It wasn't much. Antoninus was helping his father-in-law with some stairs. But Hadrian saw it and it convinced him—this was a man who could be trusted with power. As we said recently, this is probably because Antoninus' kindness echoed one of the founding myths of Rome, where Aeneas carried his weak father from a burning Troy (Virgil's The Aeneid captures this founding myth best).
This is actually just one glimpse into Antoninus' character. We get several more from Marcus Aurelius. We're told that he took pains to make his friends feel at ease, even after he became emperor. We're told of an encounter with a customs officer at some border crossing—where almost certainly Antoninus dealt with a rude person without getting upset. It's interesting that we hear about this story involving travel and Antoninus because unlike other emperors, Antoninus did not travel much—he did this out of consideration, knowing what an expense and ordeal it was for provincial officials to host the imperial processions.
We're also told of his consistency to friends—never getting fed up with them, or playing favorites. His dogged determination to treat people as they deserved. His willingness to take care of himself. His ability to feel at ease with people—and put them at their ease.
We don't know all that much about Antoninus but what we do know tells us a lot. We can tell that his character was good. We can tell that he had empathy. We can tell that he cared about the little guy and the weak and the old. It would have been so easy for him to be heartless and cruel—most emperors were. But then again, if he had been, perhaps he never would have been chosen for the job in the first place.
"Take Antoninus as your model, always," Marcus writes in Book 6 of Meditations—and it's easy to understand why. Because in the end, character isn't defined by grand gestures, but by the small moments when we think no one is watching. It's our daily choices—our response to rudeness, our handling of power, how we treat friends, children, the elderly—that reveals the core of who we are.
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