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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Walter Pater's "Marius the Epicurean" is a profound exploration of the philosophical and aesthetic dilemmas faced by its titular character in the tempestuous milieu of ancient Rome. Written in a richly descriptive and impressionistic style, the novel engages deeply with themes of hedonism, beauty, and the search for meaning amidst moral ambiguity. Pater immerses readers in a lush landscape of sensory experiences and intellectual reflections, capturing the essence of Epicurean thought while also critiquing its limitations against the backdrop of a decaying empire. The narrative delicately balances lush prose with thoughtful insights, marking it as a significant contribution to late 19th-century literature that anticipates modern existential concerns. Walter Pater (1839-1894) was an influential English essayist and critic, notably linked with the Aesthetic Movement and the pre-Raphaelite circle. His philosophical approach, particularly his emphasis on 'art for art's sake,' reflects his own engagement with the tensions between beauty and morality. Pater's scholarly background in Renaissance studies played a crucial role in shaping Marius's character as he navigates the ethical considerations of pleasure and intellect amidst the cultural decline of Rome. Readers seeking a nuanced and evocative exploration of philosophical inquiry embedded within a narrative rich with historical context will find "Marius the Epicurean" a compelling read. Pater's distinctive prose and profound ideas invite deep reflection, making this work not only a significant literary achievement but also a thought-provoking journey into the interplay of art, philosophy, and life itself. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Marius the Epicurean (Vol. 1&2)
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its heart, Marius the Epicurean traces a young Roman’s search for a life both beautiful and morally serious amid competing philosophies and emergent faiths. Walter Pater’s only completed novel offers a meditative portrait of self-formation, where aesthetic refinement and ethical inquiry unfold together in a world of exquisite surfaces and unsettled convictions. Set in imperial Rome, it follows an observant youth as he tests ideas against experience, attentive to the textures of ritual, friendship, and thought. The result is not a plot-driven chronicle but a close record of sensibility, charting the education of perception as much as belief. Readers enter a reflective space in which feeling, judgment, and culture are weighed with scrupulous care.
First published in two volumes in 1885, Marius the Epicurean belongs to the late Victorian tradition of the novel of ideas, written by Walter Pater, a critic central to the Aesthetic movement. It is historical fiction set in the second-century Roman world, yet it reads as a philosophical Bildungsroman as much as a period reconstruction. Pater’s reputation for polished, intricate prose and for exploring the relations between art, ethics, and temperament shapes every page. The two-volume form reflects contemporary publishing practice and supports the book’s slow, cumulative unfolding of an inner life. Together, the volumes present a unified design rather than discrete episodes.
The premise is simple and capacious: a thoughtful youth grows up amid the splendors and disciplines of Roman culture and seeks a durable way to live. He encounters philosophies that promise composure, pleasure, or duty, and he tests them through daily conduct rather than abstract debate. Pater’s voice is measured and exacting, favoring carefully modulated rhythms and descriptive patience over sudden turns of plot. The narrative, told in a reflective third person, stays close to Marius’s perceptions, rendering the world through sensations, textures, and moods. The reading experience is contemplative, rewarding an unhurried pace, and offers the satisfactions of intellectual travel as much as story.
Central themes include the ethics of sensation, the cultivation of taste as a moral practice, and the search for inward coherence in an era of plural beliefs. Pater lets questions accumulate: how does one reconcile delight in the world with seriousness of character, or balance private refinement with obligations to others? The book considers the claims of tradition, the appeal of discipline, and the pull of new forms of community, without forcing a premature resolution. It probes mortality and transience, suggesting that clear attention itself can be a kind of reverence. Rather than preaching, it invites readers to watch a conscience form, temper itself, and test its limits.
Although scrupulously literary in method, the novel is anchored in a richly realized Roman setting. The atmosphere of the Antonine age—its stability, learning, and undertow of unease—pervades the pages, from rural sanctuaries to urbane salons. Pater draws on classical sources and antiquarian detail to evoke festivals, domestic spaces, and intellectual circles, but he filters them through Marius’s sensibility. The effect is not documentary display but lived texture: objects, customs, and ideas gain meaning as they pass through a reflective mind. This historically grounded inwardness distinguishes the book from costume romance, making the past feel immediate while preserving its difference and dignity.
