They wanted the emperor to distinguish him, because Marcus was, after all, a distant relative of Caesar through Sabine. Hadrian was then in a good mood without the whims and irritations that had become commonplace in recent times, without a shadow of melancholic sadness at the sight of someone else's youth, which seemed irretrievably lost by himself. And he didn't resist. Distinguish little Verus? Why not!
Hadrian gave him a white rider toga10 with a narrow red stripe and a ring that the boy could not yet wear on his finger because of its large size. This did not seem surprising because there were other boys of tender age, who were already distinguished by emperors. Another mercy aroused surprise—Hadrian the next year introduced Marcus to the priestly college of the Salii,11 these jumpers, keeping the morale in the people. There were twelve of them, and they worshipped Mars, a god who, for the Romans who were used to fighting, was not the last in the divine pantheon.
Probably, the tedious rites associated with walking the streets, dancing, shouting, the noise of the city crowd, did not fit at all for a seven-year-old boy. And yet the boy was given a great honor, about which he did not suspect and did not fully understand its meaning, but his loved ones knew and understood—venerable mother and stern great-grandfather.
Then, another close emperor, his secretary, Gaius Avidius Heliodorus, a Syrian-born man from the city of Kirra, a swarthy man with almond-shaped brown eyes, sympathetically told Hadrian how he watched a strange procession on one of the streets of the city: eleven adult men and a boy walking nearby.
“He was serious, this little Marcus,” Heliodorus said, bowing respectfully before Caesar. “He was walking with a tense frown, as he held a shield in his left hand, and in his right a little twig. Of course, the shield was smaller, not like that of grown men—it was made special—but he faithfully beat it with a wooden stick, and also sang along with all the old battle songs “Help, Lara, us!” and “Be enough, evil Mars!”
“Well, you heard them,” he added.
Tricky Heliodorus did not explain that the meaning of these songs no one remembered, and because of the outsider's eye they seemed a set of incoherent sounds. But Marcus, as the attentive secretary noted, had a good memory, and he confidently sang along with his ringing boyish voice, focused on jumping in the streets to the cheerful and loud cries of the priests.