pledges for his good treatment; but when tidings arrived that Regulus
was dead, Marcia began to treat them both with savage cruelty, though
one of them assured her that he had been careful to have her husband
well used. Horrible stories were told that Regulus had been put out in
the sun with his eyelids cut off, rolled down a hill in a barrel with
spikes, killed by being constantly kept awake, or else crucified. Marcia
seems to have set about, and perhaps believed in these horrors, and
avenged them on her unhappy captives till one had died, and the Senate
sent for her sons and severely reprimanded them. They declared it was
their mother's doing, not theirs, and thenceforth were careful of the
comfort of the remaining prisoner.

It may thus be hoped that the frightful tale of Regulus' sufferings was
but formed by report acting on the fancy of a vindictive woman, and that
Regulus was permitted to die in peace of the disease brought on far more
probably by the climate and imprisonment, than by the poison to which he
ascribed it. It is not the tortures he may have endured that make him
one of the noblest characters of history, but the resolution that would
neither let him save himself at the risk of his country's prosperity,
nor forfeit the word that he had pledged.




THE BRAVE BRETHREN OF JUDAH

B.C. 180