But their impatience was excited by another and more acrid longing:
Matho's death has been promised for the ceremony.
It had been proposed at first to flay him alive, to pour lead into his
entrails, to kill him with hunger; he should be tied to a tree, and
an ape behind him should strike him on the head with a stone; he had
offended Tanith, and the cynocephaluses of Tanith should avenge her.
Others were of opinion that he should be led about on a dromedary after
linen wicks, dipped in oil, had been inserted in his body in several
places;--and they took pleasure in the thought of the large animal
wandering through the streets with this man writhing beneath the fires
like a candelabrum blown about by the wind.
But what citizens should be charged with his torture, and why disappoint
the rest? They would have liked a kind of death in which the whole
town might take part, in which every hand, every weapon, everything
Carthaginian, to the very paving-stones in the streets and the waves in
the gulf, could rend him, and crush him, and annihilate him. Accordingly
the Ancients decided that he should go from his prison to the square of
Khamon without any escort, and with his arms fastened to his back; it
was forbidden to strike him to the heart, in order that he might live
the longer; to put out his eyes, so that he might see the torture
through; to hurl anything against his person, or to lay more than three
fingers upon him at a time.
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