indulging his sensual appetites. His hours were spent in a
seraglio of three hundred beautiful women, and as many boys, of every
rank, and of every province; and, wherever the arts of seduction proved
ineffectual, the brutal lover had recourse to violence. The ancient
historians have expatiated on these abandoned scenes of prostitution,
which scorned every restraint of nature or modesty; but it would not be
easy to translate their too faithful descriptions into the decency of
modern language. The intervals of lust were filled up with the basest
amusements. The influence of a polite age, and the labor of an attentive
education, had never been able to infuse into his rude and brutish
mind the least tincture of learning; and he was the first of the Roman
emperors totally devoid of taste for the pleasures of the understanding.
Nero himself excelled, or affected to excel, in the elegant arts
of music and poetry: nor should we despise his pursuits, had he not
converted the pleasing relaxation of a leisure hour into the serious
business and ambition of his life. But Commodus, from his earliest
infancy, discovered an aversion to whatever was rational or liberal, and
a fond attachment to the amusements of the populace; the sports of the
circus and amphitheatre, the combats of gladiators, and the hunting
of wild beasts. The masters in every branch of learning, whom Marcus
provided for his son, were heard with inattention and disgust; whilst
the Moors and Parthians, who taught him to dart the javelin and to shoot
with the bow, found a disciple who delighted in his application, and
soon equalled the most skilful of his instructors in the steadiness of
the eye and the dexterity of the hand.

The servile crowd, whose fortune depended on their master's vices,
applauded these ignoble pursuits. The perfidious voice of flattery
reminded him, that by exploits of the same nature, by the defeat of
the Nemaean lion, and the slaughter of the wild boar of Erymanthus, the
Grecian Hercules had acquired a place among the gods, and an immortal
memory among men. They only forgot to observe, that, in the first
ages of society, when the fiercer animals often dispute with man the
possession of an unsettled country, a successful war against those
savages is one of the most innocent and beneficial labors of heroism. In
the civilized state of the Roman empire, the wild beasts had long since
retired from the face of man, and the neighborhood of populous ci