CHAPTER XI - "THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD"

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER XI - "THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD", MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

[172] MARIUS awoke early and passed curiously from room to room,
noting for more careful inspection by and by the rolls of
manuscripts. Even greater than his curiosity in gazing for the first
time on this ancient possession, was his eagerness to look out upon
Rome itself, as he pushed back curtain and shutter, and stepped forth
in the fresh morning upon one of the many balconies, with an oft-
repeated dream realised at last. He was certainly fortunate in the
time of his coming to Rome. That old pagan world, of which Rome
was the flower, had reached its perfection in the things of poetry
and art--a perfection which indicated only too surely the eve of
decline. As in some vast intellectual museum, all its manifold
products were intact and in their places, and with custodians also
still extant, duly qualified to appreciate and explain them. And at
no period of history had the material Rome itself been better worth
seeing--lying there not less consummate than that world of [173]
pagan intellect which it represented in every phase of its darkness
and light. The various work of many ages fell here harmoniously
together, as yet untouched save by time, adding the final grace of a
rich softness to its complex expression. Much which spoke of ages
earlier than Nero, the great re-builder, lingered on, antique,
quaint, immeasurably venerable, like the relics of the medieval city
in the Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth: the work of Nero's own time had
come to have that sort of old world and picturesque interest which
the work of Lewis has for ourselves; while without stretching a
parallel too far we might perhaps liken the architectural finesses of
the archaic Hadrian to the more excellent products of our own Gothic
revival. The temple of Antoninus and Faustina was still fresh in all
the majesty of its closely arrayed columns of cipollino; but, on the
whole, little had been added under the late and present emperors, and
during fifty years of public quiet, a sober brown and gray had grown
apace on things. The gilding on the roof of many a temple had lost
its garishness: cornice and capital of polished marble shone out with
all the crisp freshness of real flowers, amid the already mouldering
travertine and brickwork, though the birds had built freely among
them. What Marius then saw was in many respects, after all deduction
of difference, more like the modern Rome than the enumeration of
particular losses [174] might lead us to suppose; the Renaissance,
in its most ambitious mood and with amplest resources, having resumed
the ancient classical tradition there, with no break or obstruction,
as it had happened, in any very considerable work of the middle age.
Immediately before him, on the square, steep height, where the
earliest little old Rome had huddled itself together, arose the
palace of the Caesars. Half-veiling the vast substruction of rough,
brown stone--line upon line of successive ages of builders--the trim,
old-fashioned garden walks, under their closely-woven walls of dark
glossy foliage, test of long and careful cultivation, wound
gradually, among choice trees, statues and fountains, distinct and
sparkling in the full morning sunlight, to the richly tinted mass of
pavilions and corridors above, centering in the lofty, white-marble
dwelling-place of Apollo himself.

How often had Marius looked forward to that first, free wandering
through Rome, to which he now went forth with a heat in the town
sunshine (like a mist of fine gold-dust spread through the air) to
the height of his desire, making the dun coolness of the narrow
streets welcome enough at intervals. He almost feared, descending
the stair hastily, lest some unforeseen accident should snatch the
little cup of enjoyment from him ere he passed the door. In such
morning rambles in places new to him, [175] life had always seemed to
come at its fullest: it was then he could feel his youth, that youth
the days of which he had already begun to count jealously, in entire
possession. So the grave, pensive figure, a figure, be it said
nevertheless, fresher far than often came across it now, moved
through the old city towards the lodgings of Cornelius, certainly not
by the most direct course, however eager to rejoin the friend of
yesterday.

