ship 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 bef