The Story of Lucretia and the Founding of the Republic
At a Glance
- Central figures: Lucretia, a Roman noblewoman and wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus; Sextus Tarquinius, son of King Lucius Tarquinius Superbus; Lucius Junius Brutus, kinsman of the royal house and leader of the revolt against the monarchy.
- Setting: Rome and the military camp at Ardea, during the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, the last of Rome’s seven kings; the principal source is Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita, Book I, with additional accounts in Ovid’s Fasti and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.
- The turn: Sextus Tarquinius forces himself on Lucretia at knifepoint in her own chamber at Collatia; Lucretia summons her father and husband, testifies to what was done, and drives a blade into her own chest.
- The outcome: Brutus draws the knife from Lucretia’s body, swears an oath over it, and leads an uprising that expels the Tarquin dynasty from Rome, ending the monarchy in 509 BCE.
- The legacy: The Roman Republic itself - the system of two annually elected consuls, the authority of the Senate, and the constitutional order that would govern Rome for nearly five centuries. Brutus and Collatinus served as the first two consuls.
The army was camped outside Ardea, and the siege was going nowhere. The Volscians held their walls. The Roman officers drank and argued over nothing, the way soldiers do when they have been sitting in mud too long. One night the argument turned to wives. Each man claimed his own was the most virtuous, the most faithful, the finest keeper of a household. Collatinus said there was a simple way to settle the matter. They could ride to Rome unannounced, right now, and see for themselves what the women were doing when their husbands were not expected home.
They went. The wives of the other officers were found at banquets, reclining among friends, dressed for company. Then they rode to Collatia, to the house of Collatinus. Lucretia sat in the atrium with her maids, spinning wool by lamplight. It was late. The spindles turned. She had not expected visitors and did not need to.
Collatinus had won the argument. But Sextus Tarquinius, the king’s son, who had ridden along with the rest, looked at Lucretia in that lamplight and did not forget her.
The Son of the King at Collatia
A few days later, Sextus returned to Collatia alone. He arrived at the house of Collatinus as a guest - a member of the royal family, a fellow officer, a cousin by marriage. Lucretia received him as custom required. She offered food, wine, a room for the night. No Roman matron could turn away a Tarquin.
He waited until the household was asleep. Then he went to her chamber with a drawn sword.
Livy records what he said. He told her he would have her, and if she resisted he would kill her and a slave beside her and tell the world he had caught them together. He would leave her dead and dishonored - not just killed, but remembered as an adulteress. The threat was calculated with precision. For a Roman woman of Lucretia’s rank, the accusation of stuprum - sexual disgrace - was worse than the act of dying. It would destroy her family’s name, her husband’s standing, her father’s dignitas. Sextus understood the mechanics of Roman shame. He used them.
Lucretia submitted. Sextus left before dawn and rode back to the camp.
The Knife and the Oath
The next morning Lucretia sent messengers to her father, Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, and to her husband. She told each to come at once and to bring a trusted friend. Collatinus brought Lucius Junius Brutus.
When they arrived, they found Lucretia dressed in mourning. She told them everything - what Sextus had done, when, and how. She asked them to swear that the man who violated her would not go unpunished.
They swore. They tried to console her. They told her the guilt was his, not hers. The mind sins, they said, not the body. Where there is no consent, there is no fault.
Lucretia answered that no woman would use her as a precedent for surviving dishonor. Then she drew a knife she had hidden in her clothing and stabbed herself beneath the ribs.
She fell. Her father caught her. Collatinus stood frozen. It was Brutus who moved first. He pulled the blade from the wound, held it up still wet with her blood, and spoke an oath over it.
By this blood, which was pure before a king’s son defiled it, I swear - and I call you, gods, to witness - that I will drive Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, his criminal wife, and all their offspring from Rome, with fire and sword and everything in my power. Neither they nor any other man shall be king in Rome again.
Brutus in the Forum
Until that night, no one in Rome had suspected Brutus of anything. He had spent years playing the fool - the name Brutus itself, meaning dull or stupid, was one he had cultivated. He had watched the Tarquins murder his brother and confiscate his father’s property, and he had survived by seeming too slow-witted to threaten. The mask dropped over Lucretia’s body and never went back on.
Brutus carried the corpse into the Forum at Collatia, laid it on the ground where the people could see it, and spoke. He named Sextus and what Sextus had done. He named the king’s tyrannies - the forced labor on public works, the citizens set to digging sewers and quarrying stone, the murders of senators, the contempt for custom and law. He named the mos maiorum, the way of the ancestors, and said the Tarquins had trampled it.
The people of Collatia voted to revolt. Brutus led a group to Rome itself. He entered the city and spoke again in the Forum Romanum, this time to the full body of Quirites. He displayed the knife and recounted the violation. The crowd moved from grief to fury. The Senate convened. A decree was passed: the Tarquins were banished. The gates were shut against the king.
The First Consuls
Tarquinius Superbus was at Ardea with the army when word reached him. He marched on Rome, but the gates held. He went into exile among the Etruscans and spent the rest of his life trying to reclaim his throne by foreign arms. He never succeeded.
Rome had no king. The Senate determined that executive power - imperium - would be held by two men, elected annually, each with the authority to check the other. They were called consuls. The first two elected to the office were Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, the widower of Lucretia. The year, by later Roman reckoning, was 509 BCE.
Collatinus did not last long. His name was Tarquin, and the people could not bear the sound of it. Brutus himself asked his fellow consul to step down. Collatinus went into voluntary exile at Lavinium. Publius Valerius Publicola took his place.
Brutus lasted only that first year. The Tarquins sent an army under their Etruscan allies. Brutus rode out to meet it, and in the battle he met Arruns, the king’s other son, on horseback. They drove their spears into each other simultaneously and both fell dead. The matrons of Rome mourned Brutus for a full year, Livy says, as they would have mourned a father.
The Republic stood. It would govern Rome for four hundred and sixty years, until another Brutus - or a man who claimed descent from this one - drove a different knife into a different body, on the Ides of March, in the name of the same principle. But that was a long way off. In 509, the consuls took their seats, the fasces were carried before them, and no man in Rome called himself king.