the so-called Historia Augusta. Birley also draws on recent
research into the careers of upper-class officeholders
(prosopography) and the workings of the imperial
administration to paint a picture of Marcus’s background and
the society he moved in.
The most comprehensive and reliable treatment of the
Antonine age can be found in the Cambridge Ancient
History, volume XI, The High Empire, A.D. 70–192
(Cambridge University Press, 2000). Edward Gibbon’s
famous characterization of the period in the opening chapters
of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
remains well worth reading, although the picture it paints
may be too rosy-colored. A useful counterbalance is E. R.
Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety
(Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1965),
which offers a very different assessment of the period.
Treatments of special topics abound, and only a few titles
can be mentioned. The upper-class education that Marcus
enjoyed is described by S. F. Bonner, Education in Ancient
Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). E.
Champlin’s Fronto and Antonine Rome (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1980) is the best modern study of
Marcus’s teacher. Glen Bowersock’s Greek Sophists in the
Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969) is a
fundamental study of intellectual culture in the second
century. Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World