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Gérôme's two pictures, the "Ave Cæsar! Morituri te Salutant," "Hail, Cæsar! Those about to die, salute Thee," and "The Gladiators," are so universally known as to need no description.
"It was something sinister and superb, this chant of the shipwrecked, the condemned, something like a prayer and also like something grander, something comparable to the ancient 'Ave Caesar morituri te salutant. "When they had finished I asked my neighbor to sing a ballad alone, anything she liked, to make us forget our terrors.
She simply put the things down on the table by my bedside, and then stood there with the air of sullen hostility which she seemed generally to wear in McMurtrie's presence. "I feel rather like a gladiator," I said. "Morituri te salutant!" McMurtrie, who had taken a shallow blue saucepan out of the bag and was filling it with hot water, looked up with a smile.
These amateurs, whom it would be rude to call sports, lurk in the wayside cafe over their cups of chocolate and wait till in that darkest hour before dawn, with irregular trampling and deep bellowing, these hapless heroes of the arena pass on to their doom. It is a great thing for the aficionados who may imagine in that bellowing the the gladiator's hail of Morituri salutant.
All these men and women, their deep in-born corruption momentarily transfigured by this enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for sentiment, for austerity, which mingled oddly with their childish pleasure in all new things, in mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Montgolfier balloons, with their habitual pleasure in all their big and small futile and wicked pleasures of worldliness; all these men and women, these morituri delighted at the preparations, the scaffoldings, red clothes, black crape, torches and drums and bugles, for their own execution, all assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bourgoyne.
Slowly Uncle Chris adjusted his mind to the disaster. "Then you mean . . . ?" "It's off!" said Freddie. For a moment Uncle Chris stood motionless. Then, with a sudden jerk, he seemed to stiffen his backbone. His face was bleak, but he pulled at his mustache jauntily. "Morituri te salutant!" he said. "Good-bye, Freddie, my boy." He turned away, gallant and upright, the old soldier.
Bowdoin was a small college, graduating at that time about thirty students at its annual Commencement; its professors were kindly and cultivated men, and its curriculum the simple academic course of those days. Hawthorne's class, immortalized fifty years later by Longfellow's grave and tender anniversary lines, "Morituri Salutamus," was destined to unusual distinction in after life.
The following note gives a hint of his natural gayety, and details one of the many excuses by which he always declined to speak in public; the one memorable exception being that beautiful occasion at Bowdoin, when he returned in age to the scenes of his youth and read to the crowd assembled there to do him reverence his poem entitled "Morituri Salutamus."
And now, as the inevitable end drew near, it was as if they would imitate the Roman gladiator with that terrible chorus of his: "Ave Cæsar morituri te salutant."
The shrill sound of a horn stopped the applause; the combatants stretched their right hands upward, raised their eyes and heads toward Cæsar, and began to cry or rather to chant with drawling voice, "Ave, Cæsar imperator! Morituri te salutant!" Then they pushed apart quickly, occupying their places on the arena.
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