Chapter XXXIII: Book VI: is largely devoted to the story of Regulus taken from the first

Punic War. His son, Serranus, severely wounded, reaches the door of Marus, one of his father’s old soldiers, who preaches endurance amidst the reverses of Rome:

In the ancestral way, most valiant Sir,
Bear present hardship and our fortune’s swerve:
So by Heaven’s law adown life’s sloping path
Headlong thro’ chequered hazards rolls Time’s wheel
(_Per uarios praeceps casus rota uoluitur aeui_).[1336]

The old man’s tale of Regulus is partly legendary, partly historical: it begins with dragon-fighting, and proceeds, not without rhetoric, to relate how Regulus kept his _parole_ when the Carthaginian senate sent him to Rome in the vain hope that he would advocate an exchange of prisoners. There must always be a moral greatness in this story of self-abnegation and Stoic austerity:

Squalor and starveling meals and restless couch
And strife with crowding ills he reckoned more
Than vanquishing a foe; nor counted it
So noble to escape adversity
By care as by endurance to prevail.[1337]

And yet Silius’s long-drawn narrative has not the moving force of Horace’s brief treatment of the same episode in the third book of the _Odes_. The digression ends at line 552, where Silius returns to his true subject—panic in the city and Jupiter’s prompting of the Romans to entrust all to Fabius.

The saving of Rome by Fabius’s delaying tactics is the theme of Book VII. The digressions include the legend of the 300 Fabii told to Hannibal by a prisoner, a story of Bacchus occasioned by the Carthaginian inroad on the Falernian vineyards, and, at the approach of the Carthaginian fleet, the introduction of Nereids with the Virgilian cave of Proteus. The delays are not confined to the inaction of Fabius: Proteus is asked to prophesy, but first he must hark back to the Judgement of Paris. There is, however, a foil to Fabius’s caution in the impetuous Minucius, who is magnanimously rescued from the consequences of his foolhardiness by his colleague.