Parole

Hi friend,

In the spring of 255 BC, a Roman army that had marched within a day of Carthage was cut to pieces on the plain outside Tunis, and its commander was taken alive.

His name was Marcus Atilius Regulus, and he had been consul twice. A year earlier he had helped win one of the largest sea battles of the ancient world, landed an army in Africa, and pressed Carthage so hard that the city asked him for terms. He answered with demands so harsh that the Carthaginians decided they would rather keep fighting. They hired a Spartan soldier of fortune named Xanthippus to rebuild their army, sent elephants through the Roman lines, and put Regulus in a cell.

On that much, the historians agree. What follows is the story the Romans told about him for the next six hundred years.

Some years into his captivity, with the war turning against them, the Carthaginians sent Regulus home with an embassy. They wanted peace or an exchange of prisoners, and they reckoned that a famous Roman who stood to win his own freedom from the bargain would argue for it better than anyone alive. Before he sailed, he swore an oath. If the Senate refused, he would come back.

He reached Rome and would not pass through the gates, saying he had come as a slave of Carthage and had no right to enter as a citizen. When the Senate asked his opinion, he told them to refuse both offers. The Carthaginians held in Roman hands were young and dangerous, he said, and the Romans Carthage would give back were worn out, himself among them. The Senate took his advice.

Then he made ready to leave.

His wife and sons begged him to stay. The senators told him, with perfect reason, that an oath forced on a prisoner by an enemy was not binding, and that no Roman would think less of him for breaking it. Carthage had no way of fetching him. The only thing holding Regulus to that promise was the fact that he had made it.

He sailed anyway, and Carthage, the story says, put him to death for it. The later versions compete with one another in horror: his eyelids cut away and his face turned to the African sun, or a barrel driven through with nails and rolled down a hill with him inside.

Now the part the schoolbooks leave out.

Polybius, the best historian of the war we have, says nothing about any of it. He records the defeat and the capture, and then Regulus drops out of his account entirely. The embassy, the oath and the return first surface a century later, in Roman writers with reasons of their own for telling them.

One of those reasons may be ugly. The Greek historian Diodorus reports that two captured Carthaginian officers were handed to Regulus's family as hostages, and that when word came of his death his widow, Marcia, treated them so savagely that one of them died, and the Senate had to step in and threaten the family. More than one modern historian suspects that the tale of Regulus's torture was put about to excuse what had been done in his name, inside his own house.

So it may never have happened. Rome told it anyway, and kept telling it. Cicero held Regulus up as the model of duty in the last book he wrote. Horace gave him an ode, in which the old man pushes through the crowd of relatives trying to hold him back and walks down to the harbour as calmly as a lawyer heading to his country house after settling a client's case. Augustine was still arguing about him in the fifth century, and in the eighteenth he became an opera.

A hard and practical people does not repeat a story for six centuries by accident. The question worth asking is what they needed it for.

Rome ran on a thing it called fides, the word given. Treaties, debts, the bond between a patron and the men who depended on him, the oath a soldier swore to his general: all of it rested on the belief that a Roman's word would hold when holding it hurt. A system like that can survive a great many liars. What it cannot survive is the suspicion that every man is one, and the only answer to that suspicion is a man who paid the full price, once, in public, so that everyone else's word is worth something by comparison.

Regulus was that payment, and whether or not he made it, Rome needed to believe that somebody had.

Notice where the real danger in the story lies. Carthage is the obvious villain, but Carthage only threatened him. The thing that nearly beat him was the Senate's offer, which was reasonable, respectable, legally sound, and made by his friends. Most promises are not broken in betrayal. They die of a good excuse, handed to you by someone who likes you, at the moment keeping your word has become expensive.

We still carry the story in our language without knowing it. For centuries, an officer captured in war could be released on his promise not to fight again, or to return when called, and that promise was called his parole, from the French for word. A man on parole was a man walking around free on nothing but a sentence he had said out loud.

That is the position you are in far more often than you realise. I'll send it by Friday. I'll call you back. I'll be there. The promise you made to yourself at eleven last night about how the morning would go. Nobody is coming to fetch you for any of these, and there will always be a sensible reason to let one slide. I have broken smaller promises than his for poorer reasons than the one the Senate offered him, and I suspect you have too.

But each of those promises is a small parole. You are released on your word, and every time you break it with a good reason, you teach the people around you what your word is worth, and you teach yourself the same lesson with greater effect, because you are the one listening every time.

A man who keeps his word only when someone can make him has a supervisor and nothing more. Regulus had every exit Rome could offer, and he walked past all of them to the harbour.

Until next time
Lorenc - Founder of Success Skill