Meditations I.8
From Apollonius,17 self-reliance and an unequivocal determination not to leave anything to chance; and to look to nothing else even for a moment save Reason alone; and to remain ever the same, in the throes of pain, on the loss of a child,18 during a lingering illness; and to see plainly from a living example that one and the same man can be very vehement and yet gentle: not to be impatient in instructing others; and to see in him a man who obviously counted as the least among his gifts his practical experience and facility in imparting philosophic truths; and to learn in accepting seeming favours from friends19 not to give up our independence for such things nor take them callously as a matter of course.
- 17.Compare Fronto’s letter to Marcus as Caesar, v. 36. Capitolinus (Life of Pius x. 4) and Lucian (Demonax 31) shew him in a different light, as ill-mannered and avaricious. He is mentioned as Ἀντωνίνου ἑταῖρος by Epiphanius.
Apollonius of Chalcedon was a Stoic philosopher whom Antoninus Pius summoned to Rome to teach Marcus. Capitolinus’s Life of Pius x. 4 records his refusal to come to the palace, and Pius’s remark that it was easier for Apollonius to travel from Chalcis (as the Historia Augusta gives his home) to Rome than from his house to the palace. Lucian, the 2nd-century Greek satirist, has the Cynic philosopher Demonax describe Apollonius leaving for Rome with his students as “Apollonius and his Argonauts”; Epiphanius calls him Antōninou hetairos, “companion of Antoninus.”
- 18.See the behaviour of Marcus on the death of M. Annius Verus, aged 7, at Praeneste in 169 (Capitolinus’s Life of Marcus xxi. 3), and on the death of his first-born son T. Aelius Antoninus soon after birth in 147 (Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, Boeckh 3176). Compare Dio’s Roman History 71. 34, § 5.
Capitolinus records that Marcus mourned his son Annius Verus, who died at Praeneste after an operation on a tumour below the ear, for no more than five days, and gave time to public business even during that period. August Boeckh’s Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, a 19th-century collection of Greek inscriptions, is cited by number for an inscription recording the death of Marcus’s first son.
- 19.Compare Fronto’s letter to Appian (Naber’s edition p. 246).
Appian of Alexandria, the Greek historian of Rome’s wars, was a friend of Fronto. Their surviving exchange concerns gifts between friends: Appian offered Fronto a gift of slaves, and Fronto declined it.