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should not be restored; and in the second place, when his relatives and friends would have kept him back, he chose to
return to a death by torture rather than prove false to his promise, though given to an enemy. And again in the 2nd Punic
War, after the Battle of Cannae, Hannibal sent to Rome ten Roman captives bound by an oath to return to him, if they did
not succeed in ransoming his prisoners; and as long as any one of them lived, the censors kept them all degraded and
disfranchised, because they were guilty of perjury in not returning. And they punished in like manner the one who had
incurred guilt by an evasion of his oath: with Hannibal's permission this man left the camp and returned a litttle later on the
pretext that he had forgotten something or other; and then, when he left the camp the second time, he claimed that he was
released from the obligation of his oath; and so he was, according to the letter of it, but not according to the spirit. In the
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