CHAPTER XIV - MANLY AMUSEMENT

Marius the Epicurean - Volume 1

by Walter Pater

CHAPTER XIV - MANLY AMUSEMENT, MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - VOLUME 1 by Walter Pater

DURING the Eastern war there came a moment when schism in the empire
had seemed possible through the defection of Lucius Verus; when to
Aurelius it had also seemed possible to confirm his allegiance by no
less a gift than his beautiful daughter Lucilla, the eldest of his
children--the domnula, probably, of those letters. The little lady,
grown now to strong and stately maidenhood, had been ever something
of the good genius, the better soul, to Lucius Verus, by the law of
contraries, her somewhat cold and apathetic modesty acting as
counterfoil to the young man's tigrish fervour. Conducted to
Ephesus, she had become his wife by form of civil marriage, the more
solemn wedding rites being deferred till their return to Rome.

The ceremony of the Confarreation, or religious marriage, in which
bride and bridegroom partook together of a certain mystic bread, was
celebrated accordingly, with due pomp, early in the spring; Aurelius
himself [231] assisting, with much domestic feeling. A crowd of
fashionable people filled the space before the entrance to the
apartments of Lucius on the Palatine hill, richly decorated for the
occasion, commenting, not always quite delicately, on the various
details of the rite, which only a favoured few succeeded in actually
witnessing. "She comes!" Marius could hear them say, "escorted by
her young brothers: it is the young Commodus who carries the torch of
white-thornwood, the little basket of work-things, the toys for the
children:"--and then, after a watchful pause, "she is winding the
woollen thread round the doorposts. Ah! I see the marriage-cake:
the bridegroom presents the fire and water." Then, in a longer
pause, was heard the chorus, Thalassie! Thalassie! and for just a
few moments, in the strange light of many wax tapers at noonday,
Marius could see them both, side by side, while the bride was lifted
over the doorstep: Lucius Verus heated and handsome--the pale,
impassive Lucilla looking very long and slender, in her closely
folded yellow veil, and high nuptial crown.

As Marius turned away, glad to escape from the pressure of the crowd,
he found himself face to face with Cornelius, an infrequent spectator
on occasions such as this. It was a relief to depart with him--so
fresh and quiet he looked, though in all his splendid equestrian
array in honour of the ceremony--from the garish heat [232] of the
marriage scene. The reserve which had puzzled Marius so much on his
first day in Rome, was but an instance of many, to him wholly
unaccountable, avoidances alike of things and persons, which must
certainly mean that an intimate companionship would cost him
something in the way of seemingly indifferent amusements. Some
inward standard Marius seemed to detect there (though wholly unable
to estimate its nature) of distinction, selection, refusal, amid the
various elements of the fervid and corrupt life across which they
were moving together:--some secret, constraining motive, ever on the
alert at eye and ear, which carried him through Rome as under a
charm, so that Marius could not but think of that figure of the white
bird in the market-place as undoubtedly made true of him. And Marius
was still full of admiration for this companion, who had known how to
make himself very pleasant to him. Here was the clear, cold
corrective, which the fever of his present life demanded. Without
it, he would have felt alternately suffocated and exhausted by an
existence, at once so gaudy and overdone, and yet so intolerably
empty; in which people, even at their best, seemed only to be
brooding, like the wise emperor himself, over a world's
disillusion. For with all the severity of Cornelius, there was such
a breeze of hopefulness--freshness and hopefulness, as of new
morning, about him. [233] For the most part, as I said, those
refusals, that reserve of his, seemed unaccountable. But there were
cases where the unknown monitor acted in a direction with which the
judgment, or instinct, of Marius himself wholly concurred; the
effective decision of Cornelius strengthening him further therein, as
by a kind of outwardly embodied conscience. And the entire drift of
his education determined him, on one point at least, to be wholly of
the same mind with this peculiar friend (they two, it might be,
together, against the world!) when, alone of a whole company of
brilliant youth, he had withdrawn from his appointed place in the
amphitheatre, at a grand public show, which after an interval of many
months, was presented there, in honour of the nuptials of Lucius
Verus and Lucilla.

And it was still to the eye, through visible movement and aspect,
that the character, or genius of Cornelius made itself felt by
Marius; even as on that afternoon when he had girt on his armour,
among the expressive lights and shades of the dim old villa at the
roadside, and every object of his knightly array had seemed to be but
sign or symbol of some other thing far beyond it. For, consistently
with his really poetic temper, all influence reached Marius, even
more exclusively than he was aware, through the medium of sense.
From Flavian in that brief early summer of his existence, he had
derived a powerful impression of the [234] "perpetual flux": he had
caught there, as in cipher or symbol, or low whispers more effective
than any definite language, his own Cyrenaic philosophy, presented
thus, for the first time, in an image or person, with much
attractiveness, touched also, consequently, with a pathetic sense of
personal sorrow:--a concrete image, the abstract equivalent of which
he could recognise afterwards, when the agitating personal influence
had settled down for him, clearly enough, into a theory of practice.
But of what possible intellectual formula could this mystic Cornelius
be the sensible exponent; seeming, as he did, to live ever in close
relationship with, and recognition of, a mental view, a source of
discernment, a light upon his way, which had certainly not yet sprung
up for Marius? Meantime, the discretion of Cornelius, his energetic
clearness and purity, were a charm, rather physical than moral: his
exquisite correctness of spirit, at all events, accorded so perfectly
with the regular beauty of his person, as to seem to depend upon it.
And wholly different as was this later friendship, with its exigency,
its warnings, its restraints, from the feverish attachment to
Flavian, which had made him at times like an uneasy slave, still,
like that, it was a reconciliation to the world of sense, the visible
world. From the hopefulness of this gracious presence, all visible
things around him, even the commonest objects of everyday life--if
they but [235] stood together to warm their hands at the same fire--
took for him a new poetry, a delicate fresh bloom, and interest. It
was as if his bodily eyes had been indeed mystically washed, renewed,
strengthened.