Bent as keenly on seeing as if his first day in Rome were to be also
his last, the two friends descended along the Vicus Tuscus, with its
rows of incense-stalls, into the Via Nova, where the fashionable
people were busy shopping; and Marius saw with much amusement the
frizzled heads, then ŕ la mode. A glimpse of the Marmorata, the
haven at the river-side, where specimens of all the precious marbles
of the world were lying amid great white blocks from the quarries of
Luna, took his thoughts for a moment to his distant home. They
visited the flower-market, lingering where the coronarii pressed on
them the newest species, and purchased zinias, now in blossom (like
painted flowers, thought Marius), to decorate the folds of their
togas. Loitering to the other side of the Forum, past the great
Galen's drug-shop, after a glance at the announcements of new poems
on sale attached to the doorpost of a famous bookseller, they entered
the curious [176] library of the Temple of Peace, then a favourite
resort of literary men, and read, fixed there for all to see, the
Diurnal or Gazette of the day, which announced, together with births
and deaths, prodigies and accidents, and much mere matter of
business, the date and manner of the philosophic emperor's joyful
return to his people; and, thereafter, with eminent names faintly
disguised, what would carry that day's news, in many copies, over the
provinces--a certain matter concerning the great lady, known to be
dear to him, whom he had left at home. It was a story, with the
development of which "society" had indeed for some time past edified
or amused itself, rallying sufficiently from the panic of a year ago,
not only to welcome back its ruler, but also to relish a chronique
scandaleuse; and thus, when soon after Marius saw the world's wonder,
he was already acquainted with the suspicions which have ever since
hung about her name. Twelve o'clock was come before they left the
Forum, waiting in a little crowd to hear the Accensus, according to
old custom, proclaim the hour of noonday, at the moment when, from
the steps of the Senate-house, the sun could be seen standing between
the Rostra and the Graecostasis. He exerted for this function a
strength of voice, which confirmed in Marius a judgment the modern
visitor may share with him, that Roman throats and Roman chests,
namely, must, in some peculiar way, be differently [177] constructed
from those of other people. Such judgment indeed he had formed in
part the evening before, noting, as a religious procession passed
him, how much noise a man and a boy could make, though not without a
great deal of real music, of which in truth the Romans were then as
ever passionately fond.

Hence the two friends took their way through the Via Flaminia, almost
along the line of the modern Corso, already bordered with handsome
villas, turning presently to the left, into the Field-of-Mars, still
the playground of Rome. But the vast public edifices were grown to
be almost continuous over the grassy expanse, represented now only by
occasional open spaces of verdure and wild-flowers. In one of these
a crowd was standing, to watch a party of athletes stripped for
exercise. Marius had been surprised at the luxurious variety of the
litters borne through Rome, where no carriage horses were allowed;
and just then one far more sumptuous than the rest, with dainty
appointments of ivory and gold, was carried by, all the town pressing
with eagerness to get a glimpse of its most beautiful woman, as she
passed rapidly. Yes! there, was the wonder of the world--the empress
Faustina herself: Marius could distinguish, could distinguish
clearly, the well-known profile, between the floating purple
curtains.

For indeed all Rome was ready to burst into gaiety again, as it
awaited with much real [178] affection, hopeful and animated, the
return of its emperor, for whose ovation various adornments were
preparing along the streets through which the imperial procession
would pass. He had left Rome just twelve months before, amid immense
gloom. The alarm of a barbarian insurrection along the whole line of
the Danube had happened at the moment when Rome was panic-stricken by
the great pestilence.

In fifty years of peace, broken only by that conflict in the East
from which Lucius Verus, among other curiosities, brought back the
plague, war had come to seem a merely romantic, superannuated
incident of bygone history. And now it was almost upon Italian soil.
Terrible were the reports of the numbers and audacity of the
assailants. Aurelius, as yet untried in war, and understood by a few
only in the whole scope of a really great character, was known to the
majority of his subjects as but a careful administrator, though a
student of philosophy, perhaps, as we say, a dilettante. But he was
also the visible centre of government, towards whom the hearts of a
whole people turned, grateful for fifty years of public happiness--
its good genius, its "Antonine"--whose fragile person might be
foreseen speedily giving way under the trials of military life, with
a disaster like that of the slaughter of the legions by Arminius.
Prophecies of the world's impending conflagration were easily
credited: "the secular fire" would descend from [179] heaven:
superstitious fear had even demanded the sacrifice of a human victim.

Marcus Aurelius, always philosophically considerate of the humours of
other people, exercising also that devout appreciation of every
religious claim which was one of his characteristic habits, had
invoked, in aid of the commonwealth, not only all native gods, but
all foreign deities as well, however strange.--"Help! Help! in the
ocean space!" A multitude of foreign priests had been welcomed to
Rome, with their various peculiar religious rites. The sacrifices
made on this occasion were remembered for centuries; and the starving
poor, at least, found some satisfaction in the flesh of those herds
of "white bulls," which came into the city, day after day, to yield
the savour of their blood to the gods.

