l.

Didius Julianus paid his wager without any show of chagrin, as he could
well afford to do.

At once Commodus offered to bet that he could kill a hundred similar lions
with a bare hundred arrows. Didius at once wagered the same sum he had
just lost and the bet was made. The exhibition was delayed more than a
month until it had been possible to accumulate at Rome a full hundred
full-grown male lions. Then Commodus again shot in sight of a pile of gold
pieces on an expanse of crimson velvet spread on the sand of the arena.

Commodus won as before, with exactly the same number of heart shots and
fancy shots. If one miracle can be greater than another this feat
surpassed its predecessor. For a lion takes a great deal of killing before
he dies, and each of these hundred lions died as quickly as any lion ever
does. Instant killing of a lion with a javelin is a miracle, even more
miraculous is instant killing of a lion with one arrow. Commodus so killed
the full hundred.

I know of no more astounding demonstration of his infallible and
tremendous muscle power than the fact that, shooting at a lion fully
twenty yards away, and in the act of rearing rampantly at the beginning of
a bound, he sent his arrow into the roof of its mouth, through the brain,
the entire length of the spinal cord and so far that its point protruded
from the dead beast's rump above the root of its tail. Galen, who, as
often, was in the amphitheater in case of injury to the Prince, and who
was in the habit of dissecting such dead beasts as interested him, cut
along the path followed by the missile, cleaving the dead lion in two
lengthwise and laying the two halves hide downward on the sand, so as to
demonstrate to a bevy of curious and awed spectators the incredible path
of that arrow.

Commodus lived on miracles. Of all the thousands of darts, javelins and
spears which I saw him throw, of all the countless arrows I saw him shoot,
not one ever missed its mark, not one merely hit the beast aimed at,
everyone, even if launched at an ostrich skimming the sand or a gazelle,
struck deep and true precisely where he had aimed it.

As I am about to narrate the occurrence which put an end to the insensate
indulgence in beast-killing in which Commodus had revelled, I am reminded
that, besides his vilifiers, who assert that he publicly exhibited himself
as an ordinary beast-fighter, and his apologists, who maintain that he not
only did not do so, but never s