Marius the Epicurean — Volume 1

by Walter Pater

  CHAPTER X: ON THE WAY

  Mirum est ut animus agitatione motuque corporis excitetur. Pliny's Letters.

  [158] MANY points in that train of thought, its harder and moreenergetic practical details especially, at first surmised but vaguelyin the intervals of his visits to the tomb of Flavian, attained thecoherence of formal principle amid the stirring incidents of thejourney, which took him, still in all the buoyancy of his nineteenyears and greatly expectant, to Rome. That summons had come from oneof the former friends of his father in the capital, who had kepthimself acquainted with the lad's progress, and, assured of his parts,his courtly ways, above all of his beautiful penmanship, now offeredhim a place, virtually that of an amanuensis, near the person of thephilosophic emperor. The old town-house of his family on the Caelianhill, so long neglected, might well require his personal care; andMarius, relieved a little by his preparations for travelling from acertain over-tension [159] of spirit in which he had lived of late, waspresently on his way, to await introduction to Aurelius, on hisexpected return home, after a first success, illusive enough as it wassoon to appear, against the invaders from beyond the Danube.

  The opening stage of his journey, through the firm, golden weather, forwhich he had lingered three days beyond the appointed time ofstarting--days brown with the first rains of autumn--brought him, bythe byways among the lower slopes of the Apennines of Luna, to the townof Luca, a station on the Cassian Way; travelling so far mainly onfoot, while the baggage followed under the care of his attendants. Hewore a broad felt hat, in fashion not unlike a more modern pilgrim's,the neat head projecting from the collar of his gray paenula, ortravelling mantle, sewed closely together over the breast, but with itstwo sides folded up upon the shoulders, to leave the arms free inwalking, and was altogether so trim and fresh, that, as he climbed thehill from Pisa, by the long steep lane through the olive-yards, andturned to gaze where he could just discern the cypresses of the oldschool garden, like two black lines down the yellow walls, a littlechild took possession of his hand, and, looking up at him with entireconfidence, paced on bravely at his side, for the mere pleasure of hiscompany, to the spot where the road declined again [160] into thevalley beyond. From this point, leaving the servants behind, hesurrendered himself, a willing subject, as he walked, to theimpressions of the road, and was almost surprised, both at thesuddenness with which evening came on, and the distance from his oldhome at which it found him.

  And at the little town of Luca, he felt that indescribable sense of awelcoming in the mere outward appearance of things, which seems to markout certain places for the special purpose of evening rest, and givesthem always a peculiar amiability in retrospect. Under the deepeningtwilight, the rough-tiled roofs seem to huddle together side by side,like one continuous shelter over the whole township, spread low andbroad above the snug sleeping-rooms within; and the place one sees forthe first time, and must tarry in but for a night, breathes the veryspirit of home. The cottagers lingered at their doors for a fewminutes as the shadows grew larger, and went to rest early; thoughthere was still a glow along the road through the shorn corn-fields,and the birds were still awake about the crumbling gray heights of anold temple. So quiet and air-swept was the place, you could hardlytell where the country left off in it, and the field-paths became itsstreets. Next morning he must needs change the manner of his journey.The light baggage-wagon returned, and he proceeded now more quickly,travelling [161] a stage or two by post, along the Cassian Way, wherethe figures and incidents of the great high-road seemed already to tellof the capital, the one centre to which all were hastening, or hadlately bidden adieu. That Way lay through the heart of the old,mysterious and visionary country of Etruria; and what he knew of itsstrange religion of the dead, reinforced by the actual sight of thefuneral houses scattered so plentifully among the dwelling-places ofthe living, revived in him for a while, in all its strength, his oldinstinctive yearning towards those inhabitants of the shadowy land hehad known in life. It seemed to him that he could half divine how timepassed in those painted houses on the hillsides, among the gold andsilver ornaments, the wrought armour and vestments, the drowsy and deadattendants; and the close consciousness of that vast population gavehim no fear, but rather a sense of companionship, as he climbed thehills on foot behind the horses, through the genial afternoon.

  The road, next day, passed below a town not less primitive, it mightseem, than its rocky perch--white rocks, that had long been glisteningbefore him in the distance. Down the dewy paths the people weredescending from it, to keep a holiday, high and low alike in rough,white-linen smocks. A homely old play was just begun in an open-airtheatre, with seats hollowed out of the turf-grown slope. Marius [162]caught the terrified expression of a child in its mother's arms, as itturned from the yawning mouth of a great mask, for refuge in her bosom.The way mounted, and descended again, down the steep street of anotherplace, all resounding with the noise of metal under the hammer; forevery house had its brazier's workshop, the bright objects of brass andcopper gleaming, like lights in a cave, out of their dark roofs andcorners. Around the anvils the children were watching the work, or ranto fetch water to the hissing, red-hot metal; and Marius too watched,as he took his hasty mid-day refreshment, a mess of chestnut-meal andcheese, while the swelling surface of a great copper water-vessel grewflowered all over with tiny petals under the skilful strokes. Towardsdusk, a frantic woman at the roadside, stood and cried out the words ofsome philter, or malison, in verse, with weird motion of her hands, asthe travellers passed, like a wild picture drawn from Virgil.

