o. Crossing
the Anio, he pitched his camp three miles from the city, and lastly,
came up to the very walls and gates. He gave them to understand that
he would take their city from them, unless they gave up Capua. But
they did not give it up. Wild beasts, impelled by headlong fury and
rage, you may divert from their object to bring assistance to those
belonging to them, if you attempt to approach their dens and their
young. The Romans could not be diverted from Capua by the blockade of
Rome, by their wives and children, whose lamentations could almost be
heard from this place, by their altars, their hearths, the temples of
their gods, and the sepulchres of their ancestors profaned and
violated. So great was their avidity to bring us to punishment, so
insatiable their thirst for drinking our blood. Nor, perhaps, without
reason. We too would have done the same had the opportunity been
afforded us. Since, however, the gods have thought proper to determine
it otherwise, though I ought not to shrink from death, while I am
free, while I am master of myself, I have it in my power, by a death
not only honourable but mild, to escape the tortures and indignities
which the enemy hope to inflict upon me. I will not see Appius
Claudius and Quintus Fulvius in the pride and insolence of victory,
nor will I be dragged in chains through Rome as a spectacle in a
triumph, that afterwards in a dungeon, or tied to a stake, after my
back has been lacerated with stripes, I may place my neck under a
Roman axe. I will neither see my native city demolished and burnt, nor
the matrons, virgins, and free-born youths of Campania dragged to
constupration. Alba, from which they themselves derived their origin,
they demolished from her foundations, that there might remain no trace
of their rise and extraction, much less can I believe they will spare
Capua, towards which they bear a more rancorous hatred than towards
Carthage. For such of you, therefore, as have a mind to yield to fate,
before they behold such horrors, a banquet is furnished and prepared
at my house. When satiated with wine and food, the same cup which
shall have been given to me shall be handed round to them. That potion
will rescue our bodies from torture, our minds from insult, our eyes
and ears from seeing and hearing all those cruelties and indignities
which await the vanquished. There will be persons in readiness who
will throw our lifeless bodies upon a large pile kindled in the
c