As a work of Aestheticism, the novel values form, clarity, and the disciplined pleasures of attention; as a Victorian reflection, it addresses doubt, conscience, and the possibility of a humane life. Contemporary readers may recognize its concerns: negotiating pluralism, resisting cynicism, and finding standards that do not deaden joy. The book proposes that a genuinely educated sensibility involves both scruple and openness, care for detail and care for others. Its intellectual appeal rests on close reasoning about conduct; its emotional appeal arises from the tenderness with which it treats small acts and subtle impressions. It models a thoughtful poise amid flux, neither complacent nor despairing.
Approached today in its complete two-volume form, Marius the Epicurean offers a sustained meditation rather than a rapid sequence of events. Volume I and Volume II together trace early formation and subsequent testing, allowing readers to witness a temperament maturing through choice and circumstance. The style rewards patient reading: passages of description and analysis accumulate resonance, and recurrent images bind the whole. Those interested in classical culture, moral philosophy, and Victorian prose will find an especially rich encounter. Yet its invitation is universal—an exploration of how to live attentively, kindly, and well. Pater’s novel endures as a companion for reflective readers seeking measure and meaning.
Synopsis (Selection)
Walter Pater’s two-volume novel follows Marius, a young Roman of the Antonine age, from his childhood in rural Etruria into the intellectual and moral complexities of imperial life. Raised amid ancestral rites and domestic piety, he learns early to associate beauty with conduct and custom. The quiet order of his mother’s household and the country’s old religious usages shape his first impressions. From the outset, he is marked by a careful, observant temperament, drawn to weigh every feeling and belief. The book begins by tracing how this sensibility, nurtured by landscape, ritual, and memory, prepares him for a lifelong inner education.
Sent to school at Pisa, Marius falls under the spell of literature, art, and a brilliant companion, Flavian. Public shows, festival days, and poetic recitations sharpen his desire to live vividly and attentively. The tale of Cupid and Psyche, alongside other pagan myths and contemporary writings, reveals to him a world where form, color, and disciplined pleasure matter. Through Flavian’s influence, he turns toward a measured Epicureanism: the careful appreciation of each clear impression, the pursuit of refined delight, and the ethical tact that respects limits. This new outlook becomes the rule by which he judges experience and thought.
Experience soon tests these early theories. Illness and loss impress on Marius the frailty of sensation and the transience of the things he loves. He studies the schools—Epicureans, Cyrenaics, Sceptics—seeking a method to secure serenity without illusion. He begins a private discipline of exact self-observation, keeping a record of motives, moods, and choices, and weighing pleasures by their lasting clarity rather than their intensity. The result is a more stringent, almost ascetic Epicureanism, a conscience of the senses that prizes lucidity, kindness, and economy of life. Yet questions about duty, fate, and the claims of others start to press more urgently.
Arriving in Rome, Marius enters cultivated circles and, through patronage, comes near the court of Antoninus Pius. He observes a regime marked by moderation, domestic virtue, and religious decorum. This atmosphere of orderly usefulness tempers his earlier impulses, showing him how beauty may reside in steady practice as well as in rare moments. He visits temples, museums, and private libraries, testing old beliefs by their moral fruits rather than their arguments. Without adopting any rigid creed, he refines his standard of judgment: ideas are to be valued for the calm, consideration, and probity they produce in daily life.
Pater interweaves narrative and meditation to track Marius’s evolving rule of conduct. Epicurean restraint broadens into a disciplined charity, where courtesy and exactness in small matters become signs of larger moral intent. He learns to distrust any doctrine that dulls perception or hardens the heart, and he resists both superstition and speculative systems that promise certainty without experience. Ritual and art remain important, not as proofs, but as instruments of ethical tone. This ethic asks for scruple in action, tenderness in judgment, and a steady, practical care for well-being—his own and that of others—within the limits of a mortal world.
