Until rather recently, commentators commonly disparaged Shakespeare's understanding or presentation of Rome. Shakespeare's Roman characters, they claimed, were simply Englishmen in togas. “His story requires Romans … but he thinks only on men.”Footnote ¹Lucrece, at first glance, seems to be a case in point. Although depicting a crucial moment in Roman history, the poem contains numerous Christian and late medieval or early Renaissance terms and allusions: “saint,” “devil,” “hell-born sin,” “damned,” “the general doom,” “knighthood,” “coat [of arms],” “heraldry,” and so on.Footnote ² “The blackest sin is cleared with absolution,” Tarquin reassures himself, finally deciding to carry out his rape (354). The anachronisms seem to lend the Roman story a Christian patina. Some commentators go so far as to say, “What Shakespeare actually gives us is an alternation between Roman and Christian viewpoints, which generates constant uncertainty as to the way in which the poem is to be read.”Footnote ³ The poem also uses—some say, overuses— deliberately archaic diction and self-conscious rhetorical tropes. The anachronisms and rhetoric reflect the late-medieval, early Renaissance world. While Christianity dominates the age, its leading teachers of rhetoric emphasize employing exempla and developing them with an abundance of words and tropes. “[M]ost powerful for proof, and therefore for copia, is the force of exempla.”Footnote ⁴ Although Shakespeare uses a Christian narrator and follows the tenets of Erasmus and other leading teachers of rhetoric of his time, we shall see that his presentation of Roman honor in Lucrece is historically precise and profound.

Shamed Lucrece poses the paradox of redeeming Roman honor—and the paradox of Roman honor itself. Having been raped by Sextus Tarquin, she thinks that she must kill herself to acquit herself. Although her husband and father forcefully protest that her pure mind clears her stained body (“Her body's stain her mind untainted clears” [Lucrece, 1710])—and even though Lucrece herself distinguishes between her “pure mind” and the “foul act” to which she was forced to submit (1704; also 1655–59)—she kills herself insisting that suicide alone can remove her stain. “My blood shall wash the slander of mine ill” (1207). Only her blood, she thinks, can cleanse her honor.

The Romans, regarding worldly glory as the highest good, yearn and hunger for honor. “[I]t is incredible to report,” Sallust writes, “in how short a time, the city, having obtained … liberty in government, increased and prospered, so infinite a desire for glory had possessed the minds of all sorts.”Footnote ⁵ Even before the Tarquins are expelled and “the state government [is] changed from kings to consuls” (Argument, 35–36), nothing counts so much to a Roman as his honor. Honor determines who or what he is.Footnote ⁶

Besides being more concerned with honor than we, the Romans understand it differently. Where we tend to distinguish sharply between someone's moral worth and his public reputation, the Romans unite the two. The honorable is the honored. For a Roman, the inner and the outer, the personal and the public, are not easily distinguished. As the Romans use the same word (honestas) for virtue and reputation,Footnote ⁷ throughout Lucrece the word “honor” always suggests both, never clearly distinguishing between them: for example, “Thou wrong'st his honour, wound'st his princely name” (599); “Yet am I guilty of thy honour's wrack; / Yet for thy honour did I entertain him” (841–42); “Honour thyself to rid me of this shame; / For if I die, my honour lives in thee” (1031–32).Footnote ⁸ Because they hold that the only thing in life worth seeking is what is worthy of public praise and renown, the Romans believe that a person's actions should be governed by the estimation of others.Footnote ⁹ The good Roman is the Roman thought to be good. He is what he is to others. His honor is his worth in the eyes of his fellow citizens. Moral life is public life in Rome.

