CHANGE OF AIR
Dilexi decorem domus tuae.
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.
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 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 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 was the only
thing audible, as they waited till two priestly figures, speaking Greek
to one another, admitted them into a large, white-walled and clearly
lighted guest-chamber, in which, while he partook of a simple but
wholesomely prepared supper, Marius still seemed to feel pleasantly the
height they had attained to among the hills.
The agreeable sense of all this was spoiled by one thing only, his old
fear of serpents; for it was under the form of a serpent that
Aesculapius had come to Rome, and the last definite thought of his
weary head before he fell asleep had been a dread either that the god
might appear, as he was said sometimes to do, under this hideous
aspect, or perhaps one of those great sallow-hued snakes themselves,
kept in the sacred place, as he had also heard was usual.
And after an hour’s feverish dreaming he awoke—with a cry, it would
seem, for some one had entered the room bearing a light. The footsteps
of the youthful figure which approached and sat by his bedside were
certainly real. Ever afterwards, when the thought arose in his mind of
some unhoped-for but entire relief from distress, like blue sky in a
storm at sea, would come back the memory of that gracious countenance
which, amid all the kindness of its gaze, had yet a certain air of
predominance over him, so that he seemed now for the first time to have
found the master of his spirit. It would have been sweet to be the
servant of him who now sat beside him speaking.
He caught a lesson from what was then said, still somewhat beyond his
years, a lesson in the skilled cultivation of life, of experience, of
opportunity, which seemed to be the aim of the young priest’s
recommendations. The sum of them, through various forgotten intervals
of argument, as might really have happened in a dream, was the precept,
repeated many times under slightly varied aspects, of a diligent
promotion of the capacity of the eye, inasmuch as in the eye would lie
for him the determining influence of life: he was of the number of
those who, in the words of a poet who came long after, must be “made
perfect by the love of visible beauty.” The discourse was conceived
from the point of view of a theory Marius found afterwards in Plato’s
Phaedrus, which supposes men’s spirits susceptible to certain
influences, diffused, after the manner of streams or currents, by fair
things or persons visibly present—green fields, for instance, or
children’s faces—into the air around them, acting, in the case of some
peculiar natures, like potent material essences, and conforming the
seer to themselves as with some cunning physical necessity. This
theory,* in itself so fantastic, had however determined in a range of
methodical suggestions, altogether quaint here and there from their
circumstantial minuteness. And throughout, the possibility of some
vision, as of a new city coming down “like a bride out of heaven,” a
vision still indeed, it might seem, a long way off, but to be granted
perhaps one day to the eyes thus trained, was presented as the motive
of this laboriously practical direction.
* [Transliteration:] Ê aporroê tou kallous. +Translation: “Emanation
from a thing of beauty.”
“If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear light,” so the discourse recommenced after a pause,
“be temperate in thy religious notions, in love, in wine, in all
things, and of a peaceful heart with thy fellows.” To keep the eye
clear by a sort of exquisite personal alacrity and cleanliness,
extending even to his dwelling-place; to discriminate, ever more and
more fastidiously, select form and colour in things from what was less
select; to meditate much on beautiful visible objects, on objects, more
especially, connected with the period of youth—on children at play in
the morning, the trees in early spring, on young animals, on the
fashions and amusements of young men; to keep ever by him if it were
but a single choice flower, a graceful animal or sea-shell, as a token
and representative of the whole kingdom of such things; to avoid
jealously, in his way through the world, everything repugnant to sight;
and, should any circumstance tempt him to a general converse in the
range of such objects, to disentangle himself from that circumstance at
any cost of place, money, or opportunity; such were in brief outline
the duties recognised, the rights demanded, in this new formula of
life. And it was delivered with conviction; as if the speaker verily
saw into the recesses of the mental and physical being of the listener,
while his own expression of perfect temperance had in it a fascinating
power—the merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from
taint or flaw, in exercise as a positive influence. Long afterwards,
when Marius read the Charmides—that other dialogue of Plato, into which
he seems to have expressed the very genius of old Greek temperance—the
image of this speaker came back vividly before him, to take the chief
part in the conversation.
It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost visible
symbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen
moralities) that the memory of that night’s double experience, the
dream of the great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest,
always returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made him
revolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought of an excess in
sleep, or diet, or even in matters of taste, still more from any excess
of a coarser kind.
