Marius the Epicurean is a story about the intellectual and spiritual development of Marius, a young Italian acting as an amanuensis to the great emperor Marcus Aurelius, set in the second century A.D. against the backdrop of a Roman Empire on the edge of ruin. Marius travels through several philosophical systems in search of an illusive image of love, passing through Epicureanism, Cyrenaicism, and finally Stoicism until discovering what he was looking for in the dreadful beauty of Christian sacrifice. Marius the Epicurean is a rare novel in which the style is as important as the plot. Marius became a major impact on writers of the late Victorian era's Aesthetic and Decadent movements, because of Pater's elegant and poetic prose. ( )

Índice p. 1: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6llDyUXkuZLd1EweEZ4clFUV1k/view?usp=sharing
Índice p. 2:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6llDyUXkuZLZEV3YlBERnBiVTA/view?usp=sharing

Is Marius the Epicurean really a novel — I mean in the novelistic sense of "Novel"? Let us measure it against E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and see what we come up with. We know Forster read Marius because he mentions it in the introduction. Forster lists people, story, plot, fantasy, prophecy, pattern and rhythm as aspects worth talking about.

We do have people. Marius is the main character, of course, and we start out with his boyhood, his friends, his encounter with the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, he grows up and he dies. Oops! Spoiler! There, I said it. Yes, Marius does indeed die, but then don't we all? So that's really not much of a spoiler. It is the circumstances that make all the difference.

There is a story — sort of. Boy grows up, meets the Emperor and a few others along the way and dies. This is the kind of bare bones "story" that causes Forster to refer to it as a "low atavistic form."

Is there a plot? Actually . . . no. There is no plot. Forster says that the plot is dependent upon causality. And Marius sticks strictly to the march of time.

One could stretch Forster's definition of fantasy and talk about Marius's interiority as a complete fantasy, but that would be to do both Forster and Pater a disservice. Let us just accept that fantasy is not a part of this novel.

Regarding prophecy Forster says:

With prophecy in the narrow sense of foretelling the future, we have no concern and we have not much concern with it as an appeal for righteousness. What will interest us . . . is an accent in the novelist's voice. . . . His theme is the universe, or something universal, but he is not necessarily going to 'say' anything about the universe.

Marius would fall within Forster's definition, as it addresses something universal, larger than life in its quest for truth and a right way of living.

"Each aspect of the novel demands a different quality from the reader. [T]he prophetic aspect demands two qualities: humility and the suspension of a sense of humor." And further on he reiterates that "we are not concerned with the prophet's message . . . what matters is the accent of his voice, his song."

And this is where Pater shines. In his era he was viewed as a great stylist. For the modern reader, the florid sentences take some getting used to, but persistence is rewarded. The intense interiority of this novel really does require the extra effort to get in synch with Pater's style.

But Marius is not entirely devoid of humor. There are two chapters which are largely lifted from classical antecedents that provide a spot of comic relief. Neither of these moves the story forward in any way but enriches the book nonetheless. One is the story of Cupid and Psyche from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, newly translated here by Pater, and the other is a highly edited satirical dialogue of Lucian which is delightfully reminiscent of Socrates.

And just to wrap up this discussion of aspects, pattern and rhythm are largely absent.

When you want to curl up with a good novel, you do not normally expect to have to do a lot of homework in preparation. After all, we think of a novel as leisure reading. Marius is an exception. It helps to know something about Pater himself, and it especially helps to know something about the intellectual and religious context in England leading up to and during the 1870s and 1880s when Pater was studying and eventually teaching at Oxford. Most Americans particularly are unlikely to be fully aware of the religious crisis that occurred at Oxford in the 1800s surrounding the so-called Oxford Movement. Knowing the historical context is essential to fully appreciate this very unusual novel. At the risk of causing the reader's eyes to glaze over, I would like to give a bit of that context in order to encourage people who enjoy philosophical fiction to explore further in preparation for reading Marius the Epicurean and other of Pater's writings.