  But all along, accompanying the superficial grace of these incidents ofthe way, Marius noted, more and more as he drew nearer to Rome, marksof the great plague. Under Hadrian and his successors, there had beenmany enactments to improve the condition of the slave. The ergastula+were abolished. But no system of free labour had as yet succeeded. Awhole mendicant population, artfully exaggerating every symptom andcircumstance of misery, still hung [163] around, or shelteredthemselves within, the vast walls of their old, half-ruinedtask-houses. And for the most part they had been variously stricken bythe pestilence. For once, the heroic level had been reached in rags,squints, scars--every caricature of the human type--ravaged beyond whatcould have been thought possible if it were to survive at all.Meantime, the farms were less carefully tended than of old: here andthere they were lapsing into their natural wildness: some villas alsowere partly fallen into ruin. The picturesque, romantic Italy of alater time--the Italy of Claude and Salvator Rosa--was already forming,for the delight of the modern romantic traveller.

  And again Marius was aware of a real change in things, on crossing theTiber, as if some magic effect lay in that; though here, in truth, theTiber was but a modest enough stream of turbid water. Nature, under thericher sky, seemed readier and more affluent, and man fitter to theconditions around him: even in people hard at work there appeared to bea less burdensome sense of the mere business of life. How dreamily thewomen were passing up through the broad light and shadow of the steepstreets with the great water-pots resting on their heads, like women ofCaryae, set free from slavery in old Greek temples. With what a fresh,primeval poetry was daily existence here impressed--all the details ofthe threshing-floor and the vineyard; [164] the common farm-life even;the great bakers' fires aglow upon the road in the evening. In thepresence of all this Marius felt for a moment like those old, early,unconscious poets, who created the famous Greek myths of Dionysus, andthe Great Mother, out of the imagery of the wine-press and theploughshare. And still the motion of the journey was bringing histhoughts to systematic form. He seemed to have grown to the fulness ofintellectual manhood, on his way hither. The formative and literarystimulus, so to call it, of peaceful exercise which he had alwaysobserved in himself, doing its utmost now, the form and the matter ofthought alike detached themselves clearly and with readiness from thehealthfully excited brain.--"It is wonderful," says Pliny, "how th
emind is stirred to activity by brisk bodily exercise." The presentableaspects of inmost thought and feeling became evident to him: thestructure of all he meant, its order and outline, defined itself: hisgeneral sense of a fitness and beauty in words became effective indaintily pliant sentences, with all sorts of felicitous linking offigure to abstraction. It seemed just then as if the desire of theartist in him--that old longing to produce--might be satisfied by theexact and literal transcript of what was then passing around him, insimple prose, arresting the desirable moment as it passed, andprolonging its life a little.--To live in the concrete! To be sure, atleast, of [165] one's hold upon that!--Again, his philosophic schemewas but the reflection of the data of sense, and chiefly of sight, areduction to the abstract, of the brilliant road he travelled on,through the sunshine.

  But on the seventh evening there came a reaction in the cheerful flowof our traveller's thoughts, a reaction with which mere bodily fatigue,asserting itself at last over his curiosity, had much to do; and hefell into a mood, known to all passably sentimental wayfarers, as nightdeepens again and again over their path, in which all journeying, fromthe known to the unknown, comes suddenly to figure as a mere foolishtruancy--like a child's running away from home--with the feeling thatone had best return at once, even through the darkness. He had chosento climb on foot, at his leisure, the long windings by which the roadascended to the place where that day's stage was to end, and foundhimself alone in the twilight, far behind the rest of histravelling-companions. Would the last zigzag, round and round thosedark masses, half natural rock, half artificial substructure, everbring him within the circuit of the walls above? It was now that astartling incident turned those misgivings almost into actual fear.From the steep slope a heavy mass of stone was detached, after somewhisperings among the trees above his head, and rushing down throughthe stillness fell to pieces in a [166] cloud of dust across the roadjust behind him, so that he felt the touch upon his heel. That wassufficient, just then, to rouse out of its hiding-place his old vaguefear of evil--of one's "enemies"--a distress, so much a matter ofconstitution with him, that at times it would seem that the bestpleasures of life could but be snatched, as it were hastily, in onemoment's forgetfulness of its dark, besetting influence. A suddensuspicion of hatred against him, of the nearness of "enemies," seemedall at once to alter the visible form of things, as with the child'shero, when he found the footprint on the sand of his peaceful, dreamyisland. His elaborate philosophy had not put beneath his feet theterror of mere bodily evil; much less of "inexorable fate, and thenoise of greedy Acheron."

  The resting-place to which he presently came, in the keen, wholesomeair of the market-place of the little hill-town, was a pleasantcontrast to that last effort of his journey. The room in which he satdown to supper, unlike the ordinary Roman inns at that day, was trimand sweet. The firelight danced cheerfully upon the polished,three-wicked lucernae burning cleanly with the best oil, upon thewhite-washed walls, and the bunches of scarlet carnations set in glassgoblets. The white wine of the place put before him, of the truecolour and flavour of the grape, and with a ring of delicate foam as itmounted in the cup, had a reviving edge or freshness he had [167] foundin no other wine. These things had relieved a little the melancholy ofthe hour before; and it was just then that he heard the voice of one,newly arrived at the inn, making his way to the upper floor--a youthfulvoice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his cure.

