. After entering the arena six or seven hundred times, and there
vanquishing men whose eyes had been put out and whose legs were tied,
the colossal statue which Nero had made after his own image was
altered; to the top came the bust of Commodus, to the base this legend:
THE VICTOR OF TEN THOUSAND GLADIATORS, COMMODUS-HERCULES, IMPERATOR.

Meanwhile conspirators were at work. Like Nero, Commodus could have
sought in vain for a friend. His life was attempted again and again; he
escaped, but never the plotters; only when they had gone there were
more. He knew he was doomed. There was the usual comet; the statue of
Hercules had perspired visibly; an owl had been caught above his
bedroom, and once he had wiped in his hair the hand which he had
plunged in the warm wound of a gladiator, dead at his feet. These omens
could mean but one thing. None the less, if he were doomed, so were
others. One day one of those miserable children that the emperors kept
about them found a tablet. It was as good as anything else to play
with; and, as the child tossed it through the hall, the one woman that
had loved Commodus caught it and read on it that she and all the
household were to die. Within an hour Commodus was killed.

There is a page in Lampridus, which he quotes as coming from the lost
chronicles of Marius Maximus, and which contains the joy of the senate
at the news. It is too long for transcription, but as a bit of realism
it is unique. There is a shiver in every line. You hear the voices of
hundreds, drunk with fury, frenzied with delight; the fierce welcome
that greeted Pertinax--a slave's grandson, who was emperor for a
minute--the joy of hate assuaged.

The delight of the senate was not shared by the pretorians. Pertinax
was promptly massacred; the throne was put up at auction; there were
two or three emperors at once, and presently the purple was seized by
Septimus Severus, a rigid, white-haired disciplinarian, who, in his
admiration for Marcus Aurelius, founded that second dynasty of the
Antonins with which antiquity may be said to end.

When he had gone, his elder son, Bastian, renamed Aurelius Antonin, and
because of a cloak he had invented nicknamed Caracalla, bounded like a
panther on the throne. In a moment he was gnawing at his brother's
throat, and immediately there occurred a massacre such as Rome had
never seen. Xiphilin says the nights were not long enough to kill all
of the condemned. Twenty thousand people were