"Come along, prudent youth," he said, "we need you. The sub-procurator in charge of the beast-train which the brigands interfered with is at the villa: so are half his beast-tenders and teamsters. The animal-keepers vow they dare not attempt to recapture their charges and the procurator is angry and worried and anxious about his responsibility and what will be expected of him by his superiors. He does not want to lose one single lion or tiger or even hyena; wants them recaged at once. So do I. I've lost more stock than I like to think of. The hyenas and panthers and leopards have slaughtered a host of my sheep and goats, and the lions and tigers have banqueted on some of my most promising colts and on many of my cattle.

"Can you duplicate your feat with the panther loose on the highway?"

"I can repeat it as often as I can get anywhere near any of those beasts by daylight," I said. "Let us start at once. There is no hurry, for the beasts will do little damage in daytime, as most of them will hide till dark. But there seems to be a large number loose; I doubt if I can catch all of them before dusk."

"It'll take you two days, Felix, or three," the Villicus laughed. "The procurator states that his train had in its cages twenty-five panthers, as many leopards, fifty tigers, a hundred lions and two hundred hyenas. That's four hundred beasts for you to catch as fast as they can be located by their keepers, assisted by my whole force of horse-wranglers, herdsmen, shepherds, and the rest and all the farmers hereabouts, and all their slaves. We'll have plenty of help. Three farmers are at the villa now raving over the loss of sheep or cattle; every farmer will turn out with his men to help us; anyhow, every bumpkin and yokel will want to enjoy the fun and they'll all flock to the scene."

I do not know how many days I spent catching the escaped beasts for the procurator. I enjoyed the first day, did not mind the second and was not painfully weary on the third; but the rest passed in a daze of exhaustion; though I had good horses, a fresh horse whenever I asked for it, wine and good wine as often as I was thirsty, plenty of good food and every consideration; and although the various farms at which I spent the nights (for we did not once return to the villa) did all they could for my comfort, the repetition, for hundreds of times, of dismounting, approaching a lion or tiger in his daylight lair among reeds or tall grass or bushes, catching him by the mane or the scruff of his neck, leading him to his cage and caging him, was extremely, even unbelievably exhausting.

Whenever any of our searchers located a beast in hiding the teamsters drove their wagons with his cage as near as might be; in no case did I lead a cowed captive half a mile; seldom two furlongs. But I walked a great distance in the course of each of these days, rode many miles in the course of all the riding I did between recaptures, and was never calmed between my recurrent periods of tense excitement. I felt limp.

My condition was not improved by the occurrence and recurrence of perturbing excitement from a more disquieting cause. Early on my third day of animal-catching, just as I stepped back from bolting the door of a cage on a lion, I felt rather than saw out of the tail of my eye someone rush towards me from behind, trip when a few yards from me and fall flat. I whirled to look and beheld a mere lad, one of my fellow-slaves at the villa, a stable cleaner, scrambling to his feet. When he was half up the man nearest him, another of my fellow-slaves, an assistant colt-wrangler, apparently the man who had tripped him, dealt him a smashing blow on the ear with his clenched fist and felled him again. As he went down I saw that he had a long-bladed, keen-edged, gleaming dagger in his right hand. It flew from his grasp as he plowed up the ground with his face. The colt- wrangler picked it up.

We were on a crossroad, some distance from the highway, in the woods. The wagon and cage were surrounded by almost a score of the slaves of the estate, with nearly as many more helpers; farm-slaves, farmers, teamsters, beast-warders, yokels and stragglers; the Villicus was near.

"Napsus," he said to the colt-wrangler, "kill him with his own dagger!"

Instantly Napsus stabbed the fallen lad between the shoulders. The thrust went home neatly, under the left shoulder-blade, deep and inclined a little upward. It must have reached his heart, for he died after one violent convulsion which threw him into the air, and turned him completely over, his corpse slapping the ground like a flopping fish on a stream- bank.

"Hand me that rope!" the Villicus ordered a teamster.

He knotted a hangman's noose at one end of the rope, tried it to make sure it worked properly and ordered the estate slaves to hang the body to a convenient limb of a near by tree. They did.

I stood, gazing questioningly, first at the swinging corpse, then at the Villicus.

"Felix," said he, "I perceive that you do not understand. Tiro meant to kill you, and would most likely have succeeded had not Napsus first tripped him and then killed him. Napsus shall be handsomely rewarded in every fashion within my power. Tiro has been dealt with as he deserved, as any similar fool deserves. I propose to protect you to the extent of my abilities and authority, which includes peremptory execution of any estate slave whom I so much as suspect; I don't have to wait for any overt act, nor for any threat, uttered or whispered or hinted. You can rely on all the protection I can give you and I fancy it will suffice. If there is any other fool about let him take notice."

He spoke loudly, so as to be audible to everyone of the gathering.

I stared numb, puzzled, almost dazed.

"But," I blurted out, "why did he try to kill me? Why should anyone want to kill me?"

"You don't know Umbria, lad," spoke the Villicus, indulgently. "Many eyes in addition to those of the teamsters and beast-wardens beheld you on Selinus, galloping your fastest northwards along the highroad. Many saw you turn Selinus up the crossroad the viarii had taken. Many saw their officer on Selinus when the cavalrymen charged down the highroad and scattered the bandits. Many saw you afoot among the infantrymen when they turned from the crossroad into the highway and as they double-quicked down it. Every partisan of the outlaws blames you for their discomfiture, and regards you as a detestable traitor, many a one is looking for such a chance at you as Tiro thought he saw. I'll give you a body-guard of men I can trust, for the rest of this beast-catching job. But keep a bright lookout, yourself. You may need all your own strength and quickness to save yourself."

The strain of this surprise and anxiety was a hundredfold as trying as the most daunting beast-catching. I felt it.

I felt it more after a second similar attempt that very afternoon. I had threaded a dense patch of undergrowth, approached a lurking leopard, caught her and led her out of the thicket, led her almost to her waiting cage. By this time our helpers were so used to seeing me cage lions, panthers, leopards and tigers that they no longer, as at first, hovered at a distance, gaping at me as I, completely alone with my catch, led it towards its cage, set ready by its wagon, from which the team had been loosed and removed: no longer drew off some yards beyond the cage and wagon and stood ready for instant flight if my capture escaped me; they now merely drew aside as I approached and opened a lane for me and my charge, no more afraid than if I had been leading a calf.

As I drew near the cage, my mind intent on the leopard and my eyes on the open cage door and its fastenings, a slave of one of the neighboring farmers dashed at me, sheath-knife uplifted. He came from my left side, from a little behind me. I whirled round to face him, pulling the leopard round roughly, so that she snarled. I let her go. She was face to face with my reckless assailant and they were close together. She gave one joyful, gloating, triumphant squall and one mighty leap. Her claws sank into his shoulders, her long white fangs met, horridly crunching, in his throat, and she bore him to the earth where she crouched flat on him, greedily gulping his blood.

The bystanders fairly fell over backwards in their panic as they scattered. I stood by the leopard, and when she had exhausted the supply of hot blood, succeeded in caging her; but dropped limp on the earth once I had fastened her in her cage, for a beast of prey which had just tasted human blood was a ward with which I had felt very uncertain of being able to cope.

After that no one attempted to molest me while out catching the escaped beasts. But the night before my last day of beast-catching, as I lay abed very fast asleep at a villa fully ten miles from the Imperial villa where I belonged, I became gradually aware of some noises, then slowly I wakened. There was a fight going on at my door. Soon after I got out of bed our host and my master, the Villicus, came with a light and three or four slaves. The light revealed One of my fellow-slaves flat on his back and another throttling him. A dagger lay on the floor. Evidently the one had saved me from the other.

Late next afternoon, far up in the hills near Helvillum, I caught and caged the last hyena. These, being smaller and more cowardly than the nobler animals, were harder to locate. It was after sunset when we reached the villa where we found the procurator in charge of the beast-train; and along with, him and his men were welcomed and entertained.

After our bath and a lavish dinner the Villicus exchanged a few whispered words with our host and then he and I had a long conference alone. He explained that my life was in danger, not only from local friends of Bulla and partisans of the King of the Highwaymen who all not merely regarded me with detestation and hatred as a traitor but suspected me of being a government spy, but also from the King of the Highwaymen himself, who was certain to be informed by Bulla of how they had been discomfited and who had a long arm and countless capable and intrepid agents. He was of the opinion that the three attempts at assassination which I had escaped were a mere beginning. He was emphatic that I could not remain on the Imperial estate and survive many days. He advised me strongly not to return to the villa.

