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Tiresias: The Ancient Mediterranean Religions Source Database



7456
Livy, History, 31.12.6-31.12.8


nanFrom that time the old age of Tullius became more embittered, his reign more unhappy. The woman began to look forward from one crime to another; she allowed her husband no rest day or night, for fear lest the past murders should prove fruitless. [2] What she wanted, she said, was not a man who was only her husband in name, or with whom she was to live in uncomplaining servitude; the man she needed was one who deemed himself worthy of a throne, who remembered that he was the son of Priscus Tarquinius, who preferred to wear a crown rather than live in hopes of it. ‘If you are the man to whom I thought I was married, then I call you my husband and my king; but if not, I have changed my condition for the worse, since you are not only a coward but a criminal to boot. Why do you not prepare yourself for action? [4] You are not, like your father, a native of Corinth or Tarquinii, nor is it a foreign crown you have to win. Your father's household gods, your father's image, the royal palace, the kingly throne within it, the very name of Tarquin, all declare you king. If you have not courage enough for this, why do you excite vain hopes in the State? [5] Why do you allow yourself to be looked up to as a youth of kingly stock? Make your way back to Tarquinii or Corinth, sink back to the position whence you sprung; you have your brother's nature rather than your father's.’ With taunts like these she egged him on. [6] She, too, was perpetually haunted by the thought that whilst Tanaquil, a woman of alien descent, had shown such spirit as to give the crown to her husband and her son-in-law in succession, she herself, though of royal descent, had no power either in giving it or taking it away. [7] Infected by the woman's madness Tarquin began to go about and interview the nobles, mainly those of the Lesser Houses; he reminded them of the favour his father had shown them, and asked them to prove their gratitude; he won over the younger men with presents. By making magnificent promises as to what he would do, and by bringing charges against the king, his cause became stronger amongst all ranks. At last, when he thought the time for action had arrived, he appeared suddenly in the Forum with a body of armed men. [8] A general panic ensued, during which he seated himself in the royal chair in the senate-house and ordered the Fathers to be summoned by the crier ‘into the presence of King Tarquin.’ They hastily assembled, some already prepared for what was coming; others, apprehensive lest their absence should arouse suspicion, and dismayed by the extraordinary nature of the incident, were convinced that the fate of Servius was sealed. [9] Tarquin went back to the king's birth, protested that he was a slave and the son of a slave, and after his (the [10] speaker's) father had been foully murdered, seized the throne, as a woman's gift, without any interrex being appointed as heretofore, without any assembly being convened, without any vote of the people being taken or any confirmation of it by the Fathers. Such was his origin, such was his right to the crown. [11] His sympathies were with the dregs of society from which he had sprung, and through jealousy of the ranks to which he did not belong, he had taken the land from the foremost men in the State and divided it amongst the vilest; he had shifted on to them the whole of the burdens which had formerly been borne in common by [12] all; he had instituted the census that the fortunes of the wealthy might be held up to envy, and be an easily available source from which to shower doles, whenever he pleased, upon the neediest.


