ne, naked one?

But the sheer spectacle and fact of death is too violent an experience
for such sweet consolations, and the death of Flavian comes like a final
revelation of nothing less than the soul's extinction. Not unnaturally,
the next phase is a rebound into epicureanism, spiritual indeed in the
sense that it could not stoop to low pleasures, but living wholly in the
present none the less, with a strong and imperative appreciation of the
fullness of earthly life.

The next phase of the life of Marius opens with a journey to Rome,
during which he meets a second friend, the soldier Cornelius. This very
distinctly drawn character fascinates the eye from the first. In him we
meet a kind of earnestness which seems to interpret and fit in with the
austere aspects of the landscape. It is different from that disciplined
hardness which was to be seen in Roman soldiers as the result of their
military training; indeed, it seems as if this were some new kind of
knighthood, whose mingled austerity and blitheness were strangely
suggestive of hitherto unheard-of achievements in character.

The impression made by Rome upon the mind of Marius was a somewhat
morbid one. He was haunted more or less by the thought of its passing
and its eventual ruin, and he found much, both in its religion and its
pleasure, to criticise. The dominant figure in the imperial city was
that of Marcus Aurelius the Emperor, so famous in his day that for two
hundred years after his death his image was cherished among the Penates
of many pious families. Amid much that was admirable in him, there was a
certain chill in his stoicism, and a sense of lights fading out into the
night. His words in praise of death, and much else of his, had of course
a great distinction. Yet in his private intercourse with Marcus
Aurelius, Marius was not satisfied, nor was it the bleak sense that all
is vanity which troubled him, but rather a feeling of mediocrity--of a
too easy acceptance of the world--in the imperial philosophy. For in the
companionship of Cornelius there was a foil to the stoicism of Marcus
Aurelius, and his friend was more truly an aristocrat than his Emperor.
Cornelius did not accept the world in its entirety, either sadly or
otherwise. In him there was "some inward standard ... of distinction,
selection, refusal, amid the various elements of the period and the
corrupt life across which they were moving together." And, apparently as
a consequence of this s