the religion of Rome was everywhere in
it, like that perfume of the funeral incense still upon the air, so
also was the memory of crime prompted by a hypocritical cruelty, down
to the erring, or not erring, Vesta calmly buried alive there, only
eighty years ago, under Domitian.

It was with a sense of relief that Marius found himself in the presence
of Aurelius, whose gesture of friendly intelligence, as he entered,
raised a smile at the gloomy train of his own thoughts just then,
although since his first visit to the palace a great change had passed
over it. The clear daylight found its way now into empty rooms. To
raise funds for the war, Aurelius, his luxurious brother being no more,
had determined to sell by auction the accumulated treasures of the
imperial household. The works of art, the dainty furniture, had been
removed, and were now "on view" in the Forum, to be the delight or
dismay, for many weeks to come, of the [36] large public of those who
were curious in these things. In such wise had Aurelius come to the
condition of philosophic detachment he had affected as a boy, hardly
persuaded to wear warm clothing, or to sleep in more luxurious manner
than on the bare floor. But, in his empty house, the man of mind, who
had always made so much of the pleasures of philosophic contemplation,
felt freer in thought than ever. He had been reading, with less
self-reproach than usual, in the Republic of Plato, those passages
which describe the life of the philosopher-kings--like that of hired
servants in their own house--who, possessed of the "gold undefiled" of
intellectual vision, forgo so cheerfully all other riches. It was one
of his happy days: one of those rare days, when, almost with none of
the effort, otherwise so constant with him, his thoughts came rich and
full, and converged in a mental view, as exhilarating to him as the
prospect of some wide expanse of landscape to another man's bodily eye.
He seemed to lie readier than was his wont to the imaginative influence
of the philosophic reason--to its suggestions of a possible open
country, commencing just where all actual experience leaves off, but
which experience, one's own and not another's, may one day occupy. In
fact, he was seeking strength for himself, in his own way, before he
started for that ambiguous earthly warfare [37] which was to occupy the
remainder of his life. "Ever remember this," he writes, "that a happy
life depends, not on many thi