Notes: I have placed an asterisk immediately after each of Pater’sfootnotes and a + sign after my own notes, and have listed each of my notes atthat chapter’s end.
Greek typeface: For this full-text edition, I have transliterated Pater’sGreek quotations. If there is a need for the original Greek, it can be viewedat my site, http://www.ajdrake.com/etexts, a Victorianist archive that containsthe complete works of Walter Pater and many other nineteenth-century texts,mostly in first editions.
Χειμερινὸςὄνειρος, ὅτεμήκισται αἱνύκτες+
+“A winter’s dream, when nights are longest.”
Lucian, The Dream, Vol. 3.
The very finest flower of the same company—Aurelius with the gildedfasces borne before him, a crowd of exquisites, the empress Faustina herself,and all the elegant blue-stockings of the day, who maintained, people said,their private “sophists” to whisper philosophy into their earswinsomely as they performed the duties of the toilet—was assembled againa few months later, in a different place and for a very different purpose. Thetemple of Peace, a “modernising” foundation of Hadrian, enlarged bya library and lecture-rooms, had grown into an institution like somethingbetween a college and a literary club; and here Cornelius Fronto was topronounce a discourse on the Nature of Morals. There were some, indeed, who haddesired the emperor Aurelius himself to declare his whole mind on this matter.Rhetoric was become almost a function of the state: philosophy was upon thethrone; and had from time to time, by request, delivered an official utterancewith well-nigh divine authority. And it was as the delegate of this authority,under the full sanction of the philosophic emperor—emperor and pontiff,that the aged Fronto purposed to-day to expound some parts of the Stoicdoctrine, with the view of recommending morals to that refine