 Volume 1 chapter 8 of Marius the Epicurean. This is a LibriVox Recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Marius the Epicurean by Walter Patter. Chapter 8. Animula wagula. Animula wagula blandula hospes comeesque corporis quai noncabibis inloca palidula rigida nudula. The Emperor Hadrian to his soul. Flavian was no more. The little marble chest with its dust and tears lay cold among the faded flowers. For most people the actual spectacle of death brings out into greater reality, at least for the imagination, whatever confidence they may entertain of the soul's survival in another life. To Marius greatly agitated by that event, the earthly end of Flavian came like a final revelation of nothing less than the soul's extinction. Flavian had gone out as utterly as the fire among those still beloved ashes. Even that wistful suspense of judgment expressed by the dying Hadrian, regarding further stages of being, still possible for the soul in some dim journey hence, seemed wholly untenable, and with it almost all that remained of the religion of his childhood. Future extinction seemed just then to be what the unforced witness of his own nature pointed to. On the other hand there came a novel curiosity as to what the various schools of ancient philosophy had had to say concerning that strange fluttering creature, and that curiosity impelled him to certain severe studies in which his earlier religious conscience seemed still to survive as a principle of hieratic scrupulousness or integrity of thought regarding this new service to intellectual light. At this time by his poetic and inward temper he might have fallen prey to the innovating mysticism then in wait for ardent souls in many a melodramatic revival of old religion or theosophy. From all this, fascinating as it might actually be to one side of his character, he was kept by a genuine virility there, effecting in him, among other results, as a hatred of what was theatrical, and the instinctive recognition that invigorous intelligence after all, divinity was most likely to be found a resident. With this was connected the feeling, increasing with his advance to manhood, of a poetic beauty in mere clearness of thought, the actual aesthetic charm of a cold austerity of mind, as if the kinship of that to the clearness of physical light was something more than a figure of speech. Of all those various religious fantasies, as so many forms of enthusiasm, he could well appreciate the picturesque. That was made easy by his natural epicurianism, already prompting him to conceive of himself as but the passive spectator of the world around him. But it was to severe a reasoning of which such matters as epicurian theory are born, that in effect he now betook himself. Instinctively suspicious of those mechanical arcana those pretended secrets unveiled of the professional mystic, which really bring great and little souls to one level, for Marius the only possible dilemma lay between that old ancestral Roman religion now becomes so incredible to him, and the honest action of his own untroubled, unassisted intelligence. Even the arcana chelestia of Platonism, what the sons of Plato had had to say regarding the essential indifference of pure soul to its bodily house and merely occasional dwelling-place, seemed to him, while his heart was there in the urn with the material ashes of Flavian, or still lingering in memory over his last agony, wholly inhuman or morose as tending to alleviate his resentment at nature's wrong. It was to the sentiment of the body and the affections it defined, the flesh of whose force and colour that wandering platonic soul was but so frail a residue or abstract he must cling. The various pathetic traits of the beloved suffering perished body of Flavian so deeply pondered had made him a materialist, but with something of the temper of a devotee. As a consequence it might have seemed at first that his care for poetry had passed away to be replaced by the literature of thought. His much pondered manuscript verses were laid aside, and what happened now to one who was certainly to be something of a poet from first to last looked at the moment like a change from poetry to prose. He came of age about this time his own master though with a beardless face, and at eighteen, an age at which then as now many youths of capacity who fancied themselves poets secluded themselves from others chiefly in affectation and vague dreaming. He secluded himself indeed from others, but in a severe intellectual meditation that salt of poetry, without which all the more serious charm is lacking to the imaginative world. Still with something of the old religious earnestness of his childhood he set himself Zishimdenken zu orientieren, to determine his bearings as by compass in the world of thought, to get that precise acquaintance with the creative intelligence itself, its structure and capacities, its relation to other parts of himself and to other things, without which certainly no poetry can be masterly. Like a young man rich in this world's goods coming of age he must go into affairs and ascertain his outlook. There must be no disguises. An exact estimate of realities as towards himself he must have, a delicately measured gradation of certainty in things, from the distant haunted horizon of mere surmise or imagination to the actual feeling of sorrow in his heart, as he reclined one morning alone instead of in pleasant company to ponder the hard sayings of an imperfect old Greek manuscript unrolled beside him. His former gay companions meeting him in the streets of the old Italian town and noting the graver lines coming into the face of the somber but enthusiastic student of intellectual structure who could hold his own so well in the society of accomplished older men, were half afraid of him, though proud to have him of their company. Why, this reserve, they asked, concerning the orderly, self-possessed youth whose speech and courage seemed so carefully measured, who was surely no poet like the rat-desheveled lupus? Was he secretly in love, perhaps, whose toga was so dentally folded and who was always as fresh as the flowers he wore, or bent on his own line of ambition or even on riches? Marius, meantime, was reading freely in the early morning for the most part those writers chiefly who had made it their business to know what might be thought concerning that strange enigmatic personal essence which had seemed to go out altogether along with the funeral fires. And the old Greek who more than any other was now giving form to his thoughts was a very hard master. From Epicurus, from the thunder and lightning of Lucretius, like thunder and lightning some distance off one might recline to enjoy in a garden of roses, he had gone back to the writer who was, in a certain sense, the teacher of both, Heraclitus of Ionia. His difficult book, concerning nature, was even then rare, for people had long since satisfied themselves by the quotation of certain brilliant isolated oracles only, out of what was at best a taxing kind of law. But the difficulty of the early Greek prose did but spur the curiosity of Marius. The writer, the superior clearness of whose intellectual view had so sequestered him from other men, who had had so little joy of that superiority, being avowedly exacting as to the amount of devout attention he required from the student. The many, he said, always thus emphasising the difference between the many and the few, are, like people heavy with wine, led by children, knowing not whither they go, and yet much learning doth not make wise. And again the ass, after all, would have his thistles rather than fine gold. Heraclitus indeed had not underrated the difficulty for the many of the paradox with which his doctrine begins, and the due reception of which must involve a denial of habitual impressions as the necessary first step in the way of truth. His philosophy had been developed in conscious outspoken opposition to the current mode of thought, as a matter requiring some exceptional loyalty to pure reason and its dry light. In a subject to an illusion, he protests, regarding matters apparent to sense. What the uncorrected sense gives was a false impression of permanence or fixity in things which have really changed their nature in the very moment in which we see and touch them. And the radical flaw in the current mode of thinking would lie herein that, reflecting this false or uncorrected sensation, it attributes to the phenomena of experience a durability which does not really belong to them. Imaging forth from those fluid impressions a world of firmly outlined objects, it leads one to regard as a thing stark and dead what is in reality full of animation of vigour of the fire of life, that eternal process of nature of which at a later time Goethe spoke as the living garment, whereby God is seen of us ever in weaving at the loom of time. And the appeal which the old Greek thinker made was, in the first instance, from confused to unconfused sensation, with a sort of prophetic seriousness, a great claim and assumption such as we may understand, if we anticipate in this preliminary skepticism the ulterior scope of his speculation, according to which the universal movement of all natural things is but one particular stage or measure of that ceaseless activity wherein the divine reason consists. The one true being, that constant subject of all early thought, it was his merit to have conceived not as a sterile and stagnant inaction, but as a perpetual energy from the restless stream of which, at certain points, some elements detach themselves and harden into non-entity and death, corresponding as outward objects to man's inward condition of ignorance, that is, to the slowness of his faculties. It is with this paradox of a subtle perpetual change in all visible things that the high speculation of Heraclitus begins. Hence the scorn he expresses for anything like a careless, half-conscious use and want reception of our experience, which took so strong a hold on men's memories. Hence those many precepts, towards a strenuous self-consciousness in all we think and do, that loyalty to cool and candid reason which makes strict attentiveness of mind a kind of religious duty and service. The negative doctrine, then, that the objects of our ordinary experience fixed as they seem are really in perpetual change, had been as originally conceived, but the preliminary step towards a large positive system of almost religious philosophy. Then as now the illuminated philosophic mind might apprehend in what seemed a mass of lifeless matter the movement of that universal life in which things and men's impressions of them were ever coming to be, alternately consumed and renewed. That continual change, to be discovered by the attentive understanding where common opinion found fixed objects, was but the indicator of a subtler but all-pervading motion, the sleepless ever sustained inexhaustible energy of the divine