With the accession of Marcus Aurelius, Marius is drawn further into public life and the Stoic temper that now guides the empire. He witnesses the emperor’s example of self-control, service, and inward piety, whether in the capital or near the frontier. The austerity of Stoicism, balanced by humane reason, challenges his Epicurean balance, proposing duty as its own reward. He reads the emperor’s meditations and studies how a coherent character might be fashioned from repeated acts. Respecting this severity without embracing its metaphysics, Marius shapes a personal religion of conscience: a quiet fidelity to truthfulness, cleanliness of life, and kindly precision in conduct.
A new influence arrives through Cornelius, a friend whose sympathies lead Marius into contact with the Christian community. He observes household worship, charitable customs, and a social warmth that binds diverse people in mutual service. Stories of patience under trial, the burial of the dead with hope, and the strong sense of brotherhood impress him as a beautiful order of life. He compares this ethos with his own standards, noting convergences in gentleness and care. Without committing to doctrine, he recognizes here a moral atmosphere that seems to enlarge the heart, and he measures it by its effects on conduct and feeling.
Events bring tension: suspicions, official inquiries, and the liabilities of friendship expose Marius to practical tests. The interplay of imperial duty, private loyalty, and the standing of an unpopular sect creates difficult choices. Within this pressure he acts according to his refined rule: protection where he can offer it, silence where speech would harm, and a willingness to bear personal cost. The aesthetic of life yields to an ethic of service without forfeiting delicacy of judgment. These decisions do not resolve every doubt, but they confirm his conviction that true discipline orders feeling toward considerate, courageous kindness in the face of uncertainty.
The closing movement places Marius amid hardship and travel, where illness and danger underscore the stakes of his choices. A final ordeal tests whether the composure he cultivated can sustain active benevolence. The narrative concludes quietly, without doctrinal proclamation, presenting a life that has passed from cultivated pleasure into humane solicitude. Across both volumes, the book follows the formation of character through successive influences—pagan beauty, Stoic duty, and Christian charity—while stopping short of decisive theological claims. Its central message is the education of the conscience: that careful enjoyment of the world can ripen into measured, tender conduct toward others and oneself.
Historical Context
Set largely in the mid- to late-second century CE, the novel inhabits the Roman Empire at its Antonine zenith, from Antoninus Pius (r. 138–161) to Marcus Aurelius (r. 161–180). Its geographies move between Campania—especially Surrentum, modern Sorrento—with its villas, shrines, and coastal roads, and Rome, the administrative and ceremonial heart of empire. The Mediterranean network of ports, legions, and roads under the Pax Romana forms the stable backdrop that allows private intellectual and religious quests to flourish. Urban life, patronage, imperial ceremonies, and household piety intersect with provincial beliefs and cults, creating a cosmopolitan setting for Marius’s search for an ethical way of life.
The Antonine order provided the political structure the book presupposes. The Nerva–Antonine adoption system produced emperors famed for administrative competence; Antoninus Pius centralized justice and issued humane rescripts, including protections for slaves and minors. Under Marcus Aurelius, law and governance expanded through rescripts and juristic work such as Gaius’s Institutes (c. 160 CE). The urban prefecture, imperial fiscus, and provincial governors maintained civic stability in Italy and beyond. The novel reflects this disciplined calm in its depictions of orderly Roman households and an accessible imperial ethos, while Marius’s fascination with Marcus Aurelius’s self-scrutiny mirrors the philosopher-emperor’s ideal of duty tempered by interior moral reflection.
The spread of early Christianity in the second century, especially in Rome, Asia Minor, and Gaul, forms a crucial historical current. Legally, the framework followed earlier precedents: Trajan’s reply to Pliny (c. 112) discouraged hunts for Christians but punished obstinate refusal to sacrifice; Hadrian and Antoninus Pius issued rescripts against mob-driven accusations. Despite this, local prosecutions occurred. Apologists such as Justin Martyr defended Christians before Roman audiences and were executed in Rome around 165. The novel’s Christian households, catechumenal discipline, and patient apologetic tone echo this milieu, presenting Christianity as an ethical and communal practice emerging within, and sometimes against, Roman legal norms.