Then he told me that the procurator of the beast-train had sent to Rome by an Imperial courier, whom he had managed to intercept at a change-station, a letter setting forth my powers over fierce animals and asking that an order be sent for my transfer from the horse-breeding estate to the Beast Barracks attached to the Colosseum, where the animals are housed from their arrival in Rome, until their display in the arena; that this letter had come into the hands of the same officials who already had under consideration the requisition for me made by the procurator in charge of the Beast Barracks; that somehow these same officials appeared to know nothing of my identity with the slave who had foiled the conspirators who were fomenting a mutiny in the ergastulum at Nuceria, and for whose manumission a request had been made by the aldermen of that town, and indeed appeared to know nothing of any such request for manumission; that a requisition for my transfer from the horse-breeding estate to the Beast- Barracks at Rome had been made out, approved by the higher officials, sealed, stamped and sent out by an Imperial courier and received that very afternoon by the procurator of the beast-train, who consequently had authority to take me to Rome with him as one of the attendants on the animals of his train, which was now again in order, I having recaged all the four hundred escaped beasts, except five hyenas, one panther and one lion which had been killed by stock-owners and their slaves while attacking stock.

The Villicus went on to say that this fell out very advantageously for me, in his opinion. He advised me not only to go with the procurator without demur, but to arrange with him that I drop the name of Felix and adopt some other. He pointed out that, if it was known that Felix the Horse-wrangler of Umbria had gone to Rome as Felix the Beast-Tamer, then the King of the Highwaymen would be able without difficulty to trace me and set on me his ruthless agents until one of them assassinated me.

I felt that he was right. The danger to my former self as Andivius Hedulio, implicated in a conspiracy against Caesar, appeared now far off and unimportant, in spite of the fact that the secret service might still be keen to catch me and the hue and cry out after me from the Alps to Rhegium; the danger to my present self from the enmity of Bulla, of his ruffians, of their partisans in Umbria, of their Chief, the King of the Highwaymen, whoever he might be, appeared close and menacing. A change of name would make it impossible for Tanno and Vedia to carry out her plan for my manumission by the fiscus, my clandestine journey to Bruttium and my comfortable and unsuspected seclusion there until some other prince succeeded our present Emperor. I had grasped eagerly at the thought of this plan and had built much on it. But I realized that Bulla's admirers or the agents of the King of the Highwaymen would make an end of me long before Vedia's influence could obtain my manumission; and that, if she did accomplish all she expected, I could never hope to escape the vigilance of the tenacious and expert pursuers who would inevitably dog my footsteps.

I thought the advice of the Villicus good. I regretted that I was not to say farewell to Septima; she deserved a most fervent expression of my esteem, gratitude, regard and good wishes; but, after my encounter with Vedia, Septima seemed of very little importance. I had my amulet-bag on its thong about my neck and my coin-belt about my waist. I agreed to go with the procurator and thanked the Villicus for his solicitude for me, for his good offices and for his advice.

He said that it would be best that he should not know what name I meant to adopt. Also he said that, if I was to escape the vengeance of the King of the Highwaymen, it would be imperative that I be thought dead; he would give out that I had been killed by one of my fellow-slaves and everybody would assume that I had perished at the hands of some partisan of the outlaws; Bulla and the King of the Highwaymen would feel their animosity satiated.

I reflected that whereas news of my supposed assassination would fill Vedia with grief and would probably, after her grief abated, leave her feeling free to marry, yet, if a false report of my death was not spread abroad, a genuine report of my actual death soon would be. It was a choice between a lesser and a greater evil. I acquiesced.

I then ventured to ask him if he knew anything as to how far the brigands had succeeded in spite of my intervention and how far they had failed because of it. He told me that they had effected their escape with the propraetor's coin-chests, the propraetor, and the procurator and had carried off the widow's maid by mistake for the widow, on account of her clever device of changing clothes with her mistress.

Also that Vedia had announced that she would pay a large ransom for her maid.

I then felt safe to ask what had become of Vedia, her name being known from her advertisement. He said she had procured horses and mules and had returned to Rome, sending up agents from Nuceria to negotiate with the bandits, rescue Lydia and pay her ransom.

The next day, at dawn, I set off with the beast-train, riding by the procurator. He and I and the Villicus had had a talk. After the Villicus left my name was Festus.

I asked the procurator what had become of the bullion on account of which the brigands had routed out the cages. He laughed and asked whether I had noted anything peculiar in the handling of the cages while I was returning their contents to them. I said I had noticed that the rollers lashed to the wagons were never used, but fresh-cut rollers each time a cage was taken off a wagon or put back on.

He laughed again.

"You can conjecture then," he said, "why the outlaws got no grain of the dust, let alone any nugget: six hundred rollers, even with very moderate holes bored into half of them, would hold more bullion than the procurator was convoying."

I laughed also.

"I suppose," I said, "it could not be told which rollers were bored out and might crush if used."

"Just so!" said he.

We journeyed to Rome with as much hurry as could be made by such a beast- train, which was very slowly for men on good horses. We made excursions up crossroads, idled at inns, were entertained at villas and I decidedly enjoyed the beginning of my life as Festus the Beast-Tamer. We were fourteen full days on the road.

I had time to meditate on the fifth fulfillment of the prophecy of the Aemilian Sibyl. Also I had time to offer two white hens to Mercury at Nuceria, at Spolitum, at Interamnia, at Narnia and at Ocriculum.

Towards sunset just before our last night's halt out of the city, from a hilltop on the highway, I had a glorious view of Rome bathed in mellow evening sunlight, much as I had viewed it when I came down the same highroad with the mutineers from Britain. As always this unsurpassable sight filled me with intense emotions.

We entered Rome, of course, by the Flaminian Gate and at dawn. Before sunrise I was in the great mass of buildings variously known as the Choragium, the Therotheca, the Animal Mansions and the Beast-Barracks. These were mostly of many stories, the ground-level used for the beasts, the second floor for their keepers and attendants, the cage-cleaners, the overseers, and the rest of the army of men who cared for the animals, and the upper floors utilized as store-rooms for all sorts of weapons, armor, costumes, implements and apparatus used in and for the spectacles; swords, spears, arrows, shields, helmets, breast-plates, corselets, kilts, greaves, boots, cloaks, tunics, poles, rope, pulleys, winches, jack- screws, derricks, wagons, carts, and the like.

The jumble of buildings was without any sort of general plan. Apparently a courtyard and the structures about it had been found necessary for housing the beasts and their attendants and had been bought by the management of the Colosseum. When it was overtaxed, as the number of animals exhibited increased, an adjacent property had been acquired and annexed. So the Choragium had been created and extended till it now covered many acres and had many courtyards, all arcaded on all sides. Under the arcades were set as many cages as they could accommodate; when the beasts were too numerous for their cages to be all under the arcades some were stood out in the courtyards.

I was comfortably housed in light, airy, roomy, clean and well-furnished quarters on one of the biggest courtyards. From dawn after my first night's sleep there I was busy quelling vicious beasts so their cages could be cleaned; keeping others quiet while the beast-surgeons dressed wounds inflicted by their captors or keepers or sores caused by their confinement; inducing others to swallow the remedies the animal-doctors thought good for them; leading beasts out of their cages into others; and so on.

* * * * *

Before I had been a full day at my duties the procurator of the Beast- Barracks complimented me, declared that I was his very ideal of just the kind of man he had always needed and wanted, averred that I was already indispensable and vowed that he could not conceive how he or the Choragium had ever gotten on without me. Within a very few days he came to my quarters and said:

"I want you to be contented here. I won't listen to a word hinting at your leaving. Otherwise I'll do all I can to gratify every wish of yours not inconsistent with your continuing here and keeping up as you have begun. Of course, within a few days now, you'll have no such rush of all-day toil as you have been having. You have been doing in the past few days all the left-over jobs which should have been attended to since warm weather began. Once you get clear of legacies from the past you'll find a day's work can be done in much less than a day and will neither exhaust nor weary you. Now what can I do to make you as comfortable as possible?"

He had sat down and had motioned me to be seated also. I ruminated.

"In the first place," I said, "I do not want to be made to show off in the arena before audiences. I am willing to tame animals and to keep on taming animals, but I do not want to be forced to display my powers before the populace and the nobility, Senate and court. I have the most powerful antipathy to being compelled to become a performer as part of a public spectacle."

