Tarquin the Proud

Lucius Tarquinius the Proud  was the seventh and last king of Rome, where he reigned according to tradition from the year 534 BC. C. to 509 B.C. He was the son, or possibly grandson, of Lucio Tarquinio Prisco and son-in-law of the previous king, Servius Tullius, whom he murdered.He exercised a despotic government.

Origin

Tarquin was the last king of Rome and also the last of its three "Etruscan" kings. And in the same way as the global chronology of the Roman monarchy, the traditional chronology of the Tarquins presents inconsistencies that were already known by historians of antiquity. Thus, Tarquin the Proud would be the son of Tarquin Priscus (who reigned between c. 616 BC and c. 578 BC) and would have inherited the throne from his successor Servius Tullius in 534 BC. C. If his father died in the year 578 a. C., Tarquinio would have been at least eighty years old during the battle of Lake Regilo. In addition, his mother, Tanaquil, who had accompanied Tarquinio Prisco at his coronation in 616 BC. C. when she was already an adult woman, she would have conceived him more than thirty years later.

Dionysus of Halicarnassus (Ant. Rom., 4.7.4) cites historians who, to avoid these difficulties, proposed that Tarquin the Proud and his brother Arrunte were actually the sons of a second wife of Tarquinio Priscus; although he preferred to give credit to the analyst Lucio Calpurnio Piso Frugi who made the Superb a grandson and not a son of Tarquinio the Ancient. In any case, such solutions are incompatible with the oldest traditions and, above all, with the version maintained by Fabio Píctor.

Ascension to the throne

Tarquinius seized the throne of Rome by overthrowing his father-in-law and predecessor Servius Tullius. According to Livy's version, Tarquinius appeared at the Forum accompanied by armed men and many of them summoned the senators to denounce Servius like an illegitimate king:

Then he began to insult him... saying that... after his father's abusive death, without establishing the usual interregno, without meeting the elections, without the suffrage of the people, without the ratification of the Senate, he had occupied the throne as a gift of a woman.

Liv., Hist. Rom, 1.47.10

When Servius Tullius came to defend himself against the accusations, in the resulting confusion between the respective supporters, it was Tarquin himself who threw the king down the stairs towards the forum, leaving him half dead. According to Livio's version, Servius Tullius was executed by his persecutors and then his own daughter Tullia, Tarquinio's wife, ran over the corpse with the car she was driving (Liv., Hist. Rom , 1.48).

Reign

Cycles of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolino.
Capitoline Museums (Rome)

Ancient sources present the reign of Tarquin the Proud as a period of expansion in which Rome consolidated its hegemony over Latium. He is credited with the conquest of Pomecia and Tusculum (where he married his daughter to the local leader Octavio Mamilio), as well as the seizure of control of Gabios, a city with which a treaty was signed that, preserved in the temple of Semon Sanco, could still be consulted in the time of Augustus (Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom., 4.58.4). He also established colonies at Signia and Circeo. This policy must have continued throughout his reign, since at the time of his overthrow he was besieging Ardea, and there are even reports that he headed a military alliance of Latin cities (Liv., Hist. Rom. , 1.52).

He seized the hegemony of the Latin assembly, despite the opposition of Turno Herdonio, whom he falsely accused of seeking his death and who was executed by the Latin representatives themselves.

The importance of Rome as a regional power at the time of the last kings is also endorsed by other independent information. Thus, the excavations of Satricus (which can very possibly be identified with Pomecia) confirm the wealth of this city and support the tradition that its conquest served to finance the construction of the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus (Tacitus, Hist., 3.72). Another relevant archaeological evidence is the probable Roman origin of the architectural terracotta found in Circeyos, a colony whose place name is almost certainly due to an allusion to the power of the Latins in the appendix to Hesiod's Theogony (Theogony, 969-1018).

However, the most important description of the limits of Roman power in the late VI century a. C. is found in the treaty between Rome and Carthage signed according to Polybius (Hist, 3.22) in the first year of the republic. Carthage was the dominant power in the western Mediterranean, but it grants Rome an area of influence that reaches as far as Terracina, a city located on the coast about a hundred kilometers south of Rome.

