On a couch inlaid with ivory and pearl, within a vaulted chamber in the Prætorian Palace of the royal city, lay the emperor, in a coverlid of rich stuff. Disease had crushed his body, but the indomitable spirit was unquenched. Tossing and disturbed, at length he started from his bed. Calling to his chamberlain, he demanded if there had not been footsteps in the apartment. The ruler of the world, whose nod could shake the nations, and whose word was the arbiter of life or death to millions of his fellow-men, lay here—startled at the passing of a sound, the falling of a shadow! His face, whose chief characteristic was power,—that strength and determination of spirit which all acknowledge, and but few comprehend—was furrowed with deeper marks than care had wrought. Sixty years had moulded the steady and inflexible purpose of his soul in lines too palpable to be misunderstood. His beard was short and grizzled; and a swarthy hue, betraying his African birth, was now become sallow, and even sickly in the extreme; but an eagle eye still beamed in all its fierceness and rapacity from under his scanty brows. His nose was not of the Roman sort, like the beak of that royal bird, but thick and even clumsy, lacking that sharp and predacious intellect generally associated with forms of this description.
Such was Septimus Severus, then styled on a coin just struck, "Britannicvs Maximvs," in commemoration of a great victory gained over the Caledonians, whom he had driven beyond Adrian's wall. Though suffering from severe illness, he was carried in a horse-litter; and, marching from York at the head of his troops, penetrated almost to the extremity of the island, where he subdued that fierce and intractable nation the Scots. Returning, he left his son Caracalla to superintend the building of a stone wall across the island, in place of the earthen ramparts called Adrian's;—a structure, when completed, that effectually resisted the inroads of those barbarians for a considerable period.
He called a third time to Virius Lupus, one, the most confidential of his attendants, to whom many of the most important secrets of the state were entrusted.
"Thrice have I heard it Virius. Again, and again, it seems to mock and elude my grasp." He paused: the officer yet listening with becoming reverence. The Emperor continued, more like one whose thoughts had taken utterance, than as if he were addressing the individual before him.
"When I led the Pannonian legions to victory; when Rome opened her gates at my command; when I fought my way through blood to the throne,—I quailed not then! Now,—satiated with power, careless of fame, the prospects of life closed, and for ever,—when all that is left for me to do is to die,—behold, I tremble at the shaking of a leaf! I start, even at the footstep that awakes me!"
"Long live the Emperor!" said the cringing secretary. Interrupting him, as he would have proceeded with the customary adulations, the emperor again continued as though hardly noticing his presence.
"Caracalla yet remains with the army. Once I censured the misguided clemency of Marcus, who, by an act of justice might have prevented the miseries that his son Caligula brought upon the empire; and yet I, even I," said the haughty monarch, bitterly, "nourish the very weakness that in others I despise!"
He dashed away the sweat from his brow, ashamed of the weakness he could not quell.
"He hath sought your life," said the wily sycophant.
"He hath!—Traitor! parricide! the distinctions he would have earned. But my better genius triumphed, and history hath been spared this infamy. It may be, this temporary exile from our court, with the northern army, shall tame his spirit to submission. My life or his, once the bitter alternative, may yet be avoided."