, a comedian as well;
one who in a moment would toss the mask aside and disclose the mongrel;
the offspring, not of an empress and an emperor, but the tiger-cub that
Faustine had got by a gladiator.

The tender-hearted philosopher, who in a campaign against some fretful
Teutons, had taken Commodus with him, knew that he was not his son;
knew, too, when the agony seized him, from whose hand the agony came;
but in earlier life he had jotted in his notebook, "Forgive, forgive
always; die forgiving"; and, as he forgave the mother, so he forgave
the child, recommending him with his last breath to the army and to
Rome.

As the people had loved Nero, so did the aristocracy love Marcus
Aurelius; his foster-father Antonin excepted, he was the only gentleman
that had sat on the throne. No wonder they loved him; and seeing this
early edition of the prince in the fairy tale emerge from the bogs of
Germany, his fair face haloed by the glisten and gold of his hair,
hearts went out to him; the wish of his putative father was ratified,
and the son of a gladiator was emperor of Rome.

Lampridus--or Spartian was it? The title-page bears Lampridus' name,
but there is some doubt as to the authorship. However, whoever made the
abridgment of the life of Commodus which appears among the chronicles
of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, says that before his birth
Faustine dreamed she had engendered a serpent. It is not impossible
that Faustine had been reading Ctzias, and had stumbled over his
account of the Martichoras, a serpent with a woman's face and the
talons of a bird of prey. For it was that she conceived.

It would have been interesting to have seen that young man, the mask
removed, frightening the senate into calling Rome Commodia, and then in
a linen robe promenading in the attributes of a priest of Anubis
through a seraglio of six hundred girls and mignons embracing as he
passed. There was a spectacle, which Nero had not imagined. But Nero
was vieux jeu. Commodus outdid him, first in debauchery, then in the
arena. Nero had died while in training to kill a lion; Commodus did not
take the trouble to train. It was the lions that were trained, not he.
A skin on his shoulders, a club in his hand, he descended naked into
the ring, and there felled beasts and men. Then, acclaimed as Hercules,
he returned to the pulvina, and a mignon on one side, a mistress on the
other, ordered the guard to massacre the spectators and set fire to
Rome