The episode delves into the tragic and pivotal narrative of Lucretia, whose assault catalyzed the transition of Rome from monarchy to republic. We explore how a singular act of domestic violence not only shattered her life but also served as a catalyst for a profound political upheaval, ultimately leading to the establishment of the Roman Republic. In our discourse, we examine the complex interplay between personal trauma and political manipulation, as Lucretia's violation was subsequently appropriated by male political figures to incite revolutionary fervor. We also reflect on the enduring implications of her story, considering how the trauma of one woman became a foundational myth for a new governmental structure. Through this exploration, we aim to recenter Lucretia within the historical narrative, emphasizing her significance beyond the confines of her tragedy.

Hosts: Michael and Alana are professional historians with a passion for bringing the most captivating and often overlooked criminal events of the past to light. ✨

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The narrative of Lucretia serves as a poignant exploration of the intersection between personal tragedy and political upheaval, encapsulating how the most intimate violations can catalyze monumental shifts in governance. The episode meticulously chronicles the events leading to the establishment of the Roman Republic, emphasizing that the horrific act of violence against Lucretia was not merely a tale of personal despair, but a rallying cry for the Roman aristocracy. Her tragic end, a result of Prince Sextus Tarquinius' predatory actions, ignited a revolution that dismantled the monarchy and birthed a new political order. However, the episode delves deeper, revealing how her narrative was co-opted by male political actors, transforming her suffering into a tool for legitimizing their ambitions. The discussion raises critical questions about the representation of women's experiences in history, particularly how Lucretia's story, while foundational in the annals of the Republic, ultimately underscores the patriarchal structures that sought to suppress her agency even in death.

Takeaways:

• The podcast discusses the critical historical event of Lucretia's assault, which became a catalyst for the establishment of the Roman Republic.
• It emphasizes that Lucretia's tragic story was co-opted by male political figures to further their agendas and incite revolutionary action.
• The episode highlights the complex interplay between gender, power, and historical narrative in ancient Rome, particularly regarding women's roles.
• Listeners are urged to reflect on the implications of Lucretia's sacrifice and its impact on the evolution of republican governance.
• The discussion reveals how the repercussions of Lucretia's story extend into modern political thought, echoing through the founding of the United States.
• Ultimately, the podcast illustrates the paradox of liberty and oppression in the context of the birth of the Roman Republic, driven by a woman's suffering.

Trigger Warning.

This podcast episode includes topics about rape and suicide.

Please prioritize your mental health.

In the waning years of the 6th century BCE, the Romans transitioned from having a monarchy to a republic as their form of government.

In short, this meant that they went from following one person, a hereditary king, to establishing a government in which elected representatives made government decisions.

Traditionally, this sort of political change was the result of military engagement, something that shifted over time.

That had been the case for Athenian democracy over in ancient Greece.

But the Romans experienced a different trajectory.

They experienced and fought for a change in regimes that was sudden and total.

And the catalyst was a horrific act of domestic violence.

In the 7th and 6th centuries BCE Rome wasn't the enormous empire that we think of that would come later.

In these early centuries, the Romans occupied a small strip of territory on the central western coast of Italy and constantly fighting with other tribes for territory and resources.

According to traditional roman chronologies.

In 509 BCE, the Roman military was entrenched in a prolonged grinding siege of the Latin city of Ardea.

One evening during this military campaign, a group of elite Roman officers were gathered, attempting to entertain themselves.

As the hours passed, the group indulged in more and more wine and they began to argue about who had the most virtuous wife.

This led the officers to start a wager.

And that wager led them to make a midnight ride back to Rome to spy on their respective households.

When they arrived at the home of the officer Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, they spied his wife Lucretia, diligently weaving late into the night.

Lucretia's beauty and dedication to her wifely duties leads her to victory in the contest.

But.

But it also introduced her to the predatory eyes of Prince Sextus Tarquinius and effectively sealed the fate of the Roman monarchy.

The prince, guided by his hereditary entitlement, later went back to rape Lucretia.

