Book Description:
MARIUS THE EPICUREAN - 1885 - CONTENTS - PART THE FIRST CHAP. I. THE RELIGION OF NUMA 2. WHITE-NIGHTS . 3. CHANGE OF AIR . 4. THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE 5. THE GOLDEN BOOK 6. EUPHUISM . 7. A PAGAN END . PAGE 3 PART THE SECOND 8. ANIMULA VAGULA . 123 g. NEW CYRENAICISM X44 10. ON THE WAY . 158 I I. THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD . I 72 12. THE DIVINITY THAT DOTH HEDGE A KING . 188 I 3. THE MISTRESS AND MOTHER OF PALACES . 21 2 14. MANLY AMUSEMENT . . 230 PART THE FIRST CHAPTER I THE RELIGION OF NUMA As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in the country, and died out - at last as but paganism-the religion of the villagers, before the advance of the Christian Church so, in an earlier century, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer forms of paganism itself had survived the longest. While, in Rome, new religions had arisen with bewildering complexity around the dying old one, the earlier and simpler patriarchal religion, the religion of Numa, as people loved to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out of the habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown. Glim seso f such a survival we mav catchubelow the Aerely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoral poetry in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details of old Roman religious usage. At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates, Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari - he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, with repetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies, as part of the order of a birthday sacrifice. The hearth, from a spark of which, as one form of old legend related, the child Romulus had been miraculously born, was still indeed an altar and the Gorthiest sacrifice to the gods the perfect physical sanity of the young hen and women, which the scrupulous ways of that religion of the hearth had tended tb maintain. A religion of usages and sentiment rather than of facts and belief, and attached to very definite things and places - the oak of immemorial age, the rock on the heath fashioned by weather as if by some dim human art, the shadowy grove df ilex, passing into which one exclaimed involuntarily, in consecrated phrase, Deitv is in this Place Numen Ineft -itwas in J natural people a simpler harmony with the temper of a quiet . mid the spectacle of rural life, like that faith between man and man, which i h l l u s expressly connects with the period when, with an inexpensive worship, the old wooden gods had been still pressed for room in their homely little shrines. And about the time when the dying Antoninus Pius ordered his golden image of Fortune to be carried into the chamber of his successor now about to test the truth of the old Platonic contention, that the world would at last find itself happy, could it detach some reluctant philoso hic student from the more desirable life of I celestial contemplation, and compel him to rule it, there was a boy living in an old countryhouse, half farm, half villa, who, for himself, recruited that body of antique traditions by a spontaneous force of religious veneration such as had originally called them into being. More than a century and a half had past since Tibullus had written i but the restoration of religious - usages, and their retention where they still survived, was meantime come to be the fashion through the influence of imperial example and what had been in the main a matter of familv J pride with his father, was sustained by a native instinct of devotion in the young Marius...
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