And it was just as well they did; Domitian was quite capable of ordering everybody into the arena.  As yet, however, he had appeared little different from any other prince.  That Rome might understand that there was a difference, and also in what that difference consisted, he gave a supper.  Everyone worth knowing was bidden, and, as is usual in state functions, everyone that was bidden came.  The supper hall was draped with black; the ceiling, the walls, the floor, everything was basaltic.  The couches were black, the linen was black, the slaves were black.  Behind each guest was a broken column with his name on it.  The food was such as is prepared when death has come.  The silence was that of the tomb.  The only audible voice was Domitian’s.  He was talking very wittily and charmingly about murder, about proscriptions, the good informers do, the utility of the headsman, the majesty of the law.  The guests, a trifle ill at ease, wished their host sweet dreams.  “The same to you,” he answered, and deplored that they must go.

On the morrow informers and headsmen were at work.  Any pretext was sufficient.  Birth, wealth, fame, or the lack of them—­anything whatever—­and there the culprit stood, charged not with treason to an emperor, but with impiety to a god.  On the judgment seat Domitian sat.  Before him the accused passed, and under his eyes they were questioned, tortured, condemned and killed.  At once their property passed into the keeping of the prince.

Of that he had need.  The arena was expensive, but the drain was elsewhere.  A little before, a quarrelsome people, the Dacians, whom it took a Trajan to subdue, had overrun the Danube, and were marching down to Rome.  Domitian set out to meet them.  The Dacians retreated, not at all because they were repulsed, but because Domitian thought it better warfare to pay them to do so.  On his return after that victory he enjoyed a triumph as fair as that of Caesar.  And each year since then the emperor of Rome had paid tribute to a nation of mongrel oafs.

Of course he needed money.  The informers were there and he got it, and with it that spectacle of torture and of blood which he needed too.  Curiously, his melancholy increased; his good looks had gone; Psyche was no longer amorous of his eyes.  Something else haunted him, something he could not define; the past, perhaps, perhaps the future.  To his ears came strange sounds, the murmur of his own name, and suddenly silence.  Then, too, there always seemed to be something behind him; something that when he turned disappeared.  The room in which he slept he had covered with a polished metal that reflected everything, yet still the intangible was there.  Once Pallas came in her chariot, waved him farewell, and disappeared, borne by black horses across the black night.