"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. Ride to a conference do we? Well, nothing but
words will come of it, and words are dangerous. I like my danger
tangible and in the open where it can be faced. Three times last week I
was approached by Glyco--you remember him?--that son of Cocles and the
Jewess--asking me to join a secret mystery of which he claims to be the
unextinguishable lamp. But there are too many mysteries and not enough
plain dealing. The only mystery about Glyco is how he avoids indictment
for conspiracy--what with his long nose and sly eyes, and his way of
hinting that he knows enough to turn the world upside down. If Pertinax
talks mystery I will class him with the other foxes who slink into holes
when the agenda look like becoming acta. Show me only a raised standard
in an open field and I will take my chance beside it. But I sicken of
all this talk of what we might do if only somebody had the courage to
stick a dagger into Commodus."

"The men who could persuade themselves to do that, are persuaded that a
worse brute might succeed him," 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 praetorian guard, that makes and
unmakes emperors, has been tasting the sweets of tyranny ever since
Marcus Aurelius died. They despise their 'Roman Hercules' (Commodus'
favorite name for himself)--who doesn't? But they grow fat and enjoy
themselves under his tyranny, so they would never consent to leaving him
unguarded, as happened to Nero, for instance, or to replacing him with
any one of the caliber of Aurelius, if such a man could be found."