Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

From the opening

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: 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.

+“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.” Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.

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.

A short sample. Read the whole book

More to read

• "Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand BanksRudyard KiplingLiterature & Fiction191 pages
• "Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand BanksRudyard KiplingLiterature & Fiction191 pages
• "I Say No"Wilkie CollinsLiterature & Fiction428 pages
• "Miss Lou"Edward Payson RoeLiterature & Fiction409 pages
• "Speaking of Operations--"Irvin S. CobbLiterature & Fiction37 pages