Marius the Epicurean

By Walter Pater

Book Overview

About the Book Historical Fiction books set their characters and plot at some time in the past, providing adequate background on the customes and mores of that time to make it seem believable to the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0460009036
• ISBN13: 9780460009034
• Release Date: January 1968
• Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Lt
• Length: 284 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Stupor mundi

Why does no one read Pater these days? He writes with the fervid delicate beauty of a butterfly defying the storms of winter. As literature becomes ever more commercialised, this sensual celebration seems even more important. A pleasure every bit as sensual and refreshing as a Turkish bath.

Beautiful

Pater was one of the most insightful and exacting critics of England, and his fiction exceeded even his own standards for beauty. Marius the Epicurean is the story of a young man's spiritual and aesthetic awakening in ancient Rome. He journeys from Stoicism to Cyrenaicism to Epicureanism, and finally to Christianity. The book is subtle and profound, and is written in Pater's characteristically lovely prose. I do not recommend this book to anyone who wants a traditional linear plot in which the protagonist is motivated by external events; rather, I recommend it to all who wish "to burn with a hard, gemlike flame," to all who make careful aesthetic contemplation their highest goal.