And his sexual assault directly led to Lucretia taking her own life and a suicide.

This violence served as the definitive political spark that ignited the Roman aristocracy against their king and and it directly led to the establishment of the Roman Republic, a type of government without a king.

However, rigorous historical analysis of this foundational story reveals a deeply tragic and enduring ideological reality.

The personal trauma of a woman was immediately and systematically co opted by ambitious male political actors.

Elite men such as Lucius Junius Brutus weaponized Lucretia's violated body and her bloody dagger.

They utilize them as the ultimate political props to incite a mob, legitimize a coup d' etat and lay the unassailable moral groundwork for a complete political change.

Welcome to history's greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

The assault of Lucretia and the role of that event in Roman history prompts us to consider who Lucretia actually was and how her likely very real trauma became the center of heavily mythologized propaganda for the Romans in coming centuries.

And as proud feminist historians, one of our goals in this episode is to recenter Lucretia, both the real and mythological versions of her in our understanding of Roman history.

That's right, Elena.

As we explore the Roman Republic, we'll see how the government became representative and evolved to become more representative over time.

But one aspect remained consistent.

In both the previous Roman monarchy and the subsequent Roman Republic, men would ultimately be the only ones allowed to participate in government.

But we can't forget that the Roman Republic actually began with a woman, Lucretia.

To fully grasp the explosive political fallout triggered by the assault on Lucretia, it is essential to analyze the volatile state of Rome under the tyrannical reign of its seventh and final monarch, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus.

He is commonly known as King Tarquin the Proud, from his cognomen, Superbus, which is Latin for proud, arrogant and lofty.

According to Roman history, the Seven Kings started with Romulus in 753 BCE, when he murdered his twin brother Remus and founded the city of Rome on the Palatine Hill.

You may be familiar with the famous myth of Romulus and Remus, who were supposedly raised by a she wolf before coming into their own as the long lost sons of a priestess and the God Mars.

As you mentioned, Romulus was identified as the first king of the Romans by divine right, and the next kings would continue to rule as absolute monarchs with the most power.

However, what's interesting is that even with these early kings, we can see the seeds of a republican government to come.

That's right, Michael.

The next four kings were actually elected by citizens of Rome after the previous king died.

And even more fascinating, a candidate for Roman king could be chosen from any source.

For example, the fifth Roman king was Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was originally a citizen and migrant from the neighboring Etruscan territory.

This is where the history and mythology tend to mix together a bit, making it difficult to differentiate between reality and a trope.

In the centuries that followed, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth Roman king, was also known as the first Etruscan king in the sense that he came from.

But it's also possible that since he was the last elected king, later historians would intentionally identify him as coming from a neighboring enemy tribe, a sort of outsider who messed up a good thing.

After ruling for 38 years, the fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, was, was assassinated.

But rather than following the established process in which citizens of Rome voted on a candidate for king, the dead king's son in law, known as Servius Tullius, declared himself the sixth king of the Romans.

But as mentioned, the fifth king was the last elected king.

So let's talk about what led to the seventh king.

After reigning for 44 years, the sixth king, Servius Tullius was was overthrown and assassinated by his son or grandson.

The records aren't entirely clear.

This individual who would become the seventh and last Roman king was Tarquin the Proud.

According to the history, the day that Tarquin carried out his coup d' etat against his own close relative, he went to the Senate house with a group of armed men, seated himself on the throne and summoned the senators to attend upon him.

He then insulted King Servius, as low born as having become king through the machinations of a woman for favoring the lower classes of Rome over the wealthy, and finally for taking land from the upper classes for distribution to the poor.

When word of this brazen deed reached the current King Servius, he hurried to confront Tarquin in person.

Tarquin then supposedly picked his grandfather up, carried him outside and threw him down the steps of the Senate House and into the street.

The king's retainers fled, and as Tarquin made his way to the palace, the injured King Servius was set upon and murdered by Tarquin's allies.

Tarquin then also put to death several leading senators who he suspected of remaining loyal to the dead King Servius.

