With an imperious gesture he sent senators and gladiators to scatter themselves all over the arena. Not yet satisfied, he ordered all the guards fetched from the tunnel and arranged them in a similar disorder, so that finally no stretch of fifty yards was left without a man obstructing it. There was no spina down the midst, nor anything except the surrounding wall to suggest to a team of horses which the course might be.
"Let none move!" he commanded. "I will crush the foot of any man who stirs!"
Attendants, clinging to the heads of four gray stallions that fought and kicked, brought out his chariot and others shut the gate behind it. Commodus admired the team a minute, then examined the new high wheels of the gilded chariot, that was hardly wider than a coffin—a thing that a man could upset with a shove and built to look as flimsy as an egg shell. Suddenly he seized the reins and leaped in, throwing up his right hand.
If he could have ruled his empire as he drove that chariot he would have far outshone Augustus, for whose memory men sighed. He managed them with one hand. There was magnetism sent along the reins to play with the dynamic energy of four mad stallions as gods amuse themselves with men. If empire had amused him as athleticism did there would have been no equal in all history to Commodus.
In a chariot no other athlete could have balanced, on a course providing not one unobstructed stretch of fifty yards, he drove like Phoebus breaking in the horses of the Sun, careering this and that way, weaving patterns in among the frightened men who stood like posts for him to drive around. He missed them by a hand's breadth—less! He took delight in driving at them, turning in the last half-second, smiling at a blanched face as he wheeled and wove new figures down another zigzag avenue of men. The frenzy of the team inspired him; the rebellion of the stallions, made mad by the persistent, sudden turns, aroused his own astonishing enthusiasm. He accomplished the impossible! He made new laws of motion, breaking them, inventing others! He became a god in action, mastering the team until it had no consciousness of any self- will, or of any impulse but to loose its full strength under the directing will of genius.
The team tired first. It was its waning speed that wearied him at last. The mania that owned him could not tolerate the anticlimax of declining effort, so his mood changed. He became morose—indifferent. He reined in, tossed the reins to an attendant and began to walk toward the tunnel entrance, clothed as he was in nothing but the practise loin-cloth of a gladiator.
A dozen senators implored him to wait and clothe himself. He would not wait. He ordered them to bring his cloak and overtake him. Then he observed Narcissus, standing near the horse-gate, waiting to summon his trained gladiators for an exhibition:
"Not this time, Narcissus. Next time. Follow me." He waited for a moment for Narcissus. That gave the substitute time to come down from the box and go hurrying ahead into the tunnel-mouth; he went so fast (for he knew the emperor's moods) that the attendants found it hard to keep up; most of them were half a dozen paces in the rear. A senator gave Commodus his cloak. He took Narcissus by the arm and strode ahead into the tunnel, muttering, ignoring noisy protests from the senators, who warned him that the guards were not yet there.
Then there was sudden silence; possibly a consequence of Caesar's mood, or the reaction caused by chill and tunnel-darkness after sunlit sand. Or it might have been the shadow of impending tragedy. A long scream broke the silence, thrice repeated, horrible, like something from an unseen world. Instantly Narcissus leaped ahead into the darkness, weaponless but armed by nature with the muscles of a panther. Commodus leaped after him; his mood reversed again. Now emulation had him; he would not be beaten to a scene of action by a gladiator. He let his cloak fall and a senator tripped over it.
There were no lamps. Something less than twilight, deepened here and there by shadow, filled the tunnel. By a niche intended for a sentry the attendants were standing helplessly around the body of a man who lay with head and shoulders propped against the wall. Narcissus and another, like knotted snakes, were writhing near by. There was a sound of choking. Pavonius Nasor was silent. He appeared already dead.