nanTorquatus was sent by the senate to conduct the envoys away, and when he saw Annius lying on the ground he exclaimed, loud enough to be heard by the senators and populace alike: ‘It is well. The gods have commenced a just and righteous war! There is a divine power at work; thou, O Great Jupiter, art here . Not in vain have we consecrated this to be thine abode, O Father of gods and men . Why do you hesitate, Quirites, and you, senators, to take up arms when the gods are your leaders? [7] I will lay the legions of the Latins low, just as you see their envoy lying here.’ The consul's words were received by the people with loud applause and raised them to such a pitch of excitement that when the envoys took their departure they owed their safety more to the care of the magistrates who, on the consul's order, accompanied them to protect them from the attacks of the angry people than to any respect felt for the law of nations. War having been decided upon by senate as much as people, the consuls enrolled two armies and proceeded through the territories of the Marsi and Paeligni, where they were joined by an army of Samnites. They fixed their camp at Capua, where the Latins and their allies had assembled. It is said that whilst they were there each consul had the same vision in the quiet of the night. A Form greater and more awful than any human form appeared to them and announced that the commander of the one army and the army itself on the other side were destined as a sacrifice to the Dii Manes and to Mother Earth. [8] In whichever army the commander should have devoted the legions of his enemies and himself as well to those deities, that army, that people would have the victory. When the consuls compared these visions of the night together, they decided that victims should be slain to avert the wrath of the gods, and further, that if, on inspection, they should portend the same as the vision had announced, one of the two consuls should fulfill his destiny. When the answers of the soothsayers, after they had inspected the victims, proved to correspond with their own secret belief in the vision, they called up the superior officers and told them to explain publicly to the soldiers what the gods had decreed, in order that the voluntary death of a consul might not create a panic in the army., They arranged with each other that when either division began to give way, the consul in command of it should devote himself ‘on behalf of the Roman people and the Quirites.’ The council of war also decided that if ever any war had been conducted with the strict enforcement of orders, on this occasion certainly, military discipline should be brought back to the ancient standard. [10] Their anxiety was increased by the fact that it was against the Latins that they had to fight, a people resembling them in language, manners, arms, and especially in their military organisation. They had been colleagues and comrades, as soldiers, centurions, and tribunes, often stationed together in the same posts and side by side in the same maniples. That this might not prove a source of error and confusion, orders were given that no one was to leave his post to fight with the enemy., The question was not an easy one to settle, for the senators were governed largely by their temperaments and some advised a harsh, others a gentler course. The general divergence of opinion was widened by one of the Privernate envoys who was thinking more of the state of things in which he had been born than of his present plight. One of the senators who was advocating sterner measures asked him what punishment he thought his countrymen deserved.[9] He replied: ‘The punishment which those deserve who assert their liberty.’ The consul saw that this spirited reply only exasperated those who were already adverse to the cause of the Privernates, and he tried to get a softer answer by a more considerate question.[10] ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if we spare you now, what sort of a peace may we hope to have with you for the time to come?’ ‘A real and lasting one,’ was the reply, ‘if its terms be good, but if they are bad, one that will soon be broken.’ On hearing this, some of the senators exclaimed that he was using open threats, and that it was by such language that even those states which had been pacified were incited to renew hostilities.[11] The better part of the senate, however, put a more favourable construction on his reply, and declared that it was an utterance worthy of a man and a man who loved liberty. Was it, they asked, to be supposed that any people or, for that matter, any individual would remain longer than he could help under conditions which [12] made him discontented? Peace would only be faithfully kept where those who accepted it did so voluntarily; they could not hope that it would be faithfully kept where they sought to reduce men to servitude. The senate was brought to adopt this view mainly by the consul himself who kept repeating to the consulars — the men who had to state their opinions first — in a tone loud enough for many to hear, ‘Men whose first and last thought is their liberty deserve to become Romans.’ Thus they gained their cause in the senate, and the proposal to confer full citizenship on the Privernates was submitted to the people.


Intertexts (texts cited often on the same page as the searched text):

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1. Sallust, Catiline, 7, 6 (1st cent. BCE - 1st cent. BCE)



Subjects of this text:

subject book bibliographic info
africa Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
alexander the great Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
apocalypse/apocalyptic Beyerle and Goff, Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature (2022) 124
asia Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
catullus Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
civil war, discordia Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
cornelius nepos Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
digression Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
ethnography, ethnographies Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
gaul, gauls, sack, of rome Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
greece, greek Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
hellenistic kings/rulers, antiochus iv epiphanes Beyerle and Goff, Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature (2022) 124
herodotus Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
historiography/chronography Beyerle and Goff, Notions of Time in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature (2022) 124
hybridity, hybridities Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
identity Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
jerusalem Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
livy Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
migration, immigration, immigrants and nomadism Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
myth, mythology, mythological Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
pausanias Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
pliny the elder Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
plutarch Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
polybius Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
refugees Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
republic, the roman, memory and trauma Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
res publica Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
rome, roman Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
sallust Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
strabo Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
theater' Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
thucydides Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
titus Faßbeck and Killebrew, Viewing Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology: VeHinnei Rachel - Essays in honor of Rachel Hachlili (2016) 428
triumph Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
usage of the past Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267
virgil Poulsen, Usages of the Past in Roman Historiography (2021), 267