In spite of all this, the legions had but followed their standards
despondently. But prestige, personal prestige, the name of
"Emperor," still had its magic power over the nations. The mere
approach of the Roman army made an impression on the barbarians.
Aurelius and his colleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a
deputation arrived to ask for peace. And now the two imperial
"brothers" were returning home at leisure; were waiting, indeed, at a
villa outside the walls, till the capital had made ready to receive
them. But although Rome was thus in genial reaction, with much
relief, [180] and hopefulness against the winter, facing itself
industriously in damask of red and gold, those two enemies were still
unmistakably extant: the barbarian army of the Danube was but over-
awed for a season; and the plague, as we saw when Marius was on his
way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a large part in the
formation of the melancholy picturesque of modern Italy--till it had
made, or prepared for the making of the Roman Campagna. The old,
unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, of Antoninus Pius--that
genuine though unconscious humanist--was gone for ever. And again
and again, throughout this day of varied observation, Marius had been
reminded, above all else, that he was not merely in "the most
religious city of the world," as one had said, but that Rome was
become the romantic home of the wildest superstition. Such
superstition presented itself almost as religious mania in many an
incident of his long ramble,--incidents to which he gave his full
attention, though contending in some measure with a reluctance on the
part of his companion, the motive of which he did not understand till
long afterwards. Marius certainly did not allow this reluctance to
deter his own curiosity. Had he not come to Rome partly under poetic
vocation, to receive all those things, the very impress of life
itself, upon the visual, the imaginative, organ, as upon a mirror; to
reflect them; to transmute them [181] into golden words? He must
observe that strange medley of superstition, that centuries' growth,
layer upon layer, of the curiosities of religion (one faith jostling
another out of place) at least for its picturesque interest, and as
an indifferent outsider might, not too deeply concerned in the
question which, if any of them, was to be the survivor.

Superficially, at least, the Roman religion, allying itself with much
diplomatic economy to possible rivals, was in possession, as a vast
and complex system of usage, intertwining itself with every detail of
public and private life, attractively enough for those who had but
"the historic temper," and a taste for the past, however much a
Lucian might depreciate it. Roman religion, as Marius knew, had,
indeed, been always something to be done, rather than something to be
thought, or believed, or loved; something to be done in minutely
detailed manner, at a particular time and place, correctness in which
had long been a matter of laborious learning with a whole school of
ritualists--as also, now and again, a matter of heroic sacrifice with
certain exceptionally devout souls, as when Caius Fabius Dorso, with
his life in his hand, succeeded in passing the sentinels of the
invading Gauls to perform a sacrifice on the Quirinal, and, thanks to
the divine protection, had returned in safety. So jealous was the
distinction between sacred and profane, that, in the matter [182] of
the "regarding of days," it had made more than half the year a
holiday. Aurelius had, indeed, ordained that there should be no more
than a hundred and thirty-five festival days in the year; but in
other respects he had followed in the steps of his predecessor,
Antoninus Pius--commended especially for his "religion," his
conspicuous devotion to its public ceremonies--and whose coins are
remarkable for their reference to the oldest and most hieratic types
of Roman mythology. Aurelius had succeeded in more than healing the
old feud between philosophy and religion, displaying himself, in
singular combination, as at once the most zealous of philosophers and
the most devout of polytheists, and lending himself, with an air of
conviction, to all the pageantries of public worship. To his pious
recognition of that one orderly spirit, which, according to the
doctrine of the Stoics, diffuses itself through the world, and
animates it--a recognition taking the form, with him, of a constant
effort towards inward likeness thereto, in the harmonious order of
his own soul--he had added a warm personal devotion towards the whole
multitude of the old national gods, and a great many new foreign ones
besides, by him, at least, not ignobly conceived. If the comparison
may be reverently made, there was something here of the method by
which the catholic church has added the cultus of the saints to its
worship of the one Divine Being.

[183] And to the view of the majority, though the emperor, as the
personal centre of religion, entertained the hope of converting his
people to philosophic faith, and had even pronounced certain public
discourses for their instruction in it, that polytheistic devotion
was his most striking feature. Philosophers, indeed, had, for the
most part, thought with Seneca, "that a man need not lift his hands
to heaven, nor ask the sacristan's leave to put his mouth to the ear
of an image, that his prayers might be heard the better."--Marcus
Aurelius, "a master in Israel," knew all that well enough. Yet his
outward devotion was much more than a concession to popular
sentiment, or a mere result of that sense of fellow-citizenship with
others, which had made him again and again, under most difficult
circumstances, an excellent comrade. Those others, too!--amid all
their ignorances, what were they but instruments in the
administration of the Divine Reason, "from end to end sweetly and
strongly disposing all things"? Meantime "Philosophy" itself had
assumed much of what we conceive to be the religious character. It
had even cultivated the habit, the power, of "spiritual direction";
the troubled soul making recourse in its hour of destitution, or amid
the distractions of the world, to this or that director--philosopho
suo--who could really best understand it.