A signal episode of the age was the persecution at Lugdunum and Vienna (Lyons and Vienne) in 177. A surviving letter, preserved by Eusebius, recounts interrogations, imprisonment, and public executions in the amphitheater, naming martyrs such as Blandina, the aged bishop Pothinus, and Attalus. Civic factions, local governors, and imperial procedure combined to produce spectacle and deterrence. While the novel does not document legal minutiae, it mirrors the atmosphere of rumor, denunciation, and exemplary suffering that events like Lyons radiated across the empire. Its portrayal of Christian meekness under pressure and the circulation of martyr narratives evokes the moral shock such trials produced among educated pagans.
Second-century Christian sociability shaped Roman urban life: house-churches met in insulae and domus; burial clubs and catacomb networks (e.g., the Catacomb of Priscilla on the Via Salaria) organized memory and care. Roman bishops such as Anicetus (c. 157–168), Soter (c. 166–174), and Eleutherus (c. 174–189) administered alms and discipline; the visit of Polycarp to Rome (c. 154) illustrates early inter-church diplomacy. Charity during crises, catechesis before baptism, and restrained worship gave Christians a distinct social profile. The novel’s Christian friend Cornelius and scenes of quiet liturgy and reciprocal care translate these institutional habits into lived experience, contrasting them with aristocratic pagan sociability and aesthetic cult.
The Antonine Plague, likely smallpox, erupted in 165 as troops under Lucius Verus returned from the Parthian War. Galen’s eyewitness descriptions in Method of Medicine and On Antidotes note fever, pustular eruptions, and high mortality; outbreaks recurred into the 170s, depopulating towns, straining the army, and depressing tax receipts. Estimates of mortality range widely, but major urban centers, including Rome, experienced funeral congestion and labor shortages. The novel’s evocations of pestilence, funerary rhythms, and heightened moral urgency reflect this public health catastrophe, while the prominence of Christian nursing and burial care in the narrative signals how the epidemic sharpened contrasts between differing ethical and communal responses.
Religious pluralism and initiatory cults permeated Antonine society. Mithraism, centered on the tauroctony image, spread through the army and trade routes, leaving mithraea in Ostia (over a dozen sanctuaries) and Rome (e.g., beneath Santa Prisca). The cult of Isis and Serapis, with temples near the Campus Martius, offered healing and salvation; the Magna Mater’s taurobolium and the imperial cult knit civic loyalty to sacral ritual. Such syncretism offered moralized cosmologies and ritualized belonging outside the traditional civic pantheon. The novel’s sensual attention to temples, processions, and vows, alongside Marius’s selective Epicureanism, registers the marketplace of rites through which an educated Roman might fashion a personal piety.
By staging refined conscience amid autocracy, the novel critiques the era’s moral economy: slavery, spectacle, and class patronage coexist with imperial benevolence and Stoic rhetoric. It exposes the fragility of legal protections when local animus targets minorities, the limits of elite philanthropy during epidemic crisis, and the spiritual insufficiency of aestheticized pagan observance. Marius’s inward ethics and the Christians’ outward charity measure competing civic ideals, implying that true social reform must reach beyond cultivated taste to institutional mercy. The portrait of a philosopher-emperor hemmed in by plague, war scares, and provincial passions comments on the constraints of enlightened rule within an unequal, coercive imperial order.
Marius the Epicurean (Vol. 1&2)
Volume 1
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"
As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out at last as but paganism—the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. While, in Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity around the dying old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, "the religion of Numa," as people loved to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses of such a survival we may catch below the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry; in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage.
At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates, Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:
—he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar; and the worthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the young men and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended to maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places—the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove of ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deity is in this Place! Numen Inest!—it was in natural harmony with the temper of a quiet people amid the spectacle of rural life, like that simpler faith between man and man, which Tibullus expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines.
