ENGLISH COMMENTARY
25 February a.d. 138. Galen, the physician of Marcus Aurelius, mentions that Verus was a votary of the small ball game, and we have a tribute to his skill at ball in the curious epitaph on a champion player named Ursus.[1]
The reference to government of temper refers to a common failing of noble Romans. Marcus confesses that he was himself liable to the failing (i. 17. 7) and appears from his Meditations to have been specially occupied with resistance to this passion and, another Roman weakness, ambition and love of glory.
Ch. 2. Marcus was about 10 years old when he lost his father, whose modesty and manly character he records. In Romans of the best type modesty was a virtue which included respect for others and reverence for self, a virtue well joined with manliness, which covers all that is the reverse of effeminacy, a common failing in Roman youth.
Ch. 3. Domitia Lucilla, his mother, was daughter of P. Calvisius Tullus and Domitia Lucilla. The latter inherited from her father Cn. Domitius Lucanus and her uncle Cn. Domitius Tullus the fortune of Cn. Domitius Afer, the famous orator and master of Quintilian. Marcus' mother succeeded to this estate, part of it invested in a factory of tiles, on which her name is stamped. Though he says that she died young (i. 17. 7), she must have been nearly 50 when she passed away between a.d. 155 and Marcus' accession in a.d. 161. The correspondence of Fronto has given us a picture of Marcus' home life with the future Empress, Faustina the younger, and Domitia Lucilla is often mentioned in the letters. Her house, near what is now the Church of St. John Lateran, was a centre of Hellenic culture, and the Athenian orator and benefactor of Hellas, Herodes Atticus, was her guest on one of his visits to Rome. Fronto writes letters to her in Greek and sends her a speech modelled on one of those in Plato's Phaedrus. Her wealth and social position lends point to the description of the simplicity of her appointments and table.
Ch. 4. Domitia Lucilla's paternal grandfather, L. Catilius Severus, after being governor of Syria and proconsul of Asia,
- ↑ Printed as No. 290 in the Oxford Book of Latin Verse:
sum victus ipse, fateor, a ter consule
Vero patrono, nec semel sed saepius.
