Beyond is her daughter,
Lucille, less fair than the mother, a healthy girl of the
dairymaid type. Near by is the son, Commodus. Across the hall is
Lucius Verus, the husband of Lucille; in a corner, Antonin,
Faustine's father, and, more remotely, his wife. Together they
form quite a family group, and to the average tourist they must
seem a thoroughly respectable lot. Antonin certainly was
respectable. He was the first emperor who declined to be a brute.
Referring to his wife he said that he would rather be with her in
a desert than without her in a palace; the speech,
parenthetically, of a man who, though he could have cited that
little Greek princess, Nausicaa, as a precedent, was too well-bred
to permit so much as a fringe of his household linen to flutter in
public. Besides, at his hours, he was a poet, and it is said that
if a poet tell a lie twice he will believe it. Antonin so often
declared his wife to be a charming person that in the end no doubt
he thought so. She was not charming, however, or if she were, her
charm was not that of exclusiveness.
It was in full sight of this lady's inconsequences that Faustine
was educated. Wherever she looked, the candors of her girlhood
were violated. The phallus then was omnipresent. Iamblicus, not
the novelist, but the philosopher, has much to say on the subject;
as has Arnobius in the Adversus gentes, and Lactance in the De
falsa religione.
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