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.
As, in the triumph of Christianity, the old religion lingered latest in thecountry, and died out at last as but paganism—the religion of thevillagers, before the advance of the Christian Church; so, in an earliercentury, it was in places remote from town-life that the older and purer formsof paganism itself had survived the longest. While, in Rome, new religions hadarisen with bewildering complexity around the dying old one, the earlier andsimpler patriarchal religion, “the religion of Numa,” as peopleloved to fancy, lingered on with little change amid the pastoral life, out ofthe habits and sentiment of which so much of it had grown. Glimpses of such asurvival we may catch below the merely artificial attitudes of Latin pastoralpoetry; in Tibullus especially, who has preserved for us many poetic details ofold Roman religious usage.
At mihi contingat patrios celebrare Penates,
Reddereque antiquo menstrua thura Lari:
—he prays, with unaffected seriousness. Something liturgical, withrepetitions of a consecrated form of words, is traceable in one of his elegies,as p