Tarquin the Proud, the Rape of Lucretia, and the Fall of the Kings
Rome expelled its last king in 509 BC after his son raped a noblewoman who then killed herself. The story as Livy tells it is that the king's son Sextus Tarquinius came to the house of Collatinus while the men were away at the siege of Ardea, was received as a guest, and forced Lucretia at knifepoint with a threat to kill her and a slave together and claim he had found them. She sent for her father and her husband the next morning, told them what had happened, made them swear vengeance, and stabbed herself in front of them. Lucius Junius Brutus, who had survived under the tyranny by pretending to be a fool — which is what his name means — drew the knife from the body, swore on it, and carried it through the streets. The army was at Ardea, the city closed its gates to the king, and the monarchy of some 244 years ended. Two consuls were elected annually thereafter, one of them Brutus, who is said to have condemned his own sons to death for conspiring to bring the king back. None of this is history in the ordinary sense. It was written down four centuries later, in a form that assembles Greek tyrannicide motifs and Roman family virtue, and the archaeology says only that Rome ceased to be a monarchy around then. What it is, is the Roman Republic's account of why kings are intolerable, and it was still doing political work in 44 BC. Livy has Lucretia say that she absolves herself of wrong and does not free herself from the penalty, which is the sentence Augustine argued with four centuries later. The episode was painted and set to music repeatedly from the Renaissance onward, and read very differently in each period.
- Year: 509 BCE
- Category: Political
