6. In such employments he spent the greatest part of his time; but at
last finding the duties of his station daily increasing, and his own
strength proportionally upon the decline, he resolved on adopting a
successor, and accordingly chose Antoni'nus to that important station.
7. While he was thus careful in providing for the future welfare of
the state, his bodily infirmities became so insupportable, that he
vehemently desired some of his attendants to dispatch him. 8.
Antoni'nus, however, would by no means permit any of the domestics to
be guilty of so great an impiety, but used all the arts in his power
to reconcile the emperor to sustain life. 9. His pain daily
increasing, he was frequently heard to cry out, "How miserable a thing
it is to seek death, and not to find it!" After enduring some time
these excruciating tortures, he at last resolved to observe no
regimen, saying, that kings sometimes died merely by the multitude of
their physicians. 10. This conduct served to hasten that death he
seemed so ardently to desire; and it was probably joy upon its
approach which dictated the celebrated stanzas that are so well
known;[7] and while repeating which he expired, in the sixty-second
year of his age, after a prosperous reign of twenty-one years and
eleven months.
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