ces, and conceal their
own, approached his person in the disguise of philosophic sanctity, and
acquired riches and honors by affecting to despise them. His excessive
indulgence to his brother,[46] his wife, and his son exceeded the bounds
of private virtue, and became a public injury, by the example and
consequences of their vices.

Faustina, the daughter of Pius and the wife of Marcus, has been as much
celebrated for her gallantries as for her beauty. The grave simplicity
of the philosopher was ill-calculated to engage her wanton levity, or to
fix that unbounded passion for variety which often discovered personal
merit in the meanest of mankind. The Cupid of the ancients was, in
general, a very sensual deity; and the amours of an empress, as they
exact on her side the plainest advances, are seldom susceptible of much
sentimental delicacy. Marcus was the only man in the empire who seemed
ignorant or insensible of the irregularities of Faustina, which,
according to the prejudices of every age, reflected some disgrace on the
injured husband. He promoted several of her lovers to posts of honor and
profit, and, during a connection of thirty years, invariably gave her
proofs of the most tender confidence and of a respect which ended not
with her life. In his _Meditations_ he thanks the gods, who had bestowed
on him a wife so faithful, so gentle, and of such a wonderful simplicity
of manners. The obsequious senate, at his earnest request, declared her
a goddess. She was represented in her temples with the attributes of
Juno, Venus, and Ceres; and it was decreed that, on the day of their
nuptials, the youth of either sex should pay their vows before the altar
of their chaste patroness.

The monstrous vices of the son have cast a shade on the purity of the
father's virtues. It has been objected to Marcus that he sacrificed the
happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy; and that
he chose a successor in his own family rather than in the empire.
Nothing, however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of
virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the
narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices, and to
render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power
of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy
dispositions where it is almost superfluous. The distasteful lesson of
a grave philosopher was, in a moment, obliterated by