And from that point on, King Tarquin refused to consult the Senate on matters of government.

And he judged capital crimes without the advice of his counselors, causing fear in anyone who might think to oppose him.

Again, we have to acknowledge how the later Roman historians were painting the 5th, 6th and 7th Roman kings as increasingly authoritarian and bad.

They were meant to be seen as foreshadowing for the political revolution that was coming.

So it's hard to say whether or not Tarquin actually did all of this.

Once he was in charge, the seventh king, Tarquin the Proud, sought to project his power through an aggressive program of monumental urban construction, which was carried out through the forced labor of the common Roman citizenry known as the plebeians.

In short, King Tarquin ordered his people who numbered around 35,000 at this point.

To build things for him without compensation.

His most ambitious engineering triumph was the completion of the Great Sewer, a massive drainage canal designed to reclaim the flood prone marshy valley between the Capitoline and Palatine hills.

Archaeological excavations confirm that the earliest masonry of this archaic sewer dates precisely to the late 6th century BCE.

So this piece of history is legitimate.

The human cost exacted to build this monumental infrastructure was catastrophic, effectively reducing the free Roman populace to the status of enslaved laborers.

A Roman encyclopedist, Pliny the Elder, recorded in one of his works that the toil demanded by by the king was so agonizing and intense that, quote, the citizens were seeking to escape from their exhaustion by committing suicide wholesale in a.

Horrific display of autocratic terror.

Designed to crush this rebellion of despair, Tarquin devised a macabre deterrent.

He ordered the crucifixion of the corpses of those who had killed themselves, leaving their defiled bodies on permanent display at the construction sites.

This systemic brutalization of the plebeians and the political disenfranchisement of the Roman elites transformed Rome into a powder keg.

Awaiting only a singular unifying outrage to ignite a revolution.

In stark opposition to the privilege and tyranny of the last Roman kings stood the complex and highly controlling moral architecture of the Roman aristocracy.

The Roman aristocracy was known more commonly as the patricians, and they were mostly made up of elite families who controlled much of Roman land.

For Roman men, the masculine idea of virtus demanded physical strength, martial bravery and self sacrifice and service to the state on the battlefield.

In contrast, the feminine ideal of pudicitia demanded that elite be sexually faithful, modest and dedicated to the management of the domestic sphere.

In the Roman patriarchal framework, a woman's legal and social existence was subsumed under the paterfamilias, the male head of the household, making her physical body the literal and symbolic boundary of her family's integrity.

A noblewoman's morality was not merely a private attribute, it was a public declaration of the moral health of her husband's family, and by extension, the Roman state as well.

It was within this rigid, high stakes moral ecosystem that Lucretia existed, universally lauded by historians as the absolute, flawless epitome of Puddicitia.

As mentioned before, Roman historians tended to record the history of the time to fit different themes, tropes and stereotypes.

So it can be very difficult to know which aspects of the history are fact and which are fabricated to make the story more interesting.

In fact, there are no contemporary sources about Lucretia and her assault.

Instead, information about Lucretia and the event come to us from histories written almost 500 years after the event.

But when modern historians compare these later histories, the similarities point to some aspects of what likely actually happened.

Exactly, they point to the actual historical existence of a woman named Lucretia and an event that played a critical role in the downfall of the monarchy.

Beyond that, historians also agree that Lucretia was likely the daughter of patrician spurious Lucretius and the young wife of patrician Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, who is identified as the son of the king's cousin.

So Lucretia was very much an elite high born woman.

According to Livy, a later Roman historian, Lucretia and Colantinus were the ideal Roman union, as they were both supposedly faithfully devoted to one another.

Even more, Livy describes Lucretia as an exemplar of beauty and purity.

It was said that when her husband was away at battle, Lucretia would stay at home and pray for his safe return.

Unfortunately, beyond that, we don't know much about Lucretia at this point.

She moves beyond the veil of Roman female stereotypes.

We don't know what she actually looked like or what her hopes and dreams were.

