Bkiii:V No Surrender

We believe thunderous Jupiter rules the sky: Augustus is considered a god on earth, for adding the Britons, and likewise the weight of the Persians to our empire. Didn’t Crassus’ soldiers live in vile marriage with barbarian wives, and (because of our Senate and its perverse ways!) grow old, in the service of their hostile fathers. Marsians, Apulians ruled by a Mede, forgetting their shields, Roman names, and togas, and eternal Vesta, though Jove’s shrines and the city of Rome remained unharmed? Regulus’s far-seeing mind warned of this, when he objected to shameful surrender, and considered from its example harm would come to the following age, unless captured men were killed without pity. ‘I’ve seen standards and weapons,’ he said, ‘taken bloodlessly from our soldiers, hung there in the Carthaginian shrines, I’ve seen the arms of our freemen twisted behind their backs, enemy gates wide open, and the fields that our warfare ravaged being freely cultivated again. Do you think that our soldiers ransomed for gold, will fight more fiercely next time! You’ll add harm to shame: the wool that’s dyed purple never regains the colour that vanished, and true courage, when once departed, never cares to return to an inferior heart. When a doe that’s set free, from the thick hunting nets, turns to fight, then he’ll be brave who trusts himself to treacherous enemies and he’ll crush Carthage, in a second battle, who’s felt the chains on his fettered wrists, without a struggle, afraid of dying. He’s one who, not knowing how life should be lived, confuses war with peace. O, shame! O mighty Carthage, made mightier now because of Italy’s disgraceful decadence.’ It’s said he set aside his wife’s chaste kisses, and his little ones, as of less importance, and, grimly, he set his manly face to the soil, until he might be able to strengthen the Senate’s wavering purpose, by making of himself an example no other man had made, and hurrying, among grieving friends, to noble exile. Yet he knew what the barbarous torturer was preparing for him. Still he pushed aside the kinsmen who were blocking his way, and the people who delayed his going, as if, with some case decided, and leaving all that tedious business of his clients, he headed for Venafrum’s meadows, or Lacedaemonian Tarentum.