The Rape of  Lucretia

The day was filled with bloodshed and cries of rage and pain. With nightfall came respite from battle, and General Lucius Collatinus feasted with his comrades—men with whom he had fought side by side.

They feasted and they drank, and then they rested by the fire. Each man held a goblet of rich, dark wine the color of the blood that had stained the field. They longed for the soft and lovely things of home—their beds and their children and their wives. Far from home, each man aggrandized his wife, remembering her as more beautiful and gentle than she most likely truly was. For women are as men—flawed. No one of them bears a face without a line, a smile without a crooked tooth, a heart without a blemish. Yet, seen from a distance, they can seem as if they do, and that is how it was for Lucius and his wife that evening, the firelight flickering on the bearded faces that surrounded him, causing him to wish more fiercely for the smooth cheek of his wife, his Lucretia.

And with his tongue loosened by the blood his hand had spilled and by the wine in his cup, Lucius spoke of her. He told the men of her beauty, her goodness. Her long, dark hair, which fell in rippling waves to her knees when unpinned. The soft flesh of her thighs, how his fingers sunk into them when he gripped her with passion. Her willing mouth, supple and open to him. And her loyalty—her fierce, unshakable, moral love for him, her husband.

The other men listened. They spoke too of their wives, each in their turn, but none as eloquently as Lucius. Perhaps he had drunk more wine and so spoke more freely than the rest; maybe Death had come closer to kissing him that day than his comrades, and so he waxed more poetically about the stuff of life. Perhaps his Lucretia was a finer specimen of womanhood than the other men’s wives. Whatever the reason, Lucius’s eloquence captivated one man particularly—Sextus Tarquinius, son of the Roman king. He listened and imagined, seeing in his mind the picture Lucius painted—the flowing hair, the creamy white hip, the willing mouth. Only he imagined himself upon her, not her husband.

No one remembers who suggested it first—that when they returned to Rome, they should travel as a group to surprise each of their wives and see if each was as beautiful and as faithful as her husband extolled her to be.

And when the bloodletting was behind them, Lucius and his soldier friends returned to Rome. One by one they visited the wives of the soldiers, and one by one the soldiers were embarrassed to find their hearths cold and their wives away at play, none of them awaiting her husband’s return. Several of the wives were at the homes of their mothers and friends, laughing and drinking in a way that did not befit a wife; others luxuriated at the baths and paid no heed to their mewling children. One was found at home, but tangled in sheets and the arms of her maidservant.

Only Lucretia was where she should be—home, tending the hearth, awaiting the return of her husband. And when he darkened the doorway with his broad frame, she looked up from her needlework with a choked cry of relief, and she stumbled and fell into Lucius’s arms, and her hair was dark and soft, and her hips were rounded and supple and begging to be gripped. And her mouth—Sextus Tarquinius lusted for the taste of it.

Sextus Tarquinius left the home of Lucius Collatinus, left the presence of Lucretia, but his thoughts would not follow his form. They lingered, imagining how Lucretia would look as her robe fell away, as her hair came loose and tumbled down, as her mouth opened in a cry of passion.

And though he knew he could not cause her to open to him in passion—for he could see her love for her husband ran deep and strong—he thought it might be enough if she were to open to him in pain.

The next time Sextus Tarquinius knew Lucius Collatinus to be away from home, he visited Lucretia. He went at night and entered her bedchamber while she slept, naked but for the bedclothes. He lowered himself to the edge of her bed and stroked back her hair from her temple, a lover’s gentle caress. Slowly, so slowly, he peeled back the linen sheet and feasted on the sight of Lucretia bare to him at last—the slope of her shoulder, the crest of her breasts, and the wine-dark kiss of her nipples. From the bedside table he took a washcloth, dipped it in water, and began to bathe her, trailing the cloth along the curve of her belly.

Lucretia moaned, and her eyes opened, confused at first in the dark, mistaking in the first instant Sextus Tarquinius for her own husband. Who could tell what it was that alerted her to her mistake—to the fact that the man in her bed was a stranger? Was it that his shadow was slightly longer than her husband’s? That the fingers pressing into the flesh of her belly were thicker than those she knew so well? Or was it the knife, silently unsheathed, that touched her now between her ribs, its point both cold and sharp?

“Listen now,” Sextus Tarquinius whispered between clenched teeth. “I have come to you, and I will have what I want. That is not a question. The question is only if I will have my pleasure with my knife buried in your side or without.”

Lucretia made a sound like an animal, trapped and certain of its fate. And then Sextus Tarquinius took what he had come for.

When he left her at last, bereft in her bed, Lucretia despaired that she had allowed him to pierce her with one sword and not the other. Surely the cold steel would have been cleaner, more honorable.

It was a day and another night before Lucius Collatinus returned to his home and his wife. He found her waiting for him, but this time not with open arms and ready lips. Instead, he found her with a knife in her hands. She told him what had been done and who had done it.

And then, with the words, “Avenge me, Lucius,” she buried the blade into her chest, aiming the tip just where Sextus Tarquinius had held it not so long before.