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The only unhurried figure in the picture is the one leaving to die. West gives every agitation to the crowd and none to him.

Rome learned to sail in a single generation because Carthage left it no choice, and by 256 BC it felt confident enough to land an army in Africa. The consul who led it, Marcus Atilius Regulus, won a battle, seized a town a day's ride from Carthage, and offered peace terms so crushing that the enemy decided fighting on was cheaper. Carthage hired a Spartan drill-master named Xanthippus, who took one look at the Roman line and pointed his elephants at the flat ground. In the spring of 255 the invading army was destroyed on the Bagradas plain, and Regulus, the consul who had dictated terms, was marched into Carthage as a prisoner. Five years later, the tradition says, Carthage sent him to Rome on parole. He was to propose peace, or at least an exchange of prisoners; he swore an oath to return if he failed. What he did instead became the most famous act of bad diplomacy in Roman memory: standing before the Senate he argued against his own exchange, telling the fathers that Carthage's captive officers were young and useful and he was old and finished, and that Rome should trade nothing. Then, his oath being what it was, he said his goodbyes and boarded the ship back. Horace has him shrugging off his wife's kiss like a man already legally dead, hurrying, the poet says, as if leaving for a country weekend rather than for his executioners. The executioners are where the historians clear their throats. The stories of what Carthage did to him, the cut eyelids, the sleepless days, the barrel lined with spikes, grew with each Roman telling, and Polybius, the war's most careful chronicler, never mentions the return at all. Some scholars suspect the whole ordeal was invented to launder a nastier fact the sources preserve alongside it: that his widow tortured Carthaginian prisoners in Rome. True or built, the story did permanent work. When Cicero needed one name for the proposition that an oath binds even between enemies, the name was Regulus. Benjamin West, a Quaker from Pennsylvania who had become history painter to George III, took the departure as a royal commission; the king chose the subject. The canvas hung in the Royal Academy's first exhibition in 1769, the year the institution existed at all, and it stages the story as a tug of war with one side not pulling: the crowd grasps, pleads, and faints around a man in a pale toga who has already, visibly, left. It has belonged to the crown ever since.