Regulus

On an unseasonably humid spring day in 255 BC, Regulus’ eyelids were cut off. The Sentry took a hunting dagger, one of the more stout instruments produced in the Carthaginian armory, and delicately excised those vital folds. First the left, then the right, just as Galen would have taught, though this accidental flourish of technique was lost on the Sentry. As he worked, two Men held Regulus’ head down, pressing the aged, sunstroked skin of his neck fat against the ground. The Sentry was chosen for his light touch, but he was no surgeon, and it was best for all involved if his subject did not move.

The dagger itself was a well-worn instrument, the tip christened with animal blood and the pusses of the Sentry’s leprous hands. It was also covered with a good portion of dirt and had never been cleaned with anything other than sweat. The blade’s saving grace was the fine edge that could neatly maneuver around the pockets of bone which housed the eye and remove the lid without slipping into the iris. The Sentry cut slowly but ruthlessly, never yielding to the resistance of flesh, the squelch of corneal fluid, or the flush of blood that spilled from the blade’s wake.

For Regulus it was an exceptional but categorically normative pain: the cuts produced the relatively straightforward wince that might accompany a gashed arm or amputated toe. The ancient physicians may have taken much interest in this observation, but the curious and morbid were denied a viewing gallery. Regulus’ execution was to be painful and political, not an opportunity for study by inquiring minds. Perhaps the Men were paying attention to the Sentry’s technique, should they ever need to torture someone this way. What was left of Regulus’ imagination parodied them as enthusiastic anatomists, gleefully watching their master at work in an invitation-only session of their little inverted Hippocratic theater.

Once the major cuts had been made, the Sentry removed Regulus’ eyelids by hand, tearing away the remaining tendrils of flesh that anchored them behind the eye and discarding them on the ground like one might a scab lazily picked off the knee. They laid there, flimsy and pink and moist, growing stale in the midmorning sun.

The blood that followed stung, but it was also Regulus’ last reprieve. The incessant siege of the sun against his now unprotected eyes would dispossess them of all moisture. Regulus would soon go blind, and the only evidence of his ever having had sight would be the dried globular husks taking up space inside his skull.

*

Delirium is not a sudden thing; it sets in slowly. For Regulus, he gradually slipped out of sanity while the Men nailed eighty-four spikes into a simple shipping barrel. They had meant to do it the night before, but one of them, the short one, had gotten unexpectedly drunk and was in no state to engage in carpentry, while the other refused to labor in isolation. Consequently, there was a minor delay between the excision of his eyelids and his execution, and Regulus had the requisite time to develop a mild delirium.

As the Men hammered away, Regulus began to have irregular thoughts. The sun had grown steadily in his vision, no doubt due to the gradual deadening of his optic nerve, and the enlarged presence of the solar giant made him deeply uncomfortable. Previously, the sun was just a pinprick in the dome of the sky, contained, but now it overtook everything. It suffocated Regulus’ perception, but the last defense of his body, perhaps the only defense he ever had against this heliacal insanity had been crudely resected. He had no choice but to confront the astral beast in its totality. Once, he may have been afraid, or laughed - this was how a lifetime of loyalty to the Roman senate was repaid - but he had forgotten how to do those things. Over the course of roughly forty minutes, he lost the ability to think of anything besides all-encompassing, omnipresent, domineering sunlight. The innards of his mind were burnt away; he had no perception, no body, no soul. Regulus, once the great orator, was now just a vessel for the sun, the only mark of his sentience being a vague awareness that his edges were bleeding.

As Regulus held a steady dialogue with his final interlocutor, the Men finished their work. Were he not delirious, Regulus might have found some comfort by witnessing the contraption he would die inside of: the infinite unknowability of death confronted by the materiality, the absurdity of a wooden barrel with spikes driven through it. But Regulus had none of these thoughts.

It was not clear when Regulus died. His right lung could have been punctured when the Men stuffed him into the barrel. His left atrium could have collapsed when the Sentry rolled the barrel back and forth teasingly before fully sending him off down the hill. He could have died well after the barrel settled in the gulley, his blood dripping down the spikes, saturating the wood, enriching the soil. It didn’t really matter, at least not to Regulus; his mind had already been snuffed out. His body was merely a fleshy shell whose breakdown was a mechanical inevitability, though he was no longer in a state to comprehend it as such.

The barrel stopped rolling. The remains of Regulus’ body, along with the device that killed him, began the long, arduous, strangely public process of decomposing at the bottom of a hill outside Carthage. One of the Men, the tall one, coughed. It was noon.

***

Foxx Hart is a writer whose work broadly engages with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and psychology. They are based in Durham, NC.