Then the madness surged into his brain.

“So I rule Rome!” he exclaimed, and threw the leopard at the gladiators’ feet.  “Because I pity Rome that could not find another Paulus!  I strike first, before they strike me!”

They flattered him—­fawned on him, but he was much too genuinely mad for flattery to take effect.  “If you were worth a barrelful of rats I’d have a senate that might save me trouble!  Then like Tiberius I might remain away from Rome and live more like a god.  I’ve more than half a mind to let my dummy stay here to amuse you wastrels!” He glanced up at the box, where his substitute lolled and yawned and smiled.  “All you degenerates need is some one you can rub yourselves against like fat cats mewing for a bowl of milk!  By Hercules, now I’ll show you something that will make your blood leap.  Bring out the new Spanish team.”

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.