Marius the Epicurean
HIS SENSATIONS AND IDEAS
by WALTER PATER
VOLUME ONE
London: 1910.
(The Library Edition.)
Contents
PART THE FIRST
1. “The Religion of Numa”
2. White-Nights
3. Change of Air
4. The Tree of Knowledge
5. The Golden Book
6. Euphuism
7. A Pagan End
PART THE SECOND
8. Animula Vagula
9. New Cyrenaicism
10. On the Way
11. “The Most Religious City in the World”
12. “The Divinity that Doth Hedge a King”
13. The “Mistress and Mother” of Palaces
14. Manly Amusement
NOTES BY THE E-TEXT EDITOR:
Notes: I have placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater’s
footnotes and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each of my
notes at that chapter’s end.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated
Pater’s Greek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it
can be viewed at my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist
archive that contains the complete works of Walter Pater and many other
nineteenth-century texts, mostly in first editions.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN,
VOLUME ONE
WALTER PATER
Χειμερινὸς ὄνειρος, ὅτε μήκισται αἱ νύκτες+
+“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.”
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN, VOLUME ONE
PART THE FIRST
CHAPTER I.
“THE RELIGION OF NUMA”
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:
—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 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 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; of such gifts to men as fire, water, the earth, from labour
on which they live, really understood by him as gifts—a sense of
religious responsibility in the reception of them. It was a religion
for the most part of fear, of multitudinous scruples, of a year-long
burden of forms; yet rarely (on clear summer mornings, for instance)
the thought of those heavenly powers afforded a welcome channel for the
almost stifling sense of health and delight in him, and relieved it as
gratitude to the gods.
The day of the “little” or private Ambarvalia was come, to be
celebrated by a single family for the welfare of all belonging to it,
as the great college of the Arval Brothers officiated at Rome in the
interest of the whole state. At the appointed time all work ceases; the
instruments of labour lie untouched, hung with wreaths of flowers,
while masters and servants together go in solemn procession along the
dry paths of vineyard and cornfield, conducting the victims whose blood
is presently to be shed for the purification from all natural or
supernatural taint of the lands they have “gone about.” The old Latin
words of the liturgy, to be said as the procession moved on its way,
though their precise meaning was long since become unintelligible, were
recited from an ancient illuminated roll, kept in the painted chest in
the hall, together with the family records. Early on that day the girls
of the farm had been busy in the great portico, filling large baskets
with flowers plucked short from branches of apple and cherry, then in
spacious bloom, to strew before the quaint images of the gods—Ceres and
Bacchus and the yet more mysterious Dea Dia—as they passed through the
fields, carried in their little houses on the shoulders of white-clad
youths, who were understood to proceed to this office in perfect
temperance, as pure in soul and body as the air they breathed in the
firm weather of that early summer-time. The clean lustral water and the
full incense-box were carried after them. The altars were gay with
garlands of wool and the more sumptuous sort of blossom and green herbs
to be thrown into the sacrificial fire, fresh-gathered this morning
from a particular plot in the old garden, set apart for the purpose.
Just then the young leaves were almost as fragrant as flowers, and the
scent of the bean-fields mingled pleasantly with the cloud of incense.
But for the monotonous intonation of the liturgy by the priests, clad
in their strange, stiff, antique vestments, and bearing ears of green
corn upon their heads, secured by flowing bands of white, the
procession moved in absolute stillness, all persons, even the children,
abstaining from speech after the utterance of the pontifical formula,
Favete linguis!—Silence! Propitious Silence!—lest any words save those
proper to the occasion should hinder the religious efficacy of the
rite.
