I
can't see through it."
I may interpolate here, what I learned more than four years later, after
Cleander's downfall and death and after my return from Africa, that
Agathemer's conjectures, as we talked the matter over in our nook, were
correct. Perennis had formulated the plan and had prepared for it and
given the preliminary orders. His was the policy of allowing the mutineers
to march all the way to Rome unhindered. He, without consulting the
Emperor and with every care to prevent him from suspecting what was afoot,
imported a thousand archers from Crete, and as many mounted bowmen from
Numidia, from Mauretania and from Gaetulia. He planned the banquet-feast,
he made arrangements for the cordon of Praetorians. The massacre was his
idea.
Cleander must have known of all this; he could not, like Commodus, be kept
in ignorance. Either before he came to our camp, or, perhaps, in his
elation at his rival's ruin and his own success, he adopted the ready
plan. Most likely the separation from their fellows of the veteran
mutineers was all his own idea; Perennis was not the man to carry out so
bold a stroke nor so much as to conceive of it. Indubitably, after dark,
the eighteen veteran sergeants were secretly called to a meeting with
Cleander.
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