The Oxford Movement culminated in the 1845 defection of John Henry Newman from the Anglican priesthood and his subsequent ordination as a Catholic priest and his later elevation as a cardinal. By the time Pater entered Oxford, a rather militant attitude had developed with respect to those desiring to teach at Oxford, and anyone who appeared to be other than a down-the-line Anglican might be subject to sanctions if not outright dismissal. Pater's own career at Oxford was disrupted because of what he wrote in the Conclusion of Studies in the History of the Renaissance, which was his first book published in 1873.

In addition to or perhaps even as an outgrowth of the consequences of the Oxford Movement itself, the arbiters of literary taste in the 1870s and 1880s were Ruskin, Carlyle and Matthew Arnold, who were the highly didactic opinion leaders of the day in terms of their judgments regarding the acceptability, or otherwise, of budding writers. Their collective reaction to Pater's Renaissance along with the highly judgmental atmosphere then prevailing at Oxford made life very difficult for Pater, and in fact, aside from the articles he continued to publish regularly in the literary magazines of the day, he never published another book until Marius in 1885.

What was the uproar about with respect to his notorious Conclusion to The Renaissance? It was primarily over the essentially hedonistic message of the following paragraph:

Of this wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for art's sake has most; for art comes to you professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

Pater was encouraging students "to be forever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions," for "our one chance lies . . . in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time." His overt hedonism was viewed in a dim light as it seemed to suggest unbelief in any reality beyond this life, which meant that his moral qualifications to be a teacher of young men at Oxford were put into question. Should such a person be influencing the young?

Today, we read that paragraph and shake our heads because our value system has changed so dramatically. And that contrast in value systems is at the very heart of Marius the Epicurean, which is an account of youth and young manhood, tracing the development of his religious and philosophical attitudes.

Marius, it turns out, was much less of an Epicurean than the title suggests and most interpreters of the book believe. In fact, I interrupted my own reading of the book to do some background investigation of this very topic — and also to read a fairly recent biography of Pater to try to understand what was going on in his book. For this is the most unusual novel I have ever read. My own feeling is that there is nothing else quite like it. Marius is highly autobiographical in the sense that while we are reading about Marius's development, we are in fact reading about Pater's own experience. In some ways, this book is a response to the critics who were so outraged by his work at the beginning of his career, and it is an effort to set the record straight in a work of fiction.

Pater has set the novel during the reign of Marcus Aurelius so as to be able to suggest the pagan and Christian milieu during a period of relative calm in the history of Christian persecutions and also attempts to describe the appeal of the Church during the second century while it was still a fresh and developing religion.

Marius initially admires Marcus Aurelius, for whom he works briefly as secretary, but he loses respect for him when he is seen to be indifferent to the sufferings of both men and animals at the circus games that celebrated his return from a campaign. Marius saw an incongruity between this indifference and the Stoicism Aurelius professed.

As Marius goes through life exploring especially the Hellenistic philosophies — Epicurean, Stoic, Skeptic — he concludes that no single school quite fills the bill, and then of course he encounters Christianity and explores his own positive response to it but never seems to experience real faith. In this sense, he seems to be mirroring Pater.

Basically, I enjoyed this novel. I suspect it will stay with me for a long time. It is rich in historical and literary lore that those of us may be ignorant of who did not have a Victorian classical education at Oxford.

Do yourself a favor, dear Reader, and avoid the mistakes I made in approaching this book. First of all, I read the version from Project Gutenberg, which has only a few notes and no introduction. I eventually ended up buying a used copy of the Penguin Classics version published in 1985, which has fairly good notes and a useful introduction written incidentally by Michael Levey, author of The Case of Walter Pater, the excellent critical biography I read and now recommend.

Read the notes, which help to breathe some life into this erudite novel and will surely make it a richer reading experience. Look up Apuleius, Numa, Lucian, Lucretius as they come up. Read about the differences between the Cyrenaic and Epicurean schools of philosophy. Remind yourself of the broad outlines of the Aurelian Age.

