooded scholar, Faustina in the full warmth and sensuousness of young womanhood, and it was not unnatural that the child should inherit the temper of her mother without the spiritual restraint of her sire. She was educated with the greatest care, and was betrothed to Verus in her sixteenth year. Presumably by the will of her father, and certainly with the full assent of Verus, she remained two further years in the palace, while Verus wore out his strength in the dissipations of Antioch. Marcus heard of his conduct, and sent out Lucilla to marry him; as if a union with a young woman of seventeen or eighteen would be apt to have a sobering influence on a man of Verus’s habits and parentage. Verus met her at Ephesus, married her there with great pomp, and returned with her to his pleasures at Antioch.
They came to Rome at the peace of 166, and Marcus could not fail to learn in full the character of the man to whom he had entrusted his daughter and half his power. The villa which Verus occupied in the Clodian Way was the most notorious house of debauch in Rome. It swarmed with the dancing-girls, boys, Eastern slaves, musicians, conjurors, etc., that Verus had brought from the East. One room was fitted up as a popular tavern, and we must leave under the veil of a dead language the abominations that were perpetrated there. One can only repeat such comparatively decent details as that Verus would have gladiators to fight in his house during dinner, and prolong the carouse until his slaves had to bear away his stupefied form on his couch; or that, on other occasions, he would emulate the early feats of Nero, and revel at nights in the wine-shops and brothels of the popular quarter. One night he gave a superbly furnished banquet, and at the close, in a drunken fit, presented to his guests the costly plate, and even the litters, with silver-harnessed mules, in which they were taken home.
Marcus made several futile attempts to brace him by a campaign in the north, and must have been sincerely relieved when he at last paid, by a premature death, the price of his excesses. Lucilla had then been Empress for eleven years. As she is barely noticed in the chronicles, we are left to imagine the effect on her of living through her early womanhood in such a palace as that of Verus. Probably disgust saved her very largely from the taint. Verus’s sister Fabia lived with them, and was generally believed to be intimate with her brother. She at least usurped the place of Lucilla in authority, and the Empress must have been as much relieved as her father when Verus died. He was rumoured to have been poisoned by Lucilla because of his relations with Fabia; by Faustina, for betraying his relations with her; and by Marcus, to rid the Empire of his sottishness. But an apoplectic fit would be so natural a crown to such a career that we can dispense with so much poison.