Twenty
thousand people were slaughtered in twenty hours. The streets were
emptied, the theatres closed.
The blood that ran then must have been in rillets too thin to
slake Caracalla's thirst, for simultaneously almost, he was in
Gaul, in Dacia--wherever there was prey. African by his father,
Syrian on his mother's side, Caracalla was not a panther merely;
he was a herd of them. He had the cruelty, the treachery and guile
of a wilderness of tiger-cats. No man, said a thinker, is wholly
base. Caracalla was. He had not a taste, not a vice, even, which
was not washed and rewashed in blood. In a moment of excitement
Commodus set his guards on the spectators in the amphitheatre; the
damage was slight, for the Colosseum was so constructed that in
two minutes the eighty or ninety thousand people which it held
could escape. Caracalla had the exits closed. Those who escaped
were naked; to bribe the guards they were forced to strip
themselves to the skin. In the circus a vestal caught his eye. He
tried to violate her, and failing impotently, had her buried
alive. "Caracalla knows that I am a virgin, and knows why," the
girl cried as the earth swallowed her, but there was no one there
to aid.
Such things show the trend of a temperament, though not, perhaps,
its force. Presently the latter was displayed. For years those
arch-enemies of Rome, the unconquerable Parthians, had been quiet;
bound, too, by treaties which held Rome's honor.
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