reason itself, proceeding always by its own rhythmical logic, and lending to all mind and matter in turn what life they had. In this perpetual flux of things and of souls there was, as Heraclitus conceived, a continuance, if not of their material or spiritual elements, yet of orderly intelligible relationships, like the harmony of musical notes, wrought out in and through the series of their mutations, ordinances of the divine reason maintained throughout the changes of the phenomenal world, and this harmony in their mutation and opposition was, after all, a principle of sanity, of reality there. But it happened that, of all this, the first merely skeptical or negative step, that easiest step on the threshold, had alone remained in general memory, and the doctrine of motion seemed to those who had felt its seduction to make all fixed knowledge impossible. The swift passage of things, the still swifter passage of those modes of our conscious being which seemed to reflect them, might indeed be the burning of the divine fire, but what was ascertained was that they did pass away like a devouring flame, or like the race of water in the midstream, too swiftly for any real knowledge of them to be attainable. Heraclitonism had grown to be almost identical with the famous doctrine of the Sophist Protagoras, that the momentary, sensible apprehension of the individual was the only standard of what is or is not, and each one the measure of all things to himself. The impressive name of Heraclitus had become but an authority for a philosophy of the despair of knowledge. And as it had been with his original followers in Greece, so it happened now with the later Roman disciple. He, too, paused at the apprehension of that constant motion of things, the drift of flowers, of little or great souls, of ambitious systems in the stream around him, the first source, the ultimate issue of which, in regions out of sight, must count with him as but a dim problem. The bold mental flight of the old Greek master, from the fleeting competing objects of experience to that one universal life in which the whole sphere of physical change might be reckoned as but a single pulsation, remained by him as hypothesis only, the hypothesis he actually preferred as in itself most credible, however scantily realisable even by the imagination, yet still as but one unverified hypothesis among many others concerning the first principle of things. He might reserve it as a fine high visionary consideration, very remote upon the intellectual ladder, just at the point indeed where that ladder seemed to pass into the clouds, but for which there was certainly no time left just now by his eager interest in the real object so close to him on the lowlier earthy steps nearest the ground. And those childish days of reverie, when he played at priests, played in many another daydream, working his way from the actual present as far as he might with a delightful sense of escape in replacing the outer world of other people by an inward world as himself really cared to have it, had made him a kind of idealist. He was become aware of the possibility of a large dissidence between an inward and somewhat exclusive world of vivid personal apprehension, and the unimproved unheightened reality of the life of those about him. As a consequence he was ready now to concede somewhat more easily than others the first point of his new lesson that the individual is to himself the measure of all things, and to rely on the exclusive certainty to himself of his own impressions. To move afterwards in that outer world of other people as though taking it at their estimate would be possible henceforth only as a kind of irony. And as with the Viquea Savoyar, after reflecting on the variations of philosophy, the first fruit he drew from that reflection was the lesson of a limitation of his researches to what immediately interested him, to rest peacefully in a profound ignorance as to all beside, to disquiet himself only concerning those things which it was of import for him to know. At least he would entertain no theory of conduct which did not allow its due weight to this primary element of insertitude or negation in the conditions of man's life. Just here he joined company retracing in his individual mental pilgrimage the historic order of human thought with another wafer on the journey, another ancient Greek master, the founder of the Cyrenaic philosophy, whose weighty traditional utterances, for he had left no writing, served in turn to give effective outline to the contemplations of Marius. There was something in the doctrine itself, congruous with the place wherein it had its birth, and for a time Marius lived much mentally in the brilliant Greek colony which had given a dubious name to the philosophy of pleasure. It hung for his fancy between the mountains and the sea among richer than Italian gardens, on a certain breezy table-land projecting from the African coast some hundreds of miles southward from Greece. There in a delightful climate, with something of transalpine temperance amid its luxury, and with all in an inward atmosphere of temperance which did but further enhance the brilliancy of human life, the school of Cyrenae had maintained itself as almost one with the family of its founder, certainly as nothing coarse or unclean, and under the influence of accomplished women. Aristipus of Cyrenae, too, had left off in suspense of judgment as to what might really lie behind Flamantia Moiniamundi, the flaming ramparts of the world. Those strange bold sceptical surmises which had haunted the minds of the first Greek inquirers as merely abstract doubt, which had been present to the mind of Heraclitus as one element only in a system of abstract philosophy, became with Aristipus a very subtly practical worldly wisdom. The difference between him and those obscure earlier thinkers is almost like that between an ancient thinker generally and a modern man of the world. It was the difference between the mystic in his cell or the prophet in the desert, and the expert cosmopolitan administrator of his dark sayings translating the abstract thoughts of the master into terms, first of all, of sentiment. It has been sometimes seen in the history of the human mind that when thus translated into terms of sentiment, of sentiment as lying already halfway towards practice, the abstract ideas of metaphysics for the first time reveal their true significance. The metaphysical principle in itself, as it were, without hands or feet, becomes impressive, fascinating, of effect when translated into a precept as to how it were best to feel and act. In other words, under its sentimental or ethical equivalent. The leading idea of the great master of Cyrene, his theory that things are but shadows, and that we, even as they, never continue in one's day, might indeed have taken effect as a languid, innovating, consumptive nihilism, as a precept of renunciation, which would touch and handle and busy itself with nothing. But in the reception of metaphysical formulae, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall, the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought. There being at least so much truth as this involves in the theological maxim, that the reception of this or that speculative conclusion is really a matter of will. The persuasion that all is vanity, with this happily constituted Greek, who had been a genuine disciple of Socrates, and reflected, presumably, something of his blitheness in the face of the world, his happy way of taking all chances, did neither frivolity nor sourness, but induced, rather, an impression, just serious enough, of the call upon men's attention of the crisis in which they find themselves. It became the stimulus towards every kind of activity, and prompted a perpetual, inextinguishable thirst after experience. With Marius, then, the influence of the philosopher of pleasure depended on this, that in him an abstract doctrine, originally somewhat acrid, had fallen upon a rich and genial nature, well fitted to transform it into a theory of practice, of considerable stimulative power towards a fair life. What Marius saw in him was the spectacle of one of the happiest temperaments, coming, so to speak, to an understanding with the most depressing of theories, accepting the results of a metaphysical system which seemed to concentrate into itself all the weakening trains of thought in earlier Greek speculation, and making the best of it, turning its hard, bare truths, with wonderful tact, into precepts of grace, and delicate wisdom, and a delicate sense of honour. Given the hardest terms supposing our days are indeed but a shadow, even so we may well adorn and beautify, in scrupulous self-respect, our souls, and whatever our souls touch upon, these wonderful bodies, these material dwelling places, through which the shadows pass together for a while, the very raiment we wear, our very pastimes, and the intercourse of society. The most discerning judges saw in him something like the graceful humanities of the later Roman, and our modern culture, as it is termed, while Horace recalled his sayings as expressing best his own consummate amenity in the reception of life. In this way, for Marius, under the guidance of that old master of Decarus living, those eternal doubts as to the criteria of truth reduced themselves to a scepticism almost dryly practical, a scepticism which developed the opposition between things as they are and our impressions and thoughts concerning them, the possibility, if an outward world does really exist, of some fortiness in our apprehension of it, the doctrine in short of what is termed the subjectivity of knowledge. That is a consideration indeed which lies as an element of weakness, like some admitted fault or flaw at the very foundation of every philosophical account of the universe, which confronts all philosophies at their starting, but with which none have really dealt conclusively, some perhaps not quite sincerely, which those who are not philosophers dissipate by common but unphilosophical sense or by religious faith. The peculiar strength of Marius was to have apprehended this weakness on the threshold of human knowledge in the whole range of its consequences. Our knowledge is limited to what we feel, he reflected. We need no proof that we feel, but can we be sure that things are at all like our feelings? Mere peculiarities in the instruments of our cognition, like the little knots and waves on the surface of a mirror, may distort the matter they seem but to represent. Of other people we cannot truly know even the feelings, nor how far they would indicate the same modifications, each one of a personality really unique in using the same terms as ourselves. That common experience, which is sometimes proposed as a satisfactory basis of certainty, being after all only a fixity of language. But our own impressions, the light and heat of that blue veil over our