Talbot Mundy

“ Sextus interrupted. “If Galen is there we will find out what the philosophers are discussing in Rome when spies aren’t listening. Pertinax dresses himself like a strutting peacock and pretends that women and money are his only interests, but what the wise ones said yesterday, Pertinax does today; and what they say today, he will do tomorrow. He can look more like a popinjay and act more like a man than any one in Rome.”
“Who cares how they behave in Rome? The city has gone mad,” Norbanus answered. “Nowadays the best a man can do is to preserve his own goods and his own health. ”

“ Norbanus lapsed into a moody silence, critically staring at his friend when he was sure the other was not looking. Sextus had always puzzled him by running risks that other men (himself, for instance) steadfastly avoided, and avoiding risks that other men thought insignificant. To write a letter critical of Commodus was almost tantamount to suicide, since every Roman port and every rest-house on the roads that led to Rome had become infested with informers who were paid on a percentage basis. ”

“ Horses, litters and chariots, followed by crowds of slaves on foot with the provisions for moonlight banquets, poured toward the northern gate, some overtaking and passing the three but riding wide of the skewbald Cappadocian stallion’s heels.
“If Pertinax should really come,” said Sextus.
“He will have a girl with him,” Norbanus interrrupted. He had an annoying way of finishing the sentences that other folk began.
“True. When he is not campaigning Pertinax finds a woman irresistible.” ”

“ I wrote to my father recently and warned him to leave Rome before Commodus’s spies could invent an excuse for confiscating our estates. I said, an absent man attracts less notice, and our estates are well worth plundering. I also hinted that Commodus can hardly live forever, and reminded him that tides flow in and out—by which I meant him to understand that the next emperor may be another such as Aurelius, who will persecute the Christians but let honest men live in peace, instead of favoring the Christians and ridding Rome of honest men. ”

“ The Romans, frequently less wealthy (because those who had made money went to Rome to spend it) —frequently less educated and, in general, not less dissolute—despised the Antiochenes, although the Romans loved Antioch. The cosmopolitan Antiochenes returned the compliment, regarding Romans as mere duffers in depravity, philistines in art, but capable in war and government, and consequently to be feared, if not respected. So there was not much mingling of the groups, whose slaves took example from their masters, affecting in public a scorn that they did not feel but were careful to assert. ”

“ Sextus answered. “It is no use killing a Commodus to find a Nero in his shoes. If the successor were in sight—and visibly a man not a monster—there are plenty of men brave enough to give the dagger-thrust. But the prætorian guard, that makes and unmakes emperors, has been tasting the sweets of tyranny ever since Marcus Aurelius died. They despise their ‘Roman Hercules’ [2] —who doesn’t? ”

“ Only slaves and highwaymen are crucified.”
“They call any one a highwayman who is a fugitive from what our ‘Roman Hercules’ calls justice,” Norbanus answered with a gesture of irritation. His own trick of finishing people’s sentences did not annoy Sextus nearly as much as Sextus’s trick of pouncing on inaccuracies irritated him. He pressed his horse into a canter and for a while they rode beside the stream called the “Donkey-drowner” without further conversation, each man striving to subdue the ill-temper that was on the verge of outbreak. ”

“ The daily offering, from each meal, to the manes of his ancestors, whose images in wax and wood and marble were preserved in the little chapel attached to the old brick homestead, had inspired in him a feeling that the past was forever present and a man’s thoughts were as important as his deeds. ”

“ Norbanus advised. “The deadliest crime nowadays is to have the appearance of being serious. None suspects a drunken or a gay man.”
Sextus, however, was at no pains to appear gay. He inherited the moribund traditions that the older Cato had typified some centuries ago. His young face had the sober, chiseled earnestness that had been typically Roman in the sterner days of the Republic. ”

“ He boasts he has killed no less than twelve hundred poor devils with his own hand in the arena. True, he takes the pseudonym of Paulus when he kills lions with his javelin and drives a chariot in the races like a vulgar slave. ”

“ Sextus glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Scylax followed closely and prevented any one from overhearing. There was an endless procession now, before and behind, all bound for Daphne. As the riders passed under the city gate, where the golden cherubim that Titus took from the Jews’ temple in Jerusalem gleamed in the westering sun, Sextus noticed a slave of the municipium who wrote down the names of individuals who came and went.
“There are new proscriptions brewing,” he remarked. “Some friends of ours will not see sunrise. ”

“ Roman citizens were placed under arrest, to be submitted to all manner of indignities and to think themselves fortunate if they should escape with a heavy fine from a judge who had bought his office from an emperor’s favorite. ”

“ Wide, intersecting streets, each nearly four miles long, granite-paved, and marble-colonnaded, swarmed with fashionable loiterers. The gay Antiochenes, whom nothing except frequent earthquakes interrupted from pursuit of pleasure, were taking the air in chariots, in litters, and on foot ”