pid
wheels as they passed over the flagstones. But the highest light upon
the mausoleum of Hadrian was quite gone out, and it was dark, before
they reached the Flaminian Gate. The [171] abundant sound of water was
the one thing that impressed Marius, as they passed down a long street,
with many open spaces on either hand: Cornelius to his military
quarters, and Marius to the old dwelling-place of his fathers.

NOTES

162. +E-text editor's note: ergastula were the Roman agrarian
equivalent of prison-workhouses.

168. +Apuleius, The Golden Ass, I.17.

CHAPTER XI: "THE MOST RELIGIOUS CITY IN THE WORLD"

[172] MARIUS awoke early and passed curiously from room to room, noting
for more careful inspection by and by the rolls of manuscripts. Even
greater than his curiosity in gazing for the first time on this ancient
possession, was his eagerness to look out upon Rome itself, as he
pushed back curtain and shutter, and stepped forth in the fresh morning
upon one of the many balconies, with an oft-repeated dream realised at
last. He was certainly fortunate in the time of his coming to Rome.
That old pagan world, of which Rome was the flower, had reached its
perfection in the things of poetry and art--a perfection which
indicated only too surely the eve of decline. As in some vast
intellectual museum, all its manifold products were intact and in their
places, and with custodians also still extant, duly qualified to
appreciate and explain them. And at no period of history had the
material Rome itself been better worth seeing--lying there not less
consummate than that world of [173] pagan intellect which it
represented in every phase of its darkness and light. The various work
of many ages fell here harmoniously together, as yet untouched save by
time, adding the final grace of a rich softness to its complex
expression. Much which spoke of ages earlier than Nero, the great
re-builder, lingered on, antique, quaint, immeasurably venerable, like
the relics of the medieval city in the Paris of Lewis the Fourteenth:
the work of Nero's own time had come to have that sort of old world and
picturesque interest which the work of Lewis has for ourselves; while
without stretching a parallel too far we might perhaps liken the
architectural finesses of the archaic Hadrian to the more excellent
products of our own Gothic revival. The temple of Antoninus and
Faustina was still fresh in all the majesty of its closely arrayed
col