They agreed in chorus, it would be Rome's irreparable loss if he should
die, and certain senators, more fertile than the others in expedients
for drawing his attention to themselves, paused ostentatiously to hold a
little conversation with the guards and promise them rewards if they
should catch a miscreant lurking in wait to attack "our beloved, our
glorious emperor."

Commodus overheard them, as they meant he should.

"And such fulsome idiots as those expect me to believe they can frame
laws!" He scowled over-shoulder. "Write down their names for me,
somebody. The senate needs pruning! I will purge it the way Galen used
to purge me when I had the colic! Cioscuri! But these leaky babblers
suffocate me!"

He was true to the Caesarian tradition. He believed himself a god. He
more than half-persuaded other men. His almost superhuman energy and
skill with weapons, his terrific storms of anger and his magnetism
overawed courtiers and politicians as they did the gladiators whom he
slew in the arena. The strain of madness in his blood provided cunning
that could mask itself beneath a princely bluster of indifference to
consequences. He could fear with an extravagance coequal to the fury of
his love of danger, and his fear struck terror into men's hearts, as it
stirred his mad brain into frenzies.

He made no false claim when he called Rome the City of Commodus and
himself the Roman Hercules. The vast majority of Romans were unfit to
challenge his contempt of them, and his contempt was never under cover
for a moment.