"Set your mind at rest," he said. "I give my pledge that, unless my authority is overridden, you shall not take part in public spectacles except that you may often have to enter the arena to lead out ferocious beasts which are not to be killed or which the Emperor, or some of the courtiers, senators, nobles or populace have taken a fancy to for some display of courage or craft and have ordered spared. The driving into a cage or out of a postern of such a beast is generally an irritating matter, delaying the spectacle and often calling for the use of as many as a hundred muscular, agile and bold attendants. I perceive that you can do alone, quickly and easily, what a large gang of eager men has often taken a long time to accomplish. Often they have to kill a recalcitrant beast. I feel that I need you for this and I trust that you are willing."

"Entirely," I answered.

"Good!" said he, and resumed:

"Now, what is your next point?"

"In the second place," I said, "I do not want to be pestered with visitors; nobles or wealthy idlers who take a fancy to me and think they are conferring a favor on me by intruding on me and wasting my time with their inquisitive questions and patronizing remarks. In particular I have a horror of the kind of women who have a fad for molesting with their attentions singers, actors, gladiators, beast-fighters, charioteers and so on; if one of them gets after me and the infection spreads to more I shall find life here in Rome altogether unendurable.

"I speak feelingly (I thought it proper to lie like a Greek, if necessary, in a situation like mine). Where I was before I suffered from the attentions of enthusiastic admirers and I have had all I want of it and far more; enough to last half a dozen lifetimes."

"Festus," said the procurator, "where were you before?"

"If you had seen my back," I said, "you wouldn't expect me to tell you."

"I don't expect you to tell me," he laughed, "but I could not help asking; you are such a wonder that I am tormented with the desire to know all about you, not merely where you came from and how you got into the ergastulum at Nuceria. But I shall not press you for any information about yourself. Keep your own secrets as long as you are willing to work miracles for me.

"I don't want to see your back; without seeing it I may say that if anyone ill-treated you he was an amazing fool. You shall not be flogged here, nor ill-used in any way. I'll take all the measures in my power to ensure that no visitors bother you and that you are protected not only from genuine sporting nobles but still more from the silly loungers who think it adds to their importance to make the acquaintance of all persons of public reputation. Especially I'll have you guarded from intrusive fine ladies."

"What next?"

"I want plenty of the best fruit," I said boldly.

"You'll get all you can eat of whatever the markets afford," he said, "and understand right here that I'll indulge you to any extent in anything relating to your food or wine, as long as you keep sober. Similarly you can have anything you ask for in the way of extra clothing or bedding or furnishings for your quarters. If you don't like the slave detailed to wait on you I'll have another put in his place and keep on changing till you get one to suit you.

"You are to be indulged and pampered in every way in my power, except that I mean to keep you hard at work, long hours each day, at the cages, whenever it is necessary."

I thanked him and agreed to do my best to please him.

Not many days later, as he had foretold, my work became less continuous and less burdensome. Soon afterwards I settled into a sort of daily routine which occupied me, but did not wear me out and which often left me not a little free time.

I found that I was entirely free to go and come as I pleased, when not occupied. I did go to the Temple of Mercury and offer two white hens bought in the Forum Boarium, as I had done when in the City with Maternus. Otherwise I kept pretty close for more than a month. I feared to be recognized as myself by some secret-service agent; I feared almost as much to be identified as Felix the Horse-Tamer by some henchman of the King of the Highwaymen. I wanted to try to communicate with Vedia, but the more I pondered on how to do so the more I saw only betrayal, recognition and death as the probable results of every plan I devised.



CHAPTER XXX

FESTUS

Domiciled in the Choragium and busy there and in the Colosseum I spent almost a year. Until the approach of winter put a stop to spectacles in the arena and after the outset of spring permitted their resumption, I was not only continuously busy, but entirely contented. Of the dreary and tedious winter between, which was intensely dispiriting and appeared interminable, the less I say the better. I do not want to remind myself of it.

I was of course free from the bodily miseries which had made my winters at Placentia and Nuceria so terrible: I did not suffer from cold, hunger, vermin, sleeplessness, overwork, exhaustion, weakness, blows and abuse. I was, on the contrary, comfortably lodged and clothed, well attended, lavishly and excellently fed and humored by the procurator.

But at Placentia and Nuceria I had solaced myself amid the horror of my situation by reminding myself that I was, at least, alive, and, as long as I was in an ergastulum, entirely safe from any danger of being recognized and executed. Here, in Rome, often in the arena, under the eyes of sixty thousand Romans, thousands of whom had known me in my prosperity and hundreds of whom had known me familiarly from my childhood, I was, every instant, in peril of recognition and of betrayal to the secret service. While I was actually in the arena I was so busy or so exhilarated by my participation in the most magnificent spectacle on earth that I never worried a moment. I seldom worried while I was occupied with any of my duties in the Colosseum or Choragium, although I knew I was very liable to recognition, for the passages and vaults of the Colosseum and the courtyards of the Choragium were habitually visited by men of sporting tastes; gentlemen, wealthy idlers, noblemen, senators, courtiers, even the Emperor himself. I was, in my intellect, conscious of my danger; but, while I was occupied, it did not perturb my feelings.

During the idleness of the long winter my peril did rob me of sleep, of appetite and of peace of mind. I had continually to devise excuses for remaining in my lodgings, for declining invitations to banquets, for keeping to myself. I dreaded that the procurator himself was growing suspicious of me. He had, in the kindness of his heart, thrown in my way offers of opportunities for outings, for diversions, for entertainments, which any man in my situation might have been expected to accept with alacrity. My refusals, I felt, might set him to thinking. He was entirely loyal to the Emperor and the government. If the idea ever crossed his mind he would, at once, have reported to the secret service that it would be well to take a look at Festus the Beast-Tamer; he might be other than he appeared. The anxiety caused by these thoughts preyed upon my mind.

Without reason, apparently. The procurator, as I look back on that deadly winter, seems to have accepted all my peculiarities without question. If I would remain content and quell obstreperous beasts when spring opened as I had until autumn ushered in winter, I might do and be anything I pleased. If I pleased to mope in my quarters, pace under the arcades of the courtyard, lie abed from early dusk till after sunrise, what mattered that to him? Such, apparently, was his attitude of mind. He gave orders that I was to have my meals alone in my quarters, as I requested. He had brought to me, from the libraries of the Basilica Ulpia, most of the books I asked for. I had read all the books on catching, caring for, curing, managing, taming and fighting beasts which formed the library of the Choragium. After they were exhausted I asked the procurator for more. As he had a cousin among the assistant curators at the Ulpian Library he was able to gratify me. After I could learn of no more books on beasts I took to comedies and read Naevius, all of Menander and Caecilius, and most of the best plays of other writers of comedies; then. I turned to histories, which I thought safe, and spent my days for the remainder of the winter sleeping early, long and late, eating abundant meals of good food, walking miles round and round the big courtyard under the empty arcades, exercising in the gymnasium of the Choragium, steaming and parboiling and half-roasting myself in its small but very well-appointed and well-served baths, and, otherwise, reading every bit of my daylight. I kept well and I remained safe, ignored and unnoticed. The procurator kept his word as to shielding me from visitors, and he said he had much ado to succeed, for the ease and certitude with which, in the open arena, before all Rome, I approached a lion or tiger which had just slaughtered a criminal and lapped his blood, seized the beast by the mane or scruff of the neck, as if he had been a tame dog, and led him to a postern or into his cage, roused much interest, much curiosity, many enquiries and not a little desire to see me closer, question me, talk with me, get acquainted with me and learn the secret of my power.

I thanked the procurator for his resolution and success in rebuffing would-be patrons eager to pamper me. Also, all winter, I dreaded that he would he less lucky or less adamantine when spring came.

Thus passed my fourth winter since my disaster.

I might have been spared much of my anxiety during the winter if I had learned sooner that such aloofness as mine was no novelty to the procurator, that he had, among his most valued subordinates, a man even more unsociable than I, and even more highly esteemed and more sedulously pampered. This was the celebrated and regretted Spaniard, Mercablis, who, for more than thirty years, was accorded by the Choragium a home of his. own, a retinue of servants and the fulfillment of every whim, of which the chief was his determination to have as little as possible to do with any human being except his wife and their three children, for he was not a slave, but a freeman. In his way Mercablis was as celebrated as Felix Bulla the brigand or Agyllius Septentrio the actor of mimes, and the memory of his fame yet lingers in the recollections of the aged and in the talk of their children and grandchildren. For it was Mercablis who, for half a life-time, invented, rehearsed, and kept secret till the moment of its display the noon-hour sensational surprise for each day of games in the Colosseum.

