Meditations I.4

From my Grandfather’s Father,⁴ to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home,⁵ and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent.

• 4.Catilius Severus, urban prefect, who hoped to succeed Hadrian (Spartianus’s Life of Hadrian v. 10; xxiv. 6).

  Catilius Severus was Marcus’s great-grandfather on his mother’s side; the Historia Augusta records that he was twice consul and urban prefect (praefectus urbi), and that he hoped to succeed the emperor Hadrian. Spartianus, like Capitolinus, is one of the purported authors of the Historia Augusta.

• 5.Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus (ii. 3–iii. 4) gives a list of these.

  Capitolinus’s list runs from Marcus’s first teachers of letters, music, and geometry through his grammarians (among them Alexander of Cotiaeum), his teachers of rhetoric (among them Herodes Atticus and Fronto), and his philosophers (among them Apollonius of Chalcedon, Sextus of Chaeronea, Junius Rusticus, Claudius Maximus, and Cinna Catulus). Several of these are the teachers Marcus thanks in I.6–I.15.