Marius the Epicurean, vol 2 | Page 3

or, say, even, of dress. Yes! there were the evils, the
vices, which he avoided as, essentially, a failure in good taste. An
assent, such as this, to the preferences of others, might seem to be the
weakest of motives, and the rectitude it could determine the least
considerable element in a moral life. Yet here, according to Cornelius
Fronto, was in truth the revealing example, albeit operating upon
comparative trifles, of the general principle required. There was one
great idea associated with which that determination to conform to
precedent was elevated into the clearest, the fullest, the weightiest
principle of moral action; a principle under which one might subsume
men's most strenuous efforts after righteousness. And he proceeded to
expound the idea of Humanity--of a universal commonwealth of mind,
which [10] becomes explicit, and as if incarnate, in a select communion
of just men made perfect.
Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin+--the world is as it were a
commonwealth, a city: and there are observances, customs, usages,

actually current in it, things our friends and companions will expect of
us, as the condition of our living there with them at all, as really their
peers or fellow-citizens. Those observances were, indeed, the creation
of a visible or invisible aristocracy in it, whose actual manners, whose
preferences from of old, become now a weighty tradition as to the way
in which things should or should not be done, are like a music, to which
the intercourse of life proceeds--such a music as no one who had once
caught its harmonies would willingly jar. In this way, the becoming, as
in Greek--to prepon: or ta êthê+ mores, manners, as both Greeks and
Romans said, would indeed be a comprehensive term for duty.
Righteousness would be, in the words of "Caesar" himself, of the
philosophic Aurelius, but a "following of the reasonable will of the
oldest, the most venerable, of cities, of polities--of the royal, the
law-giving element, therein--forasmuch as we are citizens also in that
supreme city on high, of which all other cities beside are but as single
habitations." But as the old man spoke with animation of this supreme
city, this invisible society, whose conscience was become explicit in its
inner circle of inspired souls, of whose [11] common spirit, the trusted
leaders of human conscience had been but the mouthpiece, of whose
successive personal preferences in the conduct of life, the "old
morality" was the sum,--Marius felt that his own thoughts were passing
beyond the actual intention of the speaker; not in the direction of any
clearer theoretic or abstract definition of that ideal commonwealth, but
rather as if in search of its visible locality and abiding-place, the walls
and towers of which, so to speak, he might really trace and tell,
according to his own old, natural habit of mind. It would be the fabric,
the outward fabric, of a system reaching, certainly, far beyond the great
city around him, even if conceived in all the machinery of its visible
and invisible influences at their grandest--as Augustus or Trajan might
have conceived of them--however well the visible Rome might pass for
a figure of that new, unseen, Rome on high. At moments, Marius even
asked himself with surprise, whether it might be some vast secret
society the speaker had in view:--that august community, to be an
outlaw from which, to be foreign to the manners of which, was a loss
so much greater than to be excluded, into the ends of the earth, from the
sovereign Roman commonwealth. Humanity, a universal order, the
great polity, its aristocracy of elect spirits, the mastery of their example

over their successors--these were the ideas, stimulating enough in their
way, [12] by association with which the Stoic professor had attempted
to elevate, to unite under a single principle, men's moral efforts, himself
lifted up with so genuine an enthusiasm. But where might Marius
search for all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where were
those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable,
winning, persuasive--whose footsteps through the world were so
beautiful in the actual order he saw--whose faces averted from him,
would be more than he could bear? Where was that comely order, to
which as a great fact of experience he must give its due; to which, as to
all other beautiful "phenomena" in life, he must, for his own peace,
adjust himself?
Rome did well to be serious. The discourse ended somewhat abruptly,
as the noise of a great crowd in motion was heard below the walls;
whereupon, the audience, following the humour of the younger element
in it, poured into the colonnade, from the steps of which the famous
procession, or transvectio, of the military knights was to be seen
passing over the Forum, from their