heads, the heavens spread out, perhaps not like a curtain over anything. How reassuring, after so long a debate about the rival criteria of truth, to fall back upon direct sensation, to limit one's aspirations after knowledge to that. In an age still materially so brilliant, so expert in the artistic handling of material things, with sensible capacities still in undiminished vigor, with the whole world of classic art and poetry outspread before it, and where there was more than eye or ear could well take in, how natural the determination to rely exclusively upon the phenomena of the senses, which certainly never deceive us about themselves, about which alone we can never deceive ourselves. And so the abstract apprehension that the little point of this present moment alone really is between a past which has just ceased to be, and a future which may never come, became practical with Marius under the form of a resolve, as far as possible, to exclude regret and desire, and yield himself to the improvement of the present with an absolutely disengaged mind. America is here and now, here or nowhere, as Wilhelm Meister finds out one day, just not too late, after so long looking vaguely across the ocean for the opportunity of the development of his capacities. It was as if, recognizing in perpetual motion the law of nature, Marius identified his own way of life cordially with it, throwing himself into the stream, so to speak. He too must maintain a harmony with that soul of motion in things, by constantly renewed mobility of character. Omnis Aristipum decuit color et status et race. Thus Horace had summed up that perfect manner in the reception of life, attained by his old Cyranaic master. And the first practical consequence of the metaphysics which lay behind that perfect manner had been a strict limitation, almost the renunciation of metaphysical inquiry itself. Metaphysics, that art, as it has so often proved in the words of Michelet de Cigaré avec méthode, of bewildering oneself methodically, one must spend little time upon that. In the school of Cyrene, great as was its mental incisiveness, logical and physical speculation, theoretic interests generally had been valued only so far as they served to give a groundwork, an intellectual justification, to that exclusive concern with practical ethics, which was a note of the Cyranaic philosophy. How earnest and enthusiastic, how true to itself under how many varieties of character had been the efforts of the Greeks after theory, theoria, that vision of a wholly reasonable world, which, according to the greatest of them, literally makes man like God. How loyally they had still persisted in the quest after that, in spite of how many disappointments. In the Gospel of St. John, perhaps, some of them might have found the kind of vision they were seeking for, but not in doubtful disputations concerning being and not being, knowledge and appearance. Young men's minds, even young men's minds, at that late day, might well seem oppressed by the weariness of systems which had so far outrun positive knowledge. And in the mind of Marius, as in that old school of Cyrene, this sense of ennui, combined with appetites so youthfully vigorous, brought about reaction, a sort of suicide, instances of the like, have been seen since, by which a great metaphysical acumen was devoted to the function of proving metaphysical speculation impossible or useless. Abstract theory was to be valued only just so far, as it might serve to clear the tablet of the mind from suppositions no more than half realizable, or wholly visionary, leaving it in flawless evenness of surface, to the impressions of an experience concrete and direct. To be absolutely virgin towards such experience, by ridding ourselves of such abstractions as are but the ghosts of bygone impressions, to be rid of the notions we have made for ourselves, and that so often only misrepresent the experience of which they profess to be the representation. Idola, idols, false appearances as Bacon calls them later. To neutralize the distorting influence of metaphysical system by an all-accomplished metaphysics skill, it is this bold hard sober recognition under a very dry light of its own proper aim, in union with a habit of feeling which on the practical side may perhaps open a wide doorway to human weakness, that gives to the syrinaic doctrine to reproductions of this doctrine in the time of Marius, or in our own, their gravity and importance. It was a school to which the young man might come eager for truth, expecting much from philosophy, in no ignoble curiosity, aspiring after nothing less than an initiation. He would be sent back sooner or later to experience, to the world of concrete impressions, to things as they may be seen, heard, felt by him, but with a wonderful machinery of observation, and free from the tyranny of mere theories. So in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school of healthfully sensuous wisdom in the brilliant old Greek colony on its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed, and toward such a full or complete life, a life of various, yet select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, insight. Liberty of soul, freedom from all partial and misrepresentative doctrine, which does but relieve one element in our experience at the cost of another, freedom from all embarrassment alike of regret for the past and of calculation on the future, this would be but preliminary to the real business of education, insight, insight through culture, into all that the present moment holds in trust for us as we stand so briefly in its presence. From that maxim of life as the end of life, followed as a practical consequence, the desirableness of refining all the instruments of inward and outward intuition, of developing all their capacities, of testing and exercising oneself in them, till one's whole nature became one complex medium of reception, towards the vision, the beatific vision, if we really cared to make it such, of our actual experience in the world. Not the conveyance of an abstract body of truths or principles would be the aim of the right education of oneself or of another, but the conveyance of an art, an art in some degree peculiar to each individual character, with the modifications that is due to its special constitution and the peculiar circumstances of its growth, in as much as no one of us is like another all in all. And of Chapter 8, Volume 1, Chapter 9 of Marius the Epicurean This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Marius the Epicurean by Walter Patta Volume 1, Chapter 9, New Serenaicism Such were the practical conclusions drawn for himself by Marius when, somewhat later, he had outgrown the mastery of others, from the principle that all is vanity. If he could but count upon the present, if a life brief at best could not certainly be shown to conduct one anywhere beyond itself, if men's highest curiosity was indeed so persistently baffled, then, with the serenaics of all ages, he would at least fill up the measure of that present with vivid sensations, and such intellectual apprehensions as in strength and directness, and their immediately realised values at the bar of an actual experience are most like sensations. So some have spoken in every age, for, like all theories which really express a strong natural tendency of the human mind, or even one of its characteristic modes of weakness, this vein of reflection is a constant tradition in philosophy. Every age of European thought has had its serenaics, or epicureans, under many disguises, even under the hood of the monk. But, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, is a proposal, the real import of which differs immensely according to the natural taste, and the acquired judgment of the guests who sit at the table. It may express nothing better than the instinct of Dante's chaco, the accomplished glutton in the mud of the inferno, or, since or no hypothesis does man live by bread alone, may come to be identical with, my meat is to do what is just and kind, while the soul, which can make no sincere claim to have apprehended anything beyond the veil of immediate experience, yet never loses a sense of happiness in conforming to the highest moral ideal it can clearly define for itself, and actually, though, but with so faint hope, does the father's business. In that age of Marcus Aurelius so completely disabused of the metaphysical ambition to pass beyond the flaming ramparts of the world, but, on the other hand, possessed of so vast an accumulation of intellectual treasure, with so wide a view before it over all varieties of what is powerful or attractive in man and his works. The thoughts of Marius did but follow the line taken by the majority of educated persons, though to a different issue. Pitched to a really high and serious key, the precept be perfect in regard to what is here and now. The precept of culture, as it is called, or of a complete education, might at least save him from the vulgarity and heaviness of a generation, certainly of no general fineness of temper, though with a material well-being abundant enough. Conceded that what is secure in our existence is but the sharp apex of the present moment between two hypothetical eternities, and all that is real in our experience but a series of fleeting impressions, so Marius continued the sceptical argument he had condensed as the matter to hold by from his various philosophical reading, given that we are never to get beyond the walls of this closely shut cell of one's personality, that the ideas we are somehow impelled to form of an outer world and of other minds akin to our own are, it may be, but a daydream, and the thought of any world beyond, a daydream perhaps idler still. Then he, at least, in whom those fleeting impressions, faces, voices, material sunshine, were very real and imperious, might well set himself to the consideration how such actual moments as they passed might be made to yield their utmost by the most dexterous training of capacity. Amid abstract metaphysical doubts, as to what might lie one step only beyond that experience, reinforcing the deep original materialism or earthliness of human nature itself, bound so intimately to the sensuous world, let him at least make the most of what was here and now. In the actual dimness of ways from means to ends, ends in themselves desirable, yet for the most part distant, and for him certainly below the visible horizon, he would at all events be sure that the means, to use the well-worn terminology, should have something of finality or perfection about them, and themselves partake in a measure of the more excellent nature of ends, that the means should justify the end. With this in view, he would demand culture, paideia, as the Syrinaics said, or in other words, a wide, a complete education, an education partly negative as ascertaining the true limits of man's capacities, but for the most part