Every year, I teach the story of Lucretia and Sextus Tarquinius. It is one that I feel, in my very deepest mind, tells a story that is eerily relevant even today.
The story of Lucretia is the story of a rape. A rape story that I read at a time when news of rape flashes across screens every day, where women must be aware of the things they wear, for the things they wear may bring unwanted attention. We hear that it is our responsibility to make sure that we do not provide any reason to receive that unwanted attention. I see the connection – in fact it is a fairly familiar sounding story – a young woman, Lucretia, is decided to be the most chaste, the most responsible and faithful wife among the group of the King, Tarquinius Superbus, and his friends, including Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucretia’s husband, and Sextus Tarquinius. Sextus Tarquinius falls in love with Lucretia and returns to see her, when he returns he makes unwanted sexual advances on her and when she tries to push him away, he threatens to kill her and one of her slaves (so it looks like she was having a love affair with her slave). Because she can’t have that on her conscience, she agrees to have sex with Sextus. The next day, Lucretia goes straight to her husband and her father and confesses. She is brave and tells her husband and her father what has happened. And then, she kills herself.
Stories, certainly, are made for different times. This story, in Ancient Rome, is one about family honor. You don’t want to sully your good name, or the name of your family. You don’t want to ruin your family. Mary Beard, a classicist and writer, suggests that the story is one that is about Roman moral culture. Lucretia, when faced with the idea of disgrace, consents to sex with Sextus Tarquinius. Our world today is the one that is fascinated by consent. In the end, Lucretia has paid with her life for losing her chastity (pudicitia in Latin). The story explains the end of the Roman Monarchy – Tarquinius Collatinus swears on the body of Lucretia that he will avenge her death, and drive the Kings from Rome. It mirrors the story of the Rape of the Sabines at the beginning of Pliny’s Ab Urbe Condita, which tells the story of how Romans got wives. These stories show how Romans use power to make political changes. Maybe a more appropriate word than power – force, how Romans use force.
So, then what. What kind of a story is this today? Today, in our world of violence, what would we say? In our world where the areas are becoming increasingly grayer, what, then, would we say? In a masculine account of rape, the point is never about the act done to the woman (victim), but about something else entirely. Today, women don’t want to sit in a police station and face the question “are you sure?” (because the accusation is a serious one). And today, women’s bodies are a minefield. Some states allow for abortions. Some states only have one abortion clinic. Some places in the world don’t allow for abortions, even if the woman was raped. Even today, women may be asked to marry their rapists to avoid family conflict. I’m thinking of one particular article from the New York Times, published in May 2017.
It sounds all too familiar that a woman would want to protect her family before wanting to protect herself, her own body, before wanting to pursue justice. This story is not new. (A woman goes missing, a woman is found in an alleyway badly beaten, a gay man, trans man, transwoman is killed.) Is this just a story of Ancient Rome – a legend from the founding of Rome that offers no actual evidence of its occurrence? Is it just a legend about the banishment of the Roman Kings? I am fascinated by the connection between then and now. Rape, Lucretia, the Sabine Women, power play. The Romans showing power over some other culture, some other group of people, a certain gender. But, the story could be about anyone else.
I have never reported a rape, have never sat in a chair in a police station, have never had any ask me hard questions- I have kept my experiences to myself (or I have turned them into stories, pieces of fiction). Have there been times in my life when I should have, when boundaries between consent and what is ok for me have been crossed? Yes. But it never seemed to be a matter of honor to me. Maybe it is a matter of my own personal honor, a matter of my own personal self worth.
What I have realized is that the honor I have to protect does not belong to a husband, or in my case – a wife, but it has to do with my own self worth. The question “can I live with myself?” comes to mind. The only disgrace that I run the risk of undergoing is ruining my marriage. I run the risk of making the lives we lead look foolish and insignificant. But the times have changed – the only way I can do any of this now is through consent – through infidelity. A victim is protected. The area is just as grey now as it was then, but the person it favors has changed (at least, sometimes, occasionally, in the eyes of society, because we have a little thing today called feminism). We’re not talking about favoring the fall of a certain kind of government (the Roman Monarchy). We’re talking about women’s bodies, valuing women’s bodies, valuing their worth.
Alexandra Sladky 