We have to keep in mind that Roman historians were part of a patriarchal culture in which men were seen as the primary actors of history, and women, when they were acknowledged at all, were mostly passive catalysts.

We can perhaps gleam a bit more information about Lucretia if we assume that she represented the majority of elite Roman women in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE.

We know, for example, that elite girls were known to marry as young as 12 years of age.

And in most situations the marriage was arranged by a girl's father to facilitate a partnership between his family and and that of the prospective husbands.

The light regulation of marriage by the law with regards to minimum age and consent to marriage was designed to leave fathers with the freedom to propel girls into marriage whenever and with whomever the father saw fit.

Regarding education, most elite young women had some education, but the evidence suggests that the majority were limited to an elementary level, and it was mostly focused on teaching them the female tasks of a household.

In this education, virginity and sexual purity for women were emphasized as vital for the stability of both family and state.

The rape of an unmarried girl posed a threat to her reputation and marriageability, and the penalty of death was sometimes imposed on the victim.

For a married woman, rape would also pose a threat to her reputation and would prompt questions of Adultery on her part.

The assumption at the time was that the ideal woman wouldn't get into trouble if they were where they were supposed to be, in their father's or husband's house, and if they were doing what they were supposed to be doing and focusing on running the household.

Returning to Lucretia when she is first described in the story, Lucretia was being spied upon by the group of Roman officers who had all made bets about on which of their wives was most virtuous.

When they arrive at the house of one of those officers, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, his wife Lucretia is imagined as young and beautiful, possibly still a teenager, since no other children or family are mentioned, and she is depicted as weaving in the center of her house with her maids.

In this sense, Lucretia is presented as the ideal Roman wife, doing what she should be doing, where she should be doing it, and therefore upholding her feminine duty of protecting the sexual boundaries of the household.

According to the story, Lucretia is very different from the other wives, who were also being spied upon and found to be either socializing with each other or getting ready to go out for the night.

As a result, Colatinus wins the bet for most virtuous wife.

Unfortunately, although Lucretia was deemed the winner, her husband, Collatinus, participation in this rather immature contest puts her directly into danger.

Along with Collatinus and a few other unnamed elite officers, the group also included Prince Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the seventh king, Tarquin the Proud.

Like Lucretia, the real Prince Sextus Tarquinius is hidden behind a lot of mythology and stretched truth that was shaped to explain the transition from monarchy to republic.

In one Roman history, he is presented as the second son of the king.

In other histories, he's either the third or first son.

And like his father after King Tarquin, the proud Prince Sextus is presented as entitled and genetically bad.

After laying eyes on Lucretia that fateful night of the bet, he decided that he had to have her for himself, regardless of what the consequences would be.

A few days later, the officers were back on the battlefield when the king sent Prince Sextus on a military errand that took him back to the area close to Lucretia's household.

He arrived at the gates of her estate just as the sun began to set.

Lucretia, being the dutiful patrician wife, welcomed the prince in graciously as her husband's kinsman.

In some cases, she is specifically said to offer the prince the sacred rites of hospitium, under which the host offers their guest clothing, entertainment, and shelter.

In return, the guest was supposed to offer respect and the same hospitality to his former host in the future.

Those who violated this relationship were thought to provoke the wrath of the gods.

In other words, the authors of the existing histories were going to great lengths to make sure that Lucretia's virtue could not be questioned in any sort of way.

She was doing what she was supposed to do to honor her husband's extended family.

In contrast, the prince is presented as transgressing every boundary, including the relationship between host and guests.

That night, after Lucretia's household retired and the estate went dark, Sextus executed his betrayal.

Drawing his sword from its gilded scabbard, he infiltrated Lucretia's bedchamber.

Placing the blade against her neck, he whispered, lucretia, I have a blade, and I, a Tarquin.

Speak.

Sexis initially presented her with a barrage of prayers, bribes, and death threats, all of which she stoically resisted.

Recognizing that Lucretia's fear of scandal eclipsed her fear of actual death, the prince unleashed a psychological weapon of absolute, devastating cruelty.

