Marius Antonius

“ The centre of a group of princely children, in the same apartment with Aurelius, amid all the refined intimacies of a modern home, sat the empress Faustina, warming her hands over a fire. With her long fingers lighted up red by the glowing coals of the brazier Marius looked close upon the most beautiful woman in the world, who was also the great paradox of the age, among her boys and girls. ”

“ When they returned to the Aventine from the solemn obsequies of the Shepherd and Father of Rome, Marius said to Ethne—
“Thou hast never been perplexed by anything that seemed doubtful in the great Bishop’s life; not about his contest with Hilary of Arles, nor even about his forbidding the ordination of slaves.”
“Why should I?” she said; “Leo never claimed to be anything in himself. Has he not taught us [310] all to say day by day in our prayers, that ‘we can do nothing good without God’? ”

“ To the dead, in fact, was conceded in such places a somewhat closer neighbourhood to the old homes they were thought still to protect, than is usual with us, or was usual in Rome itself—a closeness which the living welcomed, so diverse are the ways of our human sentiment, and in which the more wealthy, at least in the country, might indulge themselves. All this Marius followed with a devout interest, sincerely touched and awed by his mother’s sorrow. ”

“ The death of Anthony is thus related in North's Plutarch, "Life of Marius"—
"But he (Marius) sent Annius one of his captaines thither ... and when they were come to the house which the drawer had brought them to, Annius taried beneath at the doore, and the souldiers went up the staiers into the chamber, and finding Anthonie there, they began to encourage one another to kill him, not one of them having the heart to lay hands upon him. ”

“ In all his trials he felt encouraged, and to some extent supported, by a secret force within him; for the soul helps the body and at times raises it, and is the only bird that upholds its cage.
By the side of his father's name, another name was engraved on Marius's heart, that of Thénardier. Marius, in his grave and enthusiastic nature, enveloped in a species of glory the man to whom he owed his father's life, that intrepid sergeant who saved his colonel among the balls and bullets of Waterloo. ”

“ For six days he endured the pangs of hunger, for his gaolers gave him no food, and so at last the king, shorn of his strength and power, died.
After his triumph Marius at once set out with his army to fight against the barbarians. But the Teutones and the Cimbri had turned away from Rome, and it was a long time before Marius encountered them.
He was not, however, the kind of general to let his troops be idle. He kept them at work, and the discipline of the camp was strict.
If the soldiers marched, each was made to carry his own baggage, and each had also to cook his own food. ”

“ Some of these, indeed, by reason of their Greek simplicity and grace, themselves shone out like spaces of a purer, early light, amid the splendours of the Roman manufacture.
Though he looked, thought Marius, like a man who did not sleep enough, he was abounding and bright to-day, after one of those pitiless headaches, which since boyhood had been the “thorn in his side,” challenging the pretensions of his philosophy to fortify one in humble endurances. ”

“ Marius caught the terrified expression of a child in its mother’s arms, as it turned from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her bosom. The way mounted, and descended again, down the steep street of another place, all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer; for every house had its brazier’s workshop, the bright objects of brass and copper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs and corners. ”

“ A wonderful order, actually in possession of human life!—grown inextricably through and through it; penetrating into its laws, its very language, its mere habits of decorum, in a thousand half-conscious ways; yet still felt to be, in part, an unfulfilled ideal; and, as such, awakening hope, and an aim, identical with the one only consistent aspiration of mankind! In the apprehension of that, just then, Marius seemed to have joined company once more with his own old self; to have overtaken on the road the pilgrim who had come to Rome, with absolute sincerity, on the search for perfection. ”

“ It was the very spirit of the scene and the hour—the hour Marius had spent in the imperial house. How temperate, how tranquillising! what humanity! Yet, as he left the eminent company concerning whose ways of life at home he had been so youthfully curious, and sought, after his manner, to determine the main trait in all this, he had to confess that it was a sentiment of mediocrity, though of a mediocrity for once really golden. ”

“ And Marius said to Ethne—
“How can I leave thee, who hast made earth dear to me and heaven real? who hast given me back faith in God and hope in man?”
“Thou art not leaving me,” Ethne replied. “We are in one path, in the steps of the pitiful, [188] redeeming Lord. Thou wilt not despair of the slaves, however degraded, or of the Huns, however savage, for His sake.”
“For His sake and thine,” he replied, “for the sacred memory of thy captivity, and the dear first vision of thee beside the poor dying boy. Thou feelest then, beloved, that we are beginning our life together now?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ So, in intervals of repose, after the agitation which followed the death of Flavian, the thoughts of Marius ran, while he felt himself as if returned to the fine, clear, peaceful light of that pleasant school of healthfully sensuous wisdom, in the brilliant old Greek colony, on its fresh upland by the sea. Not pleasure, but a general completeness of life, was the practical ideal to which this anti-metaphysical metaphysic really pointed. And towards such a full or complete life, a life of various yet select sensation, the most direct and effective auxiliary must be, in a word, Insight. ”

“ The united armies of the Consul and Proconsul crossed the Po, and hastened in search of the Cimbri, whom they found to the westward of Milan, near Vercellæ, searching for the Teutones, of whose destruction they had not yet heard. The Cimbri met with the same fate as the Teutones; the whole nation was annihilated; and the women, like those of the Tentones, put an end to their lives. Marius was hailed as the savior of the state; his name was coupled with the gods in the libations and at banquets; and he received the title of third founder of Rome. ”