I have, in my later years, met many persons who congratulated me on my luck in having personally known and frequently talked with Mercablis, just as many have similarly envied me my encounters with Felix Bulla. For myself I have never plumed myself on such features of my adventures, though they are not unpleasing to recall.

When, in the spring of the next year, while Fuscianus and Silanus were consuls, I came to know Mercablis and to consider him, I arrived at the conclusion that his inclination for solitude and his aloofness were not the result of any dread of strangers or of any need for seclusion, like mine, but the product of a disposition naturally churlish, crabbed, and unsocial.

Habituated as the procurator had been to Mercablis and his loathing for strangers, my desire for privacy had seemed to him as a matter of course.

Resolute as Mercablis was to be let alone, he was enormously vain and self-conceited and puffed up with his conviction of his own importance. He never smiled, but some subtle alteration in his countenance betrayed that any flattery pleased him.

He was a tall, spare, bony man, with a dry, brown, leathery skin, lean legs and arms, a stringy neck, almost no chin, a hooked nose, deep set little greeny-gray eyes and intensely black, harsh, stiff, curly hair and very bushy eyebrows. He wore old, worn, faded garments and stalked about as if the fate of the universe depended on him.

Certainly he never failed to surprise all Rome when the time came for his novelty to be displayed. Every one which I saw, either earlier when I was myself or while in the Choragium as Festus the Beast-Wizard or later, justified the claim of Mercablis to being the most original-minded sensation-deviser ever known in the Colosseum or elsewhere.

One of his utterly unpredictable surprises recurs often to my recollection.

It was a hot July day and, during the noon pause, the vendors of cooling drinks did a good business among the spectators of the upper tiers. To the ring-rope round the opening in the awning, over the middle of the arena, had been fastened a big, strong, pulley block. One of the lightest and most agile of the awning-boys hung by his hands from the radial rope stretched from nearest that pulley, worked out to it, sat on it, rove through it a light cord which he carried coiled at his waist, and worked back along the radial rope, leaving the cord trailing from the pulley- wheel to the sand of the arena. By means of the cord the arena-slaves rove through the pulley first a light rope, then a very strong one.

The end of this rope they fastened to an iron ring, from which hung four stout chains, three of them of equal length, each about thirty feet, whose lower ends, at points precisely equidistant from each other, were fastened to a big iron hoop all of twenty-four feet across. From the hoop hung six lighter chains, like the fourth chain which hung from the ring. As the six were fastened to the hoop either where one of the upper chains ended or exactly between two of them each of the six was precisely twelve feet from those on either side of it and from the center chain hanging from the ring. The hoop hung perfectly level and each of the seven chains, about thirty feet below the level of the hoop, had hung to it an iron disk, a yard or more across, hanging by a ring-bolt in its center and perfectly level. From a second ring-bolt in the underside of each disk depended more of the same light, strong chain, to a length of some thirty feet below the disks.

I, like all the arena-slaves and Choragium-slaves, like all the spectators, knew that this apparatus portended some unpredictable surprise; but I, like the others, like the audience, gaped at it, incredulous and unable to conjecture what it could be for.

Then arena-slaves carried in and set down on the sand a full hundred feet from the hoop and chains, a dozen or more wicker crates full of quacking white ducks with yellow bills. They and the noise they made recalled unpleasantly to me my sensations as I clung to the alder bush immersed in Bran Brook, after Agathemer and I had crawled through the drain at Villa Andivia.

Then there was a delay and I was called out to assist the mahout of the Choragium's best trick elephant, the smallest full-grown elephant I ever saw and the worst-dispositioned elephant of any age or size which ever I encountered. When I and the mahout had put him in a good humor he entered the arena and stationed himself by the crates of quacking ducks.

Then there marched out into the arena a procession of arena-slaves, four by four, each four carrying by two poles a strong cage housing a big African ape. These cages they set down each under one of the chains depending from the hoop. Then I was called to deal with the baboons.

Now I fear no beast, but of all beasts I most dislike an African ape. These creatures, inhabiting the mountains of Mauretania, Gaetulia and the Province of Africa, are big as a big dog and have teeth as long and cruel as any big dog. They are violent and treacherous. Whereas any wild bear or wolf I ever approached would permit me to handle him without snarling or growling, every baboon I ever had to handle made some sort of threatening noise inside him. Although none ever bit me or attempted any attack on me yet the hideousness of such apes and their vile odor always made me timid in dealing with them.

Each of these seven had around his middle an iron hoop-belt, with a strong ring-bolt in the back. It was my task to affix the end of each pendant chain to the ring-bolt in the belt of one of the baboons. This was easy to do, as each cage, in addition to a door in one side, had a trap-door in its top; and each chain had a snap-hook ringed to its last link. More difficult was managing so that the apes should be hauled up out of their cages without any two swinging sideways enough to clutch each, other; for, while baboons in their native haunts hunt in packs, male baboons not of the same pack always fight venomously and members of the same pack, if separated for a time, are as hostile to each other as males of different packs.

By care and caution, the slaves at the rope obeying my signals promptly, I at last had all seven apes clear of their cages, and not swinging too much. Then the cages were removed and the hoop lowered somewhat. Then I steadied each chain till none had any side-ways swing. Each ape finally hung on a level with every other ape, and about two yards above the sand of the arena.

I say finally, for it was at once manifest why the disks were hung to the chains; each baboon swarmed up his chain; each got no higher than the disk, for it was too broad for his arm to reach the chain above it, so that each failed to climb past it, and, after some chattering, and hesitation, each climbed down his chain again and hung by his belt, every one mewing and chattering at his neighbors, frantic with hostility and eager for a fight.

When all seven were quiet the herald proclaimed that wagers might now be laid on the apes, the survivor of the seven to be the winner. Each had a different color painted on his iron ring: blue, green, red, yellow and so on. The spectators appeared to make bets.

Then when the arena was clear between the elephant and the baboons and beyond them, the mahout spoke to his charge, the elephant inserted his trunk through the opened lid of a crate of ducks, grasped a duck by the neck, lifted it out, swung it, and hurled it at the hanging apes. It hurtled through the air, napping its wings in vain, and passed between the baboons, they grabbing for it as it shot by, it falling far beyond them on the sand.

A roar of appreciative yells rose from the spectators.

The elephant threw another duck and another. The third came within reach of one ape. He seized it and bit it savagely, tearing it to pieces with vicious glee. Its impact set him swinging.

Duck after duck was hurled till another baboon caught and rent another. This went on till two of the swinging apes came within grasping distance of each other. At once they grappled, bit each other and fought till one was killed.

It made a queer spectacle; the crates of quacking ducks, the thin-legged, blackskinned, turbaned mahout, the wickedly comprehending little elephant, the chattering baboons, the ducks hurtling through the air, and running about the sand all over the arena, for many of them fell and escaped alive, the yelling spectators of the upper tiers, the mildly amused parties in the Imperial and senatorial boxes, the blaze of sun over everything.

The duck-throwing was continued till only one ape remained alive.

It was all very exciting and so whimsically odd that it was acclaimed a most successful surprise. It is yet remembered by those who saw it or heard of it from them as the most spectacular and peculiar of all the inventions of the lamented Mercablis.

Of my experiences while in the Choragium and about the amphitheater the most notable were my opportunities for observing Commodus as a beast- fighter, the passion for the sport which possessed him, his absorption in it, even rage for it, his unflagging interest in it, his untiring pursuit of it, and his amazing strength and astounding skill in the use of arrows, spears, swords, and even clubs as weapons for killing beasts.

Keen as was his enjoyment of his own dexterity and fond as he was of displaying it to admiring and applauding onlookers, infatuated as he was with the intoxication of butchery, proficiency and adulation, he retained sufficient vestiges of decency and self-respect to restrain him from exhibiting himself as a beast-fighter in public spectacles before all Rome. Of late years I have heard not a few persons declare and maintain that they had seen and recognized him in the arena during the mornings of public festivals; that his outline, attitudes, movements and his manner of handling a sword, a club, a spear or a bow were unmistakable. I asseverate that these persons were and are self-deceived, or talking idly or repeating what they have heard from others or merely lying. Commodus never so far debased himself as to take his stand in the arena of the Colosseum on the morning of a public spectacle with all Rome looking on; still less did he ever disgrace himself by actually killing beasts in full sight of the whole populace. I speak from full knowledge. I know.

