I'm doing Latin because I love it, but often come to the stumbling point that I love it too much. We're doing packs of texts for our exam, four on JC's assassination, two on sleep, two on the creation of the world. Four on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which sucks because that story is so damn sad. I can read it once. Reading it four times in a row destroys me.

Same goes for the Rape of Lucretia, only that makes me angry. I'm a historian, I'm supposed to be impartial, and supposed to understand that different ages had different standards. But it still makes me foam at the injustice and idiocy of it all.

The poor dear is sitting there, recounting the story to her unhappy father and husband. Livy tells us they "try to comfort the heartsick woman by fixing the guilt not upon the victim but the transgressors: the mind sins, they said, not the body, and there is no guilt where intent is absent."

And so they should: all very sweet of them. This is what Lucretia has to say in reply:

"It is up to you to punish the man as he deserves. As for me, I absolve myself of wrong but not from punishment. Let no unchaste woman hereafter continue to live because of the precedent of Lucretia!" And then she stabs herself. And her father and husband found the Roman Republic after her example.

It makes me really, really angry, because it's not on for her to suddenly turn into some self-hating Rorschach. If I were writing the story, I think I'd point that desire for retribution in a more healthy direction - i.e. Sextus Tarquinius's nether regions. And then she can found the Roman Republic. Rome might have been better run with a woman in charge anyway...