Besides the grace and good looks of the two, they fenced very well, Capito correctly and with good judgment, Commodus with amazing dash and originality.
Capito, though bold, was wholly unable to touch Commodus, while Commodus slashed him, even through his tunic, till his blood ran from a dozen scratches. Before the second bout was well joined Capito was felled by a blow on the head, which laid him flat and insensible, bleeding from a terrible scalp wound.
After Capito had been carried off by the attendants, the Emperor, wrapped in an athlete's blanket, talked a while to Murmex and then went off to bathe, for he bathed many times a day.
Set free, I went out and was helped into my litter. The two dogs were still by it, took their places under it as if they had belonged to me since puppyhood and under it trotted as I returned home. Once home I ate the lunch permitted me and had an hour's sound, dreamless sleep.
I woke feeling so well that I sent for Agathemer, bade him have my litter ready and told him I was going to the Baths of Titus.
Inevitably Agathemer protested that I was not well enough; naturally I insisted and, of course, I had my way.
As with court levees, I have never been able to take as a matter of course without wonder and admiration, the marvellous spectacle afforded by an assemblage of our nobility and gentry gathered for their afternoon bath in any of our splendid Thermae. Of these I hold the Baths of Titus not only the most magnificent, which is conceded by everybody, but also I hold them the most impressive mass of buildings in Rome, both outside and inside, and surpassing in every respect every other great public building in the city. Most connoisseurs appraise the Temple of Venus and Rome as our capital's most splendid structure, but I could never bring myself to admit it superior to or even equal to the Baths of Titus. To enter this surpassing building, always congratulating myself on my right to enter the baths and use them; to be one of the courtly throng of fashionable notables resorting to them: I could never take these things as a matter of course.
Nor could I ever take as a matter of course the sight of the bulk of Rome's nobility, gentlemen and ladies together, thronging the great pools and halls or roaming about the corridors, passage-ways or galleries, all totally nude.
Social convention is an amazing factor in human life. One may say that anything fashionable is accepted and that anything unfashionable is banned. But that does not help one to explain to one's self the oddity of some social conventions.
Oddest of all our Roman social conventions is the contrast between the insistence on complete concealment of the human figure everywhere else and the universal acceptance of its display at the Thermae.
At home, if receiving guests, on the streets, at a formal dinner, at Palace levees, at the Circus games or in the Amphitheatre, a man must be wrapped up in his toga. Any exposure of too much of the left arm, of either ankle, is hooted at as bad form, is decried as indecent.
So of our ladies, on dinner sofas, on their reclining chairs in their reception rooms, in their homes, in their litters abroad, at the Amphitheatre or at the Circus games, from neck to instep they are muffled up. If one catches a glimpse of a beauty's ankle as she goes up a stair, one is thrilled, one watches eagerly, one cranes to look.
Yet one encounters the same beauty the same afternoon in a corridor of the Baths of Titus, with nothing on but a net over her elaborate coiffure and the bracelet with the key and number of the locker in which the attendant has put away her clothing and valuables and one not only cannot stare at her, one cannot look at her, not even if she accosts one and lingers for a chat.
I have pondered over this, the most singular of our social conventions, and the most mandatory and inescapable; and the more I ponder the more singular it seems.
Yet it is real, it is a fact. One meets the wives of all one's friends, the wives of all Rome's nobility, naked as they were born; they mingle with the men in the swimming pools, in the ante-rooms, in the rest-rooms, everywhere except in the shower-bath cabinets and the rubbing-down rooms; one swims with them, lounges with them, joins groups of chatting gentlemen and ladies, chats, goes off, and all the while one cannot, one simply cannot stare at a nude woman, any more than any of the women ever stares at any man.
It is a social convention. But not the less amazing, although a fact.
One not only cannot scrutinize a woman, one cannot scrutinize a group of women, even at a distance, even all the way across a swimming pool. So, hoping to encounter Vedia in the gathering, I yet could not look for her.
I had met and talked with many of my acquaintances, notably Marcus Martius and his bride Marcia.
Marcia, rosy as the inside of a sea-shell, with her gold hair confined by a net of gold wire, was a bewitching creature, if I had been able to let my eyes dwell on her.
She was as contained and slow spoken and soft-voiced as always, but she was, for her, notably complimentary as to my share in the two fights; thanked me warmly for defending her, declared that she would certainly have been carried off, either as Xantha or Greia, or as a hostage for one or the other, if I had not fought "like both the Dioscuri at once," as she phrased it.
Martius corroborated her opinion of my services to them and thanked me warmly.
Delayed by chats with friends and acquaintances, held up by distant acquaintances and even by persons hardly known to me by sight, who congratulated me on the Emperor's public championing of me against my powerful Sabine neighbors, I felt my strength ebbing and sometimes saw a gray blur between my eyes and what I looked at.
I was, in fact, so weak that I nearly fainted when, unseen in the swarm of bathers until he was close to me, I encountered Talponius Pulto, tall, handsome, disdainful, sneering and malignant as usual. From his proximity I escaped as unobtrusively as I could and as promptly.
The cold douche and a swim in the cold pool had revived me. Also, in the cold pool I had encountered Nemestronia, still personable enough at eighty-odd to mingle daily with her social world, as nude as they, and enjoy herself thoroughly. Yet, at her age, she knew she looked better when under water, and spent most of her time in the pools. She and I did some fancy swimming together, while she questioned me about my health.
I did not spend any more time than I could help between the cold pool and the tepid pool; no more at least than importunate acquaintances exacted of me.
In the tepid pool I felt, somehow, weaker and more relaxed than at any time since I had gone out the previous morning. The effect of the Emperor's favor, the effect of the cold plunge, were wearing off: mind and body were losing tone. I swam languidly, alone, on my back and so swimming found myself about one third of the way from the upper end of the pool and about midway of its width. I was staring up at the panels of the vaulting, relishing the beauty of the color scheme, the gold rosettes brilliant against the deep blue of the soffits, set off by the red of the coffering.
So swimming and staring my eyes roamed downward to the great round-headed coved window above the gallery. The railing of the gallery had a sort of wicket in it, by which bathers could emerge one by one on to the bracket- like platform which overhung the pool at that end, for use as a take-off for a high dive.
Suddenly, on this diving-stand, poised for her dive, outlined against the window behind her, I recognized Vedia; Vedia, my angered sweetheart, rosy as Marcia, more lovely, and nude as Venus rising from the sea.
Seeing her thus, and seeing her thus unexpectedly, woke in me a volcanic outburst of conflicting emotions altogether too much for my weakened