He is sometimes referred to as Lucius Aelius Verus, though this name is not attested outside the Historia Augusta, where it probably was originally the result of a manuscript error.

Before 130, the younger Lucius Commodus married Avidia, a well-connected Roman noblewoman who was the daughter of the senator Gaius Avidius Nigrinus.

Hadrian's attentions turned to Servianus' grandson, Lucius Pedanius Fuscus Salinator.

Hadrian promoted the young Salinator, his great-nephew, gave him special status in his court, and groomed him as his heir.

Convalescent in his villa at Tivoli, he decided to change his mind, and selected Lucius Ceionius Commodus as his new successor, adopting him as his son.

[6] After a year's stationing on the Danube frontier, Aelius returned to Rome to make an address to the senate on the first day of 138.

In his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon tells of Aelius's brief time as Hadrian's successor-designate in these terms: After revolving in his mind several men of distinguished merit, whom he esteemed and hated, [Hadrian] adopted Ælius Verus a gay and voluptuous nobleman, recommended by uncommon beauty to the lover of Antinous.

But whilst Hadrian was delighting himself with his own applause, and the acclamations of the soldiers, whose consent had been secured by an immense donative, the new Cæsar was ravished from his embraces by an untimely death.

[15] Some other literary sources provide specific detail: the writings of the physician Galen on the habits of the Antonine elite, the orations of Aelius Aristides on the temper of the times, and the constitutions preserved in the Digest and Codex Justinianus on Marcus' legal work.