The story begins with Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, and his companions drinking at the house of Sextus Tarquinius, son of the king Tarquinius Superbus, one night. Livy narrates the events leading up to the climax of her rape, as well as the aftermath and her impact on the founding of the republic. In Book 1 of Ab Urbe Condita, “From the Founding of the City,” Titus Livius, or Livy, a Roman historian whose works are largely viewed as reliable historical sources, recounts Lucretia’s story. Subsequently, Roman society encouraged women, and especially young girls, to view her as a matron for model behavior.Īs the victim of the story, the glorification of Lucretia’s story after her death reveals deeper insight into the sexist roles women were expected to conform to in ancient Rome. Gaining popularity immediately after her death, Lucretia became a legendary symbol of beauty, virtue, and chastity. It was narrated and criticized in several different versions of works by prolific Roman writers such as Livy, Ovid, and Dionysius. The story of Lucretia is a mythological and historical tale that has survived since the early origins of Roman history, over two thousand years since its believed origins in 509 BCE. Roman myths, passed down for generations, outlived their society and continue to echo off the tongues of modern storytellers. It’s no secret the Romans were excellent storytellers the proof is longevity. Thus an understanding of the compositional elements of the Etruscan artisan enables not just a simple identification of the participants in any given frieze, but an interpretation of the actual sequence of events.The birth of the Roman Republic, which would soon transform into a vast empire with a monumental legacy, has brutal origins all beginning with a rape victim. Hence these three urns show the death of Lucretia in an Etruscan version which implies the successful escape of Sextus. That is, the moment selected for these urns focuses on revenge stopped just before it could be exacted and implies, as a study of other urns with securely identified subjects shows, that the pursued always avoids retribution. He used certain kinds of relationships to signify specific kinds of actions, such as the stopped revenge.
![collatinus brutus collatinus brutus](https://www.hamburger-kunsthalle.de/sites/default/files/139736_0.jpg)
He had a specific vocabulary which was understood by the Etruscan purchaser. These three urns demonstrate how the Etruscan artisan worked. On the extreme left sits a wealthy matron, probably Lucretia's mother, in mourning with a statue of a goddess of chastity behind her. Between Sextus and the central group stands Venus. A servant or two stands behind Lucretia who has committed suicide on the right, while in the center her husband, Collatinus, and Lucius Junius Brutus restrain her father, Lucretius, from immediate pursuit of Sextus Tarquinius fleeing off to the left. This article studies one small group of urns which were previously identified as the death of Theano from Euripides’ Melanippe Desmotis and which are here interpreted as the only extant classical representations of the death of Lucretia. During the Hellenistic period the Etruscans depicted not only Greek myths on their funerary urns but also Etruscan-Roman legends.