Faustina, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, lives in history as the most abandoned of her sex, and his son, Commodus, although educated with the utmost solicitude, was one of the most glaring instances of wasted effort. “The monstrous vices of the son,” says Gibbon, “have cast a shade on the purity of the father’s virtues.” It has been said that he sacrificed the happiness of millions to a fond partiality for a worthless boy, when he chose a successor in his own family rather than in the republic. Nothing, however, was neglected by the anxious father, and by the men of virtue and learning whom he summoned to his assistance, to expand the narrow mind of young Commodus, to correct his growing vices and to render him worthy of the throne for which he was designed. But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous. The distasteful lesson of a grave philosopher was, in a moment, obliterated by the whisper of a profligate favourite, and Marcus himself blasted the fruits of this laboured education by admitting his son at the age of fourteen or fifteen to a full participation of the imperial powers. Yet Commodus was not as he has been represented, a tiger, born with an insatiate thirst for human blood and capable from his infancy of the most inhuman actions. “Nature had formed him of a weak rather than a wicked disposition. His simplicity and timidity rendered him the slave of his attendants, who gradually corrupted his mind. His cruelty, which at first obeyed the dictates of others, degenerated into habit and at length became the ruling passion of his soul.” He was wasteful and weakly extravagant, prodigal in his expenditure on his personal amusements, especially in gladiatorial exhibitions in which he himself engaged. He liked to pose as the Roman Hercules, and entered the arena to slay ostriches and panthers, the camel, leopard, elephant and the rhinoceros; he fought hundreds of times as a _retiarius_ in combat with a _secutor_ and stooped to receive a salary from the common fund for the gladiators in proof of his preëminence. He was slavishly fond of singing, dancing and playing the buffoon; he was a glutton and profligate who wallowed in the most sensuous abominations, and after the life of this monster and madman had been threatened by many plots, he was at last poisoned in his own palace by Marcia, his mistress, who, finding the drug too slow in action, caused him to be strangled by one of his gladiators. His body was refused burial by the Senate and thrown into the Tiber, but the Emperor Pertinax recovered it and had it secretly conveyed to the mausoleum. The memory of Commodus was branded with eternal infamy; it was ordered that his honours should be reversed; his titles erased from the public monuments; his statues thrown down; his body dragged with a hook into the stripping room of the gladiators and exposed to public contumacy.