se were slaughtered by the priests. Even on the
last day of the solemnity, when the emperor himself performed one of
the oldest ceremonies of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety had
asserted itself. There were victims enough certainly, brought from the
choice pastures of the Sabine mountains, and conducted around the city
they were to die for, in almost continuous procession, covered with
flowers and well-nigh worried to death before the time by the crowds of
people superstitiously pressing to touch them. But certain
old-fashioned Romans, in these exceptional circumstances, demanded
something more than this, in the way of a human sacrifice after the
ancient pattern; as when, not so long since, some Greeks or Gauls had
been buried alive in the Forum. At least, human blood should be shed;
and it was through a wild multitude of fanatics, cutting their flesh
with knives and whips and licking up ardently the crimson stream, that
the emperor repaired to the temple of Bellona, and in solemn symbolic
act cast the bloodstained spear, or "dart," carefully preserved there,
towards the enemy's country-- [45] towards that unknown world of German
homes, still warm, as some believed under the faint northern twilight,
with those innocent affections of which Romans had lost the sense. And
this at least was clear, amid all doubts of abstract right or wrong on
either side, that the ruin of those homes was involved in what Aurelius
was then preparing for, with,--Yes! the gods be thanked for that
achievement of an invigorating philosophy!--almost with a light heart.

For, in truth, that departure, really so difficult to him, for which
Marcus Aurelius had needed to brace himself so strenuously, came to
test the power of a long-studied theory of practice; and it was the
development of this theory--a theoria, literally--a view, an intuition,
of the most important facts, and still more important possibilities,
concerning man in the world, that Marius now discovered, almost as if
by accident, below the dry surface of the manuscripts entrusted to him.
The great purple rolls contained, first of all, statistics, a general
historical account of the writer's own time, and an exact diary; all
alike, though in three different degrees of nearness to the writer's
own personal experience, laborious, formal, self-suppressing. This was
for the instruction of the public; and part of it has, perhaps, found
its way into the Augustan Histories. But i