One's honor can of course rise or fall in Rome (“My low-declinèd honour to advance” [1705]). Victory, most obviously, can raise, defeat can lower, it. Honor is never fixed. Because the Romans ceaselessly contend with one another for distinctions, a person's honor is constantly challenged and always jealously guarded. Collatine had challenged his fellow nobles, when, during a lull in the siege of Ardea the previous night, “every one commend[ing] the virtues of his own wife,” he “extolled the incomparable chastity of his wife.” When the rivalry became heated, Collatine said that the surest test is what a man finds when he enters his wife's room unexpectedly (“by their secret and sudden arrival, to make trial of that which every one had before avouched”). His proud boast was borne out. “[O]nly Collatine finds his wife, though it were late in the night, spinning amongst her maids,” the Argument reports, in the vivid present tense. “[T]he other ladies were all found dancing or revelling, or in several disports” (Arg., 8–15).Footnote ¹⁰ New victories and honors, however, provoke new challenges and trials. No less than her beauty—indeed, indistinguishable from it—Lucrece's proven virtue arouses Tarquin's “new ambition” (411). “Haply that name of ‘chaste’ unhapp'ly set / This bateless edge on his keen appetite” (8–9).Footnote ¹¹ The less his hope, the more his desire. Lucrece's chastity becomes Tarquin's challenge.Footnote ¹² Lucrece (“Thy never-conquered fort” [482]) replaces “besiegèd Ardea” (1) as his desired conquest.Footnote ¹³ Her resistance “moves in him more rage and lesser pity, / To make the breach and enter this sweet city” (468–69).Footnote ¹⁴

Although the sight of her increases his desire, Tarquin desired Lucrece before seeing her. His “ears” initially stirred his “heart” (35, 38). Collatine, while boasting of his wife's unsurpassed beauty and chastity, had explicitly boasted of his own supreme happiness. Speaking directly to the arrogant (“proud” [37]) son of a king, he had bragged of having the “happiness enjoyed but of a few” (22). Making matters worse, he had presented his boast as a challenging or defying comparison (“Braving compare” [40]), offending Tarquin's royal pride (“disdainfully did sting / His high-pitched thoughts” [40–41]) that a meaner man should boast of a “golden hap which their superiors want” (41–42). “[E]nvy” (39), not eros,—or envy-provoked eros—impelled the prideful prince. His conquest of Lucrece was meant to be his defeat of Collatine. The conquest of her honor would be the destruction of her husband's. Lucrece's bedroom is a battleground for Tarquin.Footnote ¹⁵

Tarquin threatens Lucrece with dishonor as well as with death if she resists him. After killing her, he says, he will kill a slave and put the slave's corpse in her bed as though they had been lovers: “And in thy dead arms do I mean to place him, / Swearing I slew him, seeing thee embrace him” (517–18; also 668–72, 1628–38). Tarquin will claim to have slain the couple to defend Collatine's honor and family. Yet, in doing so, he will instead make Collatine “[t]he scornful mark of every open eye,” force Lucrece's kinsmen to “hang their heads” in shame, defame her children with “nameless bastardy,” while she, “the author of their obloquy,” will be remembered as an adulteress in verse and song (“And thou … / Shalt have thy trespass cited up in rhymes / And sung by children in succeeding times” [519–25]). Tarquin's murder and calumny, which “will be / [His] fame,” will be “[her] perpetual infamy” (1638). “Th'adulterate death of Lucrece and her groom” will “never be forgot in mighty Rome” (1645, 1644). She and her family will have a “shame that … no device can [remove]” (535). Their shame will be “lasting” (1629). As Tarquin presents her plight, Lucrece can avoid such great shame only by enduring a lesser shame. She can keep her chastity but lose her reputation and life, or keep reputation and life but give up her chastity. She must choose between the two parts of Roman honor—virtue and reputation.

