He uttered some words, I heard his voice, but not the words. Folk say he said:
"I have killed the only match I had on earth, the second-best fighter earth ever saw."
The audience, I among them, stared, awe-struck and fascinated, at Commodus laying a bloody hand on his own head; we shuddered: I saw many look back and forth from Palus in the arena to the figure on the Imperial throne.
The guards ran, the surgeons' helpers ran, even Galen ran, but Aemilius Laetus reached Palus first, and, between the dazed and stunned lanistae, picked up the big golden helmet and replaced it on his head, hiding his features. The distance from the podium wall to the center of the arena is so great, the distance from any other part of the audience so much greater, that, while many of the spectators were astounded, suspicious or curious, not one could be certain that Palus was, beyond peradventure, the Prince of the Republic in person. Palus stood there, alternately staring at his dead crony and talking to Laetus and Galen.
The heralds had run up with the guards. Laetus, without any pretense of consultation with the dummy Emperor on the throne, spoke to the heralds and each stalked off to one focus of the ellipse of the arena. Thence each bellowed for silence, their deep-toned, resonant, loud, practiced voices carrying to the upper colonnade everywhere. Silence, deep already since Murmex received his death-wound and broken only by whispers, deepened. The amphitheater became almost still. Into the stillness the heralds proclaimed that next day the funeral games of Murmex Lucro would be celebrated in the Colosseum where he had died; that all persons entitled to seats in the Colosseum were thereby enjoined to attend, unless too ill to leave their homes: that all should come without togas, but, in sign of mourning for Murmex, wearing over their garments full-length, all- enveloping rain-cloaks of undyed black wool and similarly colored umbrella hats; that any person failing to attend so habited would be severely punished; that the show would be worth seeing, for, in honor of the Manes of Murmex, to placate his ghost, no defeated fighter would be spared and all the victors of the morning would fight each other in the afternoon.
Surely the tenth day before the Kalends of January, in December of the nine hundred and forty-fourth year of the City, [Footnote: 191 A.D.] the year in which Commodus was nominally consul for the seventh time, and Pertinax consul for the second time, saw the strangest audience ever assembled in the amphitheater of the Colosseum. I was there, seated, as on the day before, next my master, my gaudy Asiatic garments, like his garb of a noble of equestrian rank, hidden under a great raincoat and my face shaded by the broad brim of an umbrella hat.
The universal material conventional for mourners' attire is certainly appropriate and proper for mourning garb. For the undyed wool of black sheep, when spun and woven, results in a cloth dingy in the extreme. The wearing of garments made of it suits admirably with grief and gloom of spirit, deepens sadness, accentuates woe, almost produces melancholy. And the sight of it, when one is surrounded by persons so habited, conduces to dejection and depression. This equally was felt by the whole audience. Instead of being a space glaring in the sunlight shining on an expanse of white togas, the hollow of the amphitheater was a dingy area of brownish black under a lowering canopy of sullen cloud, for the sky was heavily overcast and threatened rain all day, though not a drop fell. The windless air was damp and penetratingly chilly, so that we almost shivered under our swathings. The discomfort of not being warm enough and the dispiriting effect of the grim sky and gloomy interior of the amphitheater was manifest in a sort of general impression of melancholy and apprehension.
Apprehension, or, certainly, uneasiness, pervaded the audience and, as it were, seemed to diffuse itself from the Imperial Pavilion, crowded, not, as usual, with jaunty figures in gaudy apparel, all crimson, blue, and green, picked out and set off by edgings of silver and gold, but with a solemn retinue, all hidden under dingy umbrella hats and swathed in rain- cloaks. To see the throne occupied by a human shape so obscured by its habiliments gave all beholders an uncanny feeling in which foreboding deepened into alarm. The appearance of the whole audience, still more of the Imperial retinue, was one to cause all beholders to interpret the garb of the spectators as ill-omened, almost as inviting disaster.
In the center of the arena was built up the pyre which was to consume all that was left of Murmex. It was constructed of thirty-foot logs, each tier laid across the one below it, the lower tiers of linden, willow, elm and other quick-burning woods, their interstices filled with fat pine-knots; the upper tiers of oak and maple, at which last I heard not a few whispered protests, for old-fashioned folk felt it almost a sacrilege that holy wood should be used to burn a gladiator, a man of blood. The pyre was thus a square structure thirty feet on a side and fully twenty feet high; each side showing silvered log-butts or log-ends, with gilded pine-knots all between; its top covered with laurel boughs, over which was laid a crimson rug with golden fringe, setting off the corpse of Murmex, which lay in the silver armor he had worn in his last fight, high on the mound of laurel boughs.
At each focus of the arena was placed a round marble altar, one to Venus Libitina, one to Pluto. By these the heralds took their stands and proclaimed that no offerings would be made at the altars except one black lamb at each, that every man slain in the day's fighting would be an offering to the Manes of Murmex, since the day would be occupied solely with the celebration of funeral games for the solace of his ghost.