And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor (now about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world would at last find itself happy, could it detach some reluctant philosophic student from the more desirable life of celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it), there was a boy living in an old country-house, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had written; but the restoration of religious usages, and their retention where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of imperial example; and what had been in the main a matter of family pride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotion in the young Marius. A sense of conscious powers external to ourselves, pleased or displeased by the right or wrong conduct of every circumstance of daily life—that conscience, of which the old Roman religion was a formal, habitual recognition, was become in him a powerful current of feeling and observance. The old-fashioned, partly puritanic awe, the power of which Wordsworth noted and valued so highly in a northern peasantry, had its counterpart in the feeling of the Roman lad, as he passed the spot, "touched of heaven," where the lightning had struck dead an aged labourer in the field: an upright stone, still with mouldering garlands about it, marked the place. He brought to that system of symbolic usages, and they in turn developed in him further, a great seriousness—an impressibility to the sacredness of time, of life and its events, and the circumstances of family fellowship; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour on which they live, really understood by him as gifts—a sense of religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance) the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it as gratitude to the gods.
The day of the "little" or private Ambarvalia was come, to be celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it, as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases; the instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers, while masters and servants together go in solemn procession along the dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood is presently to be shed for the purification from all natural or supernatural taint of the lands they have "gone about." The old Latin words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way, though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible, were recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in the hall, together with the family records. Early on that day the girls of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large baskets with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia—as they passed through the fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in perfect temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the firm weather of that early summer-time. The clean lustral water and the full incense-box were carried after them. The altars were gay with garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green herbs to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this morning from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose. Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the scent of the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense. But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands of white, the procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons, even the children, abstaining from speech after the utterance of the pontifical formula, Favete linguis!—Silence! Propitious Silence!—lest any words save those proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the rite.
With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading part in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to complete this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind, esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation or expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving. The persons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by those prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature: they conceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting such troublesome movements at rest. By them, "the religion of Numa," so staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism, though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of high scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of domestic conduct, was mainly prized as being, through its hereditary character, something like a personal distinction—as contributing, among the other accessories of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocratic atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But in the young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind, as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his nature and experience. One thing only distracted him—a certain pity at the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher's work, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted them on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid heads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the procession approached the altars.
The names of that great populace of "little gods," dear to the Roman home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of the Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on special occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany—Vatican who causes the infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first word, Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess who watches over one's safe coming home. The urns of the dead in the family chapel received their due service. They also were now become something divine, a goodly company of friendly and protecting spirits, encamped about the place of their former abode—above all others, the father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall, grave figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitually thought as a genius a little cold and severe.
Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi, Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.—
Perhaps!—but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-day upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little—a few violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from the time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Marius taken them their portion of the family meal, at the second course, amidst the silence of the company. They loved those who brought them their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would be heard wandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of the night.
And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial—bread, oil, wine, milk—had regained for him, by their use in such religious service, that poetic and as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to all the means of daily life, could we but break through the veil of our familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. A hymn followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire rose up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame—a favourable omen, making it a duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in the great kitchen, where they had worked in the imperfect light through the long evenings of winter. The young Marius himself took but a very sober part in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste of what had been really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took him early away, that he might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid the beating of violent rain on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those angry clouds shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then he thought of the sort of protection which that day's ceremonies assured. To procure an agreement with the gods—Pacem deorum exposcere: that was the meaning of what they had all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but half-suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least not against him. His own nearer household gods were all around his bed. The spell of his religion as a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy, its dignity and security, was forcible at that moment; only, it seemed to involve certain heavy demands upon him.
CHAPTER II: WHITE-NIGHTS
To an instinctive seriousness, the material abode in which the childhood of Marius was passed had largely added. Nothing, you felt, as you first caught sight of that coy, retired place—surely nothing could happen there, without its full accompaniment of thought or reverie. White-nights! so you might interpret its old Latin name.1 "The red rose came first," says a quaint German mystic, speaking of "the mystery of so-called white things," as being "ever an after-thought—the doubles, or seconds, of real things, and themselves but half-real, half-material—the white queen, the white witch, the white mass, which, as the black mass is a travesty of the true mass turned to evil by horrible old witches, is celebrated by young candidates for the priesthood with an unconsecrated host, by way of rehearsal." So, white-nights, I suppose, after something like the same analogy, should be nights not of quite blank forgetfulness, but passed in continuous dreaming, only half veiled by sleep. Certainly the place was, in such case, true to its fanciful name in this, that you might very well conceive, in face of it, that dreaming even in the daytime might come to much there.
