Meditations I.11

From Fronto, to note the envy, the subtlety, and the dissimulation which are habitual to a tyrant; and that, as a general rule, those amongst us who rank as patricians are somewhat wanting in natural affection.²²

• 22.See Fronto’s letter to Verus, ii. 7 (Naber’s edition, p. 135; compare p. 231). Marcus acknowledges greater debts to Fronto elsewhere, for example his letter to Marcus as Caesar, iii. 12: Verum dicere ex te disco. Ea re prorsum dis hominibusque ardua.

  Marcus’s Greek word for “wanting in natural affection” is astorgoteroi, the negative of philostorgos, “affectionate”; in the letter to Lucius Verus, Fronto remarks that Latin has no word for philostorgia because no one at Rome truly feels it. The Latin quotation is from a letter of Marcus to Fronto: “From you I learn to speak the truth, a thing hard indeed for gods and men.”