already defeated. Through the fortune of the subsequent years,
passing and repassing so inexplicably from side to side, the rumour
of which reached him amid his own quiet studies, Marius seemed always
to see that central figure, with its habitually dejected hue grown
now to an expression of positive suffering, all the stranger from its
contrast with the magnificent armour worn by the emperor on this
occasion, as it had been worn by his predecessor Hadrian.

Totus et argento contextus et auro:

clothed in its gold and silver, dainty as that old divinely
constructed armour of which Homer tells, but without its miraculous
lightsomeness--he looked out baffled, labouring, moribund; a mere
comfortless shadow taking part in some shadowy reproduction of the
labours of Hercules, through those northern, mist-laden confines of
the civilised world. It was as if the familiar soul which had been
so friendly disposed towards him were actually departed to Hades; and
when he read the Conversations afterwards, though his judgment of
them underwent no material change, it was nevertheless with the
allowance we make for the dead. The memory of that suffering image,
while it certainly strengthened his adhesion [60] to what he could
accept at all in the philosophy of Aurelius, added a strange pathos
to what must seem the writer's mistakes. What, after all, had been
the meaning of that incident, observed as so fortunate an omen long
since, when the prince, then a little child much younger than was
usual, had stood in ceremony among the priests of Mars and flung his
crown of flowers with the rest at the sacred image reclining on the
Pulvinar? The other crowns lodged themselves here or there; when,
Lo! the crown thrown by Aurelius, the youngest of them all, alighted
upon the very brows of the god, as if placed there by a careful hand!