They are full of mutual admiration of each other's eloquence, restless in absence till they see one another again, noting, characteristically, their very dreams of each other, expecting the day which will terminate the office, the business or duty, which separates them--"as superstitious people watch for the star, at the rising of which they may break their fast." To one of the writers, to Aurelius, the correspondence was sincerely of value.

We see him once reading his letters with genuine delight on going to rest.

Fronto seeks to deter his pupil from writing in Greek .-- Why buy, at great cost, a foreign wine, inferior to that from one's own vineyard?
Aurelius, on the other hand, with an extraordinary innate susceptibility to words--la parole pour la parole, as the French say--despairs, in presence of Fronto's rhetorical perfection.
Like the modern visitor to the Capitoline and some other museums, Fronto had been struck, pleasantly struck, by the family likeness [225] among the Antonines; and it was part of his friendship to make much of it, in the case of the children of Faustina.

"Well! I have seen the little ones," he writes to Aurelius, then, apparently, absent from them: "I have seen the little ones--the pleasantest sight of my life; for they are as like yourself as could possibly be.

It has well repaid me for my journey over that slippery road, and up those steep rocks; for I beheld you, not simply face to face before me, but, more generously, whichever way I turned, to my right and my left.