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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;kevin McGonigal, post: 4528223, member: 72790&quot;]A few weeks ago I posted a thread on how bad was Nero. After thinking a bit about that one, I decided it was only fair to post a thread on his possible opposite, Antoninus Pius. From the previous posting we discovered that Nero may not have been quite as bad as he has been portrayed to have been, except for the matricide part, which is pretty hard to overlook. As we all know Antoninus Pius has the reputation of being squeaky clean, ultra virtuous, without blemish and well, very &quot;pious&quot;.&nbsp; But was he all that upright a person? Does he deserve that reputation? Let&#039;s take a look.</p><p><br /></p><p>First of all the primary sources. What do they have to say? Interestingly, not very much. For Nero, and other not very nice emperors, we have far more abundant sources. Since Suetonius and Tacitus liked slumming it, vicariously,&nbsp; with the more murderous and scandalous emperors of the First Century AD, we have a good deal of information ranging from the anecdotal and incidental to the hand rubbing and scandalous sort of material, guaranteed to get read (and apparently copied and preserved). We have a bit from Dio Cassius, early Third century, not an especially gifted historian and one whose works are frequently only in a garbled state of preservation when it comes to Antoninus (Epitome, Book Seven). Our main primary source is a Julius Capitolinus, one of the supposed authors of the Historia Augusta (Scriptores Historiae Augustae) put together much after the reign of Antoninus. If anyone wishes to consider Edward Gibbon ( Decline and Fall...) a primary source, he has a bit on Pius and it&#039;s all good.</p><p><br /></p><p>At this point, I&#039;ll be honest. I really hoped that I would find some material that, if not actually salacious, would be more earthy. What I have found out is that I am like a Devil&#039;s Advocate trying to find information to delay the canonization of Michael the Archangel. I can&#039;t find anything even naughty let alone evil about the guy. Just about the whole of humanity, then and now, that if he were reincarnated and returned to earth,&nbsp; thinks he would be a good candidate for emperor of the planet earth. Reading his bios is like reading from the Angelic Book of Life of the Blessed. I would start listing his achievements but there&#039;s not enough bandwith on this site to encapsulate it. if a Roman Emperor could do good, he did it. Look, I knew if I delved deep enough I might find something, but as evil, it&#039;s pathetic. Among the &quot;evils&quot; I found in the secondary sources is that he spent too much money celebrating the nine hundredth anniversary of the founding of Rome, so much so that he had to debase the denarius by five percent ( I hope Gallienus is not reading this. He debased it TO five percent with room to spare). By the way, Harl thinks that debasement may actually have had to do with getting the denarius of Antoninus down to the silver level of earlier well worn coinage. The Oxford Reference claims it was only a temporary debasement, anyway.&nbsp; In any event he left 675 million of these slightly debased denarii for his heir and successor, the slightly less saintly Marcus Aurelius, to do something with. Two secondary modern sources (and the German&nbsp; Schiller&#039;s earlier history of the empire) say that Antoninus Pius deserves to be censured for his lack of foresight in not recognizing that the growing power of the Marcomanni was going to be trouble down the line. I am surprised no one criticized his Caledonian wall for using inferior sod. The gods&#039; honest truth is that the guy really was competent and decent and the kind pf person one wishes would move in next door to you.</p><p><br /></p><p>Well, perhaps I failed to lift up the right rocks and some may find something human that I or the sources missed and can post what it is you find. Below I have some coins of Antoninus Pius and if readers have some that they would like to post, please do so.</p><p><br /></p><p>The coins are from first to second row, top to bottom, are top left a sestertius (I find these among the most attractive coins of all the Roman coinage) of Antoninus Pius with a naked mars advancing, Sear 4219. Next is a denarius of Pius with Vesta on the reverse. It weighs 2.9 grams and is Sear 1234. The coin at the right of the row is another sestertius of Pius with Salus on the reverse. it is Sear 4216. Bottom row is a sestertius of his successor as his adopted son and heir, the Caesar Marcus Aurelius with Hilaritas on the reverse. It is Sear 4802. The next coin is a denarius of his devoted wife, Faustina, after her too early death early in his reign. On the reverse is Pietas and it weighs 3.0 grams. It is Sear 4598. And lastly on the bottom right is a sestertius of his daughter, Faustina the Younger, the wife of Marcus Aurelius. Queen Juno is on the reverse and it is Sear 5278. I hope readers will post some of their own coins of his reign and family.</p><p><br /></p><p>[ATTACH=full]1121577[/ATTACH] [ATTACH=full]1121579[/ATTACH][/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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