Lucretia

Roman matron

• Born: Sixth century b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: c. 509 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Collatia, Latium (now in Italy)

Lucretia embodied Roman virtue and catalyzed the overthrow of the Roman monarchy by committing suicide after being raped by her husband’s royal relative.

Early Life

The traditional story of Lucretia (lew-KREE-shee-uh), in its earliest extant form, is recounted in Latin by the Roman historian Titus Livy (59 b.c.e.-17 c.e.), in the first book of his monumental Roman history, Ab urbe condita libri (c. 26 b.c.e.-15 c.e.; The History of Rome, 1600). In the course of his narrative, Livy records Lucretia as the daughter of Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus and as the wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus. No details about Lucretia’s early life are known, as it is in her death, rather than in life, that she performed the heroic act that made her a paradigmatic figure for the Romans and subsequently a prolific symbol for numerous productions in Western literature, art, and music.

Life’s Work

The suicide of Lucretia marks the end of the Roman monarchy and the beginning of its Republic because, in avenging her honor, her father, Lucretius, and her husband, Collatinus, contribute to the fall of the Tarquin family from absolute power at Rome. Ironically enough, it is not Collatinus but his companion, Lucius Junius Brutus, who, while Lucretia’s husband and father are distracted with mourning, emerges to swear himself Lucretia’s primary avenger and shortly thereafter to become the founder of the Roman Republic.

If Collatinus steps up a bit too slowly to avenge the violation and death of his wife, he hurries to praise her beauty and virtue far less slowly while she is still alive. In fact, it is Collatinus’s boasting that precipitates the first fateful meeting between Lucretia and Sextus Tarquinius, the youngest son of Tarquinius Superbus, monarch of Rome.

With the Roman army encamped about Ardea during a prolonged blockade of the city, Sextus Tarquinius holds a feast in his quarters at which is present Collantinus with a number of other members of the royal family. After some time of drinking, the soldiers all begin to praise their own wives to one another. Collatinus insists that his wife is clearly the most deserving of their praises and suggests that they ride off to their homes and check up on their wives unexpectedly, to prove who is the best. The group travels first to Rome, where they find that all the royal princesses are feasting and enjoying themselves late into the night. From Rome, the soldiers turn to Collatia, where they find Lucretia and her maids engaged in the domestic business of spinning, even late into the night by candlelight. Collatinus exults in the superior virtue of his wife and invites his companions into his house, paving the way for Sextus Tarquinius to become completely captivated by the unrivaled beauty and virtue of Lucretia and to conceive an insurmountable evil desire for her.

It is only a few days later that Sextus returns to the house of Collatinus, this time unaccompanied by his host. Welcomed by Lucretia as a guest of her husband, Sextus secures a meal, a guest room, and the opportunity to act on his evil intentions. In the middle of the night he visits Lucretia’s room and awakens her with a sword pressed against her chest. Alternating his threats with entreaties, he attempts to have his way with her, but she refuses to yield to him. Finally he prevails, but only when he threatens to kill her and place beside her in her bed the naked body of a murdered slave as evidence that she had been caught in the act of adultery with one of the lowest members of her household. Fearing this taint on her reputation, Lucretia relinquishes her chastity.

While Sextus departs, thinking he has successfully achieved this object of his desire, Lucretia sends messages to her husband at Ardea and to her father at Rome, summoning them each to come with one trusted friend to her house because a terrible thing has happened. When the four men arrive, they find Lucretia mourning in her bedroom with a knife concealed under her clothes. She reports what has happened to her, names her assaulter, and extracts a pledge that they will avenge her defiled body. They assure her that crime is committed by the mind, not by the body, and that her pure intentions defy any guilt on her part. In book 1 of Livy’s The History of Rome, Lucretia responds:

You will see to what that man deserves. I absolve myself from the crime but not from punishment. There will not be any woman who lives unchaste because of the precedent of Lucretia. (Vos . . . videritis quid illi debeatur: ego me etsi peccato absolvo, supplicio non libero; nec ulla deinde impudica Lucretiae exemplo vivet.

As she finishes speaking, Lucretia stabs herself with the concealed weapon and dies before the eyes of her husband and father. While they are mourning her death, the companion of her husband, Lucius Junius Brutus, picks up the bloodied knife and makes a promise to drive the royal Tarquin family out of Rome in punishment for the deed committed by Sextus Tarquinius.

Significance

Not only has Lucretia’s brave and selfless act influenced many subsequent versions and depictions of her story, but her suicide also functioned as a powerful symbol for Roman political change directly following her death. Her body was paraded first through Collatia and then through Rome, provoking the outrage of the Roman people against Sextus Tarquinius and spurring them on to take up arms against the tyrants of the Tarquin family. At Rome, Brutus made a speech to the Roman public emphasizing the violence, lust, and arrogance of the monarchy, using Lucretia’s body as an object lesson for the Roman people. Literally written on her body were the assaults of the young Tarquin. The Roman people, compelled both by her virtue and by her victimization, subsequently drove the Tarquins out of Rome, thereby dismantling the Roman monarchy and establishing the beginnings of the Roman Republic.