I may remark here that, taking the other extreme from these detractors or gossips, there exist persons who maintain that Commodus never drove a chariot in public, let alone as a competing jockey in a succession of races in the Circus Maximus on a regular festival day in full view of all Rome; likewise that he not only never, as a gladiator, killed an adversary in public combat, but never so much as shed blood in any of his fights; asserting that he merely practised with lath foils inside the Palace.

These latter persons are of the class who are horrified that a Prince of the Republic should have debased himself as did Commodus, who feel that it is discreditable to Imperial Majesty in general that such shameful occurrences took place and who are foolish enough to fancy that harm done may be undone by forgetting what happened, by whispering about it, by keeping silent, by hushing up as much as possible all reports of it, by expunging all mention of it from the public records, by garbling histories and annals so as to make it appear that Commodus merely longed to do and practiced or played at doing what he actually did.

These wiseacres are as far from the truth as his libellers and slanderers.

If anything in addition to my solemn assertion is needful to convince any reader of this chronicle that I am right, let me remind him that all Rome knew or knew of Palus the Gladiator, afterwards of Palus the Charioteer, later yet again of Palus the Gladiator; of Palus, the unsurpassable, the inimitable, the incomparable: incomparable in his ease, his grace, his litheness, his agility, his quickness, his amazing capacity for seeing the one right thing to do, the one thing which no other man could have thought of, and for doing it without a sign of perturbation, haste or effort, yet swift as lightning, with the effectiveness of Jove's thunderbolts and with the joyousness of a happy lad; always the same Palus and always in every dimension, attitude and movement the picture, the image, the double of Commodus: whereas no one ever heard or saw Palus the Beast-Fighter.

I think the chief reason why Commodus could not resist the temptation to degrade himself to the level of a public character and a public gladiator, yet, despite his infatuation for beast-killing, shrank from dishonoring himself by appearing at a public festival as a beast-fighter, was that beast-fighters are not merely more despised than charioteers or gladiators but the contempt felt for them has in it quite a different quality from that felt for gladiators and charioteers. Everybody sees criminals killed by beasts and there are all sorts of variations in the manner in which criminals are exposed to death by wild animals. Some are turned naked and weaponless into the arena to be mangled by lions or bears or other huge beasts: others are left clad in their tunics; some of these are allowed the semblance of a weapon; a club, knife, dagger or light javelin; so that their appearance of having some chance may make their destruction more diverting to the spectators: others, in order to prolong their agonies, are furnished with real weapons, as a sword, a pike, a trident, even a hunting spear with a full-sized triangular head, its edges honed sharp as razors; others are left completely clad, with or without sham weapons or actual arms, yet others are protected by armor, corselets, kilts, greaves, or even hip-boots and helmets, and wear swords and carry shields as well as pikes or spears: these last differ in appearance in no respect from professional beast-fighters.

This produces, in the minds of persons of all classes a sort of confusion between beast-fighters and criminals and brings it about that there attaches to those persons of noble-birth or free-birth who, whether from hope of gain, from poverty, or from infatuation with the sport or from mere bravado, abase themselves as beast-fighters, an obloquy far intenser than that which attaches to freemen or nobles who dishonor themselves by becoming gladiators or charioteers. Such self-abasements have been known ever since the reign of Nero, began to become more common under Domitian and have ceased to be regarded as anything unusual; in fact, so many men of good birth or even of high birth have become gladiators or charioteers, so many of these have acquired popularity, so many, even if actually few, have won wealth and fame, that professional charioteering or swordsmanship has almost ceased to be regarded as a degradation. Not so beast-fighting. No one can point to a record of any freeman or noble having appeared in the arena as a beast-fighter and afterwards having regained by any acquisition whether of reputation or fortune the position in society which he had forfeited by his dishonor.

At any rate, Commodus gratified his enthusiasm, for beast-killing in two entirely different ways. One was by regaling the people with spectacles of unheard-of, even of incredible magnificence, at which not only the noon- hour was filled with ingenious and novel feats of trick-riding, tightrope- walking, jugglery, acrobatics and the like, and one of the surprises invented by Mercablis and the afternoons ennobled by hosts of gladiators, paired or fighting by fours, sixes or tens, twenties or in battalions, as if soldiers in actual battles; but the mornings were exciting with the slaughter of hordes of animals of all kinds; with fights of ferocious beasts, and with, the fighting and killing of fierce animals by the most expert and venturesome beast-fighters. At these spectacles Commodus participated as a spectator, in the Imperial Pavilion, surrounded by his officials and the great officers of his household, clad in his princely robes, seated on his gold-mounted ivory throne.

His other method of gratifying his infatuation was by himself killing all sorts of beasts, either from the coping of the arena, or from platforms constructed out on the arena or from the level of the sand itself, for which feats he had as spectators the whole Senate and the entire body of our nobility, summoned by special invitation and most of them by no means reluctant to enjoy the spectacle of the superlative prowess possessed by their Prince.

When any of the Vestals were present at these eccentric exhibitions they occupied their front-row box and Marcia usually sat with them, generally accompanied by as many of her intimates among the wives of senators as the box would accommodate. The Vestals, as the only human beings in Rome who did not fear Commodus, were often entirely independent in their behavior and refused his invitations; but they did it politely, alleging that the regulations of their cult forbade any Vestal absenting herself from the Temple and Atrium on that particular day. When no Vestal was present Marcia occupied their box, by their invitation, and filled it with her noblest and wealthiest favorites among the senatorial matrons, often wives of ex-consuls.

On these occasions Commodus wore fulldress boots of a shape precisely as with his official robes but not of the usual color: they had indeed the Imperial eagles embroidered on them in gold thread, but, instead of being of sky-blue dull-finished leather, they were of a shiny, glaze-surfaced leather as white as milk, their soles gilded along the edges. Gold embroidery set off his tunic, which was of the purest white silk, shimmering brilliantly. He always wore many gold rings, set with rubies and emeralds; also an elaborate necklace matching his rings. His bright, soft, curly, yellow hair haloed his face as did his almost as bright and fully as yellow and curly beard. His eyes were very bright blue, his cheeks very red. He was very handsome. The expression of vacuous miscomprehension like that on the face of a country bumpkin, which was so usual with Commodus when dealing with official business or social duties, never appeared on his countenance when revelling in his favorite sport: then his expression was intelligent, lively and even charming.

He was at this time in his twenty-sixth year and in the very prime of his life. Before his death, instead of the rosiness of health on his face and the glow of youth on his cheeks, his entire countenance was unbecomingly flushed and florid, like that of a drunkard.

His weapons were as exquisitely designed and finished as his costume. When he used a club it was of the wood of some Egyptian palm or of cornel-wood, heavily gilded; a heap of such clubs was always in readiness when he entered the arena. Similarly there was ready for him an arsenal of swords, of every style, shape and size, from short Oscan swords not much longer than daggers to Gallic swords with blades a full yard long and thin as kitchen spits. All were gold-hilted, sheathed in colored, tooled, embroidered, gilded or even bejewelled leather; many had their blades gilded except the edges and points. There was piled up ready for his choice a mountain of spears, of patterns as various as the swords. All had their shafts whitened with some novel sort of paint which produced a gleaming effect like the sheen of the white portions of the finer sorts of decorated Greek vases. This glaze effect was over all of each shaft except at the grip, where the natural wood always appeared, roughened like the surface of a file with criss-cross lines to afford him a surer grasp. His bows were all gilded, his quivers gilded or of gem-studded, brightly tinted leather, in many colored patterns; his arrows gilded all over, points, shafts and feathers; or with feathers dyed red, blue, green or violet. Every detail of his get-up and equipment was to the last degree perfect, reliable, beautiful, unusual and costly.

I pondered a great deal over his infatuation and its consequences.

In the first place, as when contemplating the torrent of beast-wagons flowing down the Flaminian Highroad, I was, being still inwardly a Roman noble, overwhelmed with shame that the enormous, but even so insufficient, revenues of the Republic should be diverted from their proper uses for the maintenance of our prosperity and the defence of the frontiers of the Empire and squandered on the silly amusements of a great, hulking, empty- headed lad.