positive, and directed especially to the expansion and refinement of the power of reception, of those powers above all which are immediately relative to fleeting phenomena, the powers of emotion and sense. In such an education, an aesthetic education as it might now be termed, and certainly occupied very largely with those aspects of things which affect us pleasurably through sensation, art of course, including all the finer sorts of literature, would have a great part to play. The study of music in that wider platonic sense, according to which music comprehends all those matters over which the muses of Greek mythology preside, would conduct one to an exquisite appreciation of all the finer traits of nature and of man. Nay, the products of the imagination must themselves be held to present the most perfect forms of life, spirit and matter alike, under their purest and most perfect conditions, the most strictly appropriate objects of that impassioned contemplation which, in the world of intellectual discipline, as in the highest forms of morality and religion, must be held to be the essential function of the perfect. Such manner of life might come even to seem a kind of religion, an inward visionary mystic piety or religion by virtue of its efforts to live days lovely and pleasant in themselves, here and now, and with an all sufficiency of well-being in the immediate sense of the object contemplated independently of any faith or hope that might be entertained as to their ulterior tendency. In this way the true aesthetic culture would be realisable as a new form of the contemplative life, founding its claim on the intrinsic blessedness of vision, the vision of perfect men and things. One's human nature indeed would feign reckon on an assured and endless future, pleasing itself with the dream of a final home to be attained at some still remote date, yet with a conscious, delightful homecoming at last as depicted in many an old poetic Elysium. On the other hand the world of perfect sensation, intelligence, emotion, is so close to us and so attractive that the most visionary of spirits must needs represent the world unseen in colours and under a form really borrowed from it. Let me be sure, then, might I not plausibly say that I miss no detail of this life of realised consciousness in the present. Here at least is a vision, a theory, teoria, which reposes on no basis of unverified hypothesis, which makes no call upon a future, after all, somewhat problematic, as it would be unaffected by any discovery of an impedicles improving on the old story of Prometheus as to what had really been the origin and course of development of man's actually attained faculties and that seemingly divine particle of reason or spirit in him. Such a doctrine at more leisureable moments would, of course, have its precepts to deliver on the embellishment generally of what is near at hand on the adornment of life till in a not impracticable rule of conduct. One's existence from day to day came to be like a well-executed piece of music, that perpetual motion in things, so Marius figured the matter to himself under the old Greek imageries, according itself to a kind of cadence or harmony. It was intelligible that this aesthetic philosophy might find itself theoretically at least and by way of a curious question in casuistry legitimate from its own point of view, weighing the claims of that eager, concentrated, impassioned realization of experience against those of the received morality. Conceiving its own function in a somewhat desperate temper and becoming as every high strung form of sentiment as the religious sentiment itself may become, somewhat antinomian, when in its effort towards the order of experience as it prefers it is confronted with the traditional and popular morality, at points where that morality may look very like a convention or a mere stage property of the world, it would be found from time to time breaking beyond the limits of the actual moral order, perhaps not without some pleasurable excitement in so bold a venture. With the possibility of some such hazard as this in thought or even in practice, that it might be, though refining or tonic even in the case of those strong and in health, yet, as Pascal says, of the kindly and temperate wisdom of Montaigne, pernicious for those who have any natural tendency to impiety or vice, the line of reflection traced out above was fairly chargeable, not, however, with hedonism and its supposed consequences. The blood, the heart of Marius, were still pure. He knew that his carefully considered theory of practice braced him with the effect of a moral principle duly recurring to mind every morning, towards the work of a student, for which he might seem intended. Yet there were some among his acquaintance who jumped to the conclusion that, with the Epicurean sty, he was making pleasure, pleasure as they so poorly conceived it, the sole motive of life, and they precluded any exacter estimate of the situation by covering it with a high-sounding general term, through the vagueness of which they were enabled to see the severe and laborious youth in the vulgar company of Lice. Words like hedonism, terms of large and vague comprehension, above all, when used for a purpose avowedly controversial, have ever been the worst examples of what are called question-begging terms, and in that late age in which Marius lived, amid the dust of so many centuries of philosophical debate, the air was full of them. Yet those who used that reproachful Greek term for the philosophy of pleasure were hardly more likely than the old Greeks themselves, on whom regarding this very subject of the theory of pleasure their masters in the art of thinking had so emphatically to impress the necessity of making distinctions, to come to any very delicately correct ethical conclusions by a reasoning which began with a general term comprehensive enough to cover pleasures so different in quality in their causes and effects, as the pleasures of wine and love, of art and science, of religious enthusiasm and political enterprise, and of that taste or curiosity which satisfied itself with long days of serious study. Yet in truth each of those pleasurable modes of activity may, in its turn, fairly become the ideal of the hedonistic doctrine. Really, to the phase of reflection through which Marius was then passing, the charge of hedonism, whatever its true weight might be, was not properly applicable at all. Not pleasure, but fullness of life and insight as conducing to that fullness, energy, variety and choice of experience, including noble pain and sorrow even, loves such as those in the exquisite old story of Apuleus, sincere and strenuous forms of the moral life, such as Seneca and Epictetus, whatever form of human life, in short, might be heroic, impassioned, ideal. From these, the new syrinacism of Marius took its criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, which might properly be regarded, as in great degree, coincident with the main principle of the Stoics themselves, and an older version of the Precept, whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might, a doctrine so widely acceptable among the nobler spirits of that time. And as with that, its mistaken tendency would lie in the direction of a kind of idolatry of mere life, or natural gift, or strength. To understand the various forms of ancient art and thought, the various forms of actual human feeling, the only new thing in a world almost too opulent in what was old, to satisfy with a kind of scrupulous equity the claims of these concrete and actual objects on his sympathy, his intelligence, his senses, to pluck out the heart of their mystery, and in turn become the interpreter of them to others, this had now defined itself for Marius, as a very narrowly practical design. It determined his choice of a vocation to live by. It was the era of the rhetoricians, or Sophists, as they were sometimes called, of men who came in some instances to great fame and fortune by way of a literary cultivation of science. That science, it has often been said, must have been holy and a fear of words. But in a world confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, must necessarily consist very much in criticism. And in the case of the more excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all, the eloquent and effective interpreter for the delighted ears of others of what understanding himself had come by in years of travel and study, of the beautiful house of art and thought which was the inheritance of the age. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whose service Marius had now been called, was himself, more or less openly, a lecturer. That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern traits, had this spectacle so familiar to ourselves of the public lecturer or essayist, in some cases adding to his other gifts that of the Christian preacher, who knows how to touch people's sensibilities on behalf of the suffering. To follow in the way of these successes was the natural instinct of youthful ambition, and it was with no vulgar egotism that Marius, at the age of nineteen, determined, like many another young man of parts, to enter as a student of rhetoric at Rome. Though the manner of his work was changed formally from poetry to prose, he remained, and must always be, of the poetic temper, by which I mean, among other things, that quite independently of the general habit of that pensive age, he lived much, and as it were by system, in reminiscence. Amid his eager grasping at the sensation, the consciousness of the present, he had come to see that, after all, the main point of economy in the conduct of the present was the question, how will it look to me, at what shall I value it this day next year, that in any given day or month one's main concern was its impression for the memory. A strange trick memory sometimes played him, for, with no natural gradation, what was of last month or of yesterday, of today even, would seem as far off as entirely detached from him as things of ten years ago. Detached from him, yet very real, there lay certain spaces of his life in delicate perspective under a favourable light, and, somehow, all the less fortunate detail and circumstance had parted from them. Such hours were oftenest those in which he had been helped by work of others to the pleasurable apprehension of art, of nature, or of life. Not what I do, but what I am, under the power of this vision, he would say to himself, is what were indeed pleasing to the gods. And yet, with a kind of inconsistency in one who had taken for his philosophic ideal the monochronos hedonné of Aristipus, the pleasure of the ideal present of the mystic now, there would come, together with that precipitant sinking of things into the past, a desire, after all, to retain what was so transitive. Could he but arrest, for others also, certain clauses of experience, as the imaginative memory