Take the detours. For example, you will find Lucian's dialogues to be as charming and witty as Socrates'. You will learn that a chapter titled "A Conversation Not Imaginary" makes vague reference to a collection of Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor. Nobody reads these anymore, but perhaps we should. Much of this literature — Landor, Lucian, Lucretius — is available at Project Gutenberg for sampling.

Since I began this review by dissecting Marius in light of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, I would like to add some criticisms of my own. Difficult as it is, I have to admit it was odd to read a novel that reflected so few aspects of a typical novel. It had a basic story, a few undercharacterized people, it had a touch of prophecy, but no plot, no fantasy, and no pattern or rhythm. What drives this novel is one's curiosity about Marius. And with all the interiority, I still come up feeling a bit empty. We never learn much about how Marius actually feels, only what he thinks.

While Pater wanted to draw comparisons between the Age of Marcus Aurelius and the Renaissance and the Victorian Age, I was disturbed by his constant tearing of the curtain, his repeated violation of the time-space continuum, by making reference to later authors, books or events. These intrusions have the same effect as anachronisms. For example, after reciting the story of Cupid and Psyche from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, Pater writes: "The petulant boyish Cupid of Apuleius was become more like that 'Lord of terrible aspect' who stood at Dante's bedside and wept." Such instances are too common and tend to break the spell. It is as though Pater has forgotten he is writing a novel and not an academic treatise. Forster might not be as bothered by this as I was because he recommends detaching our criticism of a novel as much as possible from time and place, but in this case it is very difficult because the book is so much a part of its time and point of origin, even though it was set in an era sixteen hundred years earlier. The time-space problem is a difficult one to sort out in this instance.

More than once Forster says that human nature is unchangeable. And this is why this book is worth reading. It gives us a glimpse of one young man's development and the humanity of his creator. ( )

A bit slow in places, but overall effective in a low-key way. Confirms Valla's argument that Epicureanism has more in common with Christianity than Stoicism does. A mildly irritating tendency to cite modern examples which break the (otherwise well-created) ancient mood ( )

I had twice before tried to read [this book] without success but...this time have reached the end of - and reached it before my desire to punch Marius' head had become quite unbearable...It is very well worth reading. You must give up all idea of reading a story and treat it simply as a vaguely narrative essay. It interests me as showing just how far the purely aethetic attitude to life can go, in the hands of a master, and it certainly goes a good deal further than one would suppose from reading the inferior aesthetes like Oscar Wilde and George Moore. In Pater it seems almost to include the rest of spiritual life: he has to bring in chastity, he nearly has to bring in Christianity, because they are so beautiful. Perhaps it is his patronage of great things which is so offensive - condescending to add the Christian religion to his nosegay of spiritual flowers because it has a colour or scent that he thinks would just give a finishing touch to the rest...But Pater's position is valuable just because, being a perfectly honest aesthete, he really tries to follow its theory to the bitter end, and therefore betrays its weakness.
- from a 10 January 1932 letter to Arthur Greeves, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume II

This is the best specimen extant of the Epicurean-aesthetic business: which one wrongs by reading it in its inferior practitioners such as George Moore and Oscar Wilde....[I]t is a novel - or, since the story is so slight, a faintly narrative causerie - laid in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. The interesting thing is, that being a really consistent aesthete, he [the author] has to bring in the early Christians favourably because the flavour of the early Church - the new music, the humility, the chastity, the sense of order and quiet decorum - appeal to him aesthetically. It is doubtful if he sees that he can only have it in by blowing to bits the whole Epicurean basis of his outlook - so that aestheticism, honestly followed, refutes itself by leading him to something that will put aestheticism in its place - and Pater's position is therefore, in the long run, all nonsense. But it is [a] very beautiful book - much enriched by a full prose translation of the Cupid and Psyche story from Apuleius who first told it and who is one of the minor characters. I should try it if it is in your library. Gad! - how it would have bowled one over if one had read it at eighteen. One would be only just beginning to recover now.
- from a 17 January 1932 letter to his brother, in The collected letters of C.S. Lewis, volume II ( )