One of the conspirators was arrested; under the
terror and uncertainty of the moment, he made much ampler discoveries than
were expected of him; the other accomplices were secured: and Commodus was
delivered from the uplifted daggers of those who had sought him by months
of patient wanderings, pursued through all the depths of the Illyrian
forests, and the difficulties of the Alpine passes. It is not easy to find
words commensurate to the energetic hardihood of a slave--who, by way of
answer and reprisal to an edict which consigned him to persecution and
death, determines to cross Europe in quest of its author, though no less a
person than the master of the world--to seek him out in the inner recesses
of his capital city and his private palace--and there to lodge a dagger in
his heart, as the adequate reply to the imperial sentence of proscription
against himself.
Such, amidst his superhuman grandeur and consecrated powers of the Roman
emperor's office, were the extraordinary perils which menaced the
individual, and the peculiar frailties of his condition. Nor is it
possible that these circumstances of violent opposition can be better
illustrated than in this tale of Herodian.
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