universal joy; [12] his impatience
to revisit Rome was fondly ascribed to the love of his country; and
his dissolute course of amusements was faintly condemned in a prince of
nineteen years of age.

[Footnote 9: According to Tertullian, (Apolog. c. 25,) he died at
Sirmium. But the situation of Vindobona, or Vienna, where both the
Victors place his death, is better adapted to the operations of the war
against the Marcomanni and Quadi.]

[Footnote 10: Herodian, l. i. p. 12.]

[Footnote 11: Herodian, l. i. p. 16.]

[Footnote 12: This universal joy is well described (from the medals as
well as historians) by Mr. Wotton, Hist. of Rome, p. 192, 193.] During
the three first years of his reign, the forms, and even the spirit, of
the old administration, were maintained by those faithful counsellors,
to whom Marcus had recommended his son, and for whose wisdom and
integrity Commodus still entertained a reluctant esteem. The young
prince and his profligate favorites revelled in all the license of
sovereign power; but his hands were yet unstained with blood; and he
had even displayed a generosity of sentiment, which might perhaps have
ripened into solid virtue. [13] A fatal incident decided his fluctuating
character.

[Footnote 13: Manilius, the confidential secretary of Avidius Cassius,
was discovered after he had lain concealed several years. The emperor
nobly relieved the public anxiety by refusing to see him, and burning
his papers without opening them. Dion Cassius, l. lxxii. p. 1209.]

One evening, as the emperor was returning to the palace, through a dark
and narrow portico in the amphitheatre, [14] an assassin, who waited his
passage, rushed upon him with a drawn sword, loudly exclaiming, "The
senate sends you this." The menace prevented the deed; the assassin
was seized by the guards, and immediately revealed the authors of the
conspiracy. It had been formed, not in the state, but within the walls
of the palace. Lucilla, the emperor's sister, and widow of Lucius Verus,
impatient of the second rank, and jealous of the reigning empress, had
armed the murderer against her brother's life. She had not ventured to
communicate the black design to her second husband, Claudius Pompeiarus,
a senator of distinguished merit and unshaken loyalty; but among the
crowd of her lovers (for she imitated the manners of Faustina) she found
men of desperate fortunes and wild ambition, who were prepared to serve
her more violent, as well