The Historians' History of the World 05

At that sight her husband and her father cried aloud; but Lucius drew the knife from the wound, and held it up, and said, “By this blood I swear, that I will visit this deed upon King Tarquinius, and all his accursed race; neither shall any man hereafter be king in Rome, lest he do the like wickedness.” And he gave the knife to her husband, and to her father, and to Publius Valerius. They marvelled to hear such words from him whom men called dull; but they swore also, and they took up the body of Lucretia, and carried it down into the Forum; and they said, “Behold the deeds of the wicked family of Tarquinius.” All the people of Collatia were moved, and the men took up arms, and they set a guard at the gates, that none might go out to carry the tidings to Tarquinius, and they followed Lucius to Rome. There, too, all the people came together, and the crier summoned them to assemble before the tribune of the Celeres, for Lucius held that office. And Lucius spoke to them of all the tyranny of Tarquinius and his sons, and of the wicked deed of Sextus. And the people in their curiæ took back from Tarquinius the sovereign power, which they had given him, and they banished him and all his family. Then the younger men followed Lucius to Ardea, to win over the army there to join them; and the city was left in the charge of Spurius Lucretius. But the wicked Tullia fled in haste from her house, and all, both men and women, cursed her as she passed, and prayed that the furies of her father’s blood might visit her with vengeance.b

NIEBUHR ON THE STORY OF LUCRETIA

This entire story, which Shakespeare himself put into poetry, has met with the wholesale scepticism that has visited all the Roman legends. But the incredulous Niebuhr, for one, accepts it: “It may easily be believed,” he says, “that Sextus Tarquinius committed the outrage on Lucretia, for similar things are still of every-day occurrence in Turkey, and were frequently perpetrated in the Middle Ages by Italian princes down to the time of Pietro Luigi Farnese (in the sixteenth century); in antiquity similar crimes are met with in oligarchies and tyrannies, as is well known from the history of Demetrius Poliorcetes at Athens. Cicero is quite right in saying that it was a misfortune that Sextus hit upon a woman belonging to one of the most powerful families. It may readily be believed that the woman tried to avenge herself, but the whole of the subsequent events, by which the story acquired individuality and its connection with the campaign against Ardea, are of no historical value. The king is said to have been encamped before Ardea, and to have concluded a truce for fifteen years; but Ardea was dependent upon Rome before that time, since it occurs among the towns on behalf of which Rome concluded the treaty with Carthage. All therefore that remains and bears the appearance of probability, is that Lucretia was outraged, and that her death kindled the spark which had long been smouldering under the ashes.

“We are in the same perplexity in regard to the person of Brutus. He is said to have feigned stupidity in order to deceive the king, and there were several traditions as to the manner in which he attempted to accomplish this object. His mission to Delphi along with the sons of Tarquinius, although the mission from Agylla at an earlier period cannot be doubted, seems to betray a later hand, and probably the same as introduced the stories from Herodotus into Roman history. It is further said that Tarquinius, in order to render the dignity of tribunus celerum the highest after that of the king, powerless for mischief, gave the office to Brutus. But there is every reason for believing that the whole story of Brutus’ idiocy arose solely from his name. Brutus is undoubtedly an Oscan word connected with the same root as Bruttii; it signifies ‘a runaway slave,’ a name which the insolent faction of the king gave to the leader of the rebels because he was a plebeian. How is it conceivable that a great king, such as Tarquinius really was, should have raised an idiot whom he might have put to death to the dignity of tribunus celerum—for the purpose of rendering it contemptible? Tarquinius was not a tyrant of such a kind as to be under the necessity of weakening the state in order to govern it; he might have given it power and vigour and yet ruled over it by his great personal qualities; nor did the Romans think differently of him, for his statue continued to be preserved in the Capitol.”f

THE BANISHMENT OF TARQUINIUS