The young Marius represented an ancient family whose estate had come down to him much curtailed through the extravagance of a certain Marcellus two generations before, a favourite in his day of the fashionable world at Rome, where he had at least spent his substance with a correctness of taste Marius might seem to have inherited from him; as he was believed also to resemble him in a singularly pleasant smile, consistent however, in the younger face, with some degree of sombre expression when the mind within was but slightly moved.
As the means of life decreased, the farm had crept nearer and nearer to the dwelling-house, about which there was therefore a trace of workday negligence or homeliness, not without its picturesque charm for some, for the young master himself among them. The more observant passer-by would note, curious as to the inmates, a certain amount of dainty care amid that neglect, as if it came in part, perhaps, from a reluctance to disturb old associations. It was significant of the national character, that a sort of elegant gentleman farming, as we say, had been much affected by some of the most cultivated Romans. But it became something more than an elegant diversion, something of a serious business, with the household of Marius; and his actual interest in the cultivation of the earth and the care of flocks had brought him, at least, intimately near to those elementary conditions of life, a reverence for which, the great Roman poet, as he has shown by his own half-mystic pre-occupation with them, held to be the ground of primitive Roman religion, as of primitive morals. But then, farm-life in Italy, including the culture of the olive and the vine, has a grace of its own, and might well contribute to the production of an ideal dignity of character, like that of nature itself in this gifted region. Vulgarity seemed impossible. The place, though impoverished, was still deservedly dear, full of venerable memories, and with a living sweetness of its own for to-day.
To hold by such ceremonial traditions had been a part of the struggling family pride of the lad's father, to which the example of the head of the state, old Antoninus Pius—an example to be still further enforced by his successor—had given a fresh though perhaps somewhat artificial popularity. It had been consistent with many another homely and old-fashioned trait in him, not to undervalue the charm of exclusiveness and immemorial authority, which membership in a local priestly college, hereditary in his house, conferred upon him. To set a real value on these things was but one element in that pious concern for his home and all that belonged to it, which, as Marius afterwards discovered, had been a strong motive with his father. The ancient hymn—Fana Novella!—was still sung by his people, as the new moon grew bright in the west, and even their wild custom of leaping through heaps of blazing straw on a certain night in summer was not discouraged. The privilege of augury itself, according to tradition, had at one time belonged to his race; and if you can imagine how, once in a way, an impressible boy might have an inkling, an inward mystic intimation, of the meaning and consequences of all that, what was implied in it becoming explicit for him, you conceive aright the mind of Marius, in whose house the auspices were still carefully consulted before every undertaking of moment.
The devotion of the father then had handed on loyally—and that is all many not unimportant persons ever find to do—a certain tradition of life, which came to mean much for the young Marius. The feeling with which he thought of his dead father was almost exclusively that of awe; though crossed at times by a not unpleasant sense of liberty, as he could but confess to himself, pondering, in the actual absence of so weighty and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. On the part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self-sacrifice to be credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long service to the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about the funeral urn—a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair, in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself—a closeness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images. To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences, demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe and archaic religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the demand upon him of anything in which deity was concerned. He must satisfy with a kind of sacred equity,[1q] he must be very cautious lest he be found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys and calamities—the happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world of men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after years much engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of all religions as indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through many languid days, and made him anticipate all his life long as a thing towards which he must carefully train himself, some great occasion of self-devotion, such as really came, that should consecrate his life, and, it might be, its memory with others, as the early Christian looked forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon it.
The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble, mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the exquisite fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of the floor—the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on. The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but, though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece of silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously into oval form, which he had added to the mansion, still contained his collection of works of art; above all, that head of Medusa, for which the villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns on the coast had flung away or lost the thing, as it seemed, in some rapid flight across the river below, from the sands of which it was drawn up in a fisherman's net, with the fine golden laminae still clinging here and there to the bronze. It was Marcellus also who had contrived the prospect-tower of two storeys with the white pigeon-house above, so characteristic of the place. The little glazed windows in the uppermost chamber framed each its dainty landscape—the pallid crags of Carrara, like wildly twisted snow-drifts above the purple heath; the distant harbour with its freight of white marble going to sea; the lighthouse temple of Venus Speciosa on its dark headland, amid the long-drawn curves of white breakers. Even on summer nights the air there had always a motion in it, and drove the scent of the new-mown hay along all the passages of the house.
