- Mass Market Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Reissue edition (29 Aug 1985)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140432361
- ISBN-13: 978-0140432367
- Product Dimensions: 20.3 x 13.2 x 1.8 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 335,289 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Marius the Epicurean
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More About the Author
Product Description
Product Description
An imaginary historical portrait in which Marius is offered as a kind of self-portrait of Pater transferred to the Rome of Marcus Aurelius. Marius speculates on various views of art and life. The love of art for art's sake is advocated, as is the moral obligation to lead a good and ordered life.
About the Author
Walter Horatio Pater (1839 - 1894), anEnglish critic, essayist, and humanist, was born in Stepney, England. In 1864 he secured a fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford. As an aesthete, he started writingarticles of criticism that were collected in his Studies in the History of the Renaissance in 1873. His style was precise, subtle, and refined. Pater was a proponent of the doctrine of art for art's sake. Another notable work isMarius the Epicurean (1885).
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4 reviews
37 of 38 people found the following review helpful
Beautiful
4 April 2000
Format:Mass Market Paperback
Pater was one of the most insightful and exacting critics of England, and his fiction exceeded even his own standards for beauty. Marius the Epicurean is the story of a young man's spiritual and aesthetic awakening in ancient Rome. He journeys from Stoicism to Cyrenaicism to Epicureanism, and finally to Christianity. The book is subtle and profound, and is written in Pater's characteristically lovely prose. I do not recommend this book to anyone who wants a traditional linear plot in which the protagonist is motivated by external events; rather, I recommend it to all who wish "to burn with a hard, gemlike flame," to all who make careful aesthetic contemplation their highest goal.
16 of 17 people found the following review helpful
Stupor mundi
5 April 2003
Format:Paperback
Why does no one read Pater these days? He writes with the fervid delicate beauty of a butterfly defying the storms of winter. As literature becomes ever more commercialised, this sensual celebration seems even more important. A pleasure every bit as sensual and refreshing as a Turkish bath.
8 of 17 people found the following review helpful
One long exercise in navel gazing
15 Oct 2007
Format:Mass Market Paperback
To think that I intended for years to read this book! I've slogged through the first ten chapters, and it's a chore to continue.
The novel purports to be a history of the interior life of a member of the rural Roman gentry in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Not for one moment do I believe that I am reading the history of the thoughts or feelings of a Roman. What it actually is, is a transcript of the hothouse fantasies of a late-Victorian aesthete imagining how neat it would have been if he and his effete friends had been walking around in all those villas, wearing flowing togas. The narrator's story is so suffocatingly self-involved, and takes so many words to say what could be said in about ten words or less, that you find yourself longing for a car chase or an explosion, unfortunately impossible in the age of the Antonines.
I have just encountered one of the biggest howlers of all, a brief episode in which Marius's new friend, Cornelius, a military tribune, passes the time by showing off to Marius every bit of his military gear. How completely asinine. Show me a Roman soldier who ever did such a thing, and I'll eat my hat.
It's ironic that I've come to this book immediately after finishing "Quo Vadis." Now *there* was a book in which, when I read about the elegant, cynical aesthete, Petronius, I believed that I was reading a likely characterization of a recognizable human type, who really could have existed in Imperial Rome. Marius, by contrast, is so busy fondly inspecting his own interior mental state that I'm amazed he notices the outside world at all. And when it does suddenly intrude on his consciousness, as in the episode when an outcropping of rock suddenly crashes where Marius had been walking only moments before, he is so undone by it that he becomes paranoid and begins to imagine that "enemies" are after him!
Here's another irony: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is one of my favorite books, and I could probably read Book I once a week without ever growing tired of it. Pater seems to think that Marius is right at home in the age of Marcus, but they are worlds apart, and I can only wish that when Marius reached Rome, Marcus would throw him to the lions or something.
If you want a picture of how Romans in that day thought, read some of their writings, including the Meditations. If you want an example of the literature of the Victorian aesthetes that at least embraces their ethos wholeheartedly and presents an unapologetic picture of their mind-set, read "The Picture of Dorian Gray." But this book--good grief! What a load of namby pamby, piddling, hogwash.
The novel purports to be a history of the interior life of a member of the rural Roman gentry in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. Not for one moment do I believe that I am reading the history of the thoughts or feelings of a Roman. What it actually is, is a transcript of the hothouse fantasies of a late-Victorian aesthete imagining how neat it would have been if he and his effete friends had been walking around in all those villas, wearing flowing togas. The narrator's story is so suffocatingly self-involved, and takes so many words to say what could be said in about ten words or less, that you find yourself longing for a car chase or an explosion, unfortunately impossible in the age of the Antonines.
I have just encountered one of the biggest howlers of all, a brief episode in which Marius's new friend, Cornelius, a military tribune, passes the time by showing off to Marius every bit of his military gear. How completely asinine. Show me a Roman soldier who ever did such a thing, and I'll eat my hat.
It's ironic that I've come to this book immediately after finishing "Quo Vadis." Now *there* was a book in which, when I read about the elegant, cynical aesthete, Petronius, I believed that I was reading a likely characterization of a recognizable human type, who really could have existed in Imperial Rome. Marius, by contrast, is so busy fondly inspecting his own interior mental state that I'm amazed he notices the outside world at all. And when it does suddenly intrude on his consciousness, as in the episode when an outcropping of rock suddenly crashes where Marius had been walking only moments before, he is so undone by it that he becomes paranoid and begins to imagine that "enemies" are after him!
Here's another irony: the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius is one of my favorite books, and I could probably read Book I once a week without ever growing tired of it. Pater seems to think that Marius is right at home in the age of Marcus, but they are worlds apart, and I can only wish that when Marius reached Rome, Marcus would throw him to the lions or something.
If you want a picture of how Romans in that day thought, read some of their writings, including the Meditations. If you want an example of the literature of the Victorian aesthetes that at least embraces their ethos wholeheartedly and presents an unapologetic picture of their mind-set, read "The Picture of Dorian Gray." But this book--good grief! What a load of namby pamby, piddling, hogwash.
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