Hence no rigid datum is postulated, even about Commodus. We see him, through the action of the play, in the process of becoming what he was. We see how and why he became a creature so abandoned to lust and cruelty that Marcia, a Christian and his loyal friend, could yet bring herself to mix for him the poison-cup. We see the whole desperate business already implicit in his origins: not, as Gibbon somewhat mechanically saw it, from the partiality of Marcus Aurelius for his beautiful young son, but from the elements in Commodus of Faustina’s amoral nature, and his reaction from his father’s stoical austerity. Thus we find Fadilla, in Act I, speaking to her sister Lucilla of their father:
Philosophy,
That smiles on life, till life is made ashamed,
And sunders from each end for which it throbs,
Praise, glory, pleasure, how should it direct
Youth through its awful rapine? By the gods
Marcus is held as good and our fair mother
As evil ... yet our father poisoned life
In each of us from childhood, for his voice
Withered illusion, and our urgent youth
To him was nothingness, to us a lie
That could not prove the truth it made us feel.
He spoke of us as leaves within a wind,
Leaves shaken diversely: and so we are,
Unhappy children!
There are indicated in Commodus from the beginning the portents of what he afterward became; but there are also spiritual graces (his love for Marcia, his love for his sister Lucilla, and his faith in Cleander) which hold him to humanity and reasonableness. But the seed comes to its fruit through the logic of events: the grace and sweetness of humanity wither as, one by one, those whom he loved and trusted prove traitors. His deepest affection had been for Lucilla, and her plot to murder him shakes him to the soul. But he cannot bring himself to sentence her, and it is only under the shock of another perfidy that he is hardened sufficiently to order her death. That act is the spiritual crisis of his life, for in committing it he sins against the last ray of light left in him. When Cleander is revealed as a traitor, and Commodus rushes out to destroy his sister, he does in fact compass his own destruction, both moral and physical. The scene occurs in Act II, and I quote it for the reason that it is the crucial incident of the drama. But the rightness of its psychology steadily wins the mind as one perceives how the memory of Lucilla’s crime works in him at first to reject the warning of Marcia and Fadilla because they are women; the reaction to pity after he has condemned Cleander; his revulsion to hatred of Marcia because she brings evil tidings and comes in ugly clothing; the swift change when he appeals to her sympathy; his turning to perverse rage again when she cannot weep with him for the traitor, and he rushes out to sentence Lucilla—;this, finally, in order to avenge himself on Marcia because she had begged him to spare his sister.
Fadilla and Marcia have broken upon his revels, dressed in mourning as a sign of their ominous news, and Commodus has commanded them to speak at once, on pain of death:
Marcia. ’Tis you must die,
My lord, unless—;[to Fadilla]—;but tell him, Princess, all.
He will believe a lady of his blood.
Tell him of ruin, tell him he has lost
The Roman people, tell him he has lost
The moiety of his guard, that he must dread
From his own subjects what could never chance
By hand of barbarous nation.
Eclectus. All is lost;
Your Guard is broken; you are now defenceless,
And on the brink of slaughter....
Fadilla. Outside these walls a fiery hatred marshals
The citizens. They have a single shout
Of hunger after justice, and one name
For all they hate—;Cleander. Every voice
Demands his head.
Commodus. An execrable plot!
I cannot listen any more to words;
They are the language of conspirators.
[To Marcia.] But you have put your beauty quite away,
Made yourself hideous, distasteful. There
Again I catch design; my sister too—;
Cleander smote her lover. Envious, Ha!
That was Lucilla’s keynote. Agony!
I will not give him up.
Marcia. He is a traitor.
I say this in Truth’s name.
Commodus. And through your eyes
I look as to the bottom of the well.
Marcia, come nearer! You are deadly sure ...?