With the lad Marius, who, as the head of his house, took a leading part
in the ceremonies of the day, there was a devout effort to complete
this impressive outward silence by that inward tacitness of mind,
esteemed so important by religious Romans in the performance of these
sacred functions. To him the sustained stillness without seemed really
but to be waiting upon that interior, mental condition of preparation
or expectancy, for which he was just then intently striving. The
persons about him, certainly, had never been challenged by those
prayers and ceremonies to any ponderings on the divine nature: they
conceived them rather to be the appointed means of setting such
troublesome movements at rest. By them, “the religion of Numa,” so
staid, ideal and comely, the object of so much jealous conservatism,
though of direct service as lending sanction to a sort of high
scrupulosity, especially in the chief points of domestic conduct, was
mainly prized as being, through its hereditary character, something
like a personal distinction—as contributing, among the other
accessories of an ancient house, to the production of that aristocratic
atmosphere which separated them from newly-made people. But in the
young Marius, the very absence from those venerable usages of all
definite history and dogmatic interpretation, had already awakened much
speculative activity; and to-day, starting from the actual details of
the divine service, some very lively surmises, though scarcely distinct
enough to be thoughts, were moving backwards and forwards in his mind,
as the stirring wind had done all day among the trees, and were like
the passing of some mysterious influence over all the elements of his
nature and experience. One thing only distracted him—a certain pity at
the bottom of his heart, and almost on his lips, for the sacrificial
victims and their looks of terror, rising almost to disgust at the
central act of the sacrifice itself, a piece of everyday butcher’s
work, such as we decorously hide out of sight; though some then present
certainly displayed a frank curiosity in the spectacle thus permitted
them on a religious pretext. The old sculptors of the great procession
on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid
heads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for
animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their
sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the
blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the
scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the
procession approached the altars.
The names of that great populace of “little gods,” dear to the Roman
home, which the pontiffs had placed on the sacred list of the
Indigitamenta, to be invoked, because they can help, on special
occasions, were not forgotten in the long litany—Vatican who causes the
infant to utter his first cry, Fabulinus who prompts his first word,
Cuba who keeps him quiet in his cot, Domiduca especially, for whom
Marius had through life a particular memory and devotion, the goddess
who watches over one’s safe coming home. The urns of the dead in the
family chapel received their due service. They also were now become
something divine, a goodly company of friendly and protecting spirits,
encamped about the place of their former abode—above all others, the
father, dead ten years before, of whom, remembering but a tall, grave
figure above him in early childhood, Marius habitually thought as a
genius a little cold and severe.
Candidus insuetum miratur limen Olympi,
Sub pedibusque videt nubes et sidera.—
Perhaps!—but certainly needs his altar here below, and garlands to-day
upon his urn. But the dead genii were satisfied with little—a few
violets, a cake dipped in wine, or a morsel of honeycomb. Daily, from
the time when his childish footsteps were still uncertain, had Marius
taken them their portion of the family meal, at the second course,
amidst the silence of the company. They loved those who brought them
their sustenance; but, deprived of these services, would be heard
wandering through the house, crying sorrowfully in the stillness of the
night.
And those simple gifts, like other objects as trivial—bread, oil, wine,
milk—had regained for him, by their use in such religious service, that
poetic and as it were moral significance, which surely belongs to all
the means of daily life, could we but break through the veil of our
familiarity with things by no means vulgar in themselves. A hymn
followed, while the whole assembly stood with veiled faces. The fire
rose up readily from the altars, in clean, bright flame—a favourable
omen, making it a duty to render the mirth of the evening complete. Old
wine was poured out freely for the servants at supper in the great
kitchen, where they had worked in the imperfect light through the long
evenings of winter. The young Marius himself took but a very sober part
in the noisy feasting. A devout, regretful after-taste of what had been
really beautiful in the ritual he had accomplished took him early away,
that he might the better recall in reverie all the circumstances of the
celebration of the day. As he sank into a sleep, pleasant with all the
influences of long hours in the open air, he seemed still to be moving
in procession through the fields, with a kind of pleasurable awe. That
feeling was still upon him as he awoke amid the beating of violent rain
on the shutters, in the first storm of the season. The thunder which
startled him from sleep seemed to make the solitude of his chamber
almost painfully complete, as if the nearness of those angry clouds
shut him up in a close place alone in the world. Then he thought of the
sort of protection which that day’s ceremonies assured. To procure an
agreement with the gods—Pacem deorum exposcere: that was the meaning of
what they had all day been busy upon. In a faith, sincere but
half-suspicious, he would fain have those Powers at least not against
him. His own nearer household gods were all around his bed. The spell
of his religion as a part of the very essence of home, its intimacy,
its dignity and security, was forcible at that moment; only, it seemed
to involve certain heavy demands upon him.