And how eagerly, with what a light heart, would Flavian have taken
his place in the amphitheatre, among the youth of his own age! with
what an appetite for every detail of the entertainment, and its
various accessories:--the sunshine, filtered into soft gold by the
vela, with their serpentine patterning, spread over the more select
part of the company; the Vestal virgins, taking their privilege of
seats near the empress Faustina, who sat there in a maze of double-
coloured gems, changing, as she moved, like the waves of the sea; the
cool circle of shadow, in which the wonderful toilets of the
fashionable told so effectively around the blazing arena, covered
again and again during the many hours' show, with clean sand for the
absorption of certain great red patches there, by troops of white-
shirted boys, for whom the good-natured audience provided a scramble
of nuts and small coin, flung to them over a trellis-work of silver-
gilt and amber, precious gift of Nero, while a rain of flowers and
perfume fell over themselves, as they paused between the parts of
their long feast upon the spectacle of animal suffering.

During his sojourn at Ephesus, Lucius Verus had readily become a
patron, patron or protégé, [236] of the great goddess of Ephesus, the
goddess of hunters; and the show, celebrated by way of a compliment
to him to-day, was to present some incidents of her story, where she
figures almost as the genius of madness, in animals, or in the
humanity which comes in contact with them. The entertainment would
have an element of old Greek revival in it, welcome to the taste of a
learned and Hellenising society; and, as Lucius Verus was in some
sense a lover of animals, was to be a display of animals mainly.
There would be real wild and domestic creatures, all of rare species;
and a real slaughter. On so happy an occasion, it was hoped, the
elder emperor might even concede a point, and a living criminal fall
into the jaws of the wild beasts. And the spectacle was, certainly,
to end in the destruction, by one mighty shower of arrows, of a
hundred lions, "nobly" provided by Aurelius himself for the amusement
of his people.--Tam magnanimus fuit!

The arena, decked and in order for the first scene, looked
delightfully fresh, re-inforcing on the spirits of the audience the
actual freshness of the morning, which at this season still brought
the dew. Along the subterranean ways that led up to it, the sound of
an advancing chorus was heard at last, chanting the words of a sacred
song, or hymn to Diana; for the spectacle of the amphitheatre was,
after all, a [237] religious occasion. To its grim acts of blood-
shedding a kind of sacrificial character still belonged in the view
of certain religious casuists, tending conveniently to soothe the
humane sensibilities of so pious an emperor as Aurelius, who, in his
fraternal complacency, had consented to preside over the shows.

Artemis or Diana, as she may be understood in the actual development
of her worship, was, indeed, the symbolical expression of two allied
yet contrasted elements of human temper and experience--man's amity,
and also his enmity, towards the wild creatures, when they were
still, in a certain sense, his brothers. She is the complete, and
therefore highly complex, representative of a state, in which man was
still much occupied with animals, not as his flock, or as his
servants after the pastoral relationship of our later, orderly world,
but rather as his equals, on friendly terms or the reverse,--a state
full of primeval sympathies and antipathies, of rivalries and common
wants--while he watched, and could enter into, the humours of those
"younger brothers," with an intimacy, the "survivals" of which in a
later age seem often to have had a kind of madness about them. Diana
represents alike the bright and the dark side of such relationship.
But the humanities of that relationship were all forgotten to-day in
the excitement of a show, in which mere cruelty to animals, their
useless suffering and death, formed [238] the main point of interest.
People watched their destruction, batch after batch, in a not
particularly inventive fashion; though it was expected that the
animals themselves, as living creatures are apt to do when hard put
to it, would become inventive, and make up, by the fantastic
accidents of their agony, for the deficiencies of an age fallen
behind in this matter of manly amusement. It was as a Deity of
Slaughter--the Taurian goddess who demands the sacrifice of the
shipwrecked sailors thrown on her coasts--the cruel, moonstruck
huntress, who brings not only sudden death, but rabies, among the
wild creatures that Diana was to be presented, in the person of a
famous courtesan. The aim at an actual theatrical illusion, after
the first introductory scene, was frankly surrendered to the display
of the animals, artificially stimulated and maddened to attack each
other. And as Diana was also a special protectress of new-born
creatures, there would be a certain curious interest in the
dexterously contrived escape of the young from their mother's torn
bosoms; as many pregnant animals as possible being carefully selected
for the purpose.

