The Mulvian Bridge over the Tiber is not more than four miles from Rubrae along the winding Flaminian Highway and we were crossing it before the third hour of the day was past. Marching with the first of the three centuries formed at Placentia I had about five-sixths of our column ahead of me. So I did not see, did not even glimpse, did not, from far towards the rear, so much as guess what was happening. I knew only that, as I was more than half way across the Mulvian Bridge, a wave of cheers started far forward in our column and ran back to my century and all the way to the rearmost men. What had occurred we did not know, but we broke ranks and flowed out of the road to left and right, as did the men ahead of us, becoming almost a mob, despite the remonstrances and orders of our disgusted sergeants. They restrained us to some extent, but we were kept back more by the fact that the foremost men blocked the highway, the men who had been marching next them blocked the fields to right and left of the highway and the rest of us were checked behind them, like water above a dam.
As we stood there, packed together, with hardly a semblance of ranks kept anywhere, craning to see over the heads of the men in front of us and to try to see past and between the many big and tall tombs and mausoleums which flanked the road on either side, a period of tense silence or blurred murmurings was ended by a second great surge of cheers from front to rear. We all cheered till we were hoarse. Again we peered and listened and questioned each other, again came a roar of cheering like a sea billow. Again and again alternated the half silence and the uproar. Before we learned what was happening or had happened word came from mouth to mouth that we were going on. The press in front of us gradually melted away, we were able to sidle into the roadway, reform ranks and tramp on Romewards.
After a very brief march we turned aside to our right into a meadow on the west of the road and its flanking rows of tombs, between the Highway and the Tiber, about half way from Mulvian Bridge to the Flaminian Gate of Rome; that is, about half a mile from each. There we found a meticulously laid-out and perfectly appointed camp, precisely suited to the forty-five hundred of us and our requisitioned mules, wagons and what not. It contained some four hundred and fifty tents, set on clipped grass along rolled and gravelled streets as straight as bricklayers' guide-boards; all about a paved square of ample size, on the rear of which was set up a gorgeous commander's tent of the whitest canvas, striped with red almost as deep, rich and glowing as the Imperial crimson, and manifestly meant to imitate it as closely as such a dyestuff could. On either side of this Praetorium were a dozen tents, smaller indeed than the Praetorium, but much larger than tents set up for us, presumably for the commanders' aides. In front of the Praetorium, between it and the square, was a wide, broad and high platform of new brickwork, paved on top, railed with solid, low, carved railings set in short carved oak posts. The corner posts, and two others dividing the front and back of the platform equally, were tall and supported an awning of striped canvas like that of the commander's tent.
Goggling with curiosity we, as we deployed to our quarters, stared hard at the magnificent tent and sumptuous platform with its gorgeous awning. Once at our quarters, I and Agathemer, of course, must cook and serve food to our century. Only after all were fed did we, in common with all the middle and rear of our road-column, learn what had occurred.
While we ate, our sergeants, while they also ate somehow, held a centurions' council, at which those of the fifty-four who had not been far enough forward on the Highway to see and hear were informed, by those who had, of what had happened. When our sergeant returned from this council he told us, in a jumbled and mumbled attempt at an address.
From what he told me and from what I heard later I gather that, as the column debouched from the bridge, its head was met and checked by a body of mounted Praetorian Guards. Their tribune, in the name of the Emperor, ordered the column to halt and bade its centurions deploy their men right and left and mass them in a largish space free of big tombs. As they deployed the Praetorians also deployed to left and right of the Highway and the foremost mutineers descried on the roadway the splendid horses and gorgeous trappings of the Emperor's personal staff, among whom, from the statues, busts and painted panel-portraits of him which they had seen daily in their own quarters and countless times on their road to Rome, the more alert of them recognized their liege.
Then rose that unexpected wave of cheering which had first apprized us in the rear that something unusual was toward. Commodus, as I heard from Publius Cordatus himself, after our nap and before the Emperor's return, was mounted on a tall sorrel such as his father had always preferred on his frontier campaigns. Also he was garbed not only as his father had habitually been when on frontier expeditions, but seemingly, in one of his old outfits. For not only Cordatus, but a dozen more, declared that his helmet, corselet and the plates of his kilt-straps, were of ungilded, unchased, plain steel, not even bright with polishing, but tarnished, all but rusty, with exposure to rain, mist and sun; his plume and cloak rain- faded and sun-faded till their crimson showed almost brown; his scabbard plain, dingy leather; his saddle of similar cheap, durable leather, his saddle-cloth of a crimson faded as brown as his cloak and plume. This was precisely the Spartan simplicity which Aurelius, as more than half a Stoic, had always affected, partly from an innate tendency towards self- restraint and modesty, partly that his example might, at first, offset the sumptuosity of Verus and, after his death, might inculcate, by example, economy in his lavish and self-indulgent retinue.
Whatever the motive, by this semi-histrionic effort at self-effacement the Emperor made himself tenfold conspicuous among his staff-officers, whose plumes, cloaks, kilts, and saddle-cloths blazed with crimson, green and gold, blue and silver and even crimson and gold.
Commodus, in any gear, was not only a tall, well-knit, impressive figure of a man, but, in his most negligent moods, he had something about him dominating, masterful, princely and Imperial. The sight of him cowed all who could then see him. Steadily he eyed them as they finished their tumultuary deployment and pressed forward to see and hear. When they were packed as closely as possible till no more could get within earshot he spoke:
"Fellow soldiers, what does this mean?"