Verginia
Verginia was killed by her own father in the Forum, and the Roman republic told the story for five hundred years to explain why it had laws. The setting is the decemvirate: ten men appointed in 451 BC to write down the law, who produced the Twelve Tables and then refused to leave office when their term ended. Appius Claudius, the dominant one, is said to have wanted a plebeian girl betrothed to a former tribune, and to have had a client claim in court that she was in fact his own runaway slave - with Appius himself sitting as the judge who would decide it. Her father Verginius was fetched from the army. Denied any other remedy, he asked leave to speak to his daughter aside, took a knife from a butcher's stall and killed her, saying it was the only way he could make her free. The army mutinied, the plebs seceded to the Sacred Mount, and the decemvirs fell. Whether any of it happened is doubtful. The shape is identical to the story of Lucretia sixty years earlier - an outrage against a woman brings down a tyranny - and Roman historians used that shape deliberately. What is not in doubt is the use made of it: Livy gives it enormous space, and it became the standard illustration that law which is not above the men who write it is not law. Chaucer, Gower and Webster all retold it, and it was a subject for revolutionary painters in the 1790s.
- Nationality: Roman
- Roles: historical_figure
