Marcus Annius Verus (the elder) was a patrician of Italo-Hispanic descent. The Annii came from Uccubi in the province of Baetica (the south of modern Andalusia) and belonged to that same Hispanic aristocracy which produced the emperors Trajan and Hadrian. Verus's uncle, a senator of Trajan's generation, was close to the imperial circle; through this line the Verii were linked to Hadrian's house.

Career. Verus passed through the standard cursus honorum and reached an exceptional distinction — he was thrice consul: suffect in 97 CE under Nerva, ordinary consul in 121 under Hadrian, and again ordinary consul in 126 (a rare honour — across the first two centuries CE only three or four men hold the consulship three times, normally elderly senators in the innermost imperial circle). He also served as prefect of the city (praefectus urbi) — the highest urban magistracy, presiding over the senatorial court and effectively head of the Roman police. In 138, shortly before his death, he took part in the deliberations attending Hadrian's adoption of Antoninus Pius and Antoninus's subsequent adoption of Marcus and Lucius Verus; his role in these negotiations is reported by SHA Marcus 5.3.

The upbringing of Marcus. When Marcus's father, M. Annius Verus the younger (a praetor), died c. 124 CE, the three-year-old Marcus passed into the guardianship of his grandfather. He was formally adopted by him — so that Marcus bore the full name M. Annius Verus, like his father and grandfather, and became legally the son of his own grandfather. He lived in the latter's house on the Caelian until, in 138, Hadrian ordered Antoninus Pius to adopt Marcus, who passed into the imperial familia (from that moment M. Aelius Aurelius Verus Caesar). Up to his seventeenth year, then, Marcus grew up directly in the household of a thrice-consular senator, the contemporary and intimate of emperors.

Death. He died in 138 CE in extreme old age (around 90), having outlived everyone of his own generation and most of the next. Hadrian died in the same year.

Family connections

• Marcus's father — M. Annius Verus the younger (praetor; d. c. 124).
• Marcus's mother — Domitia Lucilla (also called Lucilla Minor; from her Marcus inherited a substantial fortune, see 01-03).
• Marcus's sister — Annia Cornificia Faustina.
• Marcus's maternal grandfather — P. Calvisius Tullus Ruso (consul 109).
• Marcus's step-great-grandfather — L. Catilius Severus (see 01-04): husband of Dasumia Polla, widow of the adoptive father of Marcus's grandmother Domitia Lucilla the Elder.
• Aunt — Vibia Sabina, wife of Hadrian (the connection runs through Annia Galeria Faustina). Through her, the house of the Annii was already linked to the ruling house before Marcus's adoption by Antoninus.

Ethical portrait

Marcus characterises his grandfather by two qualities — τὸ καλόηθες (kindly disposition, gentle good-naturedness) and τὸ ἀόργητον (freedom from anger). Of any other side of his personality — political, intellectual, aesthetic — Book I says nothing. This is a striking selectivity: a thrice consul and prefect of the city, a man who had passed through every grade of the senatorial cursus, is recalled not for political wisdom, not for civic courage, not for cultivation — but for the ethical tone of his everyday dealings with those closest to him. Marcus seems deliberately to choose what is acquired not by public career but in the family circle: the quality of domestic ethical presence. See also Cassius Dio (cf. SHA Marcus 1.10), where a detail is preserved: the young Marcus had to be moved by his grandfather into his own house to shield the boy from "the immoral influence of his mother" — the commentators (Brunt, Birley) regard this report as doubtful.

Note: the epithet ἀόργητος applied to an aged Roman patrician of consular rank is anything but trivial. The senatorial culture of the second century valued gravitas and severitas, and a controlled but by no means absent anger was part of the traditional aristocratic ethos. The Stoically coloured ἀόργητον (see the commentary to 01-01) is already a new ethical register, in which Marcus retrospectively re-describes the figure of his grandfather.

• 01-01 — the principal (and only direct) mention. The grandfather as source of τὸ καλόηθες καὶ ἀόργητον.
• 01-17 — in the closing paragraph of thanks to the gods, when Marcus enumerates the gifts of his family, he repeats «καλοί ... πάντες» ("all good"), without singling out anyone by name; the grandfather is implicitly included.

• SHA Marcus 1.4–9 — the principal biographical source on Marcus's early years and his grandfather (Julius Capitolinus; the source is late, c. end of the 4th century, with the well-known problems of reliability, but in matters of family context is generally accepted).
• PIR² A 695 — the standard prosopographical entry (Prosopographia Imperii Romani).
• A. Birley, Marcus Aurelius: A Biography, rev. ed., Routledge, 2000 — ch. 2 ("The Family"), pp. 28–46; the standard modern biography.
• P. Brunt, "Marcus Aurelius in his Meditations", JRS 64 (1974), 1–20 — a critical reading of Book I as a historical source.
• F. Millar, The Emperor in the Roman World, Duckworth, 1977 — for the context of the praefectus urbi and the threefold consulship as an imperial honour.
• R. Syme, "Hadrian and Italica", JRS 54 (1964) — the Hispanic background of the gens Annia and its links to the house of Trajan and Hadrian.