Marius the Epicurean, vol 2 | Page 4

trysting-place at the temple of Mars,
to the temple of the Dioscuri. The ceremony took place this year, not
on the day accustomed--anniversary of the victory of Lake Regillus,
with its pair of celestial assistants--and amid the heat and roses of a
Roman July, but, by [13] anticipation, some months earlier, the
almond-trees along the way being still in leafless flower. Through that
light trellis-work, Marius watched the riders, arrayed in all their
gleaming ornaments, and wearing wreaths of olive around their helmets,
the faces below which, what with battle and the plague, were almost all
youthful. It was a flowery scene enough, but had to-day its fulness of
war-like meaning; the return of the army to the North, where the enemy
was again upon the move, being now imminent. Cornelius had ridden
along in his place, and, on the dismissal of the company, passed below
the steps where Marius stood, with that new song he had heard once
before floating from his lips.
NOTES
10. +Transliteration: Ho kosmos hôsanei polis estin. Translation: "The

world is like a city."
10. +Transliteration: to prepon . . . ta êthê. Translation: "That which is
seemly . . . mores."
CHAPTER XVI
: SECOND THOUGHTS
[14] AND Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of
Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual,
horizon, had set him on a review--on a review of the isolating
narrowness, in particular, of his own theoretic scheme. Long after the
very latest roses were faded, when "the town" had departed to country
villas, or the baths, or the war, he remained behind in Rome; anxious to
try the lastingness of his own Epicurean rose-garden; setting to work
over again, and deliberately passing from point to point of his old
argument with himself, down to its practical conclusions. That age and
our own have much in common-- many difficulties and hopes. Let the
reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to
his modern representatives --from Rome, to Paris or London.
What really were its claims as a theory of practice, of the sympathies
that determine [15] practice? It had been a theory, avowedly, of loss
and gain (so to call it) of an economy. If, therefore, it missed something
in the commerce of life, which some other theory of practice was able
to include, if it made a needless sacrifice, then it must be, in a manner,
inconsistent with itself, and lack theoretic completeness. Did it make
such a sacrifice? What did it lose, or cause one to lose?
And we may note, as Marius could hardly have done, that Cyrenaicism
is ever the characteristic philosophy of youth, ardent, but narrow in its
survey--sincere, but apt to become one-sided, or even fanatical. It is
one of those subjective and partial ideals, based on vivid, because
limited, apprehension of the truth of one aspect of experience (in this
case, of the beauty of the world and the brevity of man's life there)
which it may be said to be the special vocation of the young to express.
In the school of Cyrene, in that comparatively fresh Greek world, we

see this philosophy where it is least blasé, as we say; in its most
pleasant, its blithest and yet perhaps its wisest form, youthfully bright
in the youth of European thought. But it grows young again for a while
in almost every youthful soul. It is spoken of sometimes as the
appropriate utterance of jaded men; but in them it can hardly be sincere,
or, by the nature of the case, an enthusiasm. "Walk in the ways of thine
heart, and in the sight of thine eyes," is, indeed, most often, [16]
according to the supposition of the book from which I quote it, the
counsel of the young, who feel that the sunshine is pleasant along their
veins, and wintry weather, though in a general sense foreseen, a long
way off. The youthful enthusiasm or fanaticism, the self- abandonment
to one favourite mode of thought or taste, which occurs, quite naturally,
at the outset of every really vigorous intellectual career, finds its special
opportunity in a theory such as that so carefully put together by Marius,
just because it seems to call on one to make the sacrifice, accompanied
by a vivid sensation of power and will, of what others value--sacrifice
of some conviction, or doctrine, or supposed first principle--for the
sake of that clear- eyed intellectual consistency, which is like spotless
bodily cleanliness, or scrupulous personal honour, and has itself for the
mind of the youthful student, when he first comes to appreciate it, the
fascination of an ideal.
The Cyrenaic doctrine, then, realised as a motive of strenuousness or
enthusiasm, is not so properly the utterance of