A thoughtful young Roman under Marcus Aurelius moves through the philosophies on offer — Epicurean, Stoic, Christian — testing each against the fact that he will die. Pater's conclusion to The Renaissance, urging readers to burn with a hard gemlike flame, had been taken up by Wilde's generation as a license; he wrote this long, slow novel to explain that he had meant something more serious. Fifty-seven plates, from Mantegna's Triumphs of Caesar to Piranesi's Roman prisons, trace the classical world Marius weighs and loses.
