In the first war against Carthage (255 B.C.) Regulus, a Roman general,
was heavily defeated and taken prisoner with a large part of his army.
Shortly afterwards the Roman fleet was destroyed by a terrible storm.
Nevertheless, the events of the next year's campaign went against the
Carthaginians. They determined to offer peace and for this purpose
sent an embassy to Rome. With this embassy Regulus was sent, on the
understanding that if he failed to induce his countrymen to make peace
and to agree to an exchange of prisoners he would return to Carthage,
where, as he well knew, a terrible fate certainly awaited him.
Nevertheless, despite the appeals of his wife and children, Regulus
urged his countrymen not to make peace. His body might belong to the
Carthaginians who had captured it, but his spirit was Roman and no Roman
could urge his countrymen to accept defeat and give up fighting until
they had won. True to his vow, he went back to Carthage and there he was
put to dreadful tortures. His eyelids were cut off and he was then
exposed to the full glare of the sun. But the story of his devotion
remained strong in the minds of his countrymen, and Horace, one of their
great poets, later put it into lines of imperishable verse.
_The Honour of Regulus_
Such a downfall had the prescient soul of Regulus feared, when he
refused assent to dishonourable terms and maintained that the
precedent would be fatal in time to come if the prisoners did not
die unpitied. 'I have seen', he said, 'our eagles hanging on
Carthaginian shrines, and weapons of our soldiers surrendered
without bloodshed; I have seen arms bound behind the back of the
free, and gates thrown open in security, and lands tilled that our
armies had wasted. Think you that the soldier, ransomed with gold,
will return the braver? You do but add loss to disgrace. Wool,
tinctured by dye, never regains its old purity; nor does true
courage, if once it is lost, deign to be restored to the degraded.
If the stag fights after being freed from the meshes of the net,
he will be brave who has surrendered to a treacherous foe, and he
will crush the Carthaginians in a second fight who without
resentment has felt the thongs binding his arms, and has feared
death. Such a man, all ignorant of the way to win a soldier's
life, has confused peace and war. Oh lost honour! Oh mighty
Carthage, exalted by the shameful downfall of Italy!' It is said
that he put from him the lips of his virtuous wife and his little
children, a free citizen no longer, and with grim resolution
turned his eyes to the ground, till with the weight of advice
never given by any before him he strengthened the wavering purpose
of the Fathers, and amid the mourning of his friends hurried into
a noble exile. Yet, though he knew what the barbarian tormentor
had in store for him, he set aside opposing kinsmen and people
that would delay his return as quietly as if he were leaving the
business of some client's suit at last decided, and were
journeying to his estate in Venefrum or to Tarentum that the
Spartan built.
Horace, _Od._ iii. 5. 13-56.