Marius The Epicurean - Literary Significance

Literary Significance

As well as being of interest to students of Pater's ideas and personality (Marius's diary in Chapter XXV has a Montaigne-like candour unusual for Pater) Marius the Epicurean is of interest as "one of the more remarkable fictional experiments of the late nineteenth century". Pater's interspersing of narrative with classical and historical texts – borrowings acknowledged and unacknowledged, translations and adaptations – makes Marius the Epicurean an early example of a novel enriched by intertextuality. These fragments cover a range of discourses – narrative within narrative (from Apuleius), oration (by Fronto), formal dialogue (an abridgement of Lucian's Hermotimus), letters (Eusebius) – which, taken with other metafictional devices – the comparative lack of plot, action, characterisation, time-line and dialogue – make the novel "look forward beyond its century to modern works of fiction". In Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith (chap. 1), Professor Gottlieb tells his medical students (in his accented English), "Before the next lab hour I shall be glad if you will read Pater's 'Marius the Epicurean,' to derife from it the calmness which iss the secret of laboratory skill."