CHAPTER III - CHANGE OF AIR

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER III - CHANGE OF AIR, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

Dilexi decorem domus tuae.

[27] 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 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 [31] 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 [32] 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.

"If thou wouldst have all about thee like the colours of some fresh
picture, in a clear [33] 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 [34] 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 [35]
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 [36] 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 [37]
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 [38] 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 [39] 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 [40] 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 [41] 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 [42] 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.

NOTES

32. *[Transliteration:] Ê aporroê tou kallous. +Translation:
"Emanation from a thing of beauty."