Regulus Returns to Carthage

In 256 BC the consul Marcus Atilius Regulus led a Roman army into Africa after the victory at Ecnomus and came close to forcing Carthage to surrender. The next year his army was destroyed by the Carthaginians and their Spartan commander Xanthippus, and Regulus was taken prisoner. So far the story is in Polybius.

What followed became one of Rome's most famous moral tales. Cicero tells it in On Duties and Horace in his Odes. Some years later, the story goes, the Carthaginians sent Regulus to Rome, under oath to return, to arrange an exchange of prisoners. In the Senate he spoke against the exchange, arguing that the Carthaginian captives were young and able commanders while he was old and worn out. Then, though his friends and family begged him to stay, he kept his oath and went back to Carthage, where, it was said, he was tortured to death. Horace pictures him putting aside his wife's kiss and his little sons, fixing his eyes on the ground, and passing through the grieving crowd as calmly as if he were leaving for his country estate. Polybius says nothing of the embassy or the death, and many historians think the story grew up later, perhaps to answer charges that his widow had mistreated Carthaginian prisoners in Rome.