[27] THAT almost morbid religious idealism, and his healthful love of
the country, were both alike developed by the circumstances of a
journey, which happened about this time, when Marius was taken to a
certain temple of Aesculapius, among the hills of Etruria, as was
then usual in such cases, for the cure of some boyish sickness. The
religion of Aesculapius, though borrowed from Greece, had been
naturalised in Rome in the old republican times; but had reached
under the Antonines the height of its popularity throughout the Roman
world. That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of
imaginary ones; but below its various crazes concerning health and
disease, largely multiplied a few years after the time of which I am
speaking by the miseries of a great pestilence, lay a valuable,
because partly practicable, belief that all the maladies of the soul
might be reached through the subtle gateways of the body.

[28] Salus, salvation, for the Romans, had come to mean bodily
sanity. The religion of the god of bodily health, Salvator, as they
called him absolutely, had a chance just then of becoming the one
religion; that mild and philanthropic son of Apollo surviving, or
absorbing, all other pagan godhead. The apparatus of the medical
art, the salutary mineral or herb, diet or abstinence, and all the
varieties of the bath, came to have a kind of sacramental character,
so deep was the feeling, in more serious minds, of a moral or
spiritual profit in physical health, beyond the obvious bodily
advantages one had of it; the body becoming truly, in that case, but
a quiet handmaid of the soul. The priesthood or "family" of
Aesculapius, a vast college, believed to be in possession of certain
precious medical secrets, came nearest perhaps, of all the
institutions of the pagan world, to the Christian priesthood; the
temples of the god, rich in some instances with the accumulated