And it had been in vain that the old, grave [184] and discreet
religion of Rome had set itself, according to its proper genius, to
prevent or subdue all trouble and disturbance in men's souls. In
religion, as in other matters, plebeians, as such, had a taste for
movement, for revolution; and it had been ever in the most populous
quarters that religious changes began. To the apparatus of foreign
religion, above all, recourse had been made in times of public
disquietude or sudden terror; and in those great religious
celebrations, before his proceeding against the barbarians, Aurelius
had even restored the solemnities of Isis, prohibited in the capital
since the time of Augustus, making no secret of his worship of that
goddess, though her temple had been actually destroyed by authority
in the reign of Tiberius. Her singular and in many ways beautiful
ritual was now popular in Rome. And then--what the enthusiasm of the
swarming plebeian quarters had initiated, was sure to be adopted,
sooner or later, by women of fashion. A blending of all the
religions of the ancient world had been accomplished. The new gods
had arrived, had been welcomed, and found their places; though,
certainly, with no real security, in any adequate ideal of the divine
nature itself in the background of men's minds, that the presence of
the new-comer should be edifying, or even refining. High and low
addressed themselves to all deities alike without scruple; confusing
them together when they prayed, and in the old, [185] authorised,
threefold veneration of their visible images, by flowers, incense,
and ceremonial lights--those beautiful usages, which the church, in
her way through the world, ever making spoil of the world's goods for
the better uses of the human spirit, took up and sanctified in her
service.

And certainly "the most religious city in the world" took no care to
veil its devotion, however fantastic. The humblest house had its
little chapel or shrine, its image and lamp; while almost every one
seemed to exercise some religious function and responsibility.
Colleges, composed for the most part of slaves and of the poor,
provided for the service of the Compitalian Lares--the gods who
presided, respectively, over the several quarters of the city. In
one street, Marius witnessed an incident of the festival of the
patron deity of that neighbourhood, the way being strewn with box,
the houses tricked out gaily in such poor finery as they possessed,
while the ancient idol was borne through it in procession, arrayed in
gaudy attire the worse for wear. Numerous religious clubs had their
stated anniversaries, on which the members issued with much ceremony
from their guild-hall, or schola, and traversed the thoroughfares of
Rome, preceded, like the confraternities of the present day, by their
sacred banners, to offer sacrifice before some famous image. Black
with the perpetual smoke of lamps and incense, oftenest old and [186]
ugly, perhaps on that account the more likely to listen to the
desires of the suffering--had not those sacred effigies sometimes
given sensible tokens that they were aware? The image of the Fortune
of Women--Fortuna Muliebris, in the Latin Way, had spoken (not once
only) and declared; Bene me, Matronae! vidistis riteque dedicastis!
The Apollo of Cumae had wept during three whole nights and days. The
images in the temple of Juno Sospita had been seen to sweat. Nay!
there was blood--divine blood--in the hearts of some of them: the
images in the Grove of Feronia had sweated blood!

From one and all Cornelius had turned away: like the "atheist" of
whom Apuleius tells he had never once raised hand to lip in passing
image or sanctuary, and had parted from Marius finally when the
latter determined to enter the crowded doorway of a temple, on their
return into the Forum, below the Palatine hill, where the mothers
were pressing in, with a multitude of every sort of children, to
touch the lightning-struck image of the wolf-nurse of Romulus--so
tender to little ones!--just discernible in its dark shrine, amid a
blaze of lights. Marius gazed after his companion of the day, as he
mounted the steps to his lodging, singing to himself, as it seemed.
Marius failed precisely to catch the words.

And, as the rich, fresh evening came on, there was heard all over
Rome, far above a whisper, [187] the whole town seeming hushed to
catch it distinctly, the lively, reckless call to "play," from the
sons and daughters of foolishness, to those in whom their life was
still green--Donec virenti canities abest!--Donec virenti canities
abest!+ Marius could hardly doubt how Cornelius would have taken the
call. And as for himself, slight as was the burden of positive moral
obligation with which he had entered Rome, it was to no wasteful and
vagrant affections, such as these, that his Epicureanism had
committed him.

NOTES

187. +Horace, Odes I.ix.17. Translation: "So long as youth is fresh
and age is far away."