Then I was almost equally ashamed that a man who could, on occasion, if sufficiently roused, be, for a space, as completely Prince and Emperor as Commodus had repeatedly shown himself in my sight, could, on the other hand, waste his time and energies on displaying his dexterity in feats of archery, javelin-throwing, swordsmanship, agility and mere strength. It appeared to me not only shameful but incredible that a man who was capable of such complete adequacy in his proper station in life as Commodus had shown himself to be, for instance, when berating Satronius and Vedius or, still more, when facing the mutineers and dooming Perennis, should be willing to leave the management of the Republic and the ruling of the Empire to an ex-slave and ex-street porter like Cleander, and occupy his time with spearing bears, shooting with arrows lions, tigers, or elephants and what not, burying his sword-blade in bulls, even with clubbing ostriches.

I oscillated or vacillated between these two lines of thought. The sight of Commodus dodging the lightning rush of an infuriated ostrich and neatly despatching him with a single blow on the head from a palm-wood club no longer and no thicker than his own forearm not only stirred my wonder that any man could possess such accuracy of eyesight, such power of judging distances and time, such perfect cooerdination of his faculties of observation, of his will and of his muscles; but also roused my disgust that a man capable of ruling the world and with the opportunity to show his capabilities should degrade himself to wasting time on tricks of agility and feats of strength and skill.

On the other hand the sight of Commodus using a full-grown male Indian elephant as a target for his arrows enraged me. Next to a man an Indian elephant is the most intelligent creature existing on this earth of ours, as far as we know. An elephant lives far longer than a man. His life of useful labor is longer than the total life of a long-lived man. And his labor can be very useful to mankind. An elephant can travel, day after day, as fast and far as a horse, he can accomplish easily tasks to which no team of horses, not even of sixteen horses, is adequate, he can outdo any gang of men at loading or unloading a ship with massive timbers or with many other kinds of cargo in heavy and bulky units. It can only be a shame to kill, for mere sport, so noble a creature. It is bad enough to exhibit in the arena fights of elephants, which kill each other for our diversion, when we might utilize their courage and prowess in battle, as the Indians do. But to use an elephant as a mere target for arrows is far worse.

Then again, while I watched Commodus killing an elephant with his arrows I could not but think of the hundreds of men who had been employed in tracking his herd, building a stockade, driving into it what elephants they could, fettering them, taming them, caring for this one after he had been tamed, tending him on his journey of many thousand miles from India, across Gadrosia, Carmania, Susiana, Mesopotamia and Syria to Antioch and from there to Rome; on getting food for him on his journey and at different cities; on the vast expense of all this; and for what? That a silly and vainglorious overgrown child should shoot him full of arrows till he bled to death!

I raged inwardly.

I quite agree that Commodus enjoyed killing for killing's sake; it gave him a sort of sense of triumph to behold any animal succumb to his weapons. But I think his sense of triumph was also far more for his repeated self-congratulation on his accuracy of aim for shot or blow, on the perfection of his really amazing dexterity.

When he shot at elephants the procedure was always the same; two elephants were turned into the arena, and Commodus was matched against some archer of superlative reputation, whose prowess had been repeatedly demonstrated before the audiences of the Colosseum, a Parthian, Scythian, or Mauretanian. A prize was offered to him if he won and wagers were laid, mostly of ten to one or more on Commodus; he, of course, betting on himself with at least one senator at any odds his taker chose. Then the contest began, Commodus shooting from the Imperial Pavilion, his competitor from any part of the podium which he might choose, so that both archers were on an equality, being placed on the coping of the arena at spots they had chosen. The prize went to whichever killed his elephant with the fewest arrows. Commodus always won. Not that his competitors did not do their best. They did. But he was, in fact, the best archer alive. His accuracy of aim was uncanny and his strength really terrific. He could himself string a hundred and sixty pound bow and he shot a bow even stiffer than that without apparent effort and with fascinating and indescribable grace. He never missed, not only not the animal, but not even the vital part aimed at. I was told that, when he first practiced on an elephant, he killed it with arrows in the liver, of which eleven were required to finish the beast. He then had it cut open under Galen's supervision, he watching. He thereafter never failed to reach an elephant's heart with his third arrow, killed most with his second, and not a few with his first, a feat never equaled or approached by any other archer, for the killing of an elephant with five arrows by Tilla the Goth remains the best record ever made in the Colosseum by any other bowman. The impact of his arrows was so weighty that I have beheld one go entirely through the paunch of a full-grown male elephant and protrude a foot on the other side.

With rhinoceroses and hippopotami the procedure was similar. Neither of these animals could be had as plentifully as elephants, of which I saw Commodus and his competitors kill more than thirty; mostly Mauretanian elephants, but some Indian and a few Nubian. I saw killed for his amusements in similar contests in which he participated four rhinoceroses and six hippopotami. In these matches he killed one rhinoceros with two arrows and the rest with one; so of the hippopotami. As with the elephants, after he had seen a rhinoceros and a hippopotamus cut open under Galen's direction, he retained so vivid an impression of the location of its heart that, from any direction, whether the beast was moving or still, he sent his arrow so as to reach the heart. This sounds incredible, but it is exactly the truth.

As I watched I kept imagining the baking deserts of Libya or the steaming swamps of Nubia, the shouting hordes of negroes, the many killed by the beast, its capture, and the infinite and expensive care necessary to bring one alive to Rome.

Besides these enormous animals he practiced archery on the huge long- horned bulls from the forests of Dacia and Germany; on the bisons from the same regions, beasts with heavy shoulders, low rumps and small horns, parallel to each other, curving downwards over the brows; on the big stags from these far-off forests, or any sort of stags! And on two varieties of African antelope not much inferior in size to stags or bulls. He very seldom needed a third arrow to put an end to any beast of these kinds, not often a second arrow, and, actually, killed hundreds, even thousands, neatly and infallibly with his first shot. All these animals he shot from the podium, often leaning on the coping, his right knee on it, generally standing, his feet wide apart, the toes of his right foot against the coping wall; for, as with sword or spear or club, he also shot left- handed.

Prom the arena itself, standing on the sand on which they scampered about, he shot multitudes of smaller animals: wild ponies, wild asses, striped African zebras, gazelles, and at least a dozen varieties of small African antelopes, for which there are no special names in Latin or even in Greek. The antelopes and gazelles, although they ran quicker than hares, he never missed and seldom did he fail to kill with one arrow whatever animal he aimed at. He never, to my knowledge, missed even the incredibly speedy wild asses.

Nor did he ever miss an ostrich, though he shot both from the podium and the sand these birds, which are swifter than even the wild asses. He shot at them with arrows made specially after a pattern of his own, with crescent-shaped heads set on the shaft with the two horns of the crescent pointing forward, the inner curve sharpened to a razor edge. Shooting at an ostrich racing at top speed he never failed to decapitate it with one shot, invariably severing its neck about a hands-breadth below its head.

He also killed with javelins or arrows wolves, hyenas, bears, lynxes, leopards, panthers, tigers and lions. But when killing such dangerous and ferocious animals he took his stand on a platform, the floor of which was about three yards square and elevated about that distance above the sand, constructed well out in the arena so that he could shoot down in any direction on beasts rushing towards or past the platform or driven past it or towards it. He slaughtered incredible multitudes of these creatures and certainly displayed amazing strength and skill, habitually killing a lion with one javelin, almost as often with one arrow, and the like for tigers; and oftener for panthers and leopards. He never needed a second arrow to finish a wolf or hyena or even a lynx. The marvellous accuracy of his aim, the way he planted his arrow unerringly in the heart of a galloping wolf scudding across the sand far from him; the way he drove a broad-bladed hunting-spear clear through a huge shaggy bear, never failed to rouse my wonder, even my admiration. [Footnote: See Note J.]



CHAPTER XXXI

RECOGNITION

I do not recall any special feat of the Imperial beast-killer during the summer and autumn of the year in which I had fooled Bulla and been transferred from the stud-farm to the Choragium, which was the year in which Crispinus and Aelian were consuls, the nine hundred and fortieth year of the City, [Footnote: 187 A.D.] and the eighth of the Principate of Commodus. But, when the season for spectacles in the arena opened with the first warm, fair weather of the following spring, he returned to his favorite sport with redoubled zest, amounting to a craze.

It was during the spring and early summer of this year that he began to make huge wagers with wealthy senators, betting that he could kill a specified number of a specified variety of animal with a specified number of spears or arrows; always proposing so to limit himself as to number of weapons that the exploit appeared impossible. The result was that avaricious Midases were eager to wager, as they felt certain of winning. Yet he never lost, not once.

