look closer

Commodus walks out of the arena in a lion skin without a mark on him. He carries a gold figure of Victory in one hand and palm branches over his shoulder. Dio puts his fee at 1,000,000 sesterces a day, and it came out of the gladiators' own fund.

The senator Cassius Dio was in the front seats the day it happened, which is why we have it. The emperor Commodus, performing in the arena as he now regularly did, killed an ostrich with one of his crescent-headed arrows, the kind he used because they took the head off a running bird cleanly. Then he walked to where the senators sat, the sword in one hand and the head in the other. He said nothing. He just held both up and wagged his own head, grinning, so that no one in the good seats could miss what he meant. Laughing meant death. Dio writes that he and his colleagues stripped the laurel leaves from their garlands and chewed them, steadily, to keep their faces in order. He was the son of Marcus Aurelius, the one succession the philosopher-emperor decided by blood after 80 years of emperors chosen by adoption, and the argument against heredity ever after. He renamed the months after his own titles, and Rome itself Colonia Commodiana. He had the head taken off Nero's colossus and replaced with his own, and added a club and a bronze lion at the feet. Hercules was the hero he liked to be taken for. He appeared in the arena hundreds of times and always won. His human opponents gave in on cue, and his animals were shot from a safe platform. For each day of it he drew a fee out of the gladiatorial fund, a sum Dio records with an accountant's disgust. The joke consumed itself on the last night of 192. His mistress Marcia found her own name on a tablet listing the next day's executions; she moved first, with the chamberlain and the Praetorian prefect. The poison went into his wine and came back up, so his wrestling partner, an athlete named Narcissus, strangled the emperor in his bath. By spring the Praetorians had auctioned the throne to the highest bidder in the camp. The empire went to war with itself for five years. The case against handing the throne down by blood turned out to have nothing better behind it. Edwin Blashfield, an American who would later paint the dome of the Library of Congress, painted the exit parade around 1878. There is no ostrich anywhere in it. Commodus strolls out in the lion skin with a palm branch and a golden Victory. Behind him one of his gladiators stoops for the roses thrown at the emperor. At the left edge the senators are already going out under the arch, close together, talking. On the paving a fallen helmet has filled with roses.