The time had been, and was to come again, when the pleasures of the
amphitheatre centered in a similar practical joking upon human
beings. What more ingenious diversion had stage manager ever
contrived than that incident, itself a practical epigram never to be
forgottten, [239] when a criminal, who, like slaves and animals, had
no rights, was compelled to present the part of Icarus; and, the
wings failing him in due course, had fallen into a pack of hungry
bears? For the long shows of the amphitheatre were, so to speak, the
novel-reading of that age--a current help provided for sluggish
imaginations, in regard, for instance, to grisly accidents, such as
might happen to one's self; but with every facility for comfortable
inspection. Scaevola might watch his own hand, consuming, crackling,
in the fire, in the person of a culprit, willing to redeem his life
by an act so delightful to the eyes, the very ears, of a curious
public. If the part of Marsyas was called for, there was a criminal
condemned to lose his skin. It might be almost edifying to study
minutely the expression of his face, while the assistants corded and
pegged him to the bench, cunningly; the servant of the law waiting
by, who, after one short cut with his knife, would slip the man's leg
from his skin, as neatly as if it were a stocking--a finesse in
providing the due amount of suffering for wrong-doers only brought to
its height in Nero's living bonfires. But then, by making his
suffering ridiculous, you enlist against the sufferer, some real, and
all would-be manliness, and do much to stifle any false sentiment of
compassion. The philosophic emperor, having no great taste for
sport, and asserting here a personal scruple, had greatly changed all
[240] that; had provided that nets should be spread under the dancers
on the tight-rope, and buttons for the swords of the gladiators. But
the gladiators were still there. Their bloody contests had, under
the form of a popular amusement, the efficacy of a human sacrifice;
as, indeed, the whole system of the public shows was understood to
possess a religious import. Just at this point, certainly, the
judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is without reproach--

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling isolated in the great
slaughter-house, could not but observe that, in his habitual
complaisance to Lucius Verus, who, with loud shouts of applause from
time to time, lounged beside him, Aurelius had sat impassibly through
all the hours Marius himself had remained there. For the most part
indeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes from the show,
reading, or writing on matters of public business, but had seemed,
after all, indifferent. He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic
paradox of the Imperceptibility of pain; which might serve as an
excuse, should those savage popular humours ever again turn against
men and women. Marius remembered well his very attitude and
expression on this day, when, a few years later, certain things came
to pass in Gaul, under his full authority; and that attitude and
expression [241] defined already, even thus early in their so
friendly intercourse, and though he was still full of gratitude for
his interest, a permanent point of difference between the emperor and
himself--between himself, with all the convictions of his life taking
centre to-day in his merciful, angry heart, and Aurelius, as
representing all the light, all the apprehensive power there might be
in pagan intellect. There was something in a tolerance such as this,
in the bare fact that he could sit patiently through a scene like
this, which seemed to Marius to mark Aurelius as his inferior now and
for ever on the question of righteousness; to set them on opposite
sides, in some great conflict, of which that difference was but a
single presentment. Due, in whatever proportions, to the abstract
principles he had formulated for himself, or in spite of them, there
was the loyal conscience within him, deciding, judging himself and
every one else, with a wonderful sort of authority:--You ought,
methinks, to be something quite different from what you are; here!
and here! Surely Aurelius must be lacking in that decisive
conscience at first sight, of the intimations of which Marius could
entertain no doubt--which he looked for in others. He at least, the
humble follower of the bodily eye, was aware of a crisis in life, in
this brief, obscure existence, a fierce opposition of real good and
real evil around him, the issues of which he must by no [242] means
compromise or confuse; of the antagonisms of which the "wise" Marcus
Aurelius was unaware.

That long chapter of the cruelty of the Roman public shows may,
perhaps, leave with the children of the modern world a feeling of
self-complacency. Yet it might seem well to ask ourselves--it is
always well to do so, when we read of the slave-trade, for instance,
or of great religious persecutions on this side or on that, or of
anything else which raises in us the question, "Is thy servant a dog,
that he should do this thing?"--not merely, what germs of feeling we
may entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to
the like; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of
considerations, may be actually present to our minds such as might
have furnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those
legal crimes, with plausible excuses for them: each age in turn,
perhaps, having its own peculiar point of blindness, with its
consequent peculiar sin--the touch-stone of an unfailing conscience
in the select few.

Those cruel amusements were, certainly, the sin of blindness, of
deadness and stupidity, in the age of Marius; and his light had not
failed him regarding it. Yes! what was needed was the heart that
would make it impossible to witness all this; and the future would be
with the forces that could beget a heart like that. [243] His chosen
philosophy had said,--Trust the eye: Strive to be right always in
regard to the concrete experience: Beware of falsifying your impressions.
And its sanction had at least been effective here, in protesting--"This,
and this, is what you may not look upon!" Surely evil was a real thing,
and the wise man wanting in the sense of it, where, not to have been,
by instinctive election, on the right side, was to have failed in life.