Something pensive, spell-bound, and but half real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can give to the dead, in our intensely realised memory of them—the "subjective immortality," to use a modern phrase, for which many a Roman epitaph cries out plaintively to widow or sister or daughter, still in the land of the living. Certainly, if any such considerations regarding them do reach the shadowy people, he enjoyed that secondary existence, that warm place still left, in thought at least, beside the living, the desire for which is actually, in various forms, so great a motive with most of us. And Marius the younger, even thus early, came to think of women's tears, of women's hands to lay one to rest, in death as in the sleep of childhood, as a sort of natural want. The soft lines of the white hands and face, set among the many folds of the veil and stole of the Roman widow, busy upon her needlework, or with music sometimes, defined themselves for him as the typical expression of maternity. Helping her with her white and purple wools, and caring for her musical instruments, he won, as if from the handling of such things, an urbane and feminine refinement, qualifying duly his country-grown habits—the sense of a certain delicate blandness, which he relished, above all, on returning to the "chapel" of his mother, after long days of open-air exercise, in winter or stormy summer. For poetic souls in old Italy felt, hardly less strongly than the English, the pleasures of winter, of the hearth, with the very dead warm in its generous heat, keeping the young myrtles in flower, though the hail is beating hard without. One important principle, of fruit afterwards in his Roman life, that relish for the country fixed deeply in him; in the winters especially, when the sufferings of the animal world became so palpable even to the least observant. It fixed in him a sympathy for all creatures, for the almost human troubles and sicknesses of the flocks, for instance. It was a feeling which had in it something of religious veneration for life as such—for that mysterious essence which man is powerless to create in even the feeblest degree. One by one, at the desire of his mother, the lad broke down his cherished traps and springes for the hungry wild birds on the salt marsh. A white bird, she told him once, looking at him gravely, a bird which he must carry in his bosom across a crowded public place—his own soul was like that! Would it reach the hands of his good genius on the opposite side, unruffled and unsoiled? And as his mother became to him the very type of maternity in things, its unfailing pity and protectiveness, and maternity itself the central type of all love;—so, that beautiful dwelling-place lent the reality of concrete outline to a peculiar ideal of home, which throughout the rest of his life he seemed, amid many distractions of spirit, to be ever seeking to regain.
And a certain vague fear of evil, constitutional in him, enhanced still further this sentiment of home as a place of tried security. His religion, that old Italian religion, in contrast with the really light-hearted religion of Greece, had its deep undercurrent of gloom, its sad, haunting imageries, not exclusively confined to the walls of Etruscan tombs. The function of the conscience, not always as the prompter of gratitude for benefits received, but oftenest as his accuser before those angry heavenly masters, had a large part in it; and the sense of some unexplored evil, ever dogging his footsteps, made him oddly suspicious of particular places and persons. Though his liking for animals was so strong, yet one fierce day in early summer, as he walked along a narrow road, he had seen the snakes breeding, and ever afterwards avoided that place and its ugly associations, for there was something in the incident which made food distasteful and his sleep uneasy for many days afterwards. The memory of it however had almost passed away, when at the corner of a street in Pisa, he came upon an African showman exhibiting a great serpent: once more, as the reptile writhed, the former painful impression revived: it was like a peep into the lower side of the real world, and again for many days took all sweetness from food and sleep. He wondered at himself indeed, trying to puzzle out the secret of that repugnance, having no particular dread of a snake's bite, like one of his companions, who had put his hand into the mouth of an old garden-god and roused there a sluggish viper. A kind of pity even mingled with his aversion, and he could hardly have killed or injured the animals, which seemed already to suffer by the very circumstance of their life, being what they were. It was something like a fear of the supernatural, or perhaps rather a moral feeling, for the face of a great serpent, with no grace of fur or feathers, so different from quadruped or bird, has a sort of humanity of aspect in its spotted and clouded nakedness. There was a humanity, dusty and sordid and as if far gone in corruption, in the sluggish coil, as it awoke suddenly into one metallic spring of pure enmity against him. Long afterwards, when it happened that at Rome he saw, a second time, a showman with his serpents, he remembered the night which had then followed, thinking, in Saint Augustine's vein, on the real greatness of those little troubles of children, of which older people make light; but with a sudden gratitude also, as he reflected how richly possessed his life had actually been by beautiful aspects and imageries, seeing how greatly what was repugnant to the eye disturbed his peace.
