Marius the Epicurean [pp. 222-231; system: 221-231]

MARI US THE EPICUREAN..
third day into a festival, amid the deep corruption which eat out
the heart of civil and domestic virtue, amid the cynical philoso phy which taught that nothing was worth fretting about, and
little worth gaining, the young Epicurean is content to walk his
chaste and simple path, yielding neither to the seductions of the
great city nor to the melancholy arguments of its great emperor,
whose tolerance of evil was founded on his fixed conviction of
the brevity and the insignificance of life.
"Think of infinite matter," says Marcus Aurelius, "and thy portion how small a particle of it! of infinite time, and thine own brief point there;
of destiny, and the jot thou art in it; and yield thyself readily to the wheel
of Clotho, to spin thee into what web she will.... Consider how
quickly all things vanish away-their bodily structure into the general sub stance of things, the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm
of past thoughts. Ab!'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping
through life-a pigmy soul carrying a dead body to its grave. Consider
all this with thyself, and let nothing seem great to thee."
But Marius, for whom each moment of existence is of supreme
value, looks out upon the evils and the sorrows of life with an ex quisite pain that no philosophy can alleviate. He would fain be
happy, but cannot with sadness and cruelty and sin staring him
resolutely in the face. With a great loathing and abhorrence he
lingers in the crowded Amphitheatre while the hundred lions
provided by Aurelius are slain with golden arrows; and when,
sick of the prolonged and brutal slaughter, he glances at the un moved emperor, who without interest, yet without disgust, sits
calmly reading amid this feast of suffering, he realizes with bitterness of heart the mediocrity of pagan virtue, even in this its
purest representative. Of all the noble youth about him, Cornelius, the young Christian soldier, alone has absented himself from
the sports; and Marius, to whom the secret of his friend's religion
is unknown, ponders over his chaste rectitude, and finds in it
"The clear, cold corrective which the fever of his present life demanded.
Without that 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 at their best seemed only to be brooding like the wise emperor himself over a world's disillusion."
In his eager search after some practical principle which might
give unity of motive to an actual integrity of life, Marius studies
lovingly the mysterious influence which to Cornelius brings both
hopefulness and restraint. He cannot find the same controlling
power either in his own gentle Cyrenaicism or in the Stoic philosophy then fashionable at court under the teaching of Fronto,
most venerable and lovable of guides. In the disturbed medita VOL. xLIII. — 5
I886.]
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