Tarquin's crime is a crime against the family and Rome itself. As Tarquin underscores by his threat that her “issue [will be] blurred with nameless bastardy” (522), the rape will bring into question the legitimacy of Lucrece's children. Making them the offspring of a mother but not of a father, it will destroy the family's lineage and hence the family itself.Footnote ¹⁶ The Roman family, consisting of ancestors and descendants as well as living members, depends on lineal descent from the same stock or blood (see 1062–64, 1751–57). Inheritance within the family includes not only (or even chiefly) property, but a “path to honors with names widely known and a firmly established ancestry” (Pliny, Letters, 8.10.3). Combining a common name and common blood, the family transmits dignity and honor, marked by its name and protected by family piety. Not surprisingly, after the rape, Lucrece immediately begins to distrust her household servant, who is in fact doing his duty (“His kindled duty kindled her mistrust” [1352]). She already suspects the breakdown of her household's proper order.Footnote ¹⁷ And because it is a crime against the family, Tarquin's rape is a crime also against Rome. The patriarchal family is the core of Rome itself. Rome is essentially an association of fathers, as the political terms patricians and patria potestas plainly signify.Footnote ¹⁸ A city where “the Patritii were at first … such as were able to name their father and grandsire, that is to say … free men” (Livy, 10.8.10; Holland, 291), Rome as a fatherland rests on the sanctity and perpetuation of the family.Footnote ¹⁹ In Tarquin's crime, “Rome herself … doth stand disgraced” (1833).Footnote ²⁰

Tarquin seems to assume that Lucrece will choose the lesser shame, that she will submit to his rape, not from fear of death, but from fear of endless infamy. Paradoxically, shame, which keeps the family intact, will force her to yield. Tarquin's assumption is not unfounded, though he fails to appreciate its full import. As much as they love honor and fame, Romans fear dishonor and infamy still more. They flee ignominy, infamy, contumely, and disgrace even more than they pursue honor, glory, praise, and distinction.Footnote ²¹ Shame is their paramount concern. Despite—or precisely because—he is constantly in public view, a Roman is hedged about, guarded by, shame,Footnote ²² just as Lucrece's “beauty” is “fence[d]” by her blush or “shame” (57–63). Wanting to be something to others and, therefore, being vulnerable to their estimation of him, a Roman, at once self-assertive and self-protective, is simultaneously exposed to continual public gaze and protected behind a wall of privacy. While often showing on the face—in a blush, an averted gaze, lowered eyes, a declined headFootnote ²³—shame dwells chiefly in the eyes.Footnote ²⁴ Involving a sense of wanting not to be, or of having been, uncovered, shame, sharing with skin and hide the Indo-European root skam or skem (meaning, “to cover”), is at once a skin or a covering and an act of hiding or concealing. Its fence of privacy and decorum protects a person whose identity and being depend on the opinion of others from being violated and hence reduced to nothing.

Shame thus has two senses for the Romans. One is retrospective or accusatory shame for a misdeed that one has already committed (or is thought to have committed): “the shame that follows …” (357). The other is anticipatory or protective shame, which keeps a person from committing a misdeed: “[B]eauty would blush for shame” (54). While the former sense exposes and dishonors, the latter, grounded in—or perhaps, paradoxically, the ground for—awe or reverence, warns, protects, and conceals.Footnote ²⁵ Like the distinction between the twin senses of honor, that between the two senses of shame is often ambiguous for Romans. For them, the senses are tied closely together. While we tend to think of shame as contrary to honor, the Romans think of protective shame as a condition for honor. A sense of honor rests on a sense of shame. Without it, one would be shameless.

Not even the arrogant Tarquin is immune to shame. Just as he threatens Lucrece's family with endless infamy, he warns himself of the shame that he will cause his family, both his ancestors (“O foul dishonour to my household's grave!” [198]) and his descendants (“[M]y posterity shamed with the note / Shall curse my bones” [208–9]). While Lucrece will shame her children (“Bequeath … to their lot, / The shame that from them no device can take, / The blemish that will never be forgot” [534–36]), Tarquin's children will “hold it for no sin / To wish that I their father had not been” (210). His shame, like hers, will outlive him (“[T]hough I die the scandal will survive” [204]) and his “crime will bear an ever-during blame” (224). In shaming Lucrece and her family, Tarquin fears, he will shame himself and his own family forever.

