Aurelius and his colleague had scarcely reached Aquileia when a deputation arrived to ask for peace.

And now the two imperial "brothers" were returning home at leisure; were waiting, indeed, at a villa outside the walls, till the capital had made ready to receive them.

But although Rome was thus in genial reaction, with much relief, [180] and hopefulness against the winter, facing itself industriously in damask of red and gold, those two enemies were still unmistakably extant: the barbarian army of the Danube was but over-awed for a season; and the plague, as we saw when Marius was on his way to Rome, was not to depart till it had done a large part in the formation of the melancholy picturesque of modern Italy--till it had made, or prepared for the making of the Roman Campagna.

The old, unaffected, really pagan, peace or gaiety, of Antoninus Pius--that genuine though unconscious humanist--was gone for ever.

And again and again, throughout this day of varied observation, Marius had been reminded, above all else, that he was not merely in "the most religious city of the world," as one had said, but that Rome was become the romantic home of the wildest superstition.