presented them to himself? In those grand hot summers he would have imprisoned the very perfume of the flowers. To create, to live perhaps, a little while beyond the allotted hours, if it were but in a fragment of perfect expression, it was thus his longing defined itself for something to hold by amid the perpetual flux. With men of his vocation people were apt to say words were things. Well, with him words should be indeed things. The word, the phrase, valuable in exact proportion to the transparency with which it conveyed to others the apprehension, the emotion, the mood, so vividly real within himself. Verba que pro visam rem non in vita sequentur Viral apprehension of the true nature of things, of the true nature of one's own impression, first of all, words would follow that naturally, a true understanding of oneself being ever the first condition of genuine style. Language, delicate and measured, the delicate Attic phrase, for instance, in which the eminent Aristides could speak, was then a power to which people's hearts and sometimes even their purses readily responded. And there were many points, as Marius thought, on which the heart of that age greatly needed to be touched. He hardly knew how strong that old religious sense of responsibility, the conscience, as we call it, still was within him, a body of inward impressions as real as those so highly valued outward ones, to offend against which brought with it a strange feeling of disloyalty as to a person. And the determination, adhered to with no misgiving, to add nothing, not so much as a transient sigh to the great total of men's unhappiness in his way through the world, that too was something to rest on in the drift of mere appearances. All this would involve a life of industry, of industrious study, only possible through healthy rule, keeping clear the eye alike of body and soul. For the male element, the logical conscience asserted itself now, with opening manhood, asserted itself even in his literary style, by a certain firmness of outline, that touch of the worker in metal, amid its richness. Already he blamed instinctively alike in his work and in himself, as youth so seldom does, all that had not passed a long and liberal process of erasure. The happy phrase or sentence was really modelled upon a cleanly finished structure of scrupulous thought, the suggestive force of the one master of his development, who had battled so hard with imaginative prose, the utterance, the golden utterance of the other, so content with its living power of persuasion that he had never written at all. In the commicture of these two qualities, he set up his literary ideal, and this rare blending of grace, with an intellectual rigor or astringency, was the secret of a singular expressiveness in it. He acquired at this time a certain bookish air, the somewhat somber habitude of the avowed scholar, which, though it never interfered with the perfect tone, fresh and serenely disposed of the Roman gentleman, yet qualified it as by an interesting oblique trait, and frightened away some of his equals in age and rank. The sober discretion of his thoughts, his sustained habit of meditation, the sense of those negative conclusions enabling him to concentrate himself with an absorption so entire, upon what is immediately here and now, gave him a peculiar manner of intellectual confidence, as of one who had indeed been initiated into a great secret. Though, with an air so disengaged, he seemed to be living so intently in the visible world. And now, in revolt against that preoccupation with other persons, which had so often perturbed his spirit, his westful speculations as to what the real, the greater, experience might be, determined in him not as the longing for love, to be with Cynthia or Aspasia, but as a thirst for existence in exquisite places. The veil that was to be lifted for him lay over the works of the old masters of art, in places where nature also had used her mastery. And it was just at this moment that a summons to Rome reached him. And of Chapter 9, Volume 1, Chapter 10 of Marius the Epicurean This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Marius the Epicurean, by Walter Patta. Volume 1, Chapter 10, On the Way Many points in that train of thought. It's harder and more energetic practical details, especially, at first surmised but vaguely in the intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained the coherence of formal principle amid the stirring incidents of the journey which took him still in all the buoyancy of his nineteen years and greatly expectant to Rome. That summons had come from one of the former friends of his father in the capital, who had kept himself acquainted with the lads' progress, and assured of his parts, his courtly ways, above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offered him a place. Virtually the Ativan Emanuensis, near the person of the philosophic emperor. The old townhouse of his family on the Caelian hill, so long neglected, might well require his personal care, and Marius, relieved a little by his preparations for travelling, from a certain over-tension of spirit in which he had lived of late, was presently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, on his expected return home, after a first success, elusive enough as it was soon to appear, against the invaders from beyond the Danube. The opening stage of his journey, through the firm golden weather, for which he had lingered three days beyond the appointed time of starting, days brown with the first rains of autumn, brought him by the byways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Luna, to the town of Luka, a station on the Cassian Way. Travelling so far, mainly on foot, while the baggage followed under the care of his attendants. He wore a broad felt hat, in fashion, not unlike a more modern pilgrims, the neat head projecting from the collar of his grey pine-ula, or travelling mantle, sewed closely together over the breast, but with its two sides folded up upon the shoulders, to leave the arms free in walking, and was altogether so trim and fresh, that as he climbed the hill from Pisa, by the long steep lane through the olive-yards, and turned to gaze where he could just discern the cypresses of the old school garden, like two black lines down the yellow walls, a little child took possession of his hand, and, looking up at him with entire confidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of his company, to the spot where the road declined again into the valley beyond. From this point, leaving the servants behind, he surrendered himself a willing subject, as he walked, to the impressions of the road, and was almost surprised, both at the suddenness with which evening came on, and the distance from his old home at which it found him. And at the little town of Luka, he felt that indescribable sense of a welcoming in the mere outward appearance of things, which seems to mark out certain places for the special purpose of evening rest, and gives them always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepening twilight, the rough-tiled roofs seemed to huddle together side by side, like one continuous shelter over the whole township, spreading low and broad above the snug sleeping rooms within, and the place one sees for the first time, and must tarry in but for a night, breathes the very spirit of home. The cottagers lingered at their doors for a few minutes, as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early, though there was still a glow along the road through the shorn cornfields, and the birds were still awake about the crumbling grey heights of an old temple. So quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardly tell where the country left off in it, and the field paths became its streets. Next morning he must need change the manner of his journey. The light baggage wagon returned, and he proceeded now more quickly, travelling a stage or two by post, along the Cassian Way, where the figures and incidents of the Great High Road seemed already to tell of the capital, the one centre to which all were hastening, or had lately bidden a dew. That way lay through the heart of the old mysterious and visionary country of Etruria, and what he knew of its strange religion of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of the funeral houses scattered so plentifully among the dwelling-places of the living, revived in him for a while in all its strength, his old instinctive yearning towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land he had known in life. It seemed to him that he could half-divine how time passed in those painted houses on the hill-sides, among the gold and silver ornaments, the wrought armour and vestments, the drowsy and dead attendants, and the close consciousness of that vast population gave him no fear but rather a sense of companionship as he climbed the hills on foot behind the horses through the genial afternoon. The road next day passed below a town not less primitive it might seem than its rocky perch, white rocks that had long been glistening before him in the distance. Down the dewy paths the people were descending from it to keep a holiday high and low alike in rough white linen smocks. A homely old play was just begun in an open-air theatre with seats hollowed out of the turf-grown slope. Marius caught the terrified expression of a child in its mother's arms as it turned from the yawning mouth of a great mask for refuge in her bosom. The way mounted and descended again down the steep street of another place all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer, for every house had its braziers workshop, the bright objects of brass and copper gleaming light-lights in a cave out of their dark roofs and corners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work or ran to fetch water to the hissing red hot metal, and Marius too watched as he took his hasty midday refreshment, a mess of chestnut meal and cheese, while the swelling surface of a great copper water vessel grew flowered all over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towards dusk a frantic woman at the roadside stood and cried out the words of some filter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, as the travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil. But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents on the way, Marius noted more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marks of the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors there had been many enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The Ergastula were abolished, but no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. A whole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom and circumstance of misery, still hung around or sheltered themselves within the vast walls of their old half-ruined task houses. And for the most part they had been variously stricken by