Thus the boyhood of Marius passed; on the whole, more given to contemplation than to action. Less prosperous in fortune than at an earlier day there had been reason to expect, and animating his solitude, as he read eagerly and intelligently, with the traditions of the past, already he lived much in the realm of the imagination, and became betimes, as he was to continue all through life, something of an idealist, constructing the world for himself in great measure from within, by the exercise of meditative power. A vein of subjective philosophy, with the individual for its standard of all things, there would be always in his intellectual scheme of the world and of conduct, with a certain incapacity wholly to accept other men's valuations. And the generation of this peculiar element in his temper he could trace up to the days when his life had been so like the reading of a romance to him. Had the Romans a word for unworldly? The beautiful word umbratilis perhaps comes nearest to it; and, with that precise sense, might describe the spirit in which he prepared himself for the sacerdotal function hereditary in his family—the sort of mystic enjoyment he had in the abstinence, the strenuous self-control and ascêsis, which such preparation involved. Like the young Ion in the beautiful opening of the play of Euripides, who every morning sweeps the temple floor with such a fund of cheerfulness in his service, he was apt to be happy in sacred places, with a susceptibility to their peculiar influences which he never outgrew; so that often in after-times, quite unexpectedly, this feeling would revive in him with undiminished freshness. That first, early, boyish ideal of priesthood, the sense of dedication, survived through all the distractions of the world, and when all thought of such vocation had finally passed from him, as a ministry, in spirit at least, towards a sort of hieratic beauty and order in the conduct of life.
And now what relieved in part this over-tension of soul was the lad's pleasure in the country and the open air; above all, the ramble to the coast, over the marsh with its dwarf roses and wild lavender, and delightful signs, one after another—the abandoned boat, the ruined flood-gates, the flock of wild birds—that one was approaching the sea; the long summer-day of idleness among its vague scents and sounds. And it was characteristic of him that he relished especially the grave, subdued, northern notes in all that—the charm of the French or English notes, as we might term them—in the luxuriant Italian landscape.
NOTE
1. Ad Vigilias Albas.
CHAPTER III: CHANGE OF AIR
Dilexi decorem domus tuae.
That almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a certain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was then usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The religion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been naturalised in Rome in the old republican times; but had reached under the Antonines the height of its popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones; but below its various crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am speaking by the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly practicable, belief that all the maladies of the soul might be reached through the subtle gateways of the body.
Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity. The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called him absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; that mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all other pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or "family" of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in possession of certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps, of all the institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian priesthood; the temples of the god, rich in some instances with the accumulated thank-offerings of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really also a kind of hospitals for the sick, administered in a full conviction of the religiousness, the refined and sacred happiness, of a life spent in the relieving of pain.
Elements of a really experimental and progressive knowledge there were doubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the reception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most part his care was held to take effect through a machinery easily capable of misuse for purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams, above all, inspired by Aesculapius himself, information as to the cause and cure of a malady was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a belief based on the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who watch them carefully, give many hints concerning the conditions of the body—those latent weak points at which disease or death may most easily break into it. In the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams had become more than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the "Orator," a man of undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to their interpretation; the really scientific Galen has recorded how beneficently they had intervened in his own case, at certain turning-points of life; and a belief in them was one of the frailties of the wise emperor himself. Partly for the sake of these dreams, living ministers of the god, more likely to come to one in his actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it was almost a necessity that the patient should sleep one or more nights within the precincts of a temple consecrated to his service, during which time he must observe certain rules prescribed by the priests.
