The result was that
avaricious Midases were eager to wager, as they felt certain of winning.
Yet he never lost, not once.
And, after each wager made, or won, he made the next on a narrower margin
at smaller odds, until he struck the whole nobility numb by offering to
wager even money that he could kill one hundred full-grown male bears from
his usual platform with one hundred hunting spears, covenanting that he
was to lose if he needed one hundred and one spear-casts to lay out those
hundred bears limp, flabby and utterly dead. This appeared so utterly an
impossibility that Aufidius Fronto offered to put up two million sesterces
against him. The pompous sham philosopher, who feigned the profoundest
contempt for riches, could not resist what looked like enormous gains. He
made the wager, and Commodus won.
Now I cannot insist too positively on the amazing, the incredible strength
and skill and nerve required for this fatiguing and taxing feat. Any other
man I ever knew or heard of would have shown evidences of weariness long
before he had despatched his hundredth bear; would certainly have betrayed
the terrific strain on his nerves. Commodus was, apparently, as fresh, as
jaunty, as full of reserve strength, as far from being unsure of himself
when he finished the hundredth bear as when he drove his first spear into
the first.
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