Chapter 15.—Of Regulus, in Whom
We Have an Example of the Voluntary Endurance of Captivity for the
Sake of Religion; Which Yet Did Not Profit Him, Though He Was a
Worshipper of the Gods.
But among their own famous men they
have
a very noble example of the voluntary endurance of
captivity in obedience to a religious scruple. Marcus Attilius
Regulus, a Roman general, was a prisoner in the hands of the
Carthaginians. But they, being more anxious to exchange their
prisoners with the Romans than to keep them, sent Regulus as a
special envoy with their own embassadors to negotiate this
exchange, but bound him first with an oath, that if he failed to
accomplish their wish, he would return to Carthage. He went and
persuaded the senate to the opposite course, because he believed it
was not for the advantage of the Roman republic to make an exchange
of prisoners. After he had thus exerted his influence, the Romans
did not compel him to return to the enemy; but what he had sworn he
voluntarily performed. But the Carthaginians put him to death
with refined, elaborate, and horrible tortures. They shut him up
in a narrow box, in which he was compelled to stand, and in which
finely sharpened nails were fixed all round about him, so that he
could not lean upon any part of it without intense pain; and so
they killed him by depriving him of sleep. With justice, indeed, do they
applaud the virtue which rose superior to so frightful a fate. However, the gods he swore by were those who are now supposed to avenge the prohibition of their worship, by inflicting these present calamities on the human race. But if these gods, who were worshipped specially in this behalf, that they might confer happiness in this life, either willed or permitted these punishments to be inflicted on one who kept his oath to them, what more cruel punishment could they in their anger have inflicted on a perjured person? But why may I not draw from my reasoning a double inference? Regulus certainly had such reverence for the gods, that for his oath’s sake he would neither remain in his own land nor go elsewhere, but without hesitation returned to his bitterest enemies. If he thought that this course would be advantageous with respect to this present life, he was certainly much deceived, for it brought his life to a frightful termination. By his own example, in fact, he taught that the gods do not secure the temporal happiness of their worshippers; since he himself, who was devoted to their worship, as both conquered in battle and taken prisoner, and then, because he refused to act in violation of the oath he had sworn by them, was tortured and put to death by a new, and hitherto unheard of, and all too horrible kind of punishment. And on the supposition that the worshippers of the gods are rewarded by felicity in the life to come, why, then, do they calumniate the influence of Christianity? why do they assert that this disaster has overtaken the city because it has ceased to worship its gods, since, worship them as assiduously as it may, it may yet be as unfortunate as Regulus was? Or will some one carry so wonderful a blindness to the extent of wildly attempting, in the face of the evident truth, to contend that though one man might be unfortunate, though a worshipper of the gods, yet a whole city could not be so? That is to say, the power of their gods is better adapted to preserve multitudes than individuals,—as if a multitude were not composed of individuals.