He declared that if she did not submit, he would murder her, and then he would drag a male slave into the room, slit the slave's throat, and leave their naked corpses intertwined upon the bed.

Sextus would then announce to the world that he had caught the pair in a foul act of adultery and and executed them in a legally justified rage.

In this rigid framework of the patriarchal Roman society, this threat represented an inescapable social annihilation.

If Sextus succeeded in this framing, Lucretia would not be remembered as a victim, but as a traitorous, immodest adulteress who brought permanent disgrace and ruin to her husband's people.

Lucretia was finally conquered.

However, as the Roman historian Ovid masterfully explained in his version of events, this brutal conquest also sealed the doom of the Tarquin dynasty.

Concerning Prince Sextus and his awful act, Ovid stated, why, rejoice, Victor.

This victory will destroy you.

Alas, how much that one night cost your kingdom.

The morning following the assault, a shattered Lucretia dispatched urgent messages to the military camp and to Rome, demanding that her husband and her father come to her immediately.

She instructed the messenger to tell them that a horrible thing had happened.

Lucretius.

Father.

Spurius Lucretius arrived from Rome accompanied by the patrician Publius Valerius.

Her husband, Collatinus, returned from the battlefield with another officer named Lucius and Junius Brutus.

They found Lucretia, sitting in her bedchamber, prostrate with unimaginable grief.

Upon entering, her husband desperately inquired if all was well.

Her response was a devastating indictment of the trauma afflicted upon her.

In a rare moment, Lucretia is given a voice in this narrative.

She says, quote, no.

What can be well with a woman when her honor is lost?

The marks of a stranger, Collatinus, are in your bed.

She then recounted the meticulous betrayal of Hospitium, the prince's drawn sword, and the horrific ultimatum involving the slave that forced her into submission.

She demanded that the four men pledge their solemn word that Sextus Tarquinius would not go unpunished.

Hearing her tragic confession, the four noblemen immediately pledged their oaths of vengeance and attempted to console her.

In a rather progressive moment for ancient Roman historians, one version by Livy presents the philosophical argument through the mouths of the men there that, quote, it is the mind that sins, not the body, and where there has been no consent, there is no guilt.

End quote.

However, Lucretia recognized a harsh political reality that superseded male philosophical comfort in Roman society.

The actual rape and her violation would be the focus of the crime, not the crimes of the prince.

Everyone would be focused on what would become of her.

Even if it was sympathetic, her family would never outrun the scandal.

In one version of the history, she is said to declare, quote, it is for you to see that he gets his deserts.

Although I equip myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty.

End quote.

With those final resolute words, she produced a knife that she had concealed within the folds of her dress, plunged the blade directly into her own heart, and sank, dying to the floor.

Before the music break, Elena and I explained how Prince Sextus raped Lucretia and how Lucretia bound her husband and father to carry out revenge for her before committing her suicide.

As Lucretia's husband and father erupted in their grief, paralyzed by mourning, the historical narrative does something interesting.

It dramatically shifts its focus to the man that Collatinus brought with him to Lucius Junius Brutus.

Watching all of this take place, Brutus recognized an opportunity for a revolutionary pivot.

Interestingly, Brutus is also described as a relative of the extended royal family.

In some histories, he is identified specifically as the nephew of King Tarquin the Proud.

In others, he is a more distant relative.

He is often also identified as the commander of the king's bodyguards.

But despite his familial and physical connections to the king, Brutus had a personal vendetta against the king.

Apparently, King Tarquin the Proud had previously executed his brother or another close family member, and Brutus was pretty angry about that.

Hearing Lucretia's words and seeing her suicide rapidly, Brutus supposedly stepped over the weeping men and pulled the dripping dagger from Lucretia's chest.

He held the bloody weapon aloft and weaponized the immediate trauma of her suicide into a sacred revolutionary oath.

Brutus swore to the heavens.

By this blood I swear.

And you, O gods, I call to witness that I will drive hence Lucius Tarquinius Superbus together with his cursed wife and his whole blood, with fire and sword and every means in my power, and I will not suffer them or anyone else to reign in Rome.

