Titus Livius, Ab Urbe Condita 1.46-48, 59.10: Tullia Minor

Agrippina Minor, Empress , 1st Century CE

Tullia Minor, the ambitious younger daughter of Rome’s beloved sixth king, Servius Tullius (578-535 BCE), and wife of Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last king of Rome (534-510 BCE), is offered in Livy's history as a transgressive woman and an exemplum of evil. Tullia's father, either a Roman or Latin by birth and perhaps a royal former slave, assumed the kingship through the strategies of Tanaquil, wife of Rome's fifth king, Tarquinius Priscus, after her husband was murdered by the sons of Ancus Marcius, the fourth king of Rome (642-617 BCE). In order to safeguard his kingship, Servius gave his two daughters, both named Tullia, in marriage to the two sons of Priscus and Tanaquil, Arruns and Lucius (later Tarquinius Superbus), whom he had displaced at their father's death as minors incapable of ruling. Unlike Tanaquil, Tullia Minor was not content to manage affairs quietly behind the scenes; she harangued Lucius, the brother-in-law whom she took for her husband, into bloody deeds and boldly flaunted her power. Livy calls her ferox, depicting her as even more vicious than her husband, who is often cited as a model of depravitas. In Tullia Livy offers a shocking portrayal of familial and civic impietas that ends in her family’s exile. Livy's account of Tarquinius' reign is noteworthy for the two women it offers as exempla: Lucretia, a violated noblewoman who determined that her pudicitia and not her shame would live on in Roman history, and Tullia Minor, a royal whose unbounded ferocitas and audacitas branded her as an infamous example of womanhood. Poles apart in character and motivation, their public actions brought about the overthrow of the Monarchy and the birth of the Republic (509 BCE).

Chapter 46 opens on the political struggle for the throne between the younger Tarquinius (Lucius) and his father-in-law, King Servius. Although Livy offers several reasons for Tarquinius' persistence, he focuses his attention on one: the continuous instigation of Tullia Minor. Here, recreating her voice and intentions through indirect discourse, Livy describes in detail how she, through unending denigration of her husband Arruns and elder sister, brought about an alliance with her brother-in-law that ended in the deaths of their spouses and marriage to each other.

Chapter 47: having obtained as her husband the brother more suited to her ambitions for political power, Tullia Minor is shown restlessly anticipating her fathe's death. Livy dramatizes the narrative by quoting Tullia's "very words" in the middle of her reported arguments with her husband. Taunting Tarquinius to take steps to undermine and succeed the old king, Tullia succeeds in getting him to act: he executes a coup d'etat (sections 8-12) by calling an assembly of the Senate and having himself proclaimed king; in his address to the shocked and fearful patres he aligns himself with elite interests, scornfully describing Servius' claim to the throne as a muliebre donum to a former slave.

Chapter 48: Servius, arriving at the Senate House to challenge Tarquinius' accusations, is bodily ejected by him and pursued and killed by hired assassins, which Livy suggests Tullia recommended. Having violated the laws of kinship, Tullia has no hesitation in transgressing gender rules: she drives a carriage into the Forum, calls her husband out of the Senate meeting, and claims the right of first salute to the new king. On her way home she sees her father's corpse lying in the road and deliberately drives over it in a fit of madness that Livy attributes to the Furies.

Chapter 59: having rehearsed the bloody and despotic beginnings of Tarquinius Superbus' reign in detail, Livy concludes the final 25 years of the Roman monarchy in 10 chapters. The chapter opens with Lucius Junius Brutus swearing, over Lucretia's dead body, to pursue Tarquinius cum scelerata coniuge and to eradicate the monarchy. Brutus leads dissidents into the Roman Forum, where, as Tribune of the Celeres, the king’s bodyguard of aristocrats, he addresses them on the abuses of the Tarquinii, giving as final evidence their murder of Servius, both king and father. Following his speech with action, Brutus leads an army against the king. Livy's final words in this chapter are for Tullia.

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