st the vanity of all outward success.

The Senate was assembled to hear the emperor's discourse in the vast
hall of the Curia Julia. A crowd of high-bred youths idled around, or
on the steps before the doors, with the marvellous toilets Marius had
noticed in the Via Nova; in attendance, as usual, to learn by
observation the minute points of senatorial procedure. Marius had
already some acquaintance with them, and passing on found himself
suddenly in the presence of what was still the most august assembly the
world had seen. Under Aurelius, ever full of veneration for this
ancient traditional guardian of public religion, the Senate had
recovered all its old dignity and independence. Among its members many
[199] hundreds in number, visibly the most distinguished of them all,
Marius noted the great sophists or rhetoricians of the day, in all
their magnificence. The antique character of their attire, and the
ancient mode of wearing it, still surviving with them, added to the
imposing character of their persons, while they sat, with their staves
of ivory in their hands, on their curule chairs--almost the exact
pattern of the chair still in use in the Roman church when a Bishop
pontificates at the divine offices--"tranquil and unmoved, with a
majesty that seemed divine," as Marius thought, like the old Gaul of
the Invasion. The rays of the early November sunset slanted full upon
the audience, and made it necessary for the officers of the Court to
draw the purple curtains over the windows, adding to the solemnity of
the scene. In the depth of those warm shadows, surrounded by her
ladies, the empress Faustina was seated to listen. The beautiful Greek
statue of Victory, which since the days of Augustus had presided over
the assemblies of the Senate, had been brought into the hall, and
placed near the chair of the emperor; who, after rising to perform a
brief sacrificial service in its honour, bowing reverently to the
assembled fathers left and right, took his seat and began to speak.

There was a certain melancholy grandeur in the very simplicity or
triteness of the theme: as it were the very quintessence of all the old
[200] Roman epitaphs, of all that was monumental in that city of tombs,
layer upon layer of dead things and people. As if in the very fervour
of disillusion, he seemed to be composing--Hosper epigraphas chronon
kai holon ethnon+--the sepulchral titles of ages and whole peoples;
nay! the very epitaph of t