All corrections
Wikipedia August 5, 2026 at 05:24 AM

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoninus_Pius

2 corrections found

1
Claim
The emperor and his Augusta were deified after their death by Marcus Aurelius.
Correction

This is wrong for Faustina the Elder. She was deified in 141, during Antoninus Pius’s own reign, and the temple was only rededicated to include Antoninus after his death in 161.

Full reasoning

The caption wrongly implies that both Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder were deified by Marcus Aurelius.

But the temple’s history shows a two-stage process:

  1. Faustina the Elder was deified first, in 141, shortly after her death.
  2. Antoninus Pius was added later, after his death in 161, when the temple was rededicated to both of them.

The Uffizi describes the monument as "dedicated first to the empress Faustina the Elder, deified in 141 AD ... and twenty years later to her husband, Antonius Pius, who had been deified." The Parco archeologico del Colosseo likewise says the temple was founded by Antoninus Pius in memory of Faustina, and that in 161 A.D., on Antoninus’s death, the Senate decreed that it should be dedicated to both.

So Marcus Aurelius was involved in Antoninus Pius’s posthumous honors, but Faustina had already been deified two decades earlier.

2 sources
2
Claim
Antoninus was the last Roman Emperor recognised by the Indian Kingdoms, especially the Kushan Empire.
Correction

Antoninus Pius was not the last Roman emperor to receive diplomatic recognition from India. Later sources record Indian embassies to Constantine, Julian, and Justinian.

Full reasoning

This statement is contradicted by both primary and scholarly sources.

Eusebius, writing about Constantine (who reigned long after Antoninus Pius), says that among the embassies arriving at court were envoys from "the Indians." That alone is enough to show Antoninus was not the last Roman emperor to be recognized diplomatically by Indian rulers.

A later scholarly survey in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society is even more explicit: after mentioning the embassy to Antoninus Pius, it lists later Indian embassies to Julian (A.D. 361) and Justinian (A.D. 530).

So the article’s wording is too absolute. Whatever one says about Antoninus’s contacts with the Kushans specifically, he was not the last Roman emperor to receive recognition or embassies from Indian polities.

2 sources
Model: OPENAI_GPT_5 Prompt: v1.16.0