mpire with fine
buildings or useful works. Wherever he traveled he did something for the
benefit of his subjects.

[Footnote 78: This mausoleum, begun by Hadrian, is now the Castle of St.
Angelo.]

[Illustration: Reverse of a brass Coin of Antoninus Pius.]

REIGN OF ANTONINUS PIUS, A.D. 138-161.

This excellent man was born at Lanuvium, September 19th, A.D. 86, but
his family came from the town of Nemausis (Nismes), in Gaul. Soon after
his accession to the empire he married his daughter Faustina to Marcus
Aurelius, procured for him the tribunitian and proconsular power from
the Senate, and made him his associate in the labors of the government.
His tranquil and prosperous reign is the most pleasing period in the
history of the Roman Empire. The world enjoyed a general peace, and the
emperor endeavored, by every wise measure, to secure the prosperity of
his subjects. Like Numa, to whom he has often been compared, Antoninus
was the peacemaker between distant nations, who were accustomed to
submit their differences to him, and to abide implicitly by his award.
He checked the persecutions to which the Christians had been exposed in
former reigns, and to him Justin Martyr addressed his apology for
Christianity. He watched carefully the conduct of the provincial
governors, and applied the public revenues to founding schools,
repairing roads and harbors, and encouraging every where industry and
trade. When Asia and Rhodes were devastated by an earthquake, Antoninus
expended large sums in relieving the sufferers by that calamity, as well
as those who were reduced to indigence by the great fires which nearly
destroyed Carthage, Narbonne, and Antioch, in A.D. 153. He appointed
teachers of rhetoric in various cities of the empire, conferred honors
and emoluments upon men of letters, and in A.D. 141 founded a
charity-school for orphan girls, whom he styled _Puellae Alimentariae
Faustinianae_, in memory of his wife Faustina, who had died the year
before. Faustina, however, does not seem to have merited his esteem, and
the emperor was well acquainted with her faults; yet he generously
overlooked them while she lived, and upon her death paid unusual honors
to her memory. His piety, his devotion to the national religion, and his
various virtues, seem to have won for him universal love and veneration,
and his successors during the next century assumed the name of Antoninus
as their worthiest title.

Antoninus made no attempt to