Sextus Tarquinius

• 1. Introduction

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  Sextus Tarquinius was the son of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome. He is not remembered for victories in battle, nor for any law he gave Rome. He is remembered for a single night in Collatia, when he entered a woman's chamber with a drawn sword, and for what that night set in motion. The act was a rape. The consequence was a republic. From that moment, Rome would never again be ruled by a king. What kind of man was Sextus Tarquinius? How did historians in antiquity disagree about even the basic facts of his life? And how did his name travel across two thousand years, from the walls of Rome into the plays of Shakespeare and the operas of the twentieth century? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. A Contested Figure

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  Ancient sources cannot agree on where Sextus stood in his father's household. Fabius Pictor, one of the earliest Roman historians, placed him as the second son, between Titus and Arruns. Livy, writing centuries later, recorded him as the third son. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in Greek, named him the first. The disagreement is telling. Sextus leaves almost no trace in the historical record outside the single episode that destroyed his family's hold on Rome. His personal life is largely unknown. What details survive are overshadowed, in the words of ancient writers themselves, by his actions. His family was of Etruscan descent, a fact that matters because Rome's identity was partly forged in opposition to Etruscan power. Before the rape of Lucretia, the one story ancient writers preserved about Sextus concerns the town of Gabii. His father could not take Gabii by force, so he sent Sextus to infiltrate it. Sextus posed as a defector, rose to become a general in their army, and then betrayed them, opening the town to his father's capture. It was a deed of calculated treachery, and it prefigures everything that follows.

• 3. The Night in Collatia

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  Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was besieging Ardea, a city of the Rutulians, when the episode began. The siege had stalled; the army lay encamped beneath the walls with nothing to do. One evening the king's sons and their cousin Tarquinius Collatinus, the son of Egerius, were feasting together, and a dispute broke out over whose wife was most virtuous. They settled it the only way they could: they mounted their horses and rode, unannounced, to their homes. In Rome, they found the king's daughters at a splendid banquet. In Collatia, late at night, they found Lucretia spinning among her handmaids. The contrast was decisive. Lucretia's beauty and virtue, ancient writers say, fired the evil passions of Sextus Tarquinius. A few days after that night, he returned to Collatia alone. Lucretia received him hospitably as her husband's kinsman. In the dead of night he entered her chamber with a drawn sword. He told her that if she did not yield to him, he would kill her and one of her slaves, place their bodies together, and claim he had caught her in adultery and defended her husband's honour. She yielded. Soon after, Lucretia sent word to her husband and to her father, Spurius Lucretius Tricipitinus, telling them everything. Then she killed herself.

• 4. The Fall of the Monarchy

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  Lucretia's death was the spark. The revolt that followed in Rome was led by Lucius Junius Brutus, who was both a friend and a cousin of Lucretia's husband Collatinus. Brutus used the outrage over what Sextus had done to overturn not just Sextus but the entire Tarquin line. Lucius Tarquinius Superbus was driven from power, and the Roman monarchy, which had stood for generations, came to an end. In its place rose the Roman Republic, with Brutus installed as the first consul and Collatinus serving alongside him as his colleague. Sextus himself fled to Gabii, the town he had once betrayed on behalf of his father. There, the tradition holds, he was killed in revenge for what he had done to its people. The symmetry is precise: the man who built his early career on deception died at the hands of those he had deceived. His father died in exile. A single night's violence had undone a dynasty.

• 5. Painters and the Deed of Shame

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  Titian painted the scene in 1571. Tintoretto followed around 1578. Rembrandt chose not Tarquin but Lucretia alone, in 1664, capturing the moment after. Joos Van Cleve painted the suicide of Lucretia somewhere between 1520 and 1525. For centuries, the image of a man with a sword standing over a woman at night was one of the defining subjects of Western painting. The painters were drawn not to Sextus as a character but to the tableau he created: coercion, defiance, death. Lucretia became a symbol of female virtue under assault, and Tarquin became the embodiment of tyranny made personal. The paintings, taken together, trace a long argument about power, consent, and the cost of honour. That Titian, Tintoretto, and Rembrandt all returned to the same night in Collatia says something about how deeply the story lodged itself in the imagination of Europe.

• 6. Shakespeare's Tarquin

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  William Shakespeare's narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece treated the story at full length, a work so long it takes about two hours to recite, comparable in scale to a full-length play. Shakespeare did not stop there. He returned to Tarquin's name again and again as a shorthand for predatory stealth. In Cymbeline, Act 2 Scene 2, the character Iachimo creeps into the sleeping Imogen's bedchamber and compares himself directly to Tarquin, pressing the rushes softly to avoid waking her. In Macbeth, the character of Macbeth, in the soliloquy known as the Dagger Soliloquy, invokes Tarquin's name as a trope of stealth: "With Tarquin's ravishing strides, towards his design / Moves like a ghost." In Julius Caesar, Act 2 Scene 1, the character Brutus recalls his ancestor's role in driving the Tarquins from Rome. By Shakespeare's time, Sextus Tarquinius had been distilled into a gesture, a way of naming something without naming it. The name Tarquin carried its full weight of meaning without explanation. Thomas Babington Macaulay placed him in the Etruscan army in the Lays of Ancient Rome, describing how "from all the town arose" a yell when the face of "false Sextus" appeared among the enemy. On the housetops, women spat at him; children screamed curses.

• 7. Britten's Opera

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  In 1946, Benjamin Britten brought the story to the operatic stage with The Rape of Lucretia. The opera compressed the ancient narrative into a modern work and gave it new musical life. Britten's treatment is one in a long line of artistic responses stretching back more than four centuries, yet it stands apart as the most recent major work to take the rape of Lucretia as its central subject. The choice to set this particular story in 1946, in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, was not incidental. The opera's reception drew attention to how old questions about violence, guilt, and political consequence remain available to new contexts. Sextus himself is not the moral centre of any of these works; he is the catalyst. The deed he committed is the fixed point around which everything else orbits, from Livy's account of the first consuls to Britten's twentieth-century stage.