And, after each wager made, or won, he made the next on a narrower margin at smaller odds, until he struck the whole nobility numb by offering to wager even money that he could kill one hundred full-grown male bears from his usual platform with one hundred hunting spears, covenanting that he was to lose if he needed one hundred and one spear-casts to lay out those hundred bears limp, flabby and utterly dead. This appeared so utterly an impossibility that Aufidius Fronto offered to put up two million sesterces against him. The pompous sham philosopher, who feigned the profoundest contempt for riches, could not resist what looked like enormous gains. He made the wager, and Commodus won.

Now I cannot insist too positively on the amazing, the incredible strength and skill and nerve required for this fatiguing and taxing feat. Any other man I ever knew or heard of would have shown evidences of weariness long before he had despatched his hundredth bear; would certainly have betrayed the terrific strain on his nerves. Commodus was, apparently, as fresh, as jaunty, as full of reserve strength, as far from being unsure of himself when he finished the hundredth bear as when he drove his first spear into the first.

Now it requires altogether exceptional strength so to cast even the best design of hunting-spear, as keen as possible, as to drive it through the matted pelt, thick hide and big bones of a bear; in so driving it, to aim it so that it will pierce his heart calls for superhuman skill. And to reiterate this feat ninety-nine times in succession argues a perfection of eye, hand and nerve never possessed by any man save Commodus. Any other man would have felt the strain, most men would have become so anxious towards the end as to become agitated. He kept calm and cool.

I thoroughly enjoyed the discomfiture of Aufidius Fronto and relished his futile efforts to appear indifferent to his money loss.

Not many days later Commodus made a similar and still more hazardous wager with Didius Julianus, the most opulent and ostentatious of the senators, who was afterwards nominally Emperor for two months and five days. This wager covenanted that Commodus, from his platform in the arena, would despatch one hundred full-grown male lions, in their prime and vigorous, with one hundred javelins. On this arduous frivolity they wagered ten million sesterces and had the actual gold, fifty thousand big, broad, gold pieces, carried into the arena and piled up in a gleaming mound on a monster crimson rug for all to behold. This bit of ostentation was like Didius Julianus and not unnatural for Commodus. I have never seen any man perform so easily so difficult a feat. Killing a lion with three javelins requires very unusual strength and skill. To kill ten lions with forty casts would tax the muscles, dexterity and nerves of the best spearman the world ever knew. To kill a hundred lions with, barely one javelin apiece was bravado to propose and miraculous to accomplish. Accomplish it he did and without any visible effort or strain. Eighty-nine of the hundred he shot through the heart; the remaining eleven with difficult fancy shots which he was, against all reason, tempted to essay, and which, against all probability, uniformly were fully successful.

Didius Julianus paid his wager without any show of chagrin, as he could well afford to do.

At once Commodus offered to bet that he could kill a hundred similar lions with a bare hundred arrows. Didius at once wagered the same sum he had just lost and the bet was made. The exhibition was delayed more than a month until it had been possible to accumulate at Rome a full hundred full-grown male lions. Then Commodus again shot in sight of a pile of gold pieces on an expanse of crimson velvet spread on the sand of the arena.

Commodus won as before, with exactly the same number of heart shots and fancy shots. If one miracle can be greater than another this feat surpassed its predecessor. For a lion takes a great deal of killing before he dies, and each of these hundred lions died as quickly as any lion ever does. Instant killing of a lion with a javelin is a miracle, even more miraculous is instant killing of a lion with one arrow. Commodus so killed the full hundred.

I know of no more astounding demonstration of his infallible and tremendous muscle power than the fact that, shooting at a lion fully twenty yards away, and in the act of rearing rampantly at the beginning of a bound, he sent his arrow into the roof of its mouth, through the brain, the entire length of the spinal cord and so far that its point protruded from the dead beast's rump above the root of its tail. Galen, who, as often, was in the amphitheater in case of injury to the Prince, and who was in the habit of dissecting such dead beasts as interested him, cut along the path followed by the missile, cleaving the dead lion in two lengthwise and laying the two halves hide downward on the sand, so as to demonstrate to a bevy of curious and awed spectators the incredible path of that arrow.

Commodus lived on miracles. Of all the thousands of darts, javelins and spears which I saw him throw, of all the countless arrows I saw him shoot, not one ever missed its mark, not one merely hit the beast aimed at, everyone, even if launched at an ostrich skimming the sand or a gazelle, struck deep and true precisely where he had aimed it.

As I am about to narrate the occurrence which put an end to the insensate indulgence in beast-killing in which Commodus had revelled, I am reminded that, besides his vilifiers, who assert that he publicly exhibited himself as an ordinary beast-fighter, and his apologists, who maintain that he not only did not do so, but never so much as drove a chariot in public or spilt human blood with an edged weapon, there are others who, while not retailing or inventing any fictions or attempting to blink or suppress any facts, yet inveigh against Commodus as absurdly assuming the attributes of Hercules while really a weakling and as pretending to powers which he never possessed, as having been largely or wholly a counterfeit spearman, a make-believe archer, a sham swordsman and a mock athlete.

Among other alleged proofs of these baseless contentions they cite the ecstatic joy with which, to the limit of the supply gathered from all parts of the African deserts, he day after day, on the sands of the arena, delightedly clubbed ostriches, alleging that killing an ostrich with a sword or club is child's play and no feat of skill. As to this particular citation of vaunted evidence, as in their contentions at large, they are egregiously mistaken and far from the facts and the truth.

Actually, for a lone man, on level ground, far from any shelter, an angry full-grown young male ostrich is a formidable assailant and a dangerous antagonist. No living creature that roves the surface of our earth moves faster than a healthy ostrich. When running it skims the arena, when attacking it darts. It kicks forward, raising its long and powerful leg high in the air and bringing it down with a blow so swift that the eye cannot follow it and so forcible that I have seen one such stroke smash all together the collar-bone, shoulder-blade, upper arm-bone and half the ribs on that side of its unfortunate victim, a big, agile, vigorous Nubian, habituated to ostriches in their haunts. And, if the leg misses its mark, as it very seldom does, the bird, as it hurls past its enemy, pecks viciously at his face, its sturdy beak being capable of inflicting a serious wound wherever it strikes, and often destroying an eye, its usual target.

To stand alone, far out in the arena, bare-headed, clad only in a diaphanous silken tunic, armed only with a club no longer or thicker than his forearm; so habited and armed to await the assault of an infuriated bird so bulky, so swift, so agile and so powerful; to dodge jauntily, but infallibly, both the stroke of the leg and the stab of the beak, and invariably to bring his club down on the darting head and finish the bird neatly with that one blow; this was equally a feat of self-confidence, of dexterity, of agility and of strength. I hold no man justified in condemning Commodus because he gloried in clubbing ostriches.

The incident I recall occurred when spring had already waned and was merging into summer. The lower tiers of the Colosseum were well filled with senators, nobles and other persons of sufficient importance to be invited. None of the Vestals were present and their box was occupied by Marcia and her intimates. There were enough spectators seated to give the amphitheater an appearance of gaiety and vivacity almost as great as if it had been filled by all classes of the populace. The weather was clear, warm and sunny, with a light, soft breeze.

Commodus had exhibited his dexterity as an archer by shooting a great number and great variety of small antelopes, each one of which he had killed with a single arrow. Next he began clubbing ostriches and disposed of a dozen or more. Altogether there were about fifty. It was characteristic of Commodus that he was impatient of any delay between different exhibitions when he was thus displaying his prowess. After the ostriches he intended to mount his platform and shoot fifty or sixty lions. In order to have them handy to begin on as soon as the last ostrich was despatched he had commanded that those which were to be let out of posterns should be disposed behind the doors and that some of the cages of those which were to be liberated from cages should be hoisted from the crypt and set ready in the arena. A full dozen of such cages had been set out. I was not with the gang hoisting these cages and marshalling other lions behind posterns, but was at the opposite end of the arena with a smaller gang which was engaged in getting ready a score or more of tigers which were to be let out after the lions and which were giving a great deal of trouble.

Commodus was facing my end of the arena and so had his back to the lions in their cages, which were about thirty yards from him. The liberated ostriches did not seem to pay any attention to the caged lions and each, as he was driven back towards Commodus by men with long hayforks, with which they caught the birds' necks and held them off, turned furiously on Commodus and charged him viciously. Each bird Commodus dodged with one slight instantaneous and effortless movement; each bird fell dead at once, neatly clubbed on the head.

