Читать книгу Ancient Rome: The Lives of Great Men - Mary Agnes Hamilton - Страница 6

The last King of Rome was Tarquin the Proud. His misrule, and the insolent heartlessness of his family, especially of his son Sextus, brought about their expulsion from Rome and the end of the kingship. Sextus had, by guile, got into the town of Gabii but was at a loss how to make himself master there. He managed to send out a messenger to his father. It was summer. In the garden where the King was walking, poppies—white and purple—were growing in long ranks. Tarquin said nothing to the messenger: only as he walked he struck off with his staff the heads of the tallest poppies, one after another, without saying a word. Sextus, when the messenger came back and described to him his father’s action, understood. Pitilessly he put the leading men of Gabii to the sword.

It was the misdeeds of this Sextus that brought the proud house of Tarquin to the ground. He tried to force his brutal love on the fair Lucretia, the wife of his cousin Collatinus, and so shamed her that, after telling her husband how she had been wronged, Lucretia killed herself before his eyes and those of his friend Brutus. Stirred to deepest wrath, Collatinus and Brutus then swore a great oath to drive the house of Tarquin from Rome and henceforth allow no king to rule over the free people of the city. When they had told their fellow citizens how Sextus had wronged Lucretia, a daughter of one of the proudest families in the city, and reminded them of the oppression and injustice they had all suffered at the hands of his family, the leading men of Rome rose up and drove the Tarquins out. The city was proclaimed for ever a republic to be ruled not by any one man but by the will and for the good of all free men who dwelt in it. Some there were, however, who took the side of Tarquin and tried to bring him back. Among them were the two sons of Brutus. They were captured and brought up for judgement, and like the others condemned to death. Brutus was the judge. Though they were his sons and he loved them he condemned them unflinchingly. Without any sign of feeling he saw them go to their death. An action for which he would have sentenced another man seemed to him no less wrong when committed by his own children.