Tarquin's warning to himself, while echoing his threat to Lucrece, also contradicts it. Contrary to the threat, the warning assumes that Tarquin will be revealed as a rapist, that his tale of catching Lucrece with the slave will not be believed. Tarquin's self-warning, although not strong enough to deter him, demonstrates the power of shame. Tarquin cannot think of his crime without explicitly—indeed, emphatically—considering his shame, and he cannot consider his shame without imagining that he will get caught.Footnote ²⁶ “I have debated even in my soul, / What wrong, what shame, what sorrow I shall breed” (498–99). In imagining his shameful deed, Tarquin imagines that everyone will see or know it. In spite of his slander and murder of Lucrece, Romans will see his crime for what it is. Ironically, Tarquin fully illustrates Lucrece's fear that “every eye can see / The same disgrace which [her own eyes] behold” (750–51). As the narrator says, “[T]hey whose guilt within their bosoms lie, / Imagine every eye beholds their blame” (1342–43). Notwithstanding their vast moral differences in other respects, Lucrece and Tarquin alike imagine that the public will necessarily see their guilt or shame.Footnote ²⁷

Shame seeks darkness. Where pride seeks public display, shame seeks privacy and concealment. The one wants to be seen; the other wants neither to see nor to be seen. Thus Tarquin seeks darkness to carry out his deed. “This said,” the narrator reports, “[Tarquin] sets his foot upon the light, / For light and lust are deadly enemies; / Shame folded up in blind concealing night, / When most unseen, then most doth tyrannise” (673–76).Footnote ²⁸ Night is the time of evil, because people go unseen. Unseen, they are unrestrained.Footnote ²⁹ And because it dwells in the eyes, shame also prompts the shamed to take shelter in darkness. Where honor is bright and shiny,Footnote ³⁰ shame may make a person feel so exposed as to be hardly able to bear the light of day.Footnote ³¹ Lucrece, feeling bottomless shame, fears the new day's light. “She prays she never may behold the day” (746). Even to see the light is to feel exposed.

As they do not easily distinguish between the two senses of honor or of shame, the Romans closely identify body and soul. Lucrece is Tarquin's “fair fair”—fair equally in body and in soul (346). The outer beauty and inner beauty reflect each other. “My body or my soul, which was the dearer?” Lucrece asks herself bewilderedly, as though the question's basic premise makes no sense (1163).Footnote ³² Although distinguishing between her “pure mind” and the “foul act” done to her, Lucrece repeatedly obscures whether the crime was done to her or by her: “my cureless crime,” “my reproach,” “the slander of mine ill,” “My life's foul deed” (772, 816, 1207, 1208). It is unclear to her whether the crime was rape or infidelity: “‘Few words,’ quoth she, ‘shall fit the trespass best, / Where no excuse can give the fault amending’” (1613–14; also 1619–20).

Speech has a similar double character in Rome. The Romans are avidly ambitious for praise and fame. They eagerly seek the renown spoken and written about them by other Romans for their achievements. Tarquin “stories to [Lucrece's] ears her husband's fame, / Won in the fields of fruitful Italy; / And decks with praises Collatine's high name” (106–8).Footnote ³³ But Romans typically “talk in deeds” (1348). Just as Tarquin declares that “[t]houghts are but dreams till their effects be tried” (353),Footnote ³⁴ Lucrece deliberately withholds the cause of her distress in her letter to Collatine: “[S]he would not blot the letter / With words, till action might become them better” (1322–23). While the words “true” and “truth” appear often in the poem, they have the characteristic of action rather than of speech. For Aristotle (as generally for us), truth is a characteristic of thought. Manifested most typically by speech, it signifies that a thought corresponds to what is (Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1027b25–27). For an early Roman, however, truth lies not in the thought, but in the thing itself. What is true has the capacity to endure some sort of test or trial: “[h]is true respect,” “my true eyes,” “thy true affection,” “true grief,” “true sorrow,” “true mark of modesty,” “her grief's true quality,” “this true wife,” and so on.Footnote ³⁵ As with “false” (“false desire,” “false lord,” “so false a foe,” “false heart,” “false slave to false delight,” “false Tarquin,” and so onFootnote ³⁶), “true” is fundamentally a moral rather than an intellectual or theoretical conclusion. When Lucrece speaks of “truth and virtue” (911), she uses a telling pleonasm. In the same way that the poem's events begin when Collatine says not to trust words but deeds (Arg., 6ff.),Footnote ³⁷ Lucrece thinks she needs her virtuous action to establish the truth of her “true type” (1050). Only actions, not words, she believes, can pardon her. An explanation offered (“an excuse”) is merely empty words (“an excuse”) and cannot clear (“excuse”) her.Footnote ³⁸ “[N]o excuse can give the fault amending” (1614).Footnote ³⁹