the pestilence. For once the heroic level had been reached in rags, squints, scars, every caricature of the human type ravaged beyond what could have been thought possible if it were to survive at all. Meantime the farms were less carefully tended than of old, here and there they were lapsing into their natural wildness. Some villas also were partly fallen into ruin. The picturesque Romantic Italy of a later time, the Italy of Claude and Salvatore Rosa, was already forming for the delight of the modern Romantic Traveller. And again, Marius was aware of a real change in things on crossing the Tiber, as if some magic effect lay in that, though here in truth the Tiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under the richer sky, seemed reddier and more affluent, and man fitter to the conditions around him. Even in people hard at work there appeared to be a less burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily the women were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steep streets, with the great water pots resting on their heads, like women of Carriai, set free from slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed, all the details of the threshing floor and the vineyard, the common farm life even, the great baker's fires aglow upon the road in the evening. In the presence of all this, Marius felt for a moment like those old early unconscious poets who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus and the Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine press and the plowshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing his thoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fullness of intellectual manhood on his way hither. The formative and literary stimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise, which he had always observed in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter of thought alike, detached themselves clearly and with readiness from the healthfully excited brain. It is wonderful, says Pliny, how the mind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise. The presentable aspects of inmost thought and feeling became evident to him. The structure of all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself. His general sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective in daintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking of figure to abstraction. It seemed just then as if the desire of the artist in him, that old longing to produce, might be satisfied by the exact and literal transcript of what was then passing around him in simple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed and prolonging its life a little. To live in the concrete, to be sure at least of one's hold upon that. Again his philosophic scheme was but the reflection of the data of sense and chiefly of sight, a reduction to the abstract of the brilliant road he travelled on through the sunshine. But on the seventh evening there came a reaction in the cheerful flow of our travellers' thoughts, a reaction with which mere bodily fatigue, asserting itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do, and he fell into a mood known to all passably sentimental wayfarers, as night deepens again and again over their path, in which all journeying, from the known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolish truancy, like a child's running away from home, with the feeling that one had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosen to climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the road ascended to the place where that day's stage was to end, and found himself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest of his travelling companions. Would the last zigzag round and round those dark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure, ever bring him within the circuit of the walls above? It was now that a startling incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear. From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after some whisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down through the stillness, fell to pieces in a cloud of dust across the road just behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel. That was sufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vague fear of evil, of one's enemies, a distress so much a matter of constitution with him, that at times it would seem that the best pleasures of life could but be snatched, as it were hastily, in one moment's forgetfulness of its dark, besetting influence. A sudden suspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of enemies, seemed all at once to alter the visible form of things, as with the child's hero, when he found the footprint on the sand of his peaceful, dreamy island. His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet the terror of mere bodily evil, much less of inexorable fate and the noise of greedy acron. The resting place to which he presently came, in the keen, wholesome air of the marketplace of the Little Hill town, was a pleasant contrast to the last effort of his journey. The room in which he sat down to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trim and sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished, three-wicked Lucerne, burning cleanly with the best oil, upon the white-washed walls and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glass goblets. The white wine of the place put before him of the true colour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam, as it mounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had found in no other wine. These things had relieved a little the melancholy of the hour before, and it was just then that he heard the voice of one newly arrived at the inn, making his way to the upper floor, a youthful voice with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his cure. He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams, uttering his name, then, awake in the full morning light, and gazing from the window, saw the guest of the night before, a very honourable-looking youth in the rich habit of a military night, standing beside his horse, and already making preparations to depart. It happened that Marius, too, was to take that day's journey on horseback. Riding presently from the inn, he overtook Cornelius of the 12th Legion, advancing carefully down the steep street, and before they had issued from the gates of Orbes Vettus, the two young men had broken into talk together. They were passing along the street of the Goldsmiths, and Cornelius must needs enter one of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of his nightly trappings. Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work, as he had watched the braziers' business a few days before, wondering most at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, on which only genius in that craft could have lighted. By what unguessed-at-stroke-of-hand, for instance, had the grains of precious metal associated themselves with so daintily regular a roughness over the surface of the little casket yonder. And the conversation which followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with sufficient interest in each other to ensure an easy companionship for the remainder of their journey. In time to come, Marius was to depend very much on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade who now laid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder as they left the workshop. Observes one of our scholarly travellers, and their road that day lay through a country well-fitted by the peculiarity of its landscape to ripen a first acquaintance into intimacy. Its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back upon each other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension of which, however, it would relieve ever and anon by the unexpected assertion of something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect of the land was, indeed, in spite of abundant olive and islets, unpleasing enough. A river of clay seemed, in some old night of time, to have burst up over valley and hill, and hardened there into fantastic shelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock up and down among the contorted vegetation, the hoary roots and trunks seeming to confess some weird kinship with them. But that was long ago, and these pallid hillsides needed only the declining sun touching the rock with purple and throwing deeper shadow into the immemorial foliage to put on a peculiar, because of very grave and or steer, kind of beauty, while the graceful outlines common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in the broader aspect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this was associated by some perhaps fantastic affinity with a peculiar trait of severity beyond his guesses as to the secret of it, which mingled with the blitheness of his new companion. Concurring, indeed, with a condition of a Roman soldier, it was certainly something far more than the expression of military hardness, or aschesis, and what was earnest or even austere in the landscape they had traversed together, seen to have been waiting for the passage of this figure to interpret or inform it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid personal presence broke through the dreamy idealism which had almost come to doubt of other men's reality, reassuringly indeed, yet not without some sense of a constraining tyranny over him from without. For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to take up his quarters on the Palatine in the Imperial Guard, seemed to carry about with him in that privileged world of comely usage to which he belonged, the atmosphere of some still more jealously exclusive circle. They halted on the morrow at noon, not at an inn, but at the house of one of the young soldier's friends, whom they found absent indeed in consequence of the plague in those parts, so that after a midday rest only they proceeded again on their journey. The great room of the villa, to which they were admitted, had lain long untouched, and the dust rose as they entered into the slanting bars of sunlight that fell through the half-closed shutters. It was here, to while away the time, that Cornelius bethought himself of displaying to his new friend the various articles and ornaments of his nightly array, the breastplate, the sandals, and curasse, lacing them on one by one with the assistance of Marius, and finally the great golden bracelet on the right arm, conferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And as he gleamed there amid that odd interchange of light and shade, with the staff of a silken standard firm in his hand, Marius felt as if he were face to face for the first time with some new knighthood or chivalry, just then coming into the world. It was soon after they left this place, journeying now by carriage, that Rome was seen at last, with much excitement on the part of our travellers. Cornelius and some others, of whom the party then consisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, to hasten forward, that it might be reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of rapid wheels, as they passed over the flagstones. But the highest light upon the mausoleum of Hadrian was quite gone out, and it was dark before they reached the Flaminion Gate. The abundant sound of water was the one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a long street, with many open spaces on either hand. Cornelius to his military quarters, and Marius to the old dwelling place of his father's. And of Chapter 10, Volume 1, Chapter 11 of Marius the Epicurean. