Historical Fiction

Marius the Epicurean — Volume 2

PART THE FOURTH 20. Two Curious Houses—1. Guests 21. Two Curious Houses—2. The Church in Cecilia’s House 22. “The Minor Peace of the Church” 23. Divine Service 24. A Conversation Not Imaginary 25. Sunt Lacrimae Rerum 26. The Martyrs 27. The Triumph of Marcus Aurelius 28. Anima...

Chapters

11. Chapter 11

In cheerfulness is the success of our studies, says Pliny—studia hilaritate proveniunt. It was still the habit of Marius, encouraged by his experience that sleep is not only a s...

9. Chapter 9

Faithful to the spirit of his early Epicurean philosophy and the impulse to surrender himself, in perfectly liberal inquiry about it, to anything that, as a matter of fact, attr...

16. Chapter 16

Those eight days at his old home, so mournfully occupied, had been for Marius in some sort a forcible disruption from the world and the roots of his life in it. He had been carr...

5. Chapter 5

The ideas of Stoicism, so precious to Marcus Aurelius, ideas of large generalisation, have sometimes induced, in those over whose intellects they have had real power, a coldness...

7. Chapter 7

A nature like that of Marius, composed, in about equal parts, of instincts almost physical, and of slowly accumulated intellectual judgments, was perhaps even less susceptible t...

8. Chapter 8

Cornelius had certain friends in or near Rome, whose household, to Marius, as he pondered now and again what might be the determining influences of that peculiar character, pres...

6. Chapter 6

The emperor demanded a senatorial decree for the erection of images in memory of the dead prince; that a golden one should be carried, together with the other images, in the gre...

3. Chapter 3

And Marius, for his part, was grave enough. The discourse of Cornelius Fronto, with its wide prospect over the human, the spiritual, horizon, had set him on a review—on a review...

12. Chapter 12

It was become a habit with Marius—one of his modernisms—developed by his assistance at the Emperor’s “conversations with himself,” to keep a register of the movements of his own...

10. Chapter 10

The more highly favoured ages of imaginative art present instances of the summing up of an entire world of complex associations under some single form, like the Zeus of Olympia,...

4. Chapter 4

The enemy on the Danube was, indeed, but the vanguard of the mighty invading hosts of the fifth century. Illusively repressed just now, those confused movements along the northe...

15. Chapter 15

Not many months after the date of that epistle, Marius, then expecting to leave Rome for a long time, and in fact about to leave it for ever, stood to witness the triumphal entr...

14. Chapter 14

The charm of its poetry, a poetry of the affections, wonderfully fresh in the midst of a threadbare world, would have led Marius, if nothing else had done so, again and again, t...

2. Chapter 2

The very finest flower of the same company—Aurelius with the gilded fasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself, and all the elegant blue-stocki...

1. Chapter 1

PART THE FOURTH 20. Two Curious Houses—1. Guests 21. Two Curious Houses—2. The Church in Cecilia’s House 22. “The Minor Peace of the Church” 23. Divine Service 24. A Conversatio...

13. Chapter 13