e. Then the
contest began, Commodus shooting from the Imperial Pavilion, his
competitor from any part of the _podium_ which he might choose, so that
both archers were on an equality, being placed on the coping of the arena
at spots they had chosen. The prize went to whichever killed his elephant
with the fewest arrows. Commodus always won. Not that his competitors did
not do their best. They did. But he was, in fact, the best archer alive.
His accuracy of aim was uncanny and his strength really terrific. He could
himself string a hundred and sixty pound bow and he shot a bow even
stiffer than that without apparent effort and with fascinating and
indescribable grace. He never missed, not only not the animal, but not
even the vital part aimed at. I was told that, when he first practiced on
an elephant, he killed it with arrows in the liver, of which eleven were
required to finish the beast. He then had it cut open under Galen's
supervision, he watching. He thereafter never failed to reach an
elephant's heart with his third arrow, killed most with his second, and
not a few with his first, a feat never equaled or approached by any other
archer, for the killing of an elephant with five arrows by Tilla the Goth
remains the best record ever made in the Colosseum by any other bowman.
The impact of his arrows was so weighty that I have beheld one go entirely
through the paunch of a full-grown male elephant and protrude a foot on
the other side.

With rhinoceroses and hippopotami the procedure was similar. Neither of
these animals could be had as plentifully as elephants, of which I saw
Commodus and his competitors kill more than thirty; mostly Mauretanian
elephants, but some Indian and a few Nubian. I saw killed for his
amusements in similar contests in which he participated four rhinoceroses
and six hippopotami. In these matches he killed one rhinoceros with two
arrows and the rest with one; so of the hippopotami. As with the
elephants, after he had seen a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus cut open
under Galen's direction, he retained so vivid an impression of the
location of its heart that, from any direction, whether the beast was
moving or still, he sent his arrow so as to reach the heart. This sounds
incredible, but it is exactly the truth.

As I watched I kept imagining the baking deserts of Libya or the steaming
swamps of Nubia, the shouting hordes of negroes, the many killed by the
beast, its capture, and the infinite and e