A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Faustina, Annia Galeria
FAUSTINA, ANNIA GALERIA,
Called the elder Faustina, was the daughter of Annius Verus, Prefect of Rome, and wife of the Emperor Titus Antoninus Pius. Her beauty and wit were of the highest order, but her conduct has been represented as dissolute in the extreme. Still the emperor built temples and struck coins to her honour; yet it is reported even when he discovered her debaucheries he favoured without resenting them. Such a course of conduct in a man represented as the wisest of sovereigns, and a model of private and domestic virtues, is hardly credible. That he loved her with constancy and confidence during her life, and raised temples to her virtues, and altars to her divinity after her death, are matters of history. There is a beautiful medal of his reign still extant, representing Antoninus Pius on one side, and on the reverse Faustina ascending to heaven, with a lighted torch, under the figure of Diana. Surely Antoninus must himself have had faith in the virtues of his wife. But she was beautiful and witty: such women will be envied and slandered, as well as loved and praised. She died in 141, at the age of about thirty-seven.
Her daughter Annia became the wife of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. She was lively, witty, and therefore attractive, although less beautiful than her mother, than whom she was even more dissolute in her manners. She, too, had her temples and her priests, and Marcus, in his Meditations, thanks the gods for a wife so tractable, so loving, and so unaffected. She attended him into Asia, where he went to suppress the revolt of Cassius, and there died, near Mount Laurus, in 175. There was a third Faustina, grand-daughter of this one, who was the third wife of Heliogabalus, but was soon neglected by him. She was very unlike her female ancestors, except in beauty.