ABSTRACT
Pater's characterisation of Euripides's The Bacchae as the work of an iconoclast mellowed by age and reconciled to 'accustomed ideas' regarding religion will likely strike readers who turn from The Renaissance to Marius the Epicurean as one of many moments of thinly veiled self-portraiture in Pater's writing. This chapter argues that Marius the Epicurean meditates on the implications of the mainstreaming of religious doubt and agnosticism in the 1870s and early 1880s. Pater had at least one prestigious contemporary model for his construction of a narratorial voice at once so sceptical and so sympathetic toward religion as to be opaque to the reading public. Romola was Pater's favourite among George Eliot's novels. David DeLaura has argued that the influence of Romola on Pater's career is extensive, shaping his references to Savonarola in The Renaissance and supplying him with a model for an 'agnostic conversion' novel in Marius the Epicurean.
