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He struggled against the spirit of his age, and was unsuccessful. He was worthy of the best ages of the empire in the exercise of all pagan virtues—the true successor of Hadrian and the Antonines. Here, too, he failed, although he gained signal successes. He was mortally wounded while effecting a retreat from the Tigris, after a short reign of twenty months.
At least as early as the Christian æra, and as late as the age of the Antonines, the Goths were established towards the mouth of the Vistula, and in that fertile province where the commercial cities of Thorn, Elbing, Koningsberg, and Dantzick, were long afterwards founded.
At the same time when Decius was struggling with the violence of the tempest, his mind, calm and deliberate amidst the tumult of war, investigated the more general causes, that, since the age of the Antonines, had so impetuously urged the decline of the Roman greatness.
Thus if, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, a subject of the Roman empire, under the bias naturally given to the imagination and expectations by the lives and characters of the Antonines, had been disposed to expect that Commodus would be a just ruler; supposing him to stop there, he might only have been undeceived by sad experience.
The earliest systematic works on Roman law were the "Manual" of Pomponius, and the "Institutes" of Gaius, who flourished in the time of Hadrian and the Antonines. Both of these works were, for a long time, lost, though fragments were preserved in the pandects of Justinian. In 1816, however, Niebuhr discovered a palimpsest MS., in which the epistles of St.
Poetry is gone to bed, or into our prose; we are like the Romans in that too. If we have the arts of the Antonines, we have the fustian also. Well! what becomes of your neighbours, the Pope and Turk? is one Babylon to fall, and the other to moulder away?
Of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines, I will not speak, since they were great exceptions to those who generally ruled at Rome. Their virtues and their talents are justly eulogized by all historians. Great in war, and greater in peace, they were ornaments of humanity. Under their sway, the empire was prosperous and happy.
Among a crowd of these private benefactors, we may select Herodes Atticus, an Athenian citizen, who lived in the age of the Antonines. Whatever might be the motive of his conduct, his magnificence would have been worthy of the greatest kings. The family of Herod, at least after it had been favored by fortune, was lineally descended from Cimon and Miltiades, Theseus and Cecrops, Æacus and Jupiter.
This resembles the account of Antoninus Pius, by Marcus Aurelius; and it is for this modesty, this careful separation between private and public affairs, that Tacitus has praised Agricola. I am well contented, with the virtues of the Antonines; but there are those, who go beyond.
The line of the Scipios, of the Cæsars, and of the Antonines, was continued by adoption; and for all practical purposes the nations of the earth have agreed to follow the examples set them by their masters. "When Love unites, wide space divides in vain, And hands may clasp across the spreading main."
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