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Updated: June 28, 2025
You lodge a grave charge against a man I have trusted, appointed and then trusted. I condemn few men unheard. As your Imperator I command you to camp where my legates indicate, to eat a hearty noon meal, to sleep, or at least rest in your tents, two full hours. About the tenth hour of the day I shall return, my trusty guards about me and Perennis himself in my retinue.
The tyrant's rage, after having shed the noblest blood of the senate, at length recoiled on the principal instrument of his cruelty. Whilst Commodus was immersed in blood and luxury, he devolved the detail of the public business on Perennis, a servile and ambitious minister, who had obtained his post by the murder of his predecessor, but who possessed a considerable share of vigor and ability.
Under Perennis and later under Cleander not a few senators took with them into their boxes favorites who were not only not of senatorial rank, nor even nobles, but not Romans at all: foreign visitors, alien residents of Rome, freedmen or even slaves, and the other senators, as a class exquisitely sensitive to any invasion of their privileges by outsiders, winked at the practice partly because some of them participated in it, much more because they feared to suffer out-and-out ruin, if, by word or look, they incurred the disfavor of Perennis while he was all-powerful or, later, of the more omnipotent Cleander.
As he ended it, it was plain that Perennis believed he had cleared himself completely and had not only vindicated himself before his master, but had convinced the mutineers of his guiltlessness and loyalty. His expression of face, as he wound up his eloquent peroration, was that of a man who, unexpectedly to himself, transmounts insuperable difficulties and triumphs.
But if you remain here inactive your death is certain, you will never see two sunrises. "But I agree with you that your friends will do what they can and I heartily believe that Opsitius and Vedia will move sky, earth and sea and Hades beneath all, as far as their powers go, to save you. If they have any chance of succeeding they will need more time than Perennis will give them.
For the twinkling of an eye I beheld above this rising tide of executioners the imperious dignity of the Emperor, master of the scene, self-confident and certain that all men would approve of his decision, magnificent in his military trappings; the incredulous amazement of Perennis, his pale, watery blue eyes bleared in his lead-colored, bloodless face, as he stood dazed and numb; the horror of his bedizened wife and sister, both fleshy women, dark-skinned and normally red-cheeked, now gray with despair, like the two wretched lads beside them; the cruelly feminine relish, as upon the successful fruition of long and tortuous intrigues, blazoned on the faces of Marcia and of Cleander's wife, a very showy woman with golden hair, violet eyes and a delicately pink and white complexion: a similar expression of relished triumph on the broad, fat, ruddy face of her big husband, who looked just what he had been; a man who had started life as a slave; whose master had thought him likely to be most profitably employed as a street porter, in which capacity he had for years carried packs, crates, bales, chests, rafters and such like immensely heavy loads long distances and had thriven on his exertions; who, whatever brains he had since displayed, however much character and merit had contributed to his dazzling rise in life, had retained and still possessed a hearty appetite, a perfect digestion, mighty muscles, hard and solid, all over his hulking frame, and the vast strength of his early prime; all these chief actors framed against a background of gaudily caparisoned officers and courtiers.
We felt panicky. Spouting long tirades about their loyalty to the Emperor, their hatred of Perennis and their eagerness to foil one and save the other, our irresponsible frontier centurions let their men and us loiter southward through Cisalpine Gaul and Umbria as they had loitered on the other side of the Alps, seldom marching more than ten miles a day.
In the letter aforementioned, which was shown to me, the good man says: 'That I might be sure not to lose any part of your valuable present, I shook the bag over a patch of earth in a shady place: on visiting which a few days afterwards I found springing up, to my inexpressible delight, a Bellis perennis of our English pastures.
He maintained that Perennis, as Prefect of the Palace, had gained such an ascendancy over Commodus that besides his proper duties as guardian of the Emperor's personal safety, surely a charge sufficiently heavy to burden any one man and sufficiently honorable to satisfy any reasonable man, his master had been enticed into entrusting to Perennis the management of the entire Empire, so that he alone controlled promotions in and appointments to the navy, army and treasury services.
As it was, it was suggestive of old blue-and-white Delft, and the collector of that ware would have gone into raptures over it. For a permanent edging, for beds, paths, and the border, Bellis perennis, whose popular name is English Daisy, is one of the best of all plants. It is entirely hardy. It blooms early in the season. It is wonderfully generous in its production of flowers.
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