MARIUS THE EPICUREAN

Marius the Epicurean appeared in 1885 as a two-volume novel. The novel tells the story of Marius, a follower of the Cyrenaic philosophy of pleasure, whose intellectual cast of mind is shaped by his successive and intense friendships (pre-eminently with Flavian, a ‘brilliant youth’ at school, and Cornelius, a young soldier who harbours Christian knowledge and belief) in the Rome of Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic. It is a pagan world whose brutality and dearth of medical knowledge permit Pater to pursue his preoccupation with death, and to dramatize the argument that the failure of the pagan religions to cope with death convincingly and to provide a satisfactory framework for life leaves theway open to Christianity to dispel the melancholy and sadness with faith, charity, and peace. Moreover, the evident interest of the novel in friendship between young men registers a transition between an initial relationship between Marius and Flavian which is terminated by the death of the latter from the plague and a second friendship, informed by Christianity. It ends with Marius’ sacrifice of his life for his friend, whose stake in the (Christian) future and in the optimism Christianity offers is dramatized by his projected marriage with Celia, an idealized Christian woman and the only female main character in the novel. The death of Marius the Epicurean is also cleverly gathered into the new wisdom by the device of the error of the strangers among whom he dies, who take him for a believer and administer communion to the grateful but passive dying man. The conclusion of the novel highlights the attraction of the early Church for those who converted to Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century, and the attention in the novel to the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the best case for the ‘new Cyrenaicism’, Pater's version of Epicureanism.

Although possessing certain characteristics of imaginative fiction such as a central character, attention to relations among characters, and detailed presentation of setting, the plot and story are frequently obscured (and even lost) by the incidence of other discourses and genres, notably those of philosophy, history, and criticism.