The Romans' use of historical examples (exempla) points up their understanding of speech. The examples, which are drawn from history and through which Roman tradition is transmitted, cite something done or said in the past and give the name of the doer or author. They provide beneficial examples to imitate and shameful ones to avoid.Footnote ⁴⁰ As Tarquin threatens her with becoming a cautionary example of infamous infidelity, sung about by children (523–25),Footnote ⁴¹ so Lucrece warns him that, since “princes are the glass, the school, the book, / Where subjects' eyes do learn, do read, do look,” future Romans will “in thee read lectures of such shame” (615–16, 618). Rome is as strong in exempla as Greece is in precepts or maxims, Quintilian writes, and exempla are more important (Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 12.2.30).Footnote ⁴² Describing their subjects so vividly as virtually to place them before their listeners' eyes,Footnote ⁴³ they derive their power to exhort or to dissuade from their appealing immediately to the Romans' love of honor and fear of disgrace. They are incarnations of specific qualities. While putting forward a standard by which people can be judged, they reify and dramatize, rather than idealize, moral and political principles.Footnote ⁴⁴ They have the particularity, physicality, and presence essential to Roman life.

Where Tarquin threatens to make her a shameful example, Lucrece deliberately fashions herself a noble one. Anticipating herself as an exemplum, she acts to make “[her] resolution” “[her] example” (1193, 1194). While her death at his hands would make it impossible for her to refute Tarquin's threatened shame of dishonor, only death at her own hands, witnessed by others, can remove her shame and redeem her honor. Augustine famously criticizes Lucrece's decision. Since innocence pertains to the soul rather than to the body, he argues, if Lucrece did not consent to Tarquin's attack, she is innocent—her mind is pure, as she herself says—and she therefore has no reason to kill herself. Only her body was violated; her soul is guiltless.Footnote ⁴⁵ Lucrece in effect rejects Augustine's Christian premises. Where Augustine sharply distinguishes body from soul, Lucrece closely unites them. For her, as for other Romans, virtue is not simply internal. It is not simply of the soul or the mind. Chastity is not a virtue of the soul alone, any more than courage is. Like all Roman virtues, chastity involves action, and it is with the body and soul together that one acts.Footnote ⁴⁶ The body's outward actions manifest the soul's inner strength. Moreover, where Augustine argues that it suffices for a woman to be pure in the witness of her conscience and in the sight of God,Footnote ⁴⁷ Lucrece cares above all about her honor among her fellow Romans. For her, it is not enough to be chaste; she must also be known to be chaste. Believing that a person's soul has no life independent of his city, Lucrece cares how she will be seen in the eyes of other Romans. She therefore thinks that she can redeem her honor only by proving her virtue in deed. Death alone can be her redemption.Footnote ⁴⁸

