CHAPTER XV: STOICISM AT COURT [3] THE very finest flower of the same company--Aurelius with the gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained, people said, their private "sophists" to whisper philosophy into their ears winsomely as they performed the duties of the toilet--was assembled again a few months later, in a different place and for a very different purpose.

The temple of Peace, a "modernising" foundation of Hadrian, enlarged by a library and lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution like something between a college and a literary club; and here Cornelius Fronto was to pronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals.

There were some, indeed, who had desired the emperor Aurelius himself to declare his whole mind on this matter.
Rhetoric was become almost a function of the state: philosophy was upon the throne; and had from time to time, by [4] request, delivered an official utterance with well-nigh divine authority.

And it was as the delegate of this authority, under the full sanction of the philosophic emperor--emperor and pontiff, that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to expound some parts of the Stoic doctrine, with the view of recommending morals to that refined but perhaps prejudiced company, as being, in effect, one mode of comeliness in things--as it were music, or a kind of artistic order, in life.

And he did this earnestly, with an outlay of all his science of mind, and that eloquence of which he was known to be a master.