Part 12 (1/2)
”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 laladiators? The arena where a uised one kills him? The senate, where they buy and sell the consulates and praetorshi+ps and guaestorshi+ps? 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 fars 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 Roers 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 Roo 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 ine 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 oay,” said Narcissus, unconvinced ”A brass as for your honor! The alternative is death or liberty in either case, and as for ion, so I will follow you, whichever road you take Now go These fellows nize you It is ti yard I daren't take more than one at a time or they'd kill ht face Commodus as boldly as they tackle me! I am a weary man, and ht coh their paces”
IX STEWED EELS
The training arena where Coy and kept his Herculean rounds, but the tunnel by which he reached it continued on and doard to the Circus Maximus, so that he could attend the public spectacles without er of assassination
Nevertheless, a certain danger still existed One of his worst frenzies of proscription had been started by a man aited for him in the tunnel, and lost his nerve and then, instead of killing hie frouards at regular intervals, and when Coed to walk in front of hih attendants to make any one not in the secret believe the double was the emperor himself
No man in the knoorld was less incapable than Coainst an arth and skill; he was undoubtedly the hter 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 Co eese that saved the capitol You cacklers can preserve your Coreed in chorus, it would be Rome's irreparable loss if he should die, and certain senators,his attention to themselves, paused ostentatiously to hold a little conversation with the guards and pro 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 nae 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 y and skill eapons, his terrific stornetisladiators whom he slew in the arena The strain ofthat 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 e his contempt of them, and his contempt was never under cover for a moment
Debauchery, of wine and woh, in public, he encouraged it in others for the siht turn on hiht underth or shake his nerves; there was an almost superhuman purity about his worshi+p of athletic powers He outdid the Greeks in that respect But he allowed the legend of his ain currency, partly because that encouraged the Romans to debauch the him, and partly because it helped to cover up his trick of eaht in the arena as the gladiator Paulus
Men who had let wine and women ruin their own nerves kneas 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 Roaze 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 coness 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 eh half Rome half-believed it; and the substitute who occupied the seat of honor at the ga a little pouchy under eyes and chin-was pointed to as proof that Co ruined by the life he led
The trick ofuse of the same substitute to save the emperor the boredom of official cere close enough to detect the fraud, ument that Commodus could not be Paulus
So the mystery of the identity of Paulus was like all court secrets and overnments, no mystery at all to hundreds, but to thousands an insoluble conundruandists of the court news, absolutely in control of all the channels through which facts could reach the public, easily offset the constant leakage fro 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 atory to the eht aled before the lahom 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 oods
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, o 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