died, whether soldiers in battle or peoples not engaged in warfare! What a huge array of ships were destroyed in naval engagements or sunk amid the vicissitudes of changing weather! If we should try to describe or even mention them, we should become in our own person a mere historian. It was then that, terrified by a new fear, the city of Rome had recourse to vain and ridiculous remedies. By the authority of the Sibylline books, the secular games, celebrated a century before, and then forgotten in happier times, were renewed. The games consecrated to the nether gods were also renewed by the pontiffs, for they, too, had sunk into disuse in the better years of the past.

And no wonder, for when they were renewed, the great abundance of dying men that enriched the gods of the lower world put them too in the mood to enjoy sport, though, to be sure, the venomous wars and blood-stained quarrels, accompanied by deadly victories, now on one side, now the other, themselves provided great sport for demons and rich banquets for the nether gods. No doubt, in the First Punic War nothing more lamentable occurred than the Roman defeat in which that Regulus was taken captive whom I mentioned in the first and second books, a man incontestably great, previously a victor and a conqueror of the Carthaginians, who would even have brought that first Punic War to an end, had not his excessive appetite for praise and glory impelled him to exact from the wearied Carthaginians terms too harsh for them to bear. If this man’s unexpected captivity and his most undeserved enslavement, his fidelity to his oath and his most cruel death, do not force the aforesaid gods to blush, it must be true that they are made of air and have no blood.