Two Historical Themes in Roman Literature

Abstract

The Regulus Ode lost none of its power by the putative discovery that the story upon which it was based was fictitious, nor will the restoration of credence in the story improve a perfect ode. However, it is largely upon the accumulated incidental comments of textbooks that our students form their cQnceptions of things Roman, and for this reason if no other, it is well that the comments be accurate. The Regulus story became one of the favorite tales for children and for tellers of patriotic anecdotes. It therefore was frequently told from memory, and in the later romantic annals accumulated many attractive but legendary elements. We may, therefore, in searching for a solid foundation of facts disregard for the present the versions of Livy, Valerius Maximus, Cassius Dio, Appian, and the rest of the late writers, and confine ourselves to the earlier version. The story appears first among the fragments of Sempronius Tuditanus, who was consul in 129 B.C. and a man trained chiefly in jurisprudence, the most exacting of sciences in Roman days. He lived long before the period of the romancers. It next appears in Cicero,' who while writing the De Republica carefully worked through Roman history with sources that *are generally very close to Fabius Pictor, and no one has yet proved that Fabius inserted fiction in the part of his history that treated of his own lifetime. From these two we learn that Regulus, who had been captured at the battle of Tunis in 254, later accompanied a Punic commission which was sent to Rome to request an exchange of prisoners, that instead of supporting the request as he was expected to do he argued against it, and that on his return to Carthage he was punished by refusal of food and sleep with the result that he died in prison. In the main this story remains intact in the later anecdotes though many versions of the manner of his death occur. On that point, in fact, there must have been uncertainty because Rome had no way of getting reliable news from Carthage in that day.