Mary Beard writes:

In Frank McLynn’s account of Marcus’ life, the emperor’s tutor Fronto is a tedious hypochondriac, whose malign influence his pupil was eager to escape – and indeed already had escaped by the mid-140s, when he was in his early twenties, more than 15 years before he became emperor. Perhaps, he writes, ‘Marcus had learned all he needed from Fronto; perhaps he had begun to tire of the older man’s pedantic ways; and, probably most of all, he was by now bored with rhetoric and wanted to switch full time to philosophy.’ On this view, many of the later letters in the collection are nothing more than attempts by Fronto to wheedle his way back into Marcus’ affections. Sometimes this is by fawning: in one letter, for example, he claims that his relationship with Marcus was more important to him than holding the consulship, and proceeds to compare their friendship to that of Achilles and Patroclus. Sometimes it is by playing for sympathy – hence all the complaints about ill-health. This did not cut much ice, McLynn believes, with Marcus himself, but it has worked with modern scholars, who have been convinced by this correspondence that there was a particularly close relationship between Fronto and his pupil.

(LRB 23 July 2009)

Bodley Head | hardback 684 pp. |ISBN: 9780224072922