I once set my heart on my own little sparrows. I called them my chicks in their nest: thirteen boys and girls, given to me by Faustina. Now only Commodus and four of the girls are left, wearing grave faces and weeping for me. The rest were taken before their time, long ago now. At first I grieved terribly, but the Stoics taught me how to both love my children and endure when Nature reclaimed them.
Child mortality was very common even for the children of the most powerful man of Earth. It was only in the modern age with the creation and use of vaccines that the death of children stopped being common.
