Walter Pater famously conceived of his 1885 historical novel Marius the Epicurean as an opportunity to recontextualise the ideas he had broached in his infamous conclusion to his earlier Renaissance (1873). In his novel, he sought to highlight an ethical distinction he hoped to establish between a ‘true’ Epicureanism (a rounded aestheticism) and a degenerate decadence. It was this nuanced and renewed idea, drawn from a classical heritage and repurposed for a Victorian audience, that underwrote Pater’s attack on the ‘unsuccessful experiment[s] in Epicureanism’ represented by the protagonist in his review of Wilde’s Dorian Gray. But while scholars have identified some of Pater’s sources for his discussion of Epicureanism in his novel, showing how he engaged with classical scholarship, the ways in which he intervened into an existing nineteenth century discourse of the reception of Epicurus’ philosophy has not been widely studied. This paper will attempt to offer a preliminary mapping of the ways in which Pater’s Marius represents a form of Epicureanism both based on classical models and sensitive to the, often openly polemic, Victorian reception of Epicurus. It will discuss the ways in which Pater’s Epicureanism replies to the moral aesthetic theory of John Ruskin, and the ethical philosophical approach exemplified by William Wallace, a key figure in British Idealism. The paper shows the ways in which Pater’s renewal of his own aestheticism in the novel itself offered a chance at a renewed engagement with his peers.