  He seemed to hear that voice again in dreams, uttering his name: then,awake in the full morning light and gazing from the window, saw theguest of the night before, a very honourable-looking youth, in the richhabit of a military knight, standing beside his horse, and alreadymaking preparations to depart. It happened that Marius, too, was totake that day's journey on horseback. Riding presently from the inn,he overtook Cornelius--of the Twelfth Legion--advancing carefully downthe steep street; and before they had issued from the gates ofUrbs-vetus, the two young men had broken into talk together. They werepassing along the street of the goldsmiths; and Cornelius must needsenter one of the workshops for the repair of some button or link of hisknightly trappings. Standing in the doorway, Marius watched the work,as he had watched the brazier's business a few days before, wonderingmost at the simplicity of its processes, a simplicity, however, onwhich only genius in that craft could have lighted.--By whatunguessed-at stroke of hand, for instance, had the grains of preciousmetal associated themselves [168] with so daintily regular a roughness,over the surface of the little casket yonder? And the conversationwhich followed, hence arising, left the two travellers with sufficientinterest in each other to insure an easy companionship for theremainder of their journey. In time to come, Marius was to depend verymuch on the preferences, the personal judgments, of the comrade who nowlaid his hand so brotherly on his shoulder, as they left the workshop.

  Itineris matutini gratiam capimus,+--observes one of our scholarlytravellers; and their road that day lay through a country, well-fitted,by the peculiarity of its landscape, to ripen a first acquaintance intointimacy; its superficial ugliness throwing the wayfarers back uponeach other's entertainment in a real exchange of ideas, the tension ofwhich, however, it would relieve, ever and anon, by the unexpectedassertion of something singularly attractive. The immediate aspect ofthe land was, indeed, in spite of abundant olive and ilex, unpleasingenough. A river of clay seemed, "in some old night of time," to haveburst up over valley and hill, and hardened there into fantasticshelves and slides and angles of cadaverous rock, up and down among thecontorted vegetation; the hoary roots and trunks seeming to confesssome weird kinship with them. But that was long ago; and these pallidhillsides needed only the declining sun, touching the rock with purple,and throwing deeper shadow into [169] the immemorial foliage, to put ona peculiar, because a very grave and austere, kind of beauty; while thegraceful outlines common to volcanic hills asserted themselves in thebroader prospect. And, for sentimental Marius, all this wasassociated, by some perhaps fantastic affinity, with a peculiar traitof severity, beyond his guesses as to the secret of it, which mingledwith the blitheness of his new companion. Concurring, indeed, with thecondition of a Roman soldier, it was certainly something far more thanthe expression of military hardness, or ascesis; and what was earnest,or even austere, in the landscape they had traversed together, seemedto have been waiting for the passage of this figure to interpret orinform it. Again, as in his early days with Flavian, a vivid personalpresence broke through the dreamy idealism, which had almost come todoubt of other men's reality: reassuringly, indeed, yet not withoutsome sense of a constraining tyranny over him from without.

  For Cornelius, returning from the campaign, to take up his quarters onthe Palatine, in the imperial guard, seemed to carry about with him, inthat privileged world of comely usage to which he belonged, theatmosphere of some still more jealously exclusive circle. They haltedon the morrow at noon, not at an inn, but at the house of one of theyoung soldier's friends, whom they found absent, indeed, in consequenceof the [170] plague in those parts, so that after a mid-day rest only,they proceeded again on their journey. The great room of the villa, towhich they were admitted, had lain long untouched; and the dust rose,as they entered, into the slanting bars of sunlight, that fell throughthe half-closed shutters. It was here, to while away the time, thatCornelius bethought himself of displaying to his new friend the variousarticles and ornaments of his knightly array--the breastplate, thesandals and cuirass, lacing them on, one by one, with the assistance ofMarius, and finally the great golden bracelet on the right arm,conferred on him by his general for an act of valour. And as hegleamed there, amid that odd interchange of light and shade, with thestaff of a silken standard firm in his hand, Marius felt as if he wereface to face, for the first time, with some new knighthood or chivalry,just then coming into the world.

  It was soon after they left this place, journeying now by carriage,that Rome was seen at last, with much excitement on the part of ourtravellers; Cornelius, and some
others of whom the party thenconsisted, agreeing, chiefly for the sake of Marius, to hasten forward,that it might be reached by daylight, with a cheerful noise of rapidwheels as they passed over the flagstones. But the highest light uponthe mausoleum of Hadrian was quite gone out, and it was dark, beforethey reached the Flaminian Gate. The [171] abundant sound of water wasthe one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a long street,with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his militaryquarters, and Marius to the old dwelling-place of his fathers.

  NOTES

  162. +E-text editor's note: ergastula were the Roman agrarianequivalent of prison-workhouses.

  168. +Apuleius, The Golden Ass, I.17.