The Caesars | Page 7

In this stage of his
adventures, he encountered and defeated several of the imperial officers
commanding large detachments of troops; and at length grew of
consequence sufficient to draw upon himself the emperor's eye, and the
honor of his personal displeasure. In high wrath and disdain at the
insults offered to his eagles by this fugitive slave, Commodus

fulminated against him such an edict as left him no hope of much
longer escaping with impunity.
Public vengeance was now awakened; the imperial troops were
marching from every quarter upon the same centre; and the slave
became sensible that in a very short space of time he must be
surrounded and destroyed. In this desperate situation he took a
desperate resolution: he assembled his troops, laid before them his plan,
concerted the various steps for carrying it into effect, and then
dismissed them as independent wanderers. So ends the first chapter of
the tale.
The next opens in the passes of the Alps, whither by various routes, of
seven or eight hundred miles in extent, these men had threaded their
way in manifold disguises through the very midst of the emperor's
camps. According to this man's gigantic enterprise, in which the means
were as audacious as the purpose, the conspirators were to rendezvous,
and first to recognise each other at the gates of Rome. From the Danube
to the Tiber did this band of robbers severally pursue their perilous
routes through all the difficulties of the road and the jealousies of the
military stations, sustained by the mere thirst of vengeance--vengeance
against that mighty foe whom they knew only by his proclamations
against themselves. Every thing continued to prosper; the conspirators
met under the walls of Rome; the final details were arranged; and those
also would have prospered but for a trifling accident. The season was
one of general carnival at Rome; and, by the help of those disguises
which the license of this festal time allowed, the murderers were to
have penetrated as maskers to the emperor's retirement, when a casual
word or two awoke the suspicions of a sentinel. One of the conspirators
was arrested; under the terror and uncertainty of the moment, he made
much ampler discoveries than were expected of him; the other
accomplices were secured: and Commodus was delivered from the
uplifted daggers of those who had sought him by months of patient
wanderings, pursued through all the depths of the Illyrian forests, and
the difficulties of the Alpine passes. It is not easy to find words
commensurate to the energetic hardihood of a slave--who, by way of
answer and reprisal to an edict which consigned him to persecution and

death, determines to cross Europe in quest of its author, though no less
a person than the master of the world--to seek him out in the inner
recesses of his capital city and his private palace--and there to lodge a
dagger in his heart, as the adequate reply to the imperial sentence of
proscription against himself.
Such, amidst his superhuman grandeur and consecrated powers of the
Roman emperor's office, were the extraordinary perils which menaced
the individual, and the peculiar frailties of his condition. Nor is it
possible that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better
illustrated than in this tale of Herodian. Whilst the emperor's mighty
arms were stretched out to arrest some potentate in the heart of Asia, a
poor slave is silently and stealthily creeping round the base of the Alps,
with the purpose of winning his way as a murderer to the imperial
bedchamber; Cæsar is watching some mighty rebel of the Orient, at a
distance of two thousand leagues, and he overlooks the dagger which is
at his own heart. In short, all the heights and the depths which belong to
man as aspirers, all the contrasts of glory and meanness, the extremities
of what is his highest and lowest in human possibility,--all met in the
situation of the Roman Cæsars, and have combined to make them the
most interesting studies which history has furnished.
This, as a general proposition, will be readily admitted. But meantime,
it is remarkable that no field has been less trodden than the private
memorials of those very Cæsars; whilst at the same time it is equally
remarkable, in concurrence with that subject for wonder, that precisely
with the first of the Cæsars commences the first page of what in
modern times we understand by anecdotes. Suetonius is the earliest
writer in that department of biography; so far as we know, he may be
held first to have devised it as a mode of history. The six writers, whose
sketches are collected under the general title of the Augustan History,
followed in the same track. Though full of entertainment, and of the
most curious researches, they are