Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 1.djvu/136

CHAP. IV.
_____and some degree of applause was deservedly bestowed on the uncommon skill of the imperial performer. Whether he aimed at the head or heart of the animal, the wound was alike certain and mortal. With arrows, whose point was shaped into the form of a crescent, Commodus often intercepted the rapid career, and cut asunder the long bony neck of the ostrich^[1]. A panther was let loose ; and the archer waited till he had leaped upon a trembling malefactor. In the same instant the shaft flew, the beast dropt dead, and the man remained unhurt. The dens of the amphitheatre disgorged at once a hundred lions ; a hundred darts from the unerring hand of Commodus laid them dead as they ran raging round the arena. Neither the huge bulk of the elephant, nor the scaly hide of the rhinoceros, could defend them from his stroke. Ethiopia and India yielded their most extraordinary productions ; and several anhnals were slain in the amphitheatre, which had been seen only in the representations of art, or perhaps of fancy^[2]. In all these exhibitions, the securest precautions were used to protect the person of the Roman Hercules from the desperate spring of any savage ; who might possibly disregard the dignity of the emperor, and the sanctity of the god^[3].

Acts as a gladiator.But the meanest of the populace were affected with shame and indignation when they beheld their sovereign enter the lists as a gladiator, and glory in a profession which the laws and manners of the Romans had branded with the justest note of infariiy^[4]. He chose

1. The ostrich's neck is three feet long, and composed of seventeen vertebraB. See Buffon, Hist. Naturelle.
2. Commodus killed a camelopardalis, or giraffe, (Dion, 1. Ixxii. p. 1211.) the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds. This singular animal, a native only of the interior parts of Africa, has not been seen in Europe since the revival of letters; and though M. de Buffon, (Hist. Naturelle, tom. xiii.") has endeavoured to describe, he has not ventured to delineate the giraffe.
3. Herodian, 1. i. p. 37. Hist. August, p. 50.
4. The virtuous and even the wise princes forbade the senators and knights to embrace this scandalous profession, under pain of infamy, or, what was more dreaded by those profligate wretches, of exile. The tyrants allured them to dishonour by threats and rewards. Nero once produced, in the arena, forty senators and sixty knights. See Lipsius, Saturnalia, 1. ii. c, 2. He has happily corrected a passage of Suetonius, in Nerone, c. 12.