, certainly, a consolation, whenever the
wings of his own soul flagged in the trying atmosphere of purely
intellectual vision. A host of companions, guides, helpers, about him
from of old time, "the very court and company of heaven," objects for
him of personal reverence and affection--the supposed presence of the
ancient popular gods determined the character of much of his daily
life, and might prove the last stay of human nature at its weakest.
"In every time and place," he had said, "it rests with thyself to use
the event of the hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods."
And when he said "Worship the gods!" he did it, as strenuously as
everything else.

Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or even
some revolt of [43] feeling, at that contact with coarser natures to
which his religious conclusions exposed him. At the beginning of the
year one hundred and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever;
and as before it brought people's superstition into unreserved play.
For seven days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new
ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their
ornaments, each in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning
incense, while the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited
them, with offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity,
according to the devotion of each.

But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest
gods had their share of worship,--strange creatures with strange
secrets startled abroad into open daylight. The delirious sort of
religion of which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during
the seven days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an
observation of Apuleius: it was "as if the presence of the gods did not
do men good, but disordered or weakened them." Some jaded women of
fashion, especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once
relief for their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for
personal display; preferring this or that "mystery," chiefly because
the attire required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of
beauty. And one morning Marius [44] encountered an extraordinary
crimson object, borne in a litter through an excited crowd--the famous
courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the bath of blood, to which she
had submitted herself, sitting below the scaffold where the victims
provided for that purpo