and his daughter's husband wreaked murder and outrage upon their father. It repre The legend, here, tells something more. sents the Patricians, or some of their number, as joining in the conspiracy against the king who had given others besides themselves a seed-time and a harvest in the state of Rome; and warrants the presumption that another revolution took place under the second Tarquin, the son, rather the grandson, of the first, supported by the principal men, who preferred a violent monarchy under their own influence to a temperate one inclining towards the interests of the Plebeians. The character of the rulers and the condition of the inferior classes at that time is but too grievously described in the tradition that Tarquin the assassin became the king. It is true that there appears to have been no formal election,113 but there was no resistance: and Servius would almost seem to have been forgotten, had not the new monarch received the name of Superbus, or the Proud; though this epithet may have been of later invention. Whoever Tarquin was, and however he obtained the throne, he was evidently a powerful and a magnificent sovereign. The great buildings he began or finished were long the pride of the city accustomed to smaller temples and meaner dwellings; while the numbers of the people increased, and their occupations, doubtless, extended with his conquests. These were vast beyond all that had hitherto been gained; 113" Ut qui neque populi jussu neque auctoribus Patribus regnavit," Liv., I. 49. and even the splendors of the elder Tarquin, as a conqueror, grew pale in contrast with the bale-fires which the younger lighted over all the country nearest Rome. The Latins yielded to his arms; other states submitted and gave him their aid; 114 and the trophies of his winning were the inspiration of the same minstrels who sang of his darker deeds. If he were a stranger, however, as his namesake seems to have been, the number of his victories and the spread of his dominions were to his glory, as it was called, rather than to that of Rome or any other city which he ruled. Perhaps this story is to be regarded only as another lesson to the Romans of what could be done in war. Stranger or Roman, Tarquin was remembered as a tyrant, whose magnificence resulted from oppression and sanguinary wrongs. He was said to have forced the lower classes to labor on his temples and sewers, which he became so earnest to complete that he also set his soldiers and mercenaries to dig and build. Some of the Plebeians were conciliated by grants of conquered lands; but the repeal of Servius's laws concerning the safety of the debtor, as well as the interference which Tarquin chose to make with the festivals and the assemblies of the whole people, were more than could be borne.115 Yet the Plebeians would have been unable to redress their grievances, if the Patricians had not, themselves, as the legends relate, been still more shockingly wronged. These were 114 Liv., I. 49. 115 Dion. Hal., IV. 43 et seq. at first, perhaps, delighted with the overthrow of the institutions which Servius had raised against their will; but when Tarquin began to use them even more tyrannically than the Plebeians, despoiling some, exiling others, and even slaying, as is told, the chief amongst them, it was too bold a trial of men long accustomed to feel that their kings belonged to them as much as they did to their kings. Still the Patricians delayed the revenge which it would have been more natural for the tradition to represent as instantly sought and as instantly executed. The Senate seemed to meet only to quail at their own diminished numbers and broken spirits; 116 and the younger men avoided one another, or else came together to bewail their fate, rather than to resolve its alleviation. Such, at least, is to be gathered from the narrative, whose exaggerations are too palpable to require contradiction; but it may not be irrelevant to repeat the surmise, that these details might have belonged to a broken legend of conquest under which the Romans suffered for some bitter years. The story of Lucretia is scarcely worth repetition, not only because it is too well known, but because it forms too lame a conclusion to the tyranny of which it purports to relate the overthrow. The eldest of the king's sons, Sextus, already stained with blood and cruelty, excited by the virtue rather than by the beauty of his own kinswom 23. 116 Dion Cass., Fragm. Peiresc., some time after A. D. 230, being at least seventy-five years old. A third part of this long life was spent in preparing and completing his Roman history. Dion Cassius, a native of Bithynia, but a magistrate and a senator of Rome, died at his birthplace an, the wife of his cousin Tarquinius Collatinus, came to the simple dwelling at Collatia, where Lucretia lived, in the midst of her handmaids, and forced her compliance with his lusts.117 She summoned her husband and her father, Lucretius, as soon as the ravisher departed; and when they, with their companions, Valerius and Brutus, had heard her dishonor from her own lips, she stabbed herself dead before them; the first, too many have repeated,118 as if her deed were praiseworthy, to strike a blow for the liberty of Rome. One of those who beheld Lucretia fall was a kinsman of the husband, and a nephew of the king. This was Brutus, a severe 119 and, as sometimes described, a stolid man, who had lived impatient of his uncle's tyranny, yet in high office himself, as the Tribune of the Celeres. The first to draw the knife from its fatal wound, he held it up, and swore, by the blood upon its blade, to pursue Tarquin and his race from Rome, where "none," he cried, "shall reign henceforward!" 120 The three who listened to the Vow repeated it at Brutus's dictation, and straightway followed him to Rome. It was easy to fulfil the designs with which they were inspired; for the king was absent with his army, and Brutus, as the Tribune 117 The inconsistencies of the story are exposed by Verri, in the Notti Romane, Nott. II. Coll. 6. 118 So the Italian poetess, Zappi :"Il ferro acquistator di libertate Fu la prima a snudar l' inclita donna": lines which are neither womanly nor Christian. VOL. I. 41 119"Festus says, that Brutus, in old Latin, was synonymous with Gravis. . . . . . It is very possible that its early signification, as a cognomen, may have differed very little from that of Severus." Arnold's Hist., Vol. I. note on p. 104. 120 Liv., I. 59. of the Celeres, nor only he, but Lucretius, then the Prince of the Senate,121 could do what either pleased, without exciting unnecessary alarm. The people 122 were forthwith called, and the proposal made them, that Tarquin and his family should be expelled for ever, was adopted in a spirit becoming men and Romans.123 The reigns of the seven kings are recorded to have filled the space of two hundred and forty-four years; but of their chronology little remained besides the day when Rome was founded, the time when Servius Tullius was born, and the king's flight,12- the last day of the Monarchy, the first of the Commonwealth of Rome. 121 Tac., Ann., VI. 11. Liv., I. 59. 122 In which assembly is uncertain, but probably in the Curies. Dion. Hal., IV. 75. Cf. 84. 123Quod viros, quod Romanos deceret." Liv., I. 59. 124 Regifugium." Festus. Ovid., Fast., II. 685. |
