I do my duty. Other things trouble me not. For they are either things without life, or things without reason, or things that have rambled and know not the way. Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Book 6.
Image: Regulus Returning to Carthage, by Andries Cornelis Lens, 1791, at the Hermitage Museum courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Marcus Atilius Regulus was a Roman statesman and general who was a consul of the Roman Republic in 256 BCE and served as a general in the First Punic War. He defeated the Carthaginians in a naval battle at Cape Ecnomus near Sicily and invaded North Africa, winning victories at Aspis and Adys, until he was defeated and captured at Tunis in 255 BCE. The Carthaginians who captured him allowed him to go back to Rome as long as he tried to convince the Senate to make peace, but made him swear to go back into captivity at Carthage afterwards. He left for the Roman Senate, but he is supposed to have urged the Roman Senate to refuse the proposals and then, over the protests of his own people, he returned to Carthage, where, according to Roman tradition and Livy, he was tortured to death. In Tertullian's "To the Martyrs" (Chapter 4) and Augustine of Hippo's The City of God (I.15), it is said the Carthaginians "packed him into a tight wooden box, spiked with sharp nails on all sides so that he could not lean in any direction without being pierced." Thereafter, he was seen by later Romans as a model of civic virtue.
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