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With no immediate source of aid, Lucretia was forced to listen to the strange proposition of Sextus as, ‘he said, “if you will consent to gratify me, I will make you my wife, and with me you shall reign, for the present, over the city my father has given me, and, after his death, over the Romans, the Latins, the Tyrrhenians, and all the other nations he rules for I know that I shall succeed to my father’s kingdom, as is right, since I am his eldest son”‘ (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities Book IV, 65, Thayer). He woke her, “he told her his name and bade her be silent and remain in the room, threatening to kill her if she attempted either to escape or to cry out” (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities Book IV, 64, Thayer). Careful not to awake her slaves who slept by her door, he entered her room with his sword in his hand. While lodging at Lucretia’s home, Sextus woke late in the night and went to the room where he knew Lucretia slept. Sextus saw Lucretia as excelling above all the Roman women in beauty and in virtue and decided he would seduce her (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities Book IV, 64, Thayer). Lucretia was the wife of Collatinus (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities Book IV, Thayer, 64). In Collatia he stayed at the house of Tarquinius’ cousin – Lucius Tarquinius, surnamed Collatinus. The story of Lucretia begins with Sextus, the eldest son of Tarquinius, who was sent by his father to a city called Collatia to perform military services. Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Account in Roman Antiquities Book IV The account of her rape differs within each story. Despite this belief, her existence is written about by Livy in Ab Urbe Condita Libri and by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in Roman Antiquities Book IV, suggesting her story has merit despite the possibility of it being exaggerated. To many modern historians, Lucretia was a mythological figure (Joshel, 2008, pg. For centuries, Lucretia’s rape would be the topic of numerous poems, artworks, and operas. Her rape would mark the beginning of the Roman Republic, forever affecting Rome itself and all its people. 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.In antiquity, the rape of Lucretia is one of the most significant occurrences of violence against women. 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. 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.
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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.