s who shouldered one another for a place beside him as he
hurried down the tunnel:

"How could Rome replace me? Yesterday I had to order a slave beaten to
death for breaking a vase of Greek glass. I can buy a hundred slaves
for half what that glass cost Hadrian. And I could have a thousand
better senators tomorrow than the fools who belch and stammer in the
curia, the senate house. But where would you find another Commodus if
some lurking miscreant should stab me from behind? It was the geese
that saved the capitol. You cacklers can preserve your Commodus."

They agreed in chorus, it would be Rome's irreparable loss if he should
die, and certain senators, more fertile than the others in expedients
for drawing his attention to themselves, paused ostentatiously to hold a
little conversation with the guards and promise them rewards if they
should catch a miscreant lurking in wait to attack "our beloved, our
glorious emperor."

Commodus overheard them, as they meant he should.

"And such fulsome idiots as those expect me to believe they can frame
laws!" He scowled over-shoulder. "Write down their names for me,
somebody. The senate needs pruning! I will purge it the way Galen used
to purge me when I had the colic! Cioscuri! But these leaky babblers
suffocate me!"

He was true to the Caesarian tradition. He believed himself a god. He
more than half-persuaded other men. His almost superhuman energy and
skill with weapons, his terrific storms of anger and his magnetism
overawed courtiers and politicians as they did the gladiators whom he
slew in the arena. The strain of madness in his blood provided cunning
that could mask itself beneath a princely bluster of indifference to
consequences. He could fear with an extravagance coequal to the fury of
his love of danger, and his fear struck terror into men's hearts, as it
stirred his mad brain into frenzies.

He made no false claim when he called Rome the City of Commodus and
himself the Roman Hercules. The vast majority of Romans were unfit to
challenge his contempt of them, and his contempt was never under cover
for a moment.

Debauchery, of wine and women, entered not at all into his private life
although, in public, he encouraged it in others for the simple reason
that it weakened men who otherwise might turn on him. He was never
guilty of excesses that might undermine his strength or shake his
nerves; there was an almost superhuman purity about his wor