Brutus then passed the bloody dagger to Collatinus Valerius and spurious Lucretius, compelling each mourner to swear the identical treasonous oath.

In that instant, domestic crime and grief were was sublimated into the violent genesis of a new political paradigm.

To execute their revolution, Brutus and his co conspirators required the visceral fury of the masses.

With that in mind, they carry Lucretia's bloody corpse out of the private estate and into the nearby public square, where the gaping wound on her body and the tragic context of her death generated explosive outrage.

Seizing the momentum, they then transported her body to the Roman Forum, which lay about 20 miles away.

In the Forum, Brutus utilized his formal authority as commander of the King's bodyguard to convene a public assembly.

Serving as the architect of the Republic, Brutus delivered a blistering, highly calculated oration.

He reminded the mob of the agonizing forced labor in the trenches, the brutal assassination of King Servius Tullius, and finally, the unspeakable sexual violence perpetrated by Prince Sextus.

When the crowd began to weep at the sight of Lucretia's father, the historian Livy notes that Brutus sharply reprimanded them for their tears and idle complaints.

He demanded that they should act as befit men and Romans and that they take up arms against the hostile regime.

The female body was thus utilized as the ultimate political prop.

At this moment, Brutus didn't want people to see Lucretia as an actual person who had been the victim of a horrible crime.

Once Lucretia had played her role in setting the active males into motion to construct the state, her agency was entirely subsumed by male state building.

The uprising was absolute and immediate.

The Roman populace voted to strip King Tarquin the Proud of his rulership and decreed the Permanent exile of his entire bloodline.

The massive gates of Rome were closed to the king, forcing him to flee to Etruria, a northern Italian region still under the control of the Etruscans.

It isn't entirely clear what happened to the rest of his sons, but Prince Sextus was supposedly tracked down as he tried to flee and assassinated.

To ensure power could never again concentrate into the hands of a single autocrat, the Romans abolished the monarchy and established a republic, replacing the king with two annually elected magistrates called consuls.

In 509 BCE, the first two men elected to hold this supreme office were none other than Lucius Junius Brutus and Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus.

As noted before, the Senate existed before as a council to the Roman kings.

When the offices of the two consuls replaced the executive power of the king, the Senate simply switched to offer advice to the consuls.

It honestly wasn't a huge change for the Romans at first.

This was officially the beginning of the Roman Republic.

All of the officials in the government were still part of the elite, the patricians.

But this was the start of a new political system based on representation.

In the years that followed, Rome's main focus was on preventing the Tarquins from reclaiming the throne and becoming king again.

In fact, Brutus is recorded as making a public oath that as consul, he would never tolerate a king in Rome and to kill anyone who attempted to restore the monarchy over the next decade.

The Romans didn't just sit back and enjoy their new government.

Instead, their priority was to prevent the former king and his allies from putting him back on the throne and returning Rome to a monarchy.

Interestingly, the first two consuls, Brutus and Collatinus, also didn't remain on good terms and neither finished their one year term of office.

Within that one year, Brutus proposed to banish all members of the Tarquin clan.

This was part of the effort to maintain the republican government and prevent a takeover by the former king.

The result though, was that his co, consul Colotinus, who was a distant relative of the foreign king, was banished from Roman territory.

And Brutus was killed within the year while leading Roman forces against another attempt by the former king.

Before his own death, Brutus also uncovered a plot to restore the monarchy that was being carried out by two of his sons, as well as the brothers of Brutus wife.

Brutus ordered all of them executed.

When the former king ran out of allies and finally died, the Romans had a moment of peace.

But that moment of peace revealed a significant issue within the new government.

All of the people in charge were members of the elite patrician class.

Despite the fact that the common plebeians made up some 98% of the Roman population, and despite the fact that they made up the bulk of the Roman army.

So the Roman Republic was representative, but only for the wealthy.

Correct.

That issue led to the struggle of the orders that lasted between around 500 BCE to 287 BCE.

During those years, the plebeians sought political equality with the patricians.