Even under the Roman Empire, Lucretia remained a symbol of the highest form of Roman female chastity and as an example of the greatest Roman virtue, whether female or male. Later Roman poets seize on the prolific material of her story to formulate sections or make references in larger works. Ovid (43 b.c.e.-17 c.e.), in his Fasti (c. 8 c.e.; English translation, 1859), a poetic synthesis of astronomy, religion, legend, and history, includes Lucretia’s story among the patriotic legends of early Rome, seeming to rely more or less on Livy’s version of the events. Shortly thereafter, Silius Italicus (c. 26-101 c.e.) in his Punica (after 88 c.e.; The Second Punick War Between Hannibal and the Romans, 1661) includes Lucretia as one of the ghosts of famous Roman women whom the Sibyl points out to Scipio on his trip through Hades. Here Lucretia is called decus pudicitiae, “the glory of chastity.” Her story is also recorded by the Greek rhetorician Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Antiquitates Romanae (c. 7 b.c.e.; The Roman Antiquities of Dionysius Halicarnassensis, 1758), by the Greek writer Plutarch (“Life of Publius Valerius Publicola,” from his Bioi paralleloi, c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives, 1579), by Dio Cassius (Romaika, early third century c.e.; Dio’s Roman History, 1914-1927), by Diodorus of Sicily (Bibliotheca historica, c. 60-30 b.c.e.; The Historical Library of Diodorus the Sicilian, 1700), by Valerius Maximus (Factorum et dictorum memorabilium libri IX, c. 31 c.e.; Romanæ antiqæ descriptio:A View of the Religion, Laws, Customs, Manners, and Dispositions of the Ancient Romans, and Others, 1678), and by Lucius Annaeus Florus (Epitome de T. Livio bellorum omnium annorusm DCC libri duo, second century c.e.; The History of the Romans, 1658).

While Lucretia has been celebrated by many ancient authors for her beauty, chastity, and virtue, the rationale for her suicide has raised questions about guilt and sin that have provoked even deeper consideration of her motives. Saint Augustine discusses her chastity and guilt in his Christian treatise De civitate Dei (413-427; The City of God, 1610), while in the medieval period John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Thomas Heywood (the first two in verses; the third in dramatic form) revisit her story as a paradigm of woman’s virtue in the face of man’s lust. William Shakespeare, too, devotes a long poem to portraying the episode, though his perspective is also more moralistic than political. From the Renaissance on, the story of Lucretia has been the subject of countless paintings, sculptures, and sketches with a flurry of artistic activity occurring in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Perhaps most famous is the 1570 Titian painting Tarquin and Lucretia. More recently, Lucretia has served as the subject of Benjamin Britten’s 1946 opera The Rape of Lucretia, based on André Obey’s play Le viol de Lucrèce (pr. 1931; Lucrece, 1933).

Lucretia’s legacy in artistic representation has been put to further use by scholarly work in various academic fields, as critics have drawn on the material in her legend to develop and support provocative arguments in political theory, cultural studies, literary criticism, and other humanities disciplines. Lucretia has become a prolific symbol for generating ideas in the spheres of feminism and humanism and in discussions of heroism and sexism. The significance of her suicide has been continuously reinterpreted from the beginnings of the Roman Republic to modern times. While Lucretia may have prevented herself from becoming a precedent for the existence of unchaste women, she has nevertheless offered herself as a striking paradigm for the social and political behavior of both sexes in a plethora of cultural contexts.

Bibliography

Bowen, Anthony. The Story of Lucretia: Selections from Ovid and Livy. Oak Park, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1987. Provides Latin text, vocabulary, notes, and useful discussion of the two versions of Lucretia’s story in Livy and in Ovid.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Legend of Good Women. Translated by Ann McMillan. East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1995. Includes Chaucer’s version of the Lucretia legend in modern English.

Donaldson, Ian. The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1982. Critical analysis of the Lucretia story, with attention to each of the Latin authors who retold her story. Also considers Saint Augustine’s remarks about her and the role of Brutus. Especially useful for its compilation (reproduced in black-and-white photographs) of artistic renditions of Lucretia from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, including Titian’s well-known Tarquin and Lucretia (1570).

Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. Edited by Russell A. Peck. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Includes his Middle English version of Lucretia in the seventh book.

Heywood, Thomas. The Rape of Lucrece: A True Roman Tragedy. London: John Raworth, 1638 (reprint 1824). Dramatic version of the Lucretia story.

Jed, Stephanie H. Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Interpretation of the Lucretia legend as symbolic of the development of humanism, with special attention to ethics, feminism, and Coluccio Salutati’s Renaissance version of Lucretia.

Matthes, Melissa M. The Rape of Lucretia and the Founding of Republics: Readings in Livy, Machiavelli, and Rousseau. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Investigates the relationship between the Lucretia story and the establishment of the Roman Republic, taking its cue from Livy’s version of Lucretia and the beginnings of the Roman Republic.

Shakespeare, William. The Poems: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, The Passionate Pilgrim, edited by John Roe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Includes Shakespeare’s lengthy poem about the Lucretia story.

Trout, D. “Retextualizing Lucretia: Cultural Subversion in The City of God.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2, no.1 (1994): 53-70. Critical analysis of Saint Augustine’s remarks about Lucretia in The City of God, book 1, chapter 19, where this early Christian writer tries to rationalize Lucretia’s guilt in terms of contemporary Christian women.