Lucrece acquits herself of guilt, but not of punishment.Footnote ⁴⁹ She cannot acquit herself of shame without punishing herself. To prove her innocence, she must impose the punishment for guilt.Footnote ⁵⁰ As previously noted, her letter to Collatine does not reveal the cause of her great sorrow: “Her certain sorrow writ uncertainly.” Lucrece tells of “[h]er grief, but not her grief's true quality.” She fears that even Collatine would doubt her innocence without her bloody proof: “She dares not thereof make discovery, / Lest he should hold it her own gross abuse, / Ere she with blood had stained her stained excuse” (1311, 1313–16). Even in the eyes of her devoted husband, only the stain of blood, she fears, can bleach the stain of dishonor.Footnote ⁵¹ Lucrece is concerned, in particular, that Collatine might be influenced by what others say of her (“[T]o clear her / From that suspicion which the world might bear her” [1320–21]). Insofar as reputation reflects virtue, the possible suspicion of Romans might raise doubts in her own husband. She needs unambiguous “action” to confirm her otherwise weak “words” (1323).

Lucrece calls upon Collatine and the other men to revenge her rape by killing Tarquin (1683ff.). Their revenge, however, is not enough. Although the men pledge to avenge her wrong, Lucrece thinks she must redeem her honor herself. Lucrece distinguishes between her “gross blood … stained with [Tarquin's] abuse” and her “[i]mmaculate and spotless … mind” (1655–56), between her “pure mind” and the “foul act” which she was “constrained” to endure (1704, 1703). And when she asks sorrowfully whether any words (“terms”) may acquit her, all the men are quick to assure her that “[h]er body's stain her mind untainted clears” (1710). A pure mind clears a stained body. Lucrece need not take any action.

Lucrece, however, disagrees. Intention alone, she thinks, does not excuse her. Yet, it is her intention, in fact, that she thinks she must show. She must demonstrate her pure mind by her deadly action. Intentions are invisible and ambiguous. Romans may think that Lucrece submitted to Tarquin, not from fear of dishonor, but from fear of death (1657–59). Lucrece must therefore show that she is superior to the fear of death. Afraid that her “shame [will] still rest upon record, / And never be forgot in mighty Rome” (1643–44), she especially fears that, while her “good name” will become “a theme for disputation” (820, 822), unchaste women will misuse her example. “‘No, no,’ quoth she, ‘no dame hereafter living / By my excuse shall claim excuse's giving’” (1714–15). Lucrece dreads that she would become an excuse for unchaste women to evade their deserved punishment. Women caught in adultery would claim that they, too, submitted out of fear of death and use the fact that Lucrece was excused as an excuse for themselves. Her chastity defamed, she would become a lasting example of a woman caught and excused for adultery. Lucrece had warned Tarquin that “kings' misdeeds cannot be hid in clay” (609). Tarquin's royalty would serve to perpetuate his infamy. But what perpetuates his infamy would also perpetuate the story of her rape (“For greatest scandal waits on greatest state” [1006]), and her motive for submitting would remain forever uncertain. Not even Tarquin's public infamy for his crime would resolve the ambiguity of her intention. As Tarquin had threatened that she would “have [her] trespass cited up in rhymes / And sung by children in succeeding times” (524–25), Lucrece is afraid that “[t]he nurse to still her child will tell my story, / And fright her crying babe with Tarquin's name. / The orator to deck his oratory / Will couple my reproach to Tarquin's shame” (813–16). Both Lucrece and Tarquin would be shamed. Faced with the inevitable scandal of human suspicion, Lucrece must prove her pure intention beyond a doubt. She must show that “she hath lost a dearer thing than life” (687). She must demonstrate that she loves her honor more than anything else.

To clear herself of dishonor, Lucrece must exact upon herself Tarquin's threat of death. She must turn one part of his threat against the other. To redeem her honor, she must give up everything she loves apart from her honor, for only our willing losses attest to our true loves. What we willingly give up for something shows how much we value it. As Roman virtue in general exemplifies, what we truly are is what we are willing to forgo.Footnote ⁵² Lucrece must therefore part with everything else dear to her—her life, her children, her husband, her father, her city—for the sake of her honor.Footnote ⁵³ Like a soldier in battle, she must scorn pain and death, and retain nothing but her honor: “Mine honour be the knife's that makes my wound” (1201). And owing to the public nature of Roman honor, she must kill herself with other Romans witnessing her act: “Stone-still, astonished with this deadly deed, / Stood Collatine and all his lordly crew” (1730–31). Her “self-slaughter” (1733) must be public and “her bleeding body” displayed “through Rome” (1851). Paradoxically, only her public act of manly courage can prove that her feminine “chastity” was “[p]ure” (692).Footnote ⁵⁴

