throne, and received
all the titles of Imperial power, confirmed by the most sincere vows of
fidelity. The memory of Commodus was branded with eternal infamy. The
names of tyrant, of gladiator, of public enemy resounded in every corner
of the house. They decreed in tumultuous votes, that his honors should
be reversed, his titles erased from the public monuments, his statues
thrown down, his body dragged with a hook into the stripping room of
the gladiators, to satiate the public fury; and they expressed some
indignation against those officious servants who had already presumed
to screen his remains from the justice of the senate. But Pertinax could
not refuse those last rites to the memory of Marcus, and the tears of
his first protector Claudius Pompeianus, who lamented the cruel fate of
his brother-in-law, and lamented still more that he had deserved it.

These effusions of impotent rage against a dead emperor, whom the senate
had flattered when alive with the most abject servility, betrayed a just
but ungenerous spirit of revenge. The legality of these decrees was,
however, supported by the principles of the Imperial constitution. To
censure, to depose, or to punish with death, the first magistrate of
the republic, who had abused his delegated trust, was the ancient and
undoubted prerogative of the Roman senate; but the feeble assembly was
obliged to content itself with inflicting on a fallen tyrant that public
justice, from which, during his life and reign, he had been shielded by
the strong arm of military despotism. *

Pertinax found a nobler way of condemning his predecessor's memory; by
the contrast of his own virtues with the vices of Commodus. On the day
of his accession, he resigned over to his wife and son his whole private
fortune; that they might have no pretence to solicit favors at the
expense of the state. He refused to flatter the vanity of the former
with the title of Augusta; or to corrupt the inexperienced youth of
the latter by the rank of Caesar. Accurately distinguishing between the
duties of a parent and those of a sovereign, he educated his son with a
severe simplicity, which, while it gave him no assured prospect of the
throne, might in time have rendered him worthy of it. In public, the
behavior of Pertinax was grave and affable. He lived with the virtuous
part of the senate, (and, in a private station, he had been acquainted
with the true character of each individual,) without either pride or