Then comes Marius’ first sight of Rome, his realisation of the fact that it was, beside being a city of palaces, become the romantic home of the most restless religious instinct, of the wildest superstition. Religions were draining into Rome, as the rivers into the sea. In the midst moved the stately figure of the Stoic Emperor, whom Marius first sees in a religious procession, and whose calm face, with its prominent eyes demurely downcast, but yet “broadly and benignantly observant,” candid gaze, and ascetic air, as though “the flesh had scarcely been an equal gainer with the spirit,” impressed him profoundly. With him walked the goodly, comely, sensual Lucius Verus, the other Augustus, with his “strange capacity for misusing the adornments of life, with a masterly grace.” Then follows the Emperor’s discourse on the Vanity of Human Ambitions, delivered in the Senate, a skilful cento of aphorisms taken from the _Meditations_, and finally Marius’ introduction to the Imperial household, his sight of Faustina the Empress, Fronto the philosopher, and the Emperor himself. He sees, too, a gladiatorial show, at which the Emperor sits impassibly, writing and reading, and wonders at the tolerance, “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.” It may be freely confessed that Pater does contrive, by pathetic and emotional touches, to bring out with wonderful vividness the human charm of the Emperor, his deep patience, his fatigue, his affectionateness, his devotion to duty. He and Flavian remain as the two vital figures of the book, apart from the hero himself; and it may be held a true triumph of a species of historical art to have evolved so real, so dignified, so intensely vivid a figure out of the somewhat chilly abstractedness that had hitherto surrounded the philosophic Lord of legions, the Stoic master of the world. In the third part of _Marius_, which is much shorter than any of the other parts, the revelation grows more distinct. Marius, overcome with doubt as to whether his new intellectual scheme can be harmonised with the old serious morality of his childhood, hears a discourse by Fronto on the question of morals.