"Your throat,
Strong, heavy, throwing out the face,
And hard, bright chin
And shameful, scornful lips that grace
Their shame, Faustine."

But it is possible that Swinburne was too hasty in accepting ancient
gossip, and that both the Faustinas were maligned. "Modern scholarship,"
says Monsieur Victor Duruy, "argues for their rehabilitation, and
chiefly because the husbands of each, good and wise men both, have left
such unequivocal testimony of their respect."

"To the gods," wrote Marcus Aurelius of the younger Faustina, "I am
indebted that I have such a wife, so obedient, so affectionate, and so
simple."

And after the death of his wife (Faustina the elder) Antoninus Pius
cried in his grief: "O God, I would rather live with her in a desert
than without her in this palace."

In this enchanting palazzita the younger Faustina may have passed her
childhood, while the scholarly boy, Marcus Aurelius, her cousin,
listened to the disquisitions of the philosophers as they discussed
great problems with the Emperor.

[Illustration: _Alinari_

Villa Pia, Vatican

The Rotondo--Pirro Ligorio, architect]

Hadrian loved the lad, and for his absolute truthfulness nicknamed him
Verissimus, making him a knight at the age of six. He was the comrade of
Antinous, and as they passed to and fro together through colonnaded
rotonda they must have often noted the young mother (she was sixteen
when married) and her bewitching child, waving white hands from across
the lily-padded moat.

Here, then, are certain of the actors, as well as our _mise-en-scene_,
and Marcus Aurelius, in his _Meditations_, has himself given us a hint
as to the drama. "Forget not," he writes, "that in times gone by
everything has already happened just as it is happening. Place before
thine eyes whole dramas with the same endings, the same scenes, just as
thou knowest them by thine own experience, or from earlier
history--such, for example, as the whole Court of Hadrian."

If with these instructions we remember Marcus Aurelius's still more
significant words, "Even in a palace life may be well led," each of us
can according to his own fancy divine the secret which Antinous kept so
well.

Had Ligorio given to literature the sympathetic imagination which he
displayed in his art it might have been worthily revealed. For ten years
he explored with the most intense enthusiasm the interminable
apartments which were to prove an inexhaustibl