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He got up and strode again along the corridor, glancing into the cells, where gladiators sat fettered to the wall. "This whole business is getting too confused for me," he grumbled, sitting down again. "You want to kill Commodus, as is reasonable. Marcia has ordered me to kill you, which is unreasonable! Yet for the present she protects you. Why? She knows you are Commodus' enemy.
I shall jilt poor dear Pacullus, who is as good a man and as good a fellow as ever lived, and I shall stick to my widowhood until I die or Commodus joins the company of the gods and we can arrange for your full rehabilitation and the restoration of your estates and rank."
That is, unless Commodus emerges from his sulks too soon and butchers all of us as we deserve!" "Have done with riddles, Galen! How will that affect Pertinax, except to make him emperor?" "Nothing will make him emperor unless he makes himself," said Galen. "You will know tonight. We lack a hero, Sextus.
I sickened at the thought of our shame along the frontiers as at the thought of the energies of thousands upon thousands of hard-muscled, bold-hearted young men wasted on capturing beasts and the like energies of thousands upon thousands of hardy peasants who ought to have been busy at productive labor on farms or in forests or mines, wasted on caring for and transporting swarms of beasts for Commodus to kill.
In this deadly game he felt no qualms, only certitude of easy victory. The controversies over the identity of Palus have produced a whole literature of pamphlets, some maintaining that he was Commodus, others professing to prove that he was not, of which some rehearse every possible theory of his relationship to Aurelius or Faustina.
Commodus admired the team a minute, then examined the new high wheels of the gilded chariot, that was hardly wider than a coffin a thing that a man could upset with a shove and built to look as flimsy as an egg shell. Suddenly he seized the reins and leaped in, throwing up his right hand.
If 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.
"It may be from neglect of this precaution," said Porphyry, "that our Maximus finds it so much easier to evoke the shades of Commodus and Caracalla than those of Socrates and Marcus Aurelius; and that these good spirits, when they do come, have no more recondite information to convey than that virtue differs from vice, and that one's grandmother is a fitting object of reverence."
Marcia stared long at him, her liquid, lazy eyes, suggesting banked fires in their depths, looking for signs of spirit that should rise to the occasion. But Pertinax preferred to choose his own occasions. "Commodus is in the bath," Marcia repeated. "He will stay there until night comes. He is sulking. He has his tablets with him writes and writes, then scratches out.
Commodus, at once after the death of Murmex, announced his intention of turning his Imperial duties and dignities over to Ducconius Furfur and of going to the Choragium, there and thenceforward to live and to die as Palus the Gladiator.
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