Читать книгу Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men - Mary Agnes Hamilton - Страница 12

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.