be heroic, impassioned, ideal: from these the "new Cyrenaicism" of
Marius took its criterion of values. It was a theory, indeed, which
might properly be regarded as in great degree coincident with the main
principle of the Stoics themselves, and an older version of the precept
"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might"--a doctrine
so widely acceptable among the nobler spirits of that time. And, as
with that, its mistaken tendency would lie in the direction of a kind
of idolatry of mere life, or natural gift, or strength--l'idolatrie des
talents.

To understand the various forms of ancient art and thought, the various
forms of actual human feeling (the only new thing, in a world almost
too opulent in what was old) to satisfy, with a kind of scrupulous
equity, the claims of these concrete and actual objects on his
sympathy, his intelligence, his senses--to "pluck out the heart of
their mystery," and in turn become the interpreter of them to others:
this had now defined itself for Marius as a very narrowly practical
design: it determined his choice of a vocation to live by. It was the
era of the rhetoricians, or sophists, as they were sometimes called; of
men who came in some instances to [153] great fame and fortune, by way
of a literary cultivation of "science." That science, it has been often
said, must have been wholly an affair of words. But in a world,
confessedly so opulent in what was old, the work, even of genius, must
necessarily consist very much in criticism; and, in the case of the
more excellent specimens of his class, the rhetorician was, after all,
the eloquent and effective interpreter, for the delighted ears of
others, of what understanding himself had come by, in years of travel
and study, of the beautiful house of art and thought which was the
inheritance of the age. The emperor Marcus Aurelius, to whose service
Marius had now been called, was himself, more or less openly, a
"lecturer." That late world, amid many curiously vivid modern traits,
had this spectacle, so familiar to ourselves, of the public lecturer or
essayist; in some cases adding to his other gifts that of the Christian
preacher, who knows how to touch people's sensibilities on behalf of
the suffering. To follow in the way of these successes, was the natural
instinct of youthful ambition; and it was with no vulgar egotism that
Marius, at the age of nineteen, determined, like many another young man
of parts, to enter a