Caesar Dies - Talbot Mundy
"Well, for instance, you could almost certainly buy your freedom by
betraying me," said Sextus. "Why don't you?"
"Jupiter! How shall a man answer that? I suppose I don't betray you
because if I did I should loathe myself. And I prefer to like myself,
which I contrive to do at intervals. Also, I enjoy the company of
honest men, and I think you are honest, although I think you are also an
idealist--which, I take it, is the same thing as a born fool, or so I
have begun to think, since I attend on the emperor and have to hear so
much talk of philosophy. Look you what philosophy has made of Commodus!
Didn't Marcus Aurelius beget him from his own loins, and wasn't Marcus
Aurelius the greatest of all philosophers? Didn't he surround young
Commodus with all the learned idealists he could find? That is what I
am told he did. And look at Commodus! Our Roman Commodus! God
Commodus! I haven't murdered him because I am afraid, and because I
don't see how I could gain by it. I don't betray you because I would
despise myself if I did."
"I would despise myself if I should be untrue to Rome," Sextus answered
after a moment. "Commodus is not Rome. Neither is the mob Rome."
"What is then?" Narcissus asked. "The bricks and mortar? The marble
that the slaves must haul under the lash? The ponds where they feed
their lampreys on dead gladiators? The arena where a man salutes a
dummy emperor before a disguised one kills him? The senate, where they
buy and sell the consulates and praetorships and guaestorships? The
tribunals where justice goes by privilege? The temples where as many
gods as there are, Romans yell for sacrifices to enrich the priests?
The farms where the slave-gangs labor like poor old Sysyphus and are
sold off in their old age to the contractors who clear the latrines, or
to the galleys, or, if they're lucky, to the lime-kilns where they dry
up like sticks and die soon? There is a woman in a side-street near the
fish-market, who is very rich and looks like Rome to me. She has so
many gold rings on her fingers that you can't see the dirt underneath;
and she owns so many brothels and wine-shops that she can even buy off
the tax-collectors. Do I love her? Do I love Rome? No! I love you,
Sextus, son of Maximus, and I will go with you to the world's end if you
will lead the way."
"I love Rome," Sextus answered. "Possibly I want to see her liberties
restored because I love my own liberty and can't imagine myself
honorable unless Rome herself is honored first. When you and I are sick
we need a Galen. Rome needs Pertinax. You ask me what is Rome? She is
the cradle of my manhood."
"A befouled nest!" said Narcissus.
"An Augean stable with a Hercules who doesn't do his work, I grant you!
But we can substitute another Hercules."
"Pertinax is too old," Narcissus objected, weakening, a trifle sulkily.
"He is old enough to wish to die in honor rather than dishonor. You and
I, Narcissus, have no honor--you a slave and I an outlaw. Let us win,
then, honor for ourselves by helping to heal Rome of her dishonor!"
"Oh well, have it your own way," said Narcissus, unconvinced. "A brass
as for your honor! The alternative is death or liberty in either case,
and as for me, I prefer friendship to religion, so I will follow you,
whichever road you take. Now go. These fellows mustn't recognize you.
It is time to take them one by one into the exercising yard. I daren't
take more than one at a time or they'd kill me even with the blunted
practise-weapons. I wish they might face Commodus as boldly as they
tackle me! I am a weary man, and many times a bruised one, I can tell
you, when the night comes, after putting twenty of them through their
paces."
IX. STEWED EELS
The training arena where Commodus worked off energy and kept his
Herculean muscles in condition was within the palace grounds, but the
tunnel by which he reached it continued on and downward to the Circus
Maximus, so that he could attend the public spectacles without much
danger of assassination.
Nevertheless, a certain danger still existed. One of his worst frenzies
of proscription had been started by a man who waited for him in the
tunnel, and lost his nerve and then, instead of killing him, pretended
to deliver an insulting message from the senate. Since that time the
tunnel had been lined with guards at regular intervals, and when
Commodus passed through his mysterious "double" was obliged to walk in
front of him surrounded by enough attendants to make any one not in the
secret believe the double was the emperor himself.
