by Walter Pater
It was as a critic and a humanist that Pater (1839-1894), professor at Oxford, became a powerful influence on his own and succeeding generations, claiming disciples as diverse as Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound. This has been described as "the most highly finished of all his works and the expression of his deepest thought". It is the story of Marius, the grave and thoughtful man whose reactions to the diverse philosophical forces of his times the Golden Book of Lucius Apuleius, the stoicism of...