letters give us a beautiful picture of his family life at his Lorium farm.
But the great and good Emperor had a deeper and more far-reaching object at heart than simple self-gratification when he cast off the trammels of State and forsook the gay and brilliant court of the great capital for the plain unostentatious life of a country gentleman of the old Roman school.
The first Antonine was conscious that the soft, luxurious city life of which Rome was the great example, and which was too faithfully copied in the wealthy provincial centres, was enfeebling the Empire,—the builders and makers of Rome he well knew were the hardy race of men who feared the old gods and who were ready to fight and die for their country, and these men were the peasant-farmers produced by the old rural life of Italy. He would set the fashion himself, and if possible popularize this better and nobler way of living. He would bring back the memories of those great ones who had been the makers of that mighty empire.
It was no mere love of antiquity, no special taste for antiquarian lore, which induced Antoninus Pius to grave upon his coins the immemorial symbols telling of the ancient traditions belonging to the great past of Rome,—symbols many of which have been immortalized in the "haunting and liquid" rhythms of the poet loved in Rome,—Æneas carrying his father; the white sow sacrificed to Juno by the fugitive Æneas on the banks of Tiber; Mars and Rhea Sylvia; the sacred wild fig-tree beneath whose branches the wolf found the children Romulus and Remus; the wolf suckling the baby founders of the Queen City; the augur Nævius and his razor before King Tarquinius Priscus; Horatius who defended the bridge against the hosts of Porsenna. It was not the instinct of a curious and scholarly archæologist, but a deep and far-reaching purpose, which prompted Antoninus Pius to search out and rebuild the little unknown Arcadian village of Pallanteum, the ancient home of Evander, the host of Æneas,—Evander, the founder of the earliest Rome, whose beautiful story is told in the noble epic of Vergil.[1] The Emperor would popularize, would bring before his people the
- ↑ Æneid, Book viii.
