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Lion skin, palm branch, gold Victory. The costume said Hercules; the fee for each appearance said something else, and Dio recorded both.

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, and said nothing: just held both up, grinning, and wagged them, so that no one in the good seats could miss the syllogism. 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, plus a club and a bronze lion at the feet, Hercules being the persona he preferred. He appeared in the arena hundreds of times, always victorious, since his human opponents submitted on cue and his animals were shot from a safe platform, and for each appearance he billed the treasury a fee that 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, and the empire was at war with itself for five years; heredity's great counterargument turned out to have no better plan behind it. Edwin Blashfield, an American who would later paint the dome of the Library of Congress, painted the exit parade around 1878: Commodus in the lion skin with a palm branch and a golden Victory, strolling; behind him the gladiators of his troupe scooping up the roses thrown for the emperor; at the left edge, the senators already going out under the arch, close together, conferring. In the sand a fallen helmet has quietly filled with flowers.