The Italian phrase coined in the 1930s to describe this period, ‘La Grande Roma dei Tarquini’ (‘The Great Rome of the Tarquins’), may not be so misleading – though it depends a lot, of course, on exactly what is meant by ‘Grande’. Rome was still, in absolute and relative terms, far from ‘great’. But it was a larger and more urban community than it had been a hundred years earlier, having profited, no doubt, from its prime position for trading and its proximity to wealthy Etruria. So far as we can judge the town’s extent in the middle of the sixth century BCE (part of that judgement inevitably comes down to guesswork), it was now substantially bigger than the Latin settlements to the south and at least as large as the largest Etruscan towns to the north, with a population of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000, although it had nowhere near the grandeur of some contemporary Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, and was significantly smaller. That is to say, Rome must have been a major player in the region, but it was not yet in any way extraordinary.
Not all the urban developments that Romans ascribed to the Tarquins were splendid in the obvious sense of the word. It was a characteristically Roman concern for the infrastructure of urban life that made later writers hail their achievements in constructing a drain: the Cloaca Maxima, or the ‘Great(est) Drain’. Quite how much of what survives of this famous structure goes back to the sixth century BCE is far from clear: the substantial masonry sections that it is still possible to explore, and that still carry part of the overflow from the modern city and the detritus from modern bathrooms, are from several centuries later, and it now seems likely that the earliest attempts at some kind of drainage system go back earlier, to the seventh century BCE. But in the Roman imagination the Cloaca was always a wonder of Rome that was owed to its final kings: ‘an amazing work and more than words can describe’ enthused Dionysius, who presumably had in mind what was visible in his day, in the first century BCE. Yet it also had a darker side: it was not just a wonder but also a reminder of the cruel tyranny that for the Romans marked the end of the regal period. In a particularly lurid, and gloriously fantastical, account, Pliny the Elder (that is, Gaius Plinius Secundus, the extraordinary Roman polymath now best remembered as the one celebrity victim of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE) describes how the people of the city were so exhausted by the construction work on the drain that many killed themselves. The king, in response, nailed the bodies of the suicides to crosses, in the hope that the shame of crucifixion would be a deterrent for others.
22. A surviving section of the underground Cloaca Maxima. The original drain can have been nothing like as grand as this later construction but this is the image that Roman writers had when they wrote of Tarquin’s building project. Some Romans boasted of taking boats and rowing along it.
It was, however, not the exploitation of the labouring poor that was supposed finally to have brought the monarchy down, but sexual violence: the rape of Lucretia by one of the king’s sons. This rape is almost certainly as mythic as the rape of the Sabines: assaults on women symbolically marking the beginning and the end of the regal period. What is more, the Roman writers who later told the story were probably influenced by Greek traditions, which often linked the culmination, and fall, of tyranny with sexual crimes. In sixth-century BCE Athens, for example, sexual advances by the ruler’s younger brother towards another man’s partner were said to have led to the overthrow of the Pisistratid dynasty. But mythic or not, for the rest of Roman time the rape of Lucretia marked a turning point in politics, and its morality was debated. The theme has been replayed and reimagined in Western culture almost ever since, from Botticelli, through Titian and Shakespeare, to Benjamin Britten; Lucretia even has her own small part in Judy Chicago’s feminist installation The Dinner Party, among some 1,000 heroines of world history.
Livy tells a highly coloured tale of these last moments of the monarchy. It starts with a group of young Romans who were trying to find ways of passing the time while besieging the nearby town of Ardea. One evening, they were having a drunken competition about whose wife was best, when one of their number, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, suggested that they should simply ride back home (it was only a few miles away) and inspect the women; this would prove, he claimed, the superiority of his own Lucretia. Indeed it did: for while all the other wives were discovered partying in the absence of their menfolk, Lucretia was doing exactly what was expected of a virtuous Roman woman – working at her loom, among her maids. She then dutifully offered supper to her husband and his guests.
There was, however, a terrible sequel. For during that visit, we are told, Sextus Tarquinius conceived a fatal passion for Lucretia, and one evening shortly afterwards he rode back to her house. After being politely entertained again, he came to her room and demanded sex with her, at knifepoint. When the simple threat of death did not move her, Tarquinius exploited instead her fear of dishonour: he threatened to kill both her and a slave (visible in Titian’s painting [see plate 4]) so that it would look as if she had been caught in the most disgraceful form of adultery. Faced with this, Lucretia acceded, but when Tarquinius had returned to Ardea, she sent for her husband and father, told them what had happened – and killed herself.
Lucretia’s story remained an extraordinarily powerful image in Roman moral culture ever after. For many Romans, it represented a defining moment of female virtue. Lucretia voluntarily paid with her life for losing, as Livy put it, her pudicitia – her ‘chastity’, or better the ‘fidelity’, on the woman’s part at least, that defined the relationship between Roman wife and husband. Yet other ancient writers found the story more difficult. There were poets and satirists who predictably questioned whether pudicitia was really what a man wanted in a wife. In one bawdy epigram, Marcus Valerius Martialis (‘Martial’ for short), who wrote a whole series of clever, sparky and rude verses at the end of the first century CE, jokes that his wife can be a Lucretia by day if she wants, so long as she is a whore by night. In another quip, he wonders whether Lucretias are ever quite what they seem; even the famous Lucretia, he fantasises, enjoyed risqué poems when her husband wasn’t looking. More serious was the issue of Lucretia’s culpability and the reasons for her suicide. To some Romans, it looked as if she was more concerned with her reputation than with real pudicitia – which surely resided in the guilt or innocence of her mind, not her body, and would not have been remotely affected by false allegations of sex with a slave. In the early fifth century CE, St Augustine, who was well versed in the pagan classics, wondered if Lucretia had been raped at alclass="underline" for had she not, in the end, consented? It is not hard to detect here versions of some of our own arguments about rape and the issues of responsibility it raises.
23. Pudicitia, as an important virtue in a woman, was stressed in many contexts. This silver coin of the emperor Hadrian, minted in the 120s CE, shows the personification of Pudicitia modestly sitting as a good Roman wife should. Around her, the words ‘COS III’ celebrate Hadrian holding the consulship for the third time, hinting at a connection between public male prestige and the proper behaviour of women.