Marius the Epicurean, vol 1 | Page 8

THAT almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of
the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a
journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a
certain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was then
usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The religion
of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been naturalised in
Rome in the old republican times; but had reached under the Antonines
the height of its popularity throughout the Roman world. That was an
age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones; but below
its various crazes concerning health and disease, largely multiplied a
few years after the time of which I am speaking by the miseries of a
great pestilence, lay a valuable, because partly practicable, belief that
all the maladies of the soul might be reached through the subtle
gateways of the body.
[28] Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily sanity.
The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they called him
absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one religion; that

mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or absorbing, all other
pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical art, the salutary mineral
or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the varieties of the bath, came to
have a kind of sacramental character, so deep was the feeling, in more
serious minds, of a moral or spiritual profit in physical health, beyond
the obvious bodily advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly,
in that case, but a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or
"family" of Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in possession of
certain precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps, of all the
institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian priesthood; the temples
of the god, rich in some instances with the accumulated thank-offerings
of centuries of a tasteful devotion, being really also a kind of hospitals
for the sick, administered in a full conviction of the religiousness, the
refined and sacred happiness, of a life spent in the relieving of pain.
Elements of a really experimental and progressive knowledge there
were doubtless amid this devout enthusiasm, bent so faithfully on the
reception of health as a direct gift from God; but for the most part his
care was held to take [29] effect through a machinery easily capable of
misuse for purposes of religious fraud. Through dreams, above all,
inspired by Aesculapius himself, information as to the cause and cure
of a malady was supposed to come to the sufferer, in a belief based on
the truth that dreams do sometimes, for those who watch them carefully,
give many hints concerning the conditions of the body--those latent
weak points at which disease or death may most easily break into it. In
the time of Marcus Aurelius these medical dreams had become more
than ever a fashionable caprice. Aristeides, the "Orator," a man of
undoubted intellectual power, has devoted six discourses to their
interpretation; the really scientific Galen has recorded how beneficently
they had intervened in his own case, at certain turning-points of life;
and a belief in them was one of the frailties of the wise emperor himself.
Partly for the sake of these dreams, living ministers of the god, more
likely to come to one in his actual dwelling-place than elsewhere, it
was almost a necessity that the patient should sleep one or more nights
within the precincts of a temple consecrated to his service, during
which time he must observe certain rules prescribed by the priests.

For this purpose, after devoutly saluting the Lares, as was customary
before starting on a journey, Marius set forth one summer morning on
his way to the famous temple which lay [30] among the hills beyond
the valley of the Arnus. It was his greatest adventure hitherto; and he
had much pleasure in all its details, in spite of his feverishness. Starting
early, under the guidance of an old serving- man who drove the mules,
with his wife who took all that was needful for their refreshment on the
way and for the offering at the shrine, they went, under the genial heat,
halting now and then to pluck certain flowers seen for the first time on
these high places, upwards, through a long day of sunshine, while cliffs
and woods sank gradually below their path. The evening came as they
passed along a steep white road with many windings among the pines,
and it was night when they reached the temple, the lights of which
shone out upon them pausing before the gates of the sacred enclosure,
while Marius became alive to a singular purity in the air. A rippling of
water about the place