When he awoke again, still in the exceeding freshness he had felt on
his arrival, and now in full sunlight, it was as if his sickness had
really departed with the terror of the night: a confusion had passed
from the brain, a painful dryness from his hands. Simply to be alive
and there was a delight; and as he bathed in the fresh water set ready
for his use, the air of the room about him seemed like pure gold, the
very shadows rich with colour. Summoned at length by one of the
white-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden. At a
distance, on either side, his guide pointed out to him the Houses of
Birth and Death, erected for the reception respectively of women about
to become mothers, and of persons about to die; neither of those
incidents being allowed to defile, as was thought, the actual precincts
of the shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw nowhere again.
But among the official ministers of the place there was one, already
marked as of great celebrity, whom Marius saw often in later days at
Rome, the physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He was standing,
the hood partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, as Marius
and his guide approached it.
This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the temple and its
surrounding institutions, was supplied by the water of a spring flowing
directly out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From the rim of
its basin rose a circle of trim columns to support a cupola of singular
lightness and grace, itself full of reflected light from the rippling
surface, through which might be traced the wavy figure-work of the
marble lining below as the stream of water rushed in. Legend told of a
visit of Aesculapius to this place, earlier and happier than his first
coming to Rome: an inscription around the cupola recorded it in letters
of gold. “Being come unto this place the son of God loved it
exceedingly:”—Huc profectus filius Dei maxime amavit hunc locum;—and it
was then that that most intimately human of the gods had given men the
well, with all its salutary properties. The element itself when
received into the mouth, in consequence of its entire freedom from
adhering organic matter, was more like a draught of wonderfully pure
air than water; and after tasting, Marius was told many mysterious
circumstances concerning it, by one and another of the bystanders:—he
who drank often thereof might well think he had tasted of the Homeric
lotus, so great became his desire to remain always on that spot:
carried to other places, it was almost indefinitely conservative of its
fine qualities: nay! a few drops of it would amend other water; and it
flowed not only with unvarying abundance but with a volume so oddly
rhythmical that the well stood always full to the brim, whatever
quantity might be drawn from it, seeming to answer with strange
alacrity of service to human needs, like a true creature and pupil of
the philanthropic god. Certainly the little crowd around seemed to find
singular refreshment in gazing on it. The whole place appeared sensibly
influenced by the amiable and healthful spirit of the thing. All the
objects of the country were there at their freshest. In the great
park-like enclosure for the maintenance of the sacred animals offered
by the convalescent, grass and trees were allowed to grow with a kind
of graceful wildness; otherwise, all was wonderfully nice. And that
freshness seemed to have something moral in its influence, as if it
acted upon the body and the merely bodily powers of apprehension,
through the intelligence; and to the end of his visit Marius saw no
more serpents.
A lad was just then drawing water for ritual uses, and Marius followed
him as he returned from the well, more and more impressed by the
religiousness of all he saw, on his way through a long cloister or
corridor, the walls well-nigh hidden under votive inscriptions
recording favours from the son of Apollo, and with a distant fragrance
of incense in the air, explained when he turned aside through an open
doorway into the temple itself. His heart bounded as the refined and
dainty magnificence of the place came upon him suddenly, in the flood
of early sunshine, with the ceremonial lights burning here and there,
and withal a singular expression of sacred order, a surprising
cleanliness and simplicity. Certain priests, men whose countenances
bore a deep impression of cultivated mind, each with his little group
of assistants, were gliding round silently to perform their morning
salutation to the god, raising the closed thumb and finger of the right
hand with a kiss in the air, as they came and went on their sacred
business, bearing their frankincense and lustral water. Around the
walls, at such a level that the worshippers might read, as in a book,
the story of the god and his sons, the brotherhood of the Asclepiadae,
ran a series of imageries, in low relief, their delicate light and
shade being heightened, here and there, with gold. Fullest of inspired
and sacred expression, as if in this place the chisel of the artist had
indeed dealt not with marble but with the very breath of feeling and
thought, was the scene in which the earliest generation of the sons of
Aesculapius were transformed into healing dreams; for “grown now too
glorious to abide longer among men, by the aid of their sire they put
away their mortal bodies, and came into another country, yet not indeed
into Elysium nor into the Islands of the Blest. But being made like to
the immortal gods, they began to pass about through the world, changed
thus far from their first form that they appear eternally young, as
many persons have seen them in many places—ministers and heralds of
their father, passing to and fro over the earth, like gliding stars.