One notable moment came in 494bce, only 15 years after the change in government.

At that time, the Romans were at war with neighboring tribes again.

But the plebeian soldiers refused to march against the enemy and instead gathered outside of the city.

Recognizing the seriousness of the situation, the consuls quickly agreed to negotiate.

They agreed to give the plebs their own plebeian assembly and their right to elect their own officials to protect their rights, who became known as tribunes of the plebs.

And later on, the laws changed to ensure that at least one of the two consuls was plebeian, and that the plebeian assembly became the place where magistrates were elected, laws were passed and trials occurred.

In this sense, over time, the plebeian assembly came to have way more power and significance than the Senate.

This isn't to say that the wealthy didn't continue to try to find ways to gain political, economic and social power over the political plebs and each other.

But the Roman Republic succeeded in becoming more equally representative for the plebs and patricians.

But we can't look at the republic as too progressive.

Although male citizens of different social classes gained more representation and political opportunities, women were never given the right to vote, nor run for office, or present ideas for legislation.

And this was the reality, despite the fact that that it was the trauma and rage of a woman that kicked off this political revolution.

You may already already know that the Roman republican government lasted quite a while in history.

That's right, Elena.

It continued until the first century bce, almost four centuries after Lucretia's assault and death.

In the centuries that followed, most governments across Europe would return to some form of a monarchy, whether absolute or constitutional, or somewhere in between.

But the ideological shockwaves generated by Lucretia's sacrifice and Brutus's oath did not dissipate entirely.

Instead, the blueprint of a republican government created by the ancient Romans would continue to influence thinkers and leaders.

One example of this was Renaissance Florence, in which the Medicis took on the trappings of running a republican style of government.

There are also some modern examples of influence of the Roman republic.

The American Founding Fathers were obsessed with the history of the Roman republic, rigorously studying classical texts.

When the American colonists revolted against the autocratic rule of King George iii, they consciously and deliberately modeled their rebellion on Brutus, expelling the Tarquins, recognizing that a true republic requires citizens to prioritize the law and the common good above royal blood and personal conflict.

A vast array of political writers utilized Roman pseudonyms to signal their ideological allegiances to the educated public.

For example, 16 of the most forceful and incisive anti federalist essays were published in the New York Journal under the pseudonym Brutus.

These particular essays explicitly invoked the name of the man who swore the bloody oath over Lucretia, directly linking the fear of a new American tyranny to the ancient tyranny of King Tarquin the Proud.

The cultural transmission of this ancient tyrannicide persisted deep into American history, eventually merging the legacy of Lucius Junius Brutus with his descendant Marcus Junius Brutus, who had assassinated Julius Caesar in 44 BCE to prevent a return to autocracy.

The fierce anti monarchical oath that the first Brutus declared birthed the cultural motto Sic semper tyrannus.

Thus always to tyrants.

It remains a dark tragic irony of history that this phrase, born from the defense of a violated woman's honor, was weaponized by the assassin John Wilkes Booth when he murdered President Abraham Lincoln.

She shouting the Latin phrase to the audience at Ford's Theater.

Ultimately, an exhaustive analysis of the events of 509 BCE reveals a profound historiographical paradox.

The transition from an autocratic monarchy to a representative republic is universally celebrated as a pinnacle triumph of liberty, law and civic virtue.

Yet the most celebrated republic in human history was fundamentally built upon the weaponized trauma of a single woman.

Lucretia was subjected to an act of supreme violence that destroyed her physical autonomy and the sacred laws of hospidium, while.

She utilized her final agency to ensure her death served as a public indictment of a tyrant rather than an anonymous cover up.

Her bodily sacrifice was immediately seized by male political architects.

From the steps of the Roman Forum to the foundational debates of the United States Constitution, the blood on Lucretia's dagger remains the indelible tragic ink with which the history of Western republicanism was written.

That's all for now.

Thanks for listening to another episode of history's Greatest crimes.

I'm Michael.

And I'm Elena.

And until next time, stay curious.

Sa.