As he clubbed the last ostrich I saw a lion step dazedly and tentatively out of one of the cages. Of course, it was not intended that any of the lions should be liberated until the Emperor had mounted his platform, approved the bow selected for him or chosen one for himself, and similarly inspected and approved as many arrows as he expected to need. It was hardly possible that any cage-door came open by accident. I conjectured a plot similar to that which I had seen fail when the piebald horse threw himself and his fall and the wreck of the chariot he helped to draw failed to cause the death of Palus the Charioteer.

The lion, once he was wholly out of his cage, sneaked forward his length or more, crouched, and bounded towards Commodus. A shout of dismay, horror and warning went up from the audience. Marcia shrieked and leapt to her feet. Most of the spectators also stood up, the audience rising in a sort of wave as it emitted its yell of consternation.

Commodus whirled round, saw the lion, stood and eyed him precisely as if he had been a charging ostrich; appeared to measure the diminishing distance, showed no sign of perturbation, crouched slightly, dodged as the lion sprang at him; dodged so slightly that I was sure the lion had him, but so effectively that no claw touched him; straightened up as the lion, wholly in the air, shot past him; swung his short club and brought it down on the lion's neck; and stood there, triumphant, by a lion stretched out motionless on the sand, totally limp and unmistakably dead.

Marcia fainted.

So did half her guests.

So did some of the older senators.

Commodus, not so much as noticing the perturbation of his guests, not even Marcia, called out to the overseer in charge of the cages:

"Not a man of you dare move. Stand where you are."

The guards, a batch of whom were stationed at each postern by which the attendants entered and left the arena, ran towards the Emperor. He ordered them to summon all their fellows from all through the Colosseum and when their chief officer approached him gave orders that they form a cordon behind the cages and see to it that no man of those who had been getting out the cages should escape.

While this was being done the spectators had reseated themselves, the inanimate had been revived and even Marcia had recovered consciousness and composure and, with her guests was as before their fright.

When all were in order Commodus ordered:

"Let out another lion!"

The overseer in charge of the cages and the officer of the guards demurred.

"Do as I tell you!" Commodus browbeat the overseer. To the officer he said:

"If I, with only a tunic and club, am not afraid of a lion charging me, you and your men, in armor and with shields and swords ought not to be afraid." "We are not," the officer declared, "we are concerned for you, not for ourselves."

"Pooh!" said Commodus. "If I could kill the first handily when I was not expecting him, I can kill all the rest the same way when I know what is coming. A lion, by that sample, is as easy to dodge and club dead as an ostrich or easier. Send me another."

Another was let out amid the dead silence of the dazed and astounded spectators. Commodus killed the second as handily as the first.

Now I must say that no exploit recorded of any human being or traditional of any legendary hero, outclasses as a feat of strength, coolness, courage and perfect coordination of all the mental and physical faculties, this act of Commodus' in killing two successive lions with a palm-wood club. A charging lion is an object so terrifying as to chill the blood of a distant onlooker. Very unusually good nerves and very exceptional self- confidence are required to face with composure a portent which appears so irresistible. And when the lion emits his tremendous roar and rises, bodily, into the air in his mortal spring, mouth wide open, its crimson cavern glaring, teeth gleaming, eyes blazing, mane erect, paws spread, claws wide, the stoutest heart might well quail. Yet, after barely escaping one lion, this foolhardy coxcomb, this vainglorious madcap, joyously called for another and jauntily despatched him: whatever may be said against Commodus as a man and an Emperor, as an athlete he believed in himself and justified his belief.

He called for a third, in spite of Marcia's shrieks, gesturing to her to sit down and keep still, and laughing up at her. But by this time Aemilus Laetus, who was afterwards the last Prefect of the Praetorium to Commodus and who was then an officer of the Guards, superior to the officer who had protested, approached, saluted and spoke to the Emperor. Their conference was conducted in tones too low to be overheard, but it was afterwards reported, both by those who claimed to learn of it from Commodus and by those who claimed to have been informed by Laetus, that he had urged upon the Emperor that his personal importance to the Republic was too great for him to risk himself so needlessly, and that Commodus had yielded to his expostulations.

At any rate Commodus ordered arrested and bound the entire gang who had been handling the lions' cages. He then walked up to them and enquired who had let out that lion. When no one confessed to having been responsible and several were accused by their fellows, the Emperor gave orders to lead off all concerned, hale them not before the Palace court, nor the commission in charge of prosecutions for offences against Imperial Majesty, but before the regular public magistrate in charge of trials for murder, assassination, poisoning, homicidal conspiracy and the like.

"Let him put the entire gang to the torture," the Emperor was reported as ordering. "Let him prosecute his enquiry until he gets a confession plainly naming the man who bribed the poor wretch who left that cage half- fastened, or the man who bribed the man who forced him to do it, or the whole chain of scoundrels, from the noble millionaire conspirators who hatched the idea, through their rabble of go-betweens down to the fool who hocussed that door-snap."

After the prisoners were marched off Commodus had the herald apologize for the interruption of the entertainment, proclaim that it would now proceed and request everyone to remain to enjoy it. Then he mounted his platform.

Yet this was his last exhibition of himself in the role of beast-slayer. I conjecture that as the episode of the piebald horse enlightened him as to the facilities for unobtrusive assassination afforded his enemies by his public appearances as a charioteer, so this episode of the accidentally liberated lion awakened him to the ease with which it might be arranged, whenever he entered the arena as a beast-slayer, that some monster might be loosed at him rather than for him. At any rate he never again took his stand in the arena for his long idolized sport. Beast-slaying he thenceforth eschewed.

Of course it was not by any means at once that we in the Choragium realized that the Emperor had abandoned his vagary. We knew only that we were suddenly unemployed and were merely glad of the respite and then uneasy at the change. I had time to reflect how marvellous had been my luck. Commodus himself had three several times asked me questions about my ability to control beasts; Galen had many times stood by me or passed near me, often with his eyes apparently meeting mine. Satronius Satro had stood and gazed at me, not three yards away. A score of other senators, all of whom had known me in the days of my prosperity, had been as near me, and noblemen to the number of something like a hundred. Not one of these had identified me.

If I escaped recognition it was, I conjectured, because of the deep-seated habit of mind of noblemen and more exalted personages and of men, like Galen, who have risen to a station in life which places them on an equality with nobles; the habit of mind which makes them regard a slave not as a human being, to be looked at as an individual, as they look at an equal or any freeman, but as a mere object like a door, or gate or piece of statuary or of furniture or a sort of utensil. Such men look full at a slave, if unknown to them, without really perceiving him. From this cause, I conceive, I escaped recognition, detection, and annihilation.

Much less than a month after the episode of Commodus and the two lions I was reading in my quarters, when the slave detailed as my personal servant entered and, cringing, said that there was a gentleman who wanted to see me. I gazed at him severely and said:

"I think you are mistaken. Please remember what the procurator told you about persons desiring to intrude on me."

The fellow fairly cowered, visibly sweating and trembling, but insisted:

"I really think that you really will be glad to see this gentleman."

I perceived that some unusual enticement must have been offered the pitiful wretch to induce him to brave the terrors of the punishments with which the procurator had threatened him if he allowed any would-be visitors to reach me. It also appeared to me that the fellow was fond of me and had the best of intentions.

"Show the gentleman up," I finally said.

He had been gone but a very short time when the door opened and in came....

Tanno!

He shut the door fast and, without a word, we were clasped in a close embrace.

When our emotions quieted sufficiently I pressed Tanno into a chair and resumed mine. We gazed at each other some time before either mastered himself enough for words. Tanno spoke first, veiling his feelings beneath his habitual jocularity. He said:

"Caius, you are certainly unkillable or bear a charmed life. You have been officially certified as dead two several times. First you were butchered by the Praetorians at Ortona, then you were assassinated by a disgruntled public-slave in the Umbrian Mountains: after two demises here you are, as alive as possible. Please explain."

"I feel faint," I said, "and, illogically, both thirsty and hungry."

I signalled for my servitor and, almost at once, he brought plenty of the Choragium's more than passable wine, fresh bread and a variety of cold viands. A draught of wine and a mouthful of bread and ham made me feel myself. Then I told about my close shaves when I three several times barely escaped assassination at the hands of partizans of Bulla, about the kindness of the Villicus and procurator and why I had changed my name.

"Why didn't you send at least a tiny note to Vedia and let her know you were alive after all?" he queried.