Lucrece's self-destruction is her self-redemption. But in addition to her suicide, her call for revenge contributes to her redemption. Lucrece urges Collatine to revenge her for what she had been: “And for my sake, when I might charm thee so, / For she that was thy Lucrece, now attend me: / Be suddenly revengèd on my foe” (1681–82). If shame diminishes or crushes one's existence (“For she that was thy Lucrece …”),Footnote ⁵⁵ revenge may restore it. As he who fails to revenge his harms ceases to exist for others, so, conversely, he who gets revenge may bring himself back. One's vengeful self-assertion may amount to one's spirited self-affirmation.

In Lucrece's case, the revenge will do much more. Lucrece offers a public reason for her revenge: “[L]et the traitor die; / For sparing injustice feeds iniquity” (1686–87). It may be true that withholding punishment encourages wickedness, but Lucrece must know that, when the wrong has been committed by a harsh king's son, Romans cannot “venge this wrong of [hers],” “chase injustice with revengeful arms” (1691, 1693), without ousting the royal family from Rome.Footnote ⁵⁶ Lucrece's suicide and revenge will thus constitute her double victory over Tarquin. Reversing his threat, they will return against him the lasting infamy that he had intended for her and give her the fame that he had imagined for himself. “[T]his act will be / My fame, and thy perpetual infamy” (1637–38). In redeeming her honor, her suicide and revenge will destroy Tarquin's. What is more, by linking her proven virtue with the expulsion of the royal family, the acts will not only redeem her personal honor, but win political glory from her shame.

Brutus, throwing off his disguise of folly (“Burying in Lucrece's wound his folly's show” [1810]) and turning Lucrece's revenge into Rome's revolution, seizes upon her rape and death to expel the Tarquins from Rome.Footnote ⁵⁷ Swearing by the Roman gods, the Capitol, the traditional rights of Romans, Lucrece's bloody knife and her chaste soul, he vows his revenge. Then, carrying her corpse through the city's streets, he shows the Romans her bleeding body and, “with a bitter invective against the tyranny of the king” (Arg., 32–33), tells of Tarquin's crime. This done, “[t]hen jointly to the ground their knees [the Romans] bow, / And that deep vow which Brutus made before / He doth again repeat, and that they swore” (1846–48). Lucrece's revenge becomes the “everlasting banishment” (1854, 1855) not only of the Tarquins, but of monarchy from Rome.Footnote ⁵⁸ Wanting freedom and fearing the return of tyranny,Footnote ⁵⁹ Brutus uses Tarquin's crime against Lucrece to rid Rome of monarchical rule and restore its ancient liberties.Footnote ⁶⁰ In the minds of the Romans, his action rivals even Romulus's founding: “[T]he Romans hold opinion, it was not so great an act done of Romulus first to build Rome as it was for Brutus to recover Rome, and the best liberty thereof, and to renew the ancient government of the same.”Footnote ⁶¹

Brutus does not carry out Lucrece's call for Tarquin's death (“[L]et the traitor die”). His restraint reflects the political turn her revenge takes. Tarquin's death would not be simply punishment for a crime, but political murder. And political murder does not come to Rome until the Gracchi, centuries later, with disastrous consequences. “This was the first sedition among the citizens of Rome that fell out with murder and bloodshed.”Footnote ⁶² The murder of Tiberius Gracchus and many of his followers will lead to decades of civil war, murder, proscriptions, and suicide, eventually destroying the republican regime that Brutus founds.