It is significant that the same tradition that portrays Tarquin as the prototype of the despot is forced to also reflect the success of Roman expansion, as is the case with the rest of the achievements attributed to him. The specific authorship of many of them is sometimes assigned to several different kings, but in the case of the Tarquins, this type of doublet is particularly notorious. An example is the case of the construction of the sewers, which Pliny (Nh., 36.107) attributes to Tarquinio Prisco and Casio Hemina al Soberbio. Both relate the same legend in which the hardships of work led many humble workers even to suicide. Other times, to solve the problem of repetitions, they resorted to assigning the first of the kings the beginning of the works and the next its completion, as it happens with, without a doubt, the most important temple of Ancient Rome: that of Jupiter. at the Capitol.

Temple of Capitoline Jupiter

Archaeological evidence supports it, placing its construction at the end of the VI century a. C., the well-established tradition that the Roman temple of Jupiter was consecrated in the early days of the republic by one of its consuls, Marco Horacio Pulvilo, whose name was perhaps inscribed on the upper part of the portico (Dion. Hal., Ant. Rom., 5.35.3). This, accepting the basic historicity of the monarchical period, would confirm the attribution of the construction to Tarquinio the Proud, although many sources place the beginning of the works in the time of Tarquinio Prisco. Thus, Valerio Anciate says that the works were financed with the funds obtained after the conquest of Apiolas by the latter king; but Apiolas is simply the Greek version of the name Pomecia, taken by the Proud. Likewise, Varro and Plutarch (Publicola, 13) affirm that both the statue of Jupiter and the one of the chariot located at the top of the temple were the work of artisans from Veii; but the first says that the commission corresponded to Tarquino Priscus, something quite improbable considering the decades that separate his reign, even if the works had been interrupted in the time of Servius Tullius, which Tacitus explicitly denies.

The sibylline books

According to one of the most famous legends in the history of Rome, Tarquin bought three prophetic books from the sibyl of Cumae and deposited them in the temple of Jupiter. The story tells that the sibyl appeared before Tarquin as a very old woman and offered him nine prophetic books at an extremely high price. Tarquin refused, thinking of getting them cheaper, and so the Sibyl destroyed three of the books. She then offered him the remaining six at the same price as at the beginning; Tarquin refused again and she destroyed another three. Fearing that they would all disappear, the king agreed to buy the last three but paid for them the price that the sibyl had asked for the nine. These three books were kept in the Temple of Jupiter Capitolino and were consulted in very special situations. In the year 83 B.C. C. fire destroyed the original Sibylline Books and a new collection had to be formed that has not survived to this day because in the year 405 they were definitively destroyed by order of Stilicho.

Overthrow and death

Sexto Tarquinio tries to rape Lucrecia.
Work of Giulio Romano. Ducal Palace of Mantua.

According to tradition, Tarquin the Proud was dethroned in 509 B.C. C. through a palatial coup that was triggered when Tarquinio's son, Sexto Tarquinio, raped Lucrecia, a young patrician woman who committed suicide as a result. Among the leaders of the revolt were the king's nephew, Lucio Junio Bruto, Lucrecia's husband, Lucio Tarquinio Colatino, and the young woman's father, Espurio Lucrecio, along with her powerful friend Publius Valerio Publicola.

Tarquinius, who was fighting in Ardea, quickly returned to Rome, but in his absence he lost the support of the army and had to go into exile in Etruria. There he convinced the cities of Caere, Veii and Tarquinia to attack Rome, but they were defeated in the battle of the Selva Arsia, where Brutus perished. Tarquin then turned to the Clusian king, Lars Porsena, who attacked Rome in 508 BC. C. although he was finally forced to retire. Finally he went to Tusculum, governed by his son-in-law Octavio Mamilio, who mobilized the Latin League against Rome, a rebellion that ended up being put down after the Battle of Lake Regillus (499 BC or 496 BC)..C.). Defeated, Tarquinio obtained the asylum of the tyrant Aristodemus of Cumas where he died in 495 a. c.

Once the king was overthrown, Brutus and Tarquinius Collatin were the first to be appointed consuls (at the beginning of the Republic they were called praetors) and it was decided to punish anyone who wanted to reinstate the monarchy with death. In addition, the entire Tarquin family was punished with exile, which cost Colatino himself his job, who was replaced by Publio Valerio Publícola.