As the people had loved Nero, so did the aristocracy love Marcus
Aurelius; his foster-father Antonin excepted, he was the only
gentleman that had sat on the throne. No wonder they loved him;
and seeing this early edition of the prince in the fairy tale
emerge from the bogs of Germany, his fair face haloed by the
glisten and gold of his hair, hearts went out to him; the wish of
his putative father was ratified, and the son of a gladiator was
emperor of Rome.
Lampridus--or Spartian was it? The title-page bears Lampridus'
name, but there is some doubt as to the authorship. However,
whoever made the abridgment of the life of Commodus which appears
among the chronicles of the Scriptores Historiae Augustae, says
that before his birth Faustine dreamed she had engendered a
serpent. It is not impossible that Faustine had been reading
Ctzias, and had stumbled over his account of the Martichoras, a
serpent with a woman's face and the talons of a bird of prey. For
it was that she conceived.
It would have been interesting to have seen that young man, the
mask removed, frightening the senate into calling Rome Commodia,
and then in a linen robe promenading in the attributes of a priest
of Anubis through a seraglio of six hundred girls and mignons
embracing as he passed. There was a spectacle, which Nero had not
imagined. But Nero was vieux jeu. Commodus outdid him, first in
debauchery, then in the arena.
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