Prof Dame Mary Beard - Lucretia and the politics of sexual violence 

Yvt

Think again: you got a king. Tyrannical. You are fed off....having a king... having a tyrannical king. Then to topple it all the king's son - and possible next king - feels entitled to get any woman he pleases, married or not ? So....how would you feel: you work, has your properties, richness but anytime some brute crowned guy can come to your house and rape your wife or daughters. Something is faulty in a system like this. Isn't it better to overthrown the royal family and make another system ?

I don't know about oratory, but in one of the episodes of Ultimate Rome, Pf. Beard tours a series of public government erected sculptures that depict the different Roman provinces as women being raped by the emperors at the time of their conquest, i. e. the very first depiction of Brittania is as a naked woman being thrown down and raped by Claudius. I've also read in works on Roman sexuality that they didn't think in gay or straight, rather that penetration, dominance and conquest was ALWAYS defined by the masculine, and to be penetrated, dominated and conquered was ALWAYS defined as feminine. So it's my personal opinion that, in the Roman mind, to conquer and destroy the kings of Rome is the EXACT male on male equivalent of raping Lucretia. That in stories where the control of the Roman state, or any land the Romans conquered, a raped woman becomes the symbol of the state because, by succumbing to the conquest of it's new masters, the state has symbolically taken on that permanently feminine role of being penetrated, dominated, and conquered. I think Lucretia, the Sabine women, and Verginia are all part of one mythological heritage because any time the Roman political system changed hands, the state itself HAD to be represented by a violated female because it had succumbed, female, to a new dominating force, male. The thing that really surprises me is that there's no big rape story to go along with the transition from Republic to Empire, though Caesar literally being penetrated by dozens of stab wounds MIGHT count, but he retained his masculinity, so???? That one confuses me.

Certainly in Roman poetry. And of course it created the impetus for the creation of the republic so I assume so

In this instance, Roman mythology has CREATED fact. To say that Pf. Beard, or any of the commentators, are suggesting that a real Lucretia really got raped is ludicrous. But there is a direct line from those types of stories to all the antique, medieval and Renaissance commentators talking about her enjoyment, her consent, how she might have invited it, to modern ideas about consent, blame and what does and does not constitute rape, which ideas create facts about who gets blamed, who gets prosecuted, who gets convicted. Of course there is an agenda: to help people understand that there is a direct heritage of ideas that shape how we think about things today. You'll find it difficult to change something if you don't understand where it originated from. People drastically underestimate the influence Roman thought has on modern Western culture.

Livy included it in his History of Rome, if there was an agenda it was part of roman society and Augustine politics. They believed or claimed this stuff was the origin of their society.

At 2:37 she prefaces the lecture by saying she's discussing mythology, although that's often implied when discussing classical antiquity as the lines between myth and history can be blurred. The rape of Lucretia is accepted as the reason for the fall of the Roman monarchy; whether that's historically accurate isn't really relevant to the points she makes.