No man in the known world was less incapable than Commodus of self-
defense against an armed man. There was no deception about his feats of
strength and skill; he was undoubtedly the most terrific fighter and
consummate athlete Rome had ever seen, and he was as proud of it as Nero
once was of his "golden voice." But, as he explained to the fawning
courtiers 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 worship of
athletic powers. He outdid the Greeks in that respect. But he allowed
the legend of his monstrous orgies in the palace to gain currency,
partly because that encouraged the Romans to debauch themselves and
render themselves incapable of overthrowing him, and partly because it
helped to cover up his trick of employing a substitute to occupy the
royal pavilion at the games when he himself drove chariots in the races
or fought in the arena as the gladiator Paulus.
Men who had let wine and women ruin their own nerves knew it was
impossible that any one, who lived as Commodus was said to do, could
drive a chariot and wield a javelin as Paulus did. Whoever faced a
Roman gladiator under the critical gaze of a crowd that knew all the
points of fighting and could instantly detect, and did instantly resent
pretense, fraud, trickery, the poor condition of one combatant or the
unwillingness of one man to have at another in deadly earnest, had to be
not only in the pink of bodily condition but a fighter such as no
drunken sensualist could ever hope to be. So it was easy to suppress
the scandal that the gladiator Paulus was the emperor himself, although
half Rome half-believed it; and the substitute who occupied the seat of
honor at the games--ageing a little, growing a little pouchy under eyes
and chin--was pointed to as proof that Commodus was being ruined by the
life he led.
The trick of making use of the same substitute to save the emperor the
boredom of official ceremony, whenever there was no risk of the public
coming close enough to detect the fraud, materially helped to strengthen
the officially fostered argument that Commodus could not be Paulus.
So the mystery of the identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and
most secrets of intriguing governments, no mystery at all to hundreds,
but to thousands an insoluble conundrum. The official propagandists of
the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which
facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage from
the lips of slaves and gladiators by disseminating artfully concocted
news. Those actually in the secret, flattered by the confidence and
fearful for their own skins, steadfastly denied the story when it
cropped up. Last, but not least, was the law, that made it sacrilege to
speak in terms derogatory to the emperor. A gladiator, though the crowd
might almost deify him, was a casteless individual, unprivileged before
the law, whom any franchised citizen would rate as socially far beneath
himself. To have identified the emperor with Paulus in a voice above a
whisper would have made the culprit liable to death and confiscation of
his goods.
The substitute himself, a man of mystery, was kept in virtual
imprisonment. He was known as "Pavonius Nasor," not because that was
his real name, which was known to very few people, but because of an old
legend that the ghost of a certain Pavonius Nasor, murdered centuries
ago and never buried, still walked in the neighborhood of that part of
the palace where the emperor's substitute now led his mysterious, secret
existence.
There were plenty of whispered stories current as to his true identity.
Some said he was an impoverished landholder whom Commodus had met by
accident when traveling in Northern Italy. But it was much more commonly
believed he was the emperor's twin brother, spirited away at birth by
midwives, and the stories told to account for that were as remarkably
unlikely as the tale itself; as for instance, that a soothsayer had
prophesied how Commodus should one day mount the throne and that he and
his twin brother would wreck Rome in civil war--a warning hardly likely
to have had much weight with the father, Marcus Aurelius, although the
mother was more likely to have given credence to it.
Whatever the truth of his origin, Pavonius Nasor never ran the risk of
telling it. He kept his sinecure by mastering his tongue, preserving
almost bovine speechlessness. When he and Commodus met face to face he
never seemed to see the joke of the resemblance, never laughed at
Commodus' obscenely vivid jibes at his expense, nor once complained of
his anomalous position. He appeared to be a man of no ambition other
than to get through life as easily as might be--of no personal dignity,
no ruling habits, but possessed of imitative talent that enabled him,
without the slightest trouble, to adopt the very gait and gesture of the
emperor whom he impersonated.
