"Your father, the divine Marcus Aurelius
Antoninus had every right to call himself emperor,
because he cultivated wisdom, despised money,
and loved what was good.
But you, Commodus,
have no such right, for you are the antithesis of your father:
you love tyranny, vice, and brutality."
Spoken by Appianus after being sentenced to death,
as recorded in one of the Oxyrhynchus papyri records.
Jerome Carcopino, Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1940).
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