Both Brutus and Lucrece win glory for their deeds. “To Brutus we owe liberty, to Lucrece we owe Brutus” (Seneca, To Marcia on Consolation, 162). Yet, strangely, Brutus is bluntly critical of Lucrece's death. “Thy wretched wife mistook the matter so,” he tells Collatine, “To slay herself that should have slain her foe” (1826–27). Lucrece's understanding of honor, he seems to say, was mistaken. Self-inflicted wounds are no cure for wounds inflicted by another: “[I]s woe the cure for woe? / Do wounds help wounds … ? / Is it revenge to give thyself a blow … ?” (1821–23). Honor demands injuring the one who injured you, not injuring yourself to redeem your lost honor.

Although he restores liberty to Rome, Brutus is strikingly un-Roman in at least one key respect. He separates reputation from virtue. For most of his life, Brutus has lived disguised as a fool. After murdering his own father-in-law for the crown (Arg., 1–5), Lucius Tarquinius killed many nobles, including Brutus's father and older brother. Young Brutus, afraid that he, too, might be murdered, decided that the only way of saving himself was to be despised, and so he pretended to be a fool. Contempt rather than justice would protect him. “He with the Romans was esteemèd so / As silly jeering idiots are with kings, / For sporting words and utt'ring foolish things” (1811–13). Romans have not only “supposed [him] a fool” (1819), but even called him by the cognomen “Stupid” (“Brutus”). For many years, Brutus has been nothing but a laughing-stock in Rome. Years of feigning folly, making him, in effect, an outsider in his own city, have taught him to distinguish the inner from the outer, virtue, in particular, from reputation. Romans are, of course, capable of hiding weaknesses and vice. Shame as well as opportunism prompts them. But Brutus knows firsthand that virtue also may be “disguise[d]” and “long-hid[den]” (1815, 1816). When the sons of Lucius Tarquinius, wanting someone to laugh at and abuse, brought him along on a visit to Delphi, Brutus brought as a gift for Apollo a wooden stick that he had secretly hollowed and filled with gold, “the very type and resemblance by secret circumstances of his natural disposition” (Livy, 1.56.9–10; Holland, 33).Footnote ⁶³ For Brutus, unlike other Romans, there can be virtue without noble reputation, depth without a similar surface. One may have to sacrifice a good reputation for one's life, but one is not compelled to give up everything but one's honor for one's name.Footnote ⁶⁴

Brutus will do for the sake of his deed what Lucrece has done for the sake of her honor. He will prevail upon the Romans to swear never to tolerate another king in RomeFootnote ⁶⁵ and to punish with death anyone who helps a king return. As it turns out, two of his sons will soon be caught conspiring to bring back the Tarquins.Footnote ⁶⁶ Brutus, sitting on the tribunal as one of Rome's first two consuls, will punish them for plotting to restore the monarchy. As Lucrece judged, condemned, and punished herself with death, Brutus will judge, condemn, and punish his own sons with death.Footnote ⁶⁷ If love of honor and devotion to the public good constitute the heart of republican Rome, Lucrece gives up what is naturally precious to her for the one and Brutus does the same for the other. The two become paired exempla of the self-denying, self-affirming core of Rome's republican life.

For ages to come, Lucrece will remain the exemplum of Roman chastity (“Lucrece was not more chaste / Than this Lavinia” [Titus Andronicus, 2.1.108–9]).Footnote ⁶⁸ As noted earlier, commentators often criticize Lucrece for its Christian anachronisms and its archaic dictionFootnote ⁶⁹ and extravagant rhetorical tropes.Footnote ⁷⁰ Shakespeare deliberately chooses to have a Christian rather than a Roman narrate Lucrece's story. He tells the story through someone foreign to classical Rome. Rather than confusing or confounding Christian and pagan viewpoints, by putting her story in the mouth of a medieval or Renaissance narrator, he seems to emphasize that even a Christian, recounting her plight two millennia after her death, might disagree with Lucrece on the fully public character of moral life, but, nevertheless, admire her—and Rome, as a whole—for her severe sense of honor. What exacts her life, elevates her soul.