believed he was the emperor's twin brother, spirited away at birth by
midwives, and the stories told to account for that were as remarkably
unlikely as the tale itself; as for instance, that a soothsayer had
prophesied how Commodus should one day mount the throne and that he and
his twin brother would wreck Rome in civil war--a warning hardly likely
to have had much weight with the father, Marcus Aurelius, although the
mother was more likely to have given credence to it.

Whatever the truth of his origin, Pavonius Nasor never ran the risk of
telling it. He kept his sinecure by mastering his tongue, preserving
almost bovine speechlessness. When he and Commodus met face to face he
never seemed to see the joke of the resemblance, never laughed at
Commodus' obscenely vivid jibes at his expense, nor once complained of
his anomalous position. He appeared to be a man of no ambition other
than to get through life as easily as might be--of no personal dignity,
no ruling habits, but possessed of imitative talent that enabled him,
without the slightest trouble, to adopt the very gait and gesture of the
emperor whom he impersonated.


As he strode ahead along the tunnel he received the guards' salute with
merely enough nod of recognition to deceive an onlooker not in the
secret. (It was Pavonius Nasor's half-indulgent, rather lazy smile that
had persuaded Rome and even the praetorian guards that Commodus was an
easy-going, sensual, good humored man.)

There was a box at one end of the private arena, over the gate where the
horses entered, so placed as to avoid the sun's direct rays. It was
reached by a short stairway from an anteroom that opened on the tunnel.
There was no other means of access to the box. It's wooden sidewalls,