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Marius the Epicurean by Walter Patta. Volume 1, Chapter 11, The Most Religious City in the World. Marius awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, noting for more careful inspection by and by the roles of manuscripts. Even greater than his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this ancient possession, whilst his eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as he pushed back, curtain and shutter, and stepped forth in the fresh morning upon one of the many balconies with an oft-repeated dream realized at last. He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world of which Rome was the flower had reached its perfection in the things of poetry and art, a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vast intellectual museum, all its manifold products were intact and in their places, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth seeing, lying there not less consummate than that world of pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various work of many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched, saved by time, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complex expression. Much which spoke of ages earlier than Nero, the great rebuilder, lingered on, antique, quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the relics of the medieval city in the Paris of Louis XIV. The work of Nero's own time had come to have that sort of old world and picturesque interest which the work of Louis has for ourselves. While without stretching a parallel too far, we might perhaps liken the architectural finesse of the archaic Hadrian to the more excellent products of our own Gothic revival. The temple of Antoninus and Faustina were still fresh in all the majesty of its closely arrayed columns of Cipollino, but on the whole little had been added under the late and present emperors, and during fifty years of public quiet the sober brown and grey had grown a pace on things. The gilding on the roof of many a temple had lost its garishness, cornice and capital of polished marble shone out with all the crisp freshness of real flowers amid the already mouldering travertine and brickwork, though the birds had built freely among them. What Marius then saw was in many respects, after all deduction of difference, more like the modern Rome, the near-numeration of particular losses might lead us to suppose. The Renaissance, in its most ambitious mood and with amplest resources, having resumed the ancient classical tradition there, with no break or obstruction, as it had happened, in any very considerable work of the Middle Age. Immediately before him, on the square steep height where the earliest little old Rome had huddled itself together, arose the palace of the Caesars. Half veiling the vast substruction of rough brown stone, line upon line of successive ages of builders, the trim old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely woven walls of dark glossy foliage, test of long and careful cultivation, wound gradually among choice trees, statues, and fountains, distinct and sparkling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted mass of pavilions and corridors above, centering in the lofty, white marble dwelling-place of Apollo himself. How often had Marius looked forward to that first free wandering through Rome, to which he now went forth, with a heat in the town sunshine, like a mist of fine gold dust spread through the air, to the height of his desire, making the done coolness of the narrow streets welcome enough at intervals. He almost feared, descending the stair hastily, lest some unforeseen accident should snatch the little cup of enjoyment from him ere he passed the door. In such morning rambles in places new to him, life had always seemed to come at its fullest. It was then he could feel his youth, that youth the days of which he had already begun to count jealously, in entire possession. So the grave-pensive figure, a figure, be it said, nevertheless, fresher far than often came across it now, moved through the old city towards the lodgings of Cornelius, certainly not by the most direct course, however eager to rejoin the friend of yesterday. Bent as keenly on seeing as if his first day in Rome were to be also his last, the two friends descended along the Wiccus Tuscus, with its rows of incense stalls, into the Via Noa, where the fashionable people were busy shopping, and Marius saw with much amusement the frizzled heads then ala mod. A glimpse of the Mar Morata, the haven at the riverside, where specimens of all the precious marbles of the world were lying amid great white blocks from the quarries of Luna, took his thoughts for a moment to his distant home. They visited the flower market, lingering where the Coronariii pressed on them the newest species, and purchased zinnias, now in blossom, like painted flowers, thought Marius, to decorate the folds of their togas. Loitering to the other side of the forum passed the Great Gallon's drug-shop, after a glance at the announcements of new poems on sale, attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller, they entered the curious library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the diurnal or gazette of the day, which announced, together with births and deaths, prodigies and accidents, and much mere matter of business, the date and manner of the philosophic emperor's joyful return to his people, and thereafter, with eminent names faintly disguised, what would carry that day's news in many copies over the provinces, a certain matter concerning the great lady known to be dear to him, whom he had left at home. It was a story with the development of which society had indeed, for some time past, edified or amused itself, rallying sufficiently from the panic of a year ago, not only to welcome back its ruler, but also to relish a chronique scandalous. And thus, when soon after, Marius saw the world's wonder, he was already acquainted with the suspicions which have ever since hung about her name. Twelve o'clock was come before they left the forum, waiting in a little crowd to hear the a-censors, according to old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the moment when, from the steps of the senate house, the sun could be seen standing between the rostra and the Greek oestasis. He exerted for this function a strength of voice which confirmed in Marius a judgment the modern visitor may share with him, that Roman throats and Roman chests, namely, must in some peculiar way be differently constructed from those of other people. Such judgment indeed he had formed in part the evening before, noting, as a religious procession passed him, how much noise a man and a boy could make, though not without a great deal of real music, of which in truth the Romans were then, as ever, passionately fond. Hence the two friends took their way through the Via Flaminia, almost along the line of the modern Corso, already bordered with handsome villas, turning presently to the left into the field of Mars, still the playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to be almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only by occasional open spaces of verger and wildflowers. In one of these a crowd was standing to watch a party of athletes stripped for exercise. Marius had been surprised at the luxurious variety of the litters born through Rome where no carriage horses were allowed, and just then one far more sumptuous than the rest, with dainty appointments of ivory and gold, was carried by, all the town pressing with eagerness to get a glimpse of its most beautiful woman as she passed rapidly. Yes, there was the wonder of the world, the Empress Faustina herself. Marius could distinguish, could distinguish clearly the well-known profile between the floating purple curtains. For indeed all Rome was ready to burst into gaiety again, as it awaited with much real affection, hopeful and animated, the return of its emperor, for whose ovation various adornments were preparing along the streets through which the imperial procession would pass. He had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense gloom. The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along the whole line of the Danube had happened at the moment when Rome was panic-stricken by the great pestilence. In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the east from which Lucius Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the plague, war had come to seem a merely romantic, superannuated incident of bygone history. And now it was almost upon Italian soil, terrible were the reports of the numbers and audacity of the assailants. Aurelius, as yet untried in war and understood by a few only in the whole scope of a really great character, was known to the majority of his subjects as but a careful administrator, though a student of philosophy, perhaps as we say a dilettante. But he was also the visible centre of government, towards whom the hearts of a whole people turned, grateful for fifty years of public happiness. It's good genius, it's Antonine, whose fragile person might be foreseen speedily giving way under the trials of military life, with a disaster like that of the slaughter of the legions by Arminius. Prophecies of the world's impending conflagration were easily credited. The secular fire would descend from heaven. Superstitious fear had even demanded the sacrifice of a human victim. Marcus Aurelius always philosophically considerate of the humours of other people, exercising also that devout appreciation of every religious claim, which was one of his characteristic habits, had invoked in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods, but all foreign deities as well, however strange. Help, help in the ocean space. A multitude of foreign priests had been welcomed to Rome with their various peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices made on this occasion were remembered for centuries, and the starving poor at least found some satisfaction in the flesh of those herds of white bulls, which came into the city day after day to yield the savor of their blood to the gods. In spite of all this, the legions had but followed their