Marius the Epicurean

Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894) was an English essayist, critic of art and literature, and writer of fiction. In his philosophical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), an extended imaginary portrait set in the Rome of the Antonines, Pater examines the "sensations and ideas" of a young Roman of integrity, who pursues a life based on the pursuit of sensations and ideas as an ideal in itself.