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The suicide of Lucretia.

T HE VIRTUOUS LUCRETIA WAS RAPED BY SEXTUS Tarquinius, the son of the tyrannical king of Rome, in the 6th century BC. Afterwards, although she was the victim, Lucretia committed suicide. Fearing posthumous disgrace when Tarquin threatened to kill both her and a male slave and make it appear that she had been caught in adultery with the slave, she yielded her body to him but not her mind. Her suicide was motivated by shame, not guilt; she felt anxious about how others might interpret her behavior if she lived and was concerned that unchaste women would claim blackmail as an excuse for their voluntary sexual encounters (epigraph). Because others could not know her conscience, she decided that suicide would testify to her innocent state of mind. Female chastity was so revered by Lucretia that she took her life rather than violate this ideal. According to the traditions of the time, she died an honorable, heroic death. Before killing herself, she pledged her husband, father, and male relative Lucius Junius Brutus to an oath of revenge against Tarquin. Outraged by her death and other excesses by the king and his family, Brutus pulled the knife from her body; held it aloft; and summoned all present to put aside their grief, convert it into anger, and overthrow the monarchy. They carried Lucretia’s body out of the house to the Roman forum and placed it there, attracting indignant crowds who were stunned by the prince’s violent lust and her pitiful death. Brutus called on the gods who avenge parents. Then, wrote Roman historian Livy, Brutus elicited in those assembled, “recollections of more savage deeds, [and produced] an immediate feeling of outrage that is by no means easy for historians to relate, he inflamed the people, driving them to revoke the king’s power” and ordered the exile of the king and his wife and children. That accomplished, 2 consuls were appointed, Brutus and Collatinus (Lucretia’s husband), who inaugurated the First Roman Republic. Thus, the rape of Lucretia initiated the founding of the republic. Brutus’ actions ensured that she did not die in vain. Throughout antiquity, the legendary Lucretia was venerated because she sacrificed herself for the ideal of purity and was a symbol of patriotism. Nearly a millennium later, in the Christian era that followed, Augustine interpreted her suicide differently. In his City of God Against the Pagans begun in AD 413 (written to defend the Church of Rome against the charge that Christians had brought about the sack of Rome by the Visigoths 3 years earlier), he insisted that Christians have no authority to commit suicide under any circumstances. He condemned Lucretia’s suicide, recasting it as response to her shame and not to the high value she placed on chastity. Echoing Lucretia’s father and husband, and citing 300 nuns who were raped during the sack of Rome and who did not commit suicide, he wrote that there is no unchastity when a woman is ravished against her will. Projecting a subjective Christian sense of guilt on Lucretia, he states that if she were indeed innocent, she should not have taken her own life. He simply wrote: “If she was pure why was she slain?” For Augustine, the sin of suicide could not atone for the shame of rape, real or imagined posthumously. Thus, he justified the nuns’ decision, noting that the nuns did not avenge on themselves the guilt of others and add crimes of their own to ones they did not share. In the sight of God, they were pure and should ignore human suspicion. For Augustine, suicide was a sin because it preempted divine power over life and demonstrated lack of gratitude for divine grace. Five church councils confirmed Augustine’s views and codified moral penalties for suicide. At the Council of Arles (452), it was deemed a mortal sin; at the Council of Orleans (533), Christian burial was denied to criminals who died by suicide; at the Council of Brega (563), Christianburial ritesweredenied toall suicides; at theCouncil of Antisidorum (590), offerings on behalf of the deceased were rejected (denying them divine grace); and at the Council of Toledo (693), suicide attempters were to be excommunicated. Later, not only was sanctified burial denied, but also the corpse was desecrated. Despite Augustine’s views, in his Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri places Lucretia and Brutus in Limbo among the nobles of Rome and virtuous pagans who have not sinned and are not punished; among the others placed here are Socrates and Seneca, both of whom committed suicide. Lucretia is not placed in the lower realms with the selfmurderers who are constantly tormented by harpies. The legend of Lucretia appears in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women (ca 1386). For Chaucer, Lucretia is constant in heart and faithful in the love of her husband. Brutus swears on her chaste blood, and in Roman history she is revered as a saint. By the Renaissance there are allusions to her heroic suicide as martyrdom; her chastity and sense of shame seem to have won out over selfmurder and accusations of vanity. For Lucretia, revenge and retaliation was carried out by men in her family, not by the abused woman herself. Lucretia isavengedbyBrutus.However,otherancientwom-