He had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom.

The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happened at the moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pestilence.
In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the East from which Lucius Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the plague, war had come to seem a merely romantic, superannuated incident of bygone history.

And now it was almost upon Italian soil.

Terrible were the reports of the numbers and audacity of the assailants.

Aurelius, as yet untried in war, and understood by a few only in the whole scope of a really great character, was known to the majority of his subjects as but a careful administrator, though a student of philosophy, perhaps, as we say, a dilettante.