As he strode ahead along the tunnel he received the guards' salute with
merely enough nod of recognition to deceive an onlooker not in the
secret. (It was Pavonius Nasor's half-indulgent, rather lazy smile that
had persuaded Rome and even the praetorian guards that Commodus was an
easy-going, sensual, good humored man.)
There was a box at one end of the private arena, over the gate where the
horses entered, so placed as to avoid the sun's direct rays. It was
reached by a short stairway from an anteroom that opened on the tunnel.
There was no other means of access to the box. It's wooden sidewalls,
finished to resemble gilded eagle's wings, projected over the arena so
that it was well screened and in shadow. There was none, observing from
below, who could have sworn it had not been the emperor himself who sat
in the box and watched Paulus the gladiator showing off his skill.
The assembled gladiators, perfectly aware of Paulus' true identity, went
through the farce of solemnly saluting as the emperor the man who stared
down at them from beneath an awning's shadow between golden eagle's
wings, and who returned the salute with a wave of the arm that all Rome
could have recognized.
Commodus, nearly as naked as when he was born, came running from a
dressing room and pranced and leaped over the sand to bring the sweat-
beads to his skin; then, snatching at the nearest gladiator, wrestled
with him until the breathless victim cried for mercy; dropped him then,
as crushed as if a python had left a job half-finished, and shouted for
the ashen sword-sticks. In a minute, with a leather buckler on his left
arm, he was parrying the thrusts and blows of six men, driving and so
crowding them on one another's toes that only two could seriously answer
the terrific flailing of his own ash stick. He named them, named his
blow, and laid them one by one, half-stunned and bleeding on the sand,
until the last one by a quick feint landed on him, raising a great
crimson welt across his shoulders.
"Well done!" Commodus exclaimed and smote him on the skull so fiercely
that he broke the sword-stick. "You have killed him," said a senator as
two men promptly seized the victim's arms to drag him out.
"Possibly," said Commodus. "That blow I landed on him would have killed
a horse. But he is fortunate. He dies proud--prouder than you ever
will, Varronius! He got past Paulus' guard! Would you like to attempt
it? Woman! How I loathe you soft, effeminate, sleek senators! You
fear death and you fear life equally! Where is Narcissus? Where are
those men who are to try to kill me at my birthday games?"
There was no answer from Narcissus. Commodus forgot him in a moment,
called for javelins and hurled them at a target, then at half-a-dozen
targets, hitting all six marks exactly in the middle as he spun himself
on one heel.
"I am in fettle!" he exclaimed, clapping the back of the senator whom he
had scurrilously insulted a moment ago. If he was conscious of applause
from the group of courtiers and gladiators he gave no sign of it. What
pleased him was his own ability, not their praises.
"Lions!" he said. "Loose that big one!"
"Paulus," a scarred veteran answered (they were all forbidden to address
him by any other name in that arena), "you have ordered us to keep that
fellow for the birthday games. If you keep killing all the best ones
off at practise, what shall we do when the day comes? The last ship-
load has arrived from Africa and already you have used up nearly half of
them. There is no chance of another cargo arriving in time for the
games. And besides, we have lacked corpses recently; that big one
hasn't tasted man's flesh. He is hungry now. He will eat whatever we
throw in, so let him taste the right meat that will make him savage."
"Loose a leopard then."
The veteran went off without a word to give his orders to the men below-
ground, whose duty it was to drag the cages to the openings of tunnels
in the masonry through which the animals emerged into the sunlight.
There were ten such openings on either side of the arena, closed by
trapdoors, set in grooves, that could be raised by ropes from overhead.
Commodus picked up one javelin and poised it. Half-a-dozen gladiators
watched him, paying no attention to the doors, through any one of which
the animal might come. They knew their Paulus, and were trained,
besides, to look at death or danger with a curious, contemptuous calm.
