judgment of Lucretius on pagan religion is without
reproach--

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.

And Marius, weary and indignant, feeling isolated in the great
slaughter-house, could not but observe that, in his habitual
complaisance to Lucius Verus, who, with loud shouts of applause from
time to time, lounged beside him, Aurelius had sat impassibly through
all the hours Marius himself had remained there. For the most part
indeed, the emperor had actually averted his eyes from the show,
reading, or writing on matters of public business, but had seemed,
after all, indifferent. He was revolving, perhaps, that old Stoic
paradox of the Imperceptibility of pain; which might serve as an
excuse, should those savage popular humours ever again turn against men
and women. Marius remembered well his very attitude and expression on
this day, when, a few years later, certain things came to pass in Gaul,
under his full authority; and that attitude and expression [241]
defined already, even thus early in their so friendly intercourse, and
though he was still full of gratitude for his interest, a permanent
point of difference between the emperor and himself--between himself,
with all the convictions of his life taking centre to-day in his
merciful, angry heart, and Aurelius, as representing all the light, all
the apprehensive power there might be in pagan intellect. There was
something in a tolerance such as this, in the bare fact that he could
sit patiently through a scene like this, which seemed to Marius to mark
Aurelius as his inferior now and for ever on the question of
righteousness; to set them on opposite sides, in some great conflict,
of which that difference was but a single presentment. Due, in
whatever proportions, to the abstract principles he had formulated for
himself, or in spite of them, there was the loyal conscience within
him, deciding, judging himself and every one else, with a wonderful
sort of authority:--You ought, methinks, to be something quite
different from what you are; here! and here! Surely Aurelius must be
lacking in that decisive conscience at first sight, of the intimations
of which Marius could entertain no doubt--which he looked for in
others. He at least, the humble follower of the bodily eye, was aware
of a crisis in life, in this brief, obscure existence, a fierce
opposition of real good and real evil around him, the issues of which
he must by no [242] means compromise or conf