Which thing is, indeed, the most wonderful concerning them!” And in
this scene, as throughout the series, with all its crowded personages,
Marius noted on the carved faces the same peculiar union of unction,
almost of hilarity, with a certain self-possession and reserve, which
was conspicuous in the living ministrants around him.
In the central space, upon a pillar or pedestal, hung, ex voto, with
the richest personal ornaments, stood the image of Aesculapius himself,
surrounded by choice flowering plants. It presented the type, still
with something of the severity of the earlier art of Greece about it,
not of an aged and crafty physician, but of a youth, earnest and strong
of aspect, carrying an ampulla or bottle in one hand, and in the other
a traveller’s staff, a pilgrim among his pilgrim worshippers; and one
of the ministers explained to Marius this pilgrim guise.—One chief
source of the master’s knowledge of healing had been observation of the
remedies resorted to by animals labouring under disease or pain—what
leaf or berry the lizard or dormouse lay upon its wounded fellow; to
which purpose for long years he had led the life of a wanderer, in wild
places. The boy took his place as the last comer, a little way behind
the group of worshippers who stood in front of the image. There, with
uplifted face, the palms of his two hands raised and open before him,
and taught by the priest, he said his collect of thanksgiving and
prayer (Aristeides has recorded it at the end of his Asclepiadae) to
the Inspired Dreams:—
“O ye children of Apollo! who in time past have stilled the waves of
sorrow for many people, lighting up a lamp of safety before those who
travel by sea and land, be pleased, in your great condescension, though
ye be equal in glory with your elder brethren the Dioscuri, and your
lot in immortal youth be as theirs, to accept this prayer, which in
sleep and vision ye have inspired. Order it aright, I pray you,
according to your loving-kindness to men. Preserve me from sickness;
and endue my body with such a measure of health as may suffice it for
the obeying of the spirit, that I may pass my days unhindered and in
quietness.”
On the last morning of his visit Marius entered the shrine again, and
just before his departure the priest, who had been his special director
during his stay at the place, lifting a cunningly contrived panel,
which formed the back of one of the carved seats, bade him look
through. What he saw was like the vision of a new world, by the opening
of some unsuspected window in a familiar dwelling-place. He looked out
upon a long-drawn valley of singularly cheerful aspect, hidden, by the
peculiar conformation of the locality, from all points of observation
but this. In a green meadow at the foot of the steep olive-clad rocks
below, the novices were taking their exercise. The softly sloping sides
of the vale lay alike in full sunlight; and its distant opening was
closed by a beautifully formed mountain, from which the last wreaths of
morning mist were rising under the heat. It might have seemed the very
presentment of a land of hope, its hollows brimful of a shadow of blue
flowers; and lo! on the one level space of the horizon, in a long dark
line, were towers and a dome: and that was Pisa.—Or Rome, was it? asked
Marius, ready to believe the utmost, in his excitement.
All this served, as he understood afterwards in retrospect, at once to
strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him. Developing
the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty, associated for
the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple of Aesculapius,
as it dawned upon him on that morning of his first visit—it developed
that ideal in connexion with a vivid sense of the value of mental and
bodily sanity. And this recognition of the beauty, even for the
aesthetic sense, of mere bodily health, now acquired, operated
afterwards as an influence morally salutary, counteracting the less
desirable or hazardous tendencies of some phases of thought, through
which he was to pass.
He came home brown with health to find the health of his mother
failing; and about her death, which occurred not long afterwards, there
was a circumstance which rested with him as the cruellest touch of all,
in an event which for a time seemed to have taken the light out of the
sunshine. She died away from home, but sent for him at the last, with a
painful effort on her part, but to his great gratitude, pondering, as
he always believed, that he might chance otherwise to look back all his
life long upon a single fault with something like remorse, and find the
burden a great one. For it happened that, through some sudden,
incomprehensible petulance there had been an angry childish gesture,
and a slighting word, at the very moment of her departure, actually for
the last time. Remembering this he would ever afterwards pray to be
saved from offences against his own affections; the thought of that
marred parting having peculiar bitterness for one, who set so much
store, both by principle and habit, on the sentiment of home.