But the courtiers were nervous, grouping themselves where the sunlight
threw a V-shaped shadow on the sand, as if they thought that semi-
twilight would protect them.
A wooden door rose squeaking in its grooves but Commodus kept his back
toward it.
"Women!" he exclaimed.
His sudden scowl transformed his handsome face into a thing of horror.
He began to mutter savagely obscene abuse. A leopard crept into the
sunlight, tried to turn again but was prevented by the closing trap, and
crouched against the arena wall.
"Beware! The beast comes!" said a gladiator.
"Hold your presumptuous tongue, you slave-born rascal!" Commodus
retorted. "Take that yapping dog away and have him whipped!"
A man stepped from the entrance gate to beckon the offending gladiator,
who walked out with a look of hatred on his face. He paused once,
hesitating whether to ask mercy, and thought better of it, shrugging his
fine bronzed shoulders. The leopard left the wall and crept toward the
center of the sand, his black and yellow beauty rippling in the sunlight
and his shadow looking like death's trailing cloak. The courtiers
seemed doubtful which of the two beasts to watch, leopard or emperor.
"A spear!" said Commodus. A gladiator put it in his hand.
"Varronius! It irks me to have cowards in the senate! Let me see you
try to kill that leopard!"
Decadent and grown effeminate though Rome was, there was no patrician
who had not received some training in the use of arms. Varronius took
the spear at once, his white hands closing on the shaft with military
firmness. But his white face gave the lie to the alacrity with which he
strode out of the shadow.
"Kill him, and you shall have the consulate next year!" said Commodus.
"Be killed, and there will be one useless bastard less to clutter up the
curia!"
A flush of anger swept over the senator's pale face. For a moment he
looked almost capable of lunging with the spear at Commodus--but
Commodus was toying with the javelin. Varronius strode out to face the
leopard, and the lithe beast did not wait to feel the spear-point. It
began to stalk its adversary in irregular swift curves. Its body almost
pressed the sand. Its eyes were spots of sunlit topaz. Commodus' frown
vanished. He began to gloat over the leopard's subtlety and strength.
"He is a lovelier thing than you, Varronius! He is a better fighter!
He is manlier! He is worth more! He has kept his body stronger and his
wits more nimble! He will get you! By the Dioscuri, he will get you!
I will bet a talent that he gets you--and I hope he does! You hold your
spear the way a woman holds a distaff--but observe the way he gathers
all his strength in readiness to leap instantly in any direction! Ah!"
The leopard made a feint, perhaps to test the swiftness of the spear-
point. Leaping like a flash of light, he seemed to change direction in
mid-air, the point missing him by half a hand's breadth. One terrific
claw, outreaching as he turned, ripped open Varronius' tunic and brought
a little stream of crimson trickling down his left arm.
"Good!" Commodus remarked. "First blood to the braver! Who would like
to bet with me?"
"I!" Varronius retorted from between set teeth, his eyes fixed on the
leopard that had recommenced his swift strategic to-and-fro stalking
movement.
"I have betted you the consulship already. Who else wants to bet?"
asked Commodus.
Before any one could answer the leopard sprang in again at Varronius,
who stepped aside and drove his spear with very well timed accuracy.
Only force enough was lacking. The point slit the leopard's skin and
made a stinging wound along the beast's ribs, turning him the way a
spur-prick turns a horse. His snarl made Varronius step back another
pace or two, neglecting his chance to attack and drive the spear-point
home. The infuriated leopard watched him for a moment, ears back, tail
spasmodically twitching, then shot to one side and charged straight at
the group of courtiers.
They scattered. They were almost unarmed. There were three of them who
stumbled, interfering with each other. The nearest to the leopard drew
a dagger with a jeweled hilt, a mere toy with a light blade hardly
longer than his hand. He threw his toga over his left forearm and
stood firm to make a fight for it, his white face rigid and his eyes
ablaze. The leopard leaped--and fell dead, hardly writhing. Commodus'
long javelin had caught him in the middle of his spring, exactly at the
point behind the shoulder-bone that leaves a clear course to the heart.
