merely negative element of purity, the mere freedom from
taint or flaw, in exercise [34] as a positive influence. Long
afterwards, when Marius read the Charmides--that other dialogue of
Plato, into which he seems to have expressed the very genius of old
Greek temperance--the image of this speaker came back vividly before
him, to take the chief part in the conversation.

It was as a weighty sanction of such temperance, in almost visible
symbolism (an outward imagery identifying itself with unseen
moralities) that the memory of that night's double experience, the
dream of the great sallow snake and the utterance of the young priest,
always returned to him, and the contrast therein involved made him
revolt with unfaltering instinct from the bare thought of an excess in
sleep, or diet, or even in matters of taste, still more from any excess
of a coarser kind.

When he awoke again, still in the exceeding freshness he had felt on
his arrival, and now in full sunlight, it was as if his sickness had
really departed with the terror of the night: a confusion had passed
from the brain, a painful dryness from his hands. Simply to be alive
and there was a delight; and as he bathed in the fresh water set ready
for his use, the air of the room about him seemed like pure gold, the
very shadows rich with colour. Summoned at length by one of the
white-robed brethren, he went out to walk in the temple garden. At a
distance, on either side, his guide pointed out to him the Houses of
Birth and Death, erected for the reception [35] respectively of women
about to become mothers, and of persons about to die; neither of those
incidents being allowed to defile, as was thought, the actual precincts
of the shrine. His visitor of the previous night he saw nowhere again.
But among the official ministers of the place there was one, already
marked as of great celebrity, whom Marius saw often in later days at
Rome, the physician Galen, now about thirty years old. He was
standing, the hood partly drawn over his face, beside the holy well, as
Marius and his guide approached it.

This famous well or conduit, primary cause of the temple and its
surrounding institutions, was supplied by the water of a spring flowing
directly out of the rocky foundations of the shrine. From the rim of
its basin rose a circle of trim columns to support a cupola of singular
lightness and grace, itself full of reflected light from the rippling
surface, through which