“ The rich man, interested in the promise of the fair child born on his estate, had sent him to school. The meanness and dejection, nevertheless, of that unoccupied old age defined the leading memory of Flavian, revived sometimes, after this first confidence, with a burst of angry tears amid the sunshine. But nature had had her economy in nursing the strength of that one natural affection; for, save his half-selfish care for Marius, it was the single, really generous part, the one piety, in the lad’s character. In him Marius saw the spirit of unbelief, achieved as if at one step. ”

“ That intelligent seriousness about life, the absence of which had ever seemed to remove those who lacked it into some strange species wholly alien from himself, accumulating all the lessons of his experience since those first days at White-nights, was as it were translated here, as if in designed congruity with his favourite precepts of the power of physical vision, into an actual picture. If the true value of souls is in proportion to what they can admire, Marius was just then an acceptable soul. ”

“ To Marius, at a later time, he counted for as it were an epitome of the whole pagan world, the depth of its corruption, and its perfection of form. And still, in his mobility, his animation, in his eager capacity for various life, he was so real an object, after that visionary idealism of the villa. His voice, his glance, were like the breaking in of the solid world upon one, amid the flimsy fictions of a dream. A shadow, handling all things as shadows, had felt a sudden real and poignant heat in them. ”

“ Marcus Cornelius Fronto, the “Orator,” favourite teacher of the emperor’s youth, afterwards his most trusted counsellor, and now the undisputed occupant of the sophistic throne, whose equipage, elegantly mounted with silver, Marius had seen in the streets of Rome, had certainly turned his many personal gifts to account with a good fortune, remarkable even in that age, so indulgent to professors or rhetoricians. ”

“ But where might Marius search for all this, as more than an intellectual abstraction? Where were those elect souls in whom the claim of Humanity became so amiable, winning, persuasive—whose footsteps through the world were so beautiful in the actual order he saw—whose faces averted from him, would be more than he could bear? Where was that comely order, to which as a great fact of experience he must give its due; to which, as to all other beautiful “phenomena” in life, he must, for his own peace, adjust himself?
Rome did well to be serious. ”

“ His birth was now no bar to any social distinction to which his simple and resolute soul might think it profitable to aspire: and a family of the patrician Julii was not ashamed to give one of its daughters to the adventurer from Arpinum. [816] Thus Marius remained for a while; to Roman society an interesting specimen of the self-made man, marked by a bluntness and directness appropriate to the type and provocative of an amused regard; to the professed politician a man with a fairly successful but puzzling political career, and one that perhaps needed not to be too seriously considered. ”

“ Marius took advantage of it as an opportunity for still closer study than of old, only now and then going out to one of his favourite spots on the Sabine or Alban hills for a quiet even greater than that of Rome in the country air. On one of these occasions, as if by favour of an invisible power withdrawing some unknown cause of dejection from around him, he enjoyed a quite unusual sense of self-possession—the possession of his own best and happiest self. ”

“ Those were, moreover, to Ethne, months of much happy learning of many things. Still in many ways a child of the wilderness, it was a constant joy to her to learn through Marius the secrets of his ancient world. And above all, she delighted, with ever-increasing wonder and joy, in drinking with him of what to her, lover of all fountains, was the new and perennial fountain of “the Testaments of God.”
“Freedom, law, life: order, beauty, truth: everything is there,” she would say. “My own people at home cannot indeed taste of all the riches of your learning. ”

“ It was with real kindliness that Marcus Aurelius looked upon Marius, as a youth of great attainments in Greek letters and philosophy; and he liked also his serious expression, being, as we know, a believer in the doctrine of physiognomy—that, as he puts it, not love only, but every other affection of man’s soul, looks out very plainly from the window of the eyes. ”

“ As if by way of a due recognition of some immeasurable divine condescension manifest in a certain historic fact, its influence was felt more especially at those points which demanded some sacrifice of one’s self, for the weak, for the aged, for little children, and even for the dead. And then, for its constant outward token, its significant manner or index, it issued in a certain debonair grace, and a certain mystic attractiveness, a courtesy, which made Marius doubt whether that famed Greek “blitheness,” or gaiety, or grace, in the handling of life, had been, after all, an unrivalled success. ”

“ The old sculptors of the great procession on the frieze of the Parthenon at Athens, have delineated the placid heads of the victims led in it to sacrifice, with a perfect feeling for animals in forcible contrast with any indifference as to their sufferings. It was this contrast that distracted Marius now in the blessing of his fields, and qualified his devout absorption upon the scrupulous fulfilment of all the details of the ceremonial, as the procession approached the altars. ”

“ There, in the early church of Rome, was to be seen, and on sufficiently reasonable grounds, that satisfaction and serenity on a dispassionate survey of the facts of life, which all hearts had desired, though for the most part in vain, contrasting itself for Marius, in particular, very forcibly, with the imperial philosopher’s so heavy burden of unrelieved melancholy. It was Christianity in its humanity, or even its humanism, in its generous hopes for man, its common sense and alacrity of cheerful service, its sympathy with all creatures, its appreciation of beauty and daylight. ”

“ Marius exclaimed. "I am not hurting thee!"
"Let the girl go, lord!" said a voice behind them. Marius turned his head, to see a figure bearing down upon them, lean and tall, with a shock of black hair and angry eyes. Varia, turning at the same instant in Marius's grasp, saw the man, and cried:
"Make him to let me go! He hath tried to make me tell thy name—do not thou tell it!"
"So!" Marius exclaimed in triumph, catching the clew. "Thou art the man—thou!" His tone held wrath and amazed disgust.
The slave stood his ground. ”