Marius the Epicurean, vol 1 | Page 5

and continual a restraint, upon the arbitrary power which Roman
religion and Roman law gave to the parent over the son. [17] On the
part of his mother, on the other hand, entertaining the husband's
memory, there was a sustained freshness of regret, together with the
recognition, as Marius fancied, of some costly self- sacrifice to be
credited to the dead. The life of the widow, languid and shadowy
enough but for the poignancy of that regret, was like one long service
to the departed soul; its many annual observances centering about the
funeral urn--a tiny, delicately carved marble house, still white and fair,
in the family-chapel, wreathed always with the richest flowers from the
garden. To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat

closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to
protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself--a closeness
which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human
sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might
indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout interest,
sincerely touched and awed by his mother's sorrow. After the
deification of the emperors, we are told, it was considered impious so
much as to use any coarse expression in the presence of their images.
To Marius the whole of life seemed full of sacred presences,
demanding of him a similar collectedness. The severe and archaic
religion of the villa, as he conceived it, begot in him a sort of devout
circumspection lest he should fall short at any point of the demand
upon him of anything [18] in which deity was concerned. He must
satisfy with a kind of sacred equity, he must be very cautious lest he be
found wanting to, the claims of others, in their joys and calamities--the
happiness which deity sanctioned, or the blows in which it made itself
felt. And from habit, this feeling of a responsibility towards the world
of men and things, towards a claim for due sentiment concerning them
on his side, came to be a part of his nature not to be put off. It kept him
serious and dignified amid the Epicurean speculations which in after
years much engrossed him, and when he had learned to think of all
religions as indifferent, serious amid many fopperies and through many
languid days, and made him anticipate all his life long as a thing
towards which he must carefully train himself, some great occasion of
self-devotion, such as really came, that should consecrate his life, and,
it might be, its memory with others, as the early Christian looked
forward to martyrdom at the end of his course, as a seal of worth upon
it.
The traveller, descending from the slopes of Luna, even as he got his
first view of the Port-of-Venus, would pause by the way, to read the
face, as it were, of so beautiful a dwelling-place, lying away from the
white road, at the point where it began to decline somewhat steeply to
the marsh-land below. The building of pale red and yellow marble,
mellowed by age, which he saw beyond the gates, was indeed but the
exquisite [19] fragment of a once large and sumptuous villa. Two
centuries of the play of the sea-wind were in the velvet of the mosses

which lay along its inaccessible ledges and angles. Here and there the
marble plates had slipped from their places, where the delicate weeds
had forced their way. The graceful wildness which prevailed in garden
and farm gave place to a singular nicety about the actual habitation, and
a still more scrupulous sweetness and order reigned within. The old
Roman architects seem to have well understood the decorative value of
the floor--the real economy there was, in the production of rich interior
effect, of a somewhat lavish expenditure upon the surface they trod on.
The pavement of the hall had lost something of its evenness; but,
though a little rough to the foot, polished and cared for like a piece of
silver, looked, as mosaic-work is apt to do, its best in old age. Most
noticeable among the ancestral masks, each in its little cedarn chest
below the cornice, was that of the wasteful but elegant Marcellus, with
the quaint resemblance in its yellow waxen features to Marius, just then
so full of animation and country colour. A chamber, curved ingeniously
into oval form, which he had added to the mansion, still contained his
collection of works of art; above all, that head of Medusa, for which the
villa was famous. The spoilers of one of the old Greek towns on the
coast had flung away or lost the [20] thing, as it seemed, in some rapid
flight across the river below,