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 court-yard of the house.  This is the only free and honourable way to death.  Our very enemies will admire our courage, and Hannibal will learn that those whom he deserted and betrayed were brave allies.”

14.  More of those who heard this speech of Virrius approved of the proposal contained in it, than had strength of mind to execute what they approved.  The greater part of the senate being not without hopes that the Romans, whose clemency they had frequently had proof of in many wars, would be exorable by them also, decreed and sent ambassadors to surrender Capua to the Romans.  About twenty-seven senators, following Vibius Virrius to his home, partook of the banquet with him; and after having, as far as they could, withdrawn their minds, by means of wine, from the perception of the impending evil, all took the poison.  They then rose from the banquet, after giving each other their right hands, and taking a last embrace, mingling their tears for their own and their country’s fate; some of them remained, that they might be burned upon the same pile, and the rest retired to their homes.  Their veins being filled in consequence of what they had eaten, and the wine they drank, rendered the poison less efficacious in expediting death; and accordingly, though the greater part of them languished the whole of that night and part of the following