These wiseacres are as far from the truth as his libellers and slanderers.
If anything in addition to my solemn assertion is needful to convince any
reader of this chronicle that I am right, let me remind him that all Rome
knew or knew of Palus the Gladiator, afterwards of Palus the Charioteer,
later yet again of Palus the Gladiator; of Palus, the unsurpassable, the
inimitable, the incomparable: incomparable in his ease, his grace, his
litheness, his agility, his quickness, his amazing capacity for seeing the
one right thing to do, the one thing which no other man could have thought
of, and for doing it without a sign of perturbation, haste or effort, yet
swift as lightning, with the effectiveness of Jove's thunderbolts and with
the joyousness of a happy lad; always the same Palus and always in every
dimension, attitude and movement the picture, the image, the double of
Commodus: whereas no one ever heard or saw Palus the Beast-Fighter.
I think the chief reason why Commodus could not resist the temptation to
degrade himself to the level of a public character and a public gladiator,
yet, despite his infatuation for beast-killing, shrank from dishonoring
himself by appearing at a public festival as a beast-fighter, was that
beast-fighters are not merely more despised than charioteers or gladiators
but the contempt felt for them has in it quite a different quality from
that felt for gladiators and charioteers.
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