"I would not have done that for a coward, Tullius! If you had run I
would have let him kill you!"
Commodus strode up and pulled out the javelin, setting one foot on the
leopard and exerting all his strength.
"Look here, Varronius. Do you see how deep my blade went? Pin-pricks
are no use against man or animal. Kill when you strike, like great Jove
with his thunderbolts! Life isn't a game between Maltese kittens; it's
a spectacle in which the strong devour the weak and all the gods look
on! Loose another leopard there! I'll show you!"
He took the spear from Varronius, balanced it a moment, discarded it and
chose another, feeling its point with his thumb. There was a squeak of
pulleys as they loosed a leopard near the end of the arena. He charged
the animal, leaping from foot to foot. He made prodigious leaps; there
was no guessing which way he would jump next. He was not like a human
being. The leopard, snarling, slunk away, attempting to avoid him, but
he crowded it against the wall. He forced it to turn at bay. No eye
was quick enough to see exactly how he killed it, save that he struck
when the leopard sprang. The next thing that anybody actually saw, he
had the writhing creature on the spear, in air, like a legion's
standard.
Then the madness surged into his brain.
"So I rule Rome!" he exclaimed, and threw the leopard at the gladiators'
feet. "Because I pity Rome that could not find another Paulus! I
strike first, before they strike me!"
They flattered him--fawned on him, but he was much too genuinely mad for
flattery to take effect. "If you were worth a barrelful of rats I'd
have a senate that might save me trouble! Then like Tiberius I might
remain away from Rome and live more like a god. I've more than half a
mind to let my dummy stay here to amuse you wastrels!" He glanced up at
the box, where his substitute lolled and yawned and smiled. "All you
degenerates need is some one you can rub yourselves against like fat
cats mewing for a bowl of milk! By Hercules, now I'll show you
something that will make your blood leap. Bring out the new Spanish
team."
With an imperious gesture he sent senators and gladiators to scatter
themselves all over the arena. Not yet satisfied, he ordered all the
guards fetched from the tunnel and arranged them in a similar disorder,
so that finally no stretch of fifty yards was left without a man
obstructing it. There was no spina down the midst, nor anything except
the surrounding wall to suggest to a team of horses which the course
might be.
"Let none move!" he commanded. "I will crush the foot of any man who
stirs!"
Attendants, clinging to the heads of four gray stallions that fought and
kicked, brought out his chariot and others shut the gate behind it.
Commodus admired the team a minute, then examined the new high wheels of
the gilded chariot, that was hardly wider than a coffin--a thing that a
man could upset with a shove and built to look as flimsy as an egg
shell. Suddenly he seized the reins and leaped in, throwing up his
right hand.
If he could have ruled his empire as he drove that chariot he would have
far outshone Augustus, for whose memory men sighed. He managed them with
one hand. There was magnetism sent along the reins to play with the
dynamic energy of four mad stallions as gods amuse themselves with men.
If empire had amused him as athleticism did there would have been no
equal in all history to Commodus.
In a chariot no other athlete could have balanced, on a course providing
not one unobstructed stretch of fifty yards, he drove like Phoebus
breaking in the horses of the Sun, careering this and that way, weaving
patterns in among the frightened men who stood like posts for him to
drive around. He missed them by a hand's breadth--less! He took
delight in driving at them, turning in the last half-second, smiling at
a blanched face as he wheeled and wove new figures down another zigzag
avenue of men. The frenzy of the team inspired him; the rebellion of
the stallions, made mad by the persistent, sudden turns, aroused his own
astonishing enthusiasm. He accomplished the impossible! He made new
laws of motion, breaking them, inventing others! He became a god in
action, mastering the team until it had no consciousness of any self-
will, or of any impulse but to loose its full strength under the
directing will of genius.