Marius the Epicurean, vol 1

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE WALTER HORATIO
PATER
London: 1910. (The Library Edition.)
Cheimerinos oneiros, hote mêkistai hai vyktes.+
+"A winter's dream, when nights are longest." Lucian, The Dream, Vol.
3.

CONTENTS
PART THE FIRST
1. "The Religion of Numa": 3-12 2. White-Nights: 13-26 3. Change of
Air: 27-42 4. The Tree of Knowledge: 43-54 5. The Golden Book:
55-91 6. Euphuism: 92-110 7. A Pagan End: 111-120
PART THE SECOND
8. Animula Vagula: 123-143 9. New Cyrenaicism: 144-157 10. On the
Way: 158-171 11. "The Most Religious City in the World": 172-187 12.
"The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King": 188-211 13. The "Mistress and
Mother" of Palaces: 212-229 14. Manly Amusement: 230-243

MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I
: "THE RELIGION OF NUMA"

[3] 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:
[4] --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 [5] 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 [6] 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;