standards despondently. But prestige, personal prestige, the name of emperor, still had its magic power over the nations. The mere approach of the Roman army made an impression on the barbarians. Aurelius and his colleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a deputation arrived to ask for peace. And now the two imperial brothers were returning home at leisure, were waiting, indeed, at a villa outside the walls till the capital had made ready to receive them. But although Rome was thus in genial reaction, with much relief and hopefulness against the winter, facing itself industriously in damask of red and gold, those two enemies were still unmistakably extant. The barbarian army of the Danube was but overawared for a season, and the plague, as we saw when Marius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a large part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque of modern Italy, till it had made, or prepared for the making of, the Roman Campania. The old unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety of Antoninus Pius, that genuine, though unconscious humanist, was gone for ever. And again and again, throughout this day of varied observation, Marius had been reminded, above all else, that he was not merely in the most religious city of the world, as one had said, but that Rome was become the romantic home of the wildest superstition. Such superstition presented itself almost as religious mania in many an incident of his long ramble, incidents to which he gave his full attention, though contending in some measure with a reluctance on the part of his companion, the motive of which he did not understand till long afterwards. Marius certainly did not allow this reluctance to deter his own curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under poetic vocation to receive all those things, the very impress of life itself, upon the visual, the imaginative organ, as upon a mirror, to reflect them, to transmute them into golden words, he must observe that strange medley of superstition that centuries growth layer upon layer of the curiosities of religion, one faith jostling another out of place, at least for its picturesque interest, and as an indifferent outsider might, not too deeply concerned in the question which, if any of them, was to be the survivor. Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying itself with much diplomatic economy to possible rivals, was in possession, as a vast and complex system of usage, intertwining itself with every detail of public and private life, attractively enough for those who had but the historic temper and a taste for the past, however much Ellucian might depreciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had indeed been always something to be done, rather than something to be thought or believed or loved, something to be done in minutely detailed manner, at a particular time and place, correctness in which had long been a matter of laborious learning with a whole school of ritualists, as also, now and again, a matter of heroic sacrifice, with certain exceptionally devout souls, as when Caus Fabius dorsal, with his life in his hand, succeeded in passing the sentinels of the invading Gauls to perform a sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, thanks to the divine protection, had returned in safety. So jealous was the distinction between sacred and profane, that, in the matter of the regarding of days, it had made more than half the year a holiday. Aurelius had indeed ordained that there should be no more than a hundred and thirty-five festival days in the year, but, in other respects, he had followed in the steps of his predecessor, Antoninus Pius, commended especially for his religion, his conspicuous devotion to its public ceremonies, and whose coins are remarkable for their reference to the oldest and most hieratic types of Roman mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in more than healing the old feud between philosophy and religion, displaying himself in singular combination, as at once the most zealous of philosophers, and the most devout of polytheists, and lending himself with an air of conviction to all the pageantries of public worship, to his pious recognition of that one orderly spirit, which, according to the doctrine of the Stoics, diffuses itself through the world and animates it, a recognition taking the form with him of a constant effort towards inward likeness there too in the harmonious order of his own soul. He had added a warm personal devotion towards the whole multitude of the old national gods, and a great many new foreign ones besides, by him at least, not ignobly conceived. If the comparison may be reverently made, there was something here of the method by which the Catholic Church has added the cultus of the saints to its worship of the one divine being. And to the view of the majority, though the Emperor, as the personal centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting his people to philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain public discourses for their instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion was his most striking feature. Philosophers indeed had, for the most part, thought with Seneca that a man need not lift his hands to heaven, nor ask the sacristons leave to put his mouth to the ear of an image, that his prayers might be heard the better. Marcus Aurelius, a master in Israel, knew all that well enough. Yet his outward devotion was much more than a concession to popular sentiment, or a mere result of that sense of fellow citizenship with others, which had made him again and again, under most difficult circumstances, an excellent comrade. Those others, too, amid all their ignorancies, what were they but instruments in the administration of the divine reason, from end to end, sweetly and strongly disposing all things. Meantime, philosophy itself had assumed much of what we conceived to be the religious character. It had even cultivated the habit, the power, of spiritual direction, the troubled soul making recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid the distraction of the world, to this or that director, philosopher Suo, who could really best understand it. And it had been in vain that the old grave and discreet religion of Rome had set itself, according to its proper genius, to prevent or subdue all trouble and disturbance in men's souls. In religion, as in other matters, plebeians as such had a taste for movement, for revolution, and it had been ever in the most populous quarters that religious changes began. To the apparatus of foreign religion, above all, recourse had been made in times of public disquietude or sudden terror, and in those great religious celebrations, before his proceeding against the Barbarians, Aurelius had even restored the solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital since the time of Augustus, making no secret of his worship of that goddess, though her temple had been actually destroyed by authority in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular, and in many ways beautiful ritual, was now popular in Rome. And then, what the enthusiasm of the swarming plebeian quarters had initiated was sure to be adopted sooner or later by women of fashion. A blending of all the religions of the ancient world had been accomplished. The new gods had arrived, had been welcomed, and found their places, though certainly, with no real security in any adequate ideal of the divine nature itself in the background of men's minds, that the presence of the newcomer should be edifying or even refining. High and low addressed themselves to all deities alike without scruple, confusing them together when they prayed and in the old authorised threefold veneration of their visible images by flowers, incense and ceremonial lights. Those beautiful usages which the church, in her way through the world, ever making spoil of the world's goods for the better uses of the human spirit, took up and sanctified in her service. And certainly the most religious city in the world took no care to veil its devotion, however fantastic. The humblest house had its little chapel or shrine, its image and lamp, while almost everyone seemed to exercise some religious function and responsibility. Colleges composed for the most part of slaves and of the poor provided for the service of the Compitalian Lares, the gods who presided, respectively, over the several quarters of the city. In one street Marius witnessed an incident of the festival of the patron deity of that neighbourhood, the way being strewn with box, the houses tricked out gaily in such poor finery as they possessed, while the ancient idol was borne through it in procession, arrayed in gaudy attire, the worst for wear. Numerous religious clubs had their stated anniversaries, on which the members issued with much ceremony from their guild hall or scholar, and traversed the thoroughfares of Rome, proceeded, like the confraternities of the present day, by their sacred banners, to offer sacrifice before some famous image. Black with the perpetual smoke of lamps and incense, oftenest old and ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to listen to the desires of the suffering, had not those sacred effigies, sometimes given sensible tokens, that they were aware, the image of the fortune of women for tuna muliebris in the latin way had spoken, not once only, and declared, The Apollo of Cormay had wept during three whole nights and days. The images in the temple of Juno's hospital had been seen to sweat. Nay, there was blood, divine blood, in the hearts of some of them. The images in the grove of Ferronia had sweated blood. From one and all Cornelius had turned away, like the atheist of whom Apuleus tells us he had never once raised hand to lip in passing image or sanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally, when the latter determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their return into the forum, below the Palatine hill, where the mothers were pressing in with a multitude of every sort of children to touch the lightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Romulus, so tender to little ones, just discernable in its dark shrine, amid a blaze of lights. Marius gazed after his companion of the day, as he mounted the steps to his lodging, singing to himself as it seemed. Marius failed precisely to catch the words. And as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was heard all over Rome, far above a whisper, the whole town seeming hushed to catch it distinctly, the lively, reckless call to play from the sons and daughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life was still green. Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral obligation, with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and vagrant affections, such as these, that his Epicurianism had committed him. And of Chapter 11.