A host of companions, guides, helpers, about him from of old time, "the very court and company of heaven," objects for him of personal reverence and affection--the supposed presence of the ancient popular gods determined the character of much of his daily life, and might prove the last stay of human nature at its weakest.
"In every time and place," he had said, "it rests with thyself to use the event of the hour religiously: at all seasons worship the gods." And when he said "Worship the gods!" he did it, as strenuously as everything else.
Yet here again, how often must he have experienced disillusion, or even some revolt of [43] feeling, at that contact with coarser natures to which his religious conclusions exposed him.

At the beginning of the year one hundred and seventy-three public anxiety was as great as ever; and as before it brought people's superstition into unreserved play.
For seven days the images of the old gods, and some of the graver new ones, lay solemnly exposed in the open air, arrayed in all their ornaments, each in his separate resting-place, amid lights and burning incense, while the crowd, following the imperial example, daily visited them, with offerings of flowers to this or that particular divinity, according to the devotion of each.
But supplementing these older official observances, the very wildest gods had their share of worship,--strange creatures with strange secrets startled abroad into open daylight.

The delirious sort of religion of which Marius was a spectator in the streets of Rome, during the seven days of the Lectisternium, reminded him now and again of an observation of Apuleius: it was "as if the presence of the gods did not do men good, but disordered or weakened them." Some jaded women of fashion, especially, found in certain oriental devotions, at once relief for their religiously tearful souls and an opportunity for personal display; preferring this or that "mystery," chiefly because the attire required in it was suitable to their peculiar manner of beauty.

And one morning Marius [44] encountered an extraordinary crimson object, borne in a litter through an excited crowd--the famous courtesan Benedicta, still fresh from the bath of blood, to which she had submitted herself, sitting below the scaffold where the victims provided for that purpose were slaughtered by the priests.

Even on the last day of the solemnity, when the emperor himself performed one of the oldest ceremonies of the Roman religion, this fantastic piety had asserted itself.