—Act V, scene i, lines 252-53

Diana (Artemis) is goddess of the moon, which is silver, rather than the sun's bright gold. The Latin word for silver is argentum, so that Diana as the silver goddess of the moon is the "goddess argentine."

The nation of Argentina was so named because the earliest explorers found the natives wearing silver ornaments. The river which they were exploring became the Rio de la Plata (Spanish for "Silver River"). The nation that grew up about that river as a nucleus became the Latinized version of the same idea, Argentina.

As a result, the term "goddess argentine" would nowadays be rather ambiguous.

In Ephesus Pericles discovers his wife Thaisa and so, after fourteen years, the family is reunited. It is left to Gower to explain that Marina will be married to Lysimachus and that Pericles visited vengeance on Cleon and Dionyza by returning to Tharsus and burning them in their palace.

Shakespeare wrote four plays and one narrative poem dealing with Roman history, real, legendary, or fictional. Of these, it is the poem, The Rape of Lucrece, that deals with the earliest event, the legendary fall of the Roman monarchy in 509 b.c.

If I were treating all Shakespeare's works in a single chronological grouping, The Rape of Lucrece would be placed between Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens. However, since I am segregating the Greek and Roman works, The Rape of Lucrece appears as the first of the Roman group.

The Rape of Lucrece was published about May 1594, a year after Venus and Adonis. This later poem is both longer and more serious than the earlier, and makes for harder reading too. Like the earlier poem, it is dedicated to Southampton (see page I-3), and the additional year seems to have increased the intimacy between Shakespeare and his young patron. At least the dedication begins:

—Dedication

The first stanza of the poem plunges the story into action at once:

—lines 1-3

The year, according to legend, is 509 b.c., and Rome is still no more than a city-state. It had been founded about two and a half centuries before (753 b.c. is the traditional date) and has been governed by a line of kings. Ruling in the city now is the seventh king to sit on the Roman throne. His name is Lucius Tarquinius (better known in English as Tarquin) and he has been given the surname Superbus, meaning "proud," because of his arrogant tyranny.

Tarquin forced the senatorial aristocracy into submission by executing some on trumped-up charges and by refusing to replace those who died a natural death.

He kept himself in power by gathering an armed guard about himself, and ruled as a military despot. Nevertheless, he maintained a kind of popularity with the common people by a program of public works and by an aggressive foreign policy that brought in loot from surrounding tribes.

The aristocracy could only wait and hope that some particular event would take place to alienate the populace generally from the despotic monarch.

It is not, however, King Tarquin who is referred to in the third line of the poem, but his son, Tarquinius Sextus, the heir to the throne.

The Roman army is engaged in a war against the Volscians, a tribe who occupied territory just south of Rome. The Romans were at this time laying siege to Ardea, one of the Volscian cities, just twenty miles south of Rome, and it is from this siege that Tarquin Sextus is hurrying.

The incident Shakespeare is about to relate is to be found in the first book of the History of Rome by Titus Livius (better known as Livy to English-speaking people), and also in the Fasti (Annals), written by Shakespeare's favorite ancient writer, Ovid.

Despite the fact that the incident is taken from ancient writers, it is not at all likely that it is historically accurate. In 390 b.c., a little over a century after the time of Tarquin, Rome was taken and sacked by the barbarian Gauls and the historical records were destroyed. All of Roman history prior to 390 b.c. is a mass of legends based on uncertain kernels of fact.

The legends narrated by Livy and others were, however, accepted as sober fact right down to modern times, and certainly Shakespeare accepted this tale as such. He goes on for the remainder of the first verse to tell the reason for the prince's haste:

—lines 4-6

Prince Tarquin has a cousin, also named Tarquin, whose estates are near Collatia (which Shakespeare calls "Collatium"), a small town ten miles east of Rome. He was therefore Tarquin of Collatia, or in Latin: Tarquinius Collatinus. In order to distinguish him from Tarquinius Superbus, the King, and from Tarquinius Sextus, the prince, he may be called simply Collatinus, or, in English, Collatine.

At the siege of Ardea (and a siege is usually a boring occupation) the Roman aristocrats, it seems, fell to discussing their wives, each boasting of the virtue and chastity of his own. This is the sort of thing one would scarcely think men would seriously do, yet it is common in romances. Shakespeare uses such a discussion as the mainspring of part of the action in Cymbeline (see page II-58), for instance.

In fact, the unreal romanticism of this discussion is part of what causes historians to suspect the account of the Rape of Lucrece to be a fable. It is very likely a tale made up long after Tarquin's reign to account for the establishment of the Republic; a historical romance, to begin with, later taken as sober history.

But, history or fiction, this is the tale. Of the Roman aristocrats, Collatine was most emphatic in maintaining the chastity and sobriety of his wife, Lucretia, a name of which Lucrece is a shortened version.

It came down to a wager eventually, and the Romans decided to leave the siege temporarily so that they might dash home to Rome to check on their wives' activities. Doing so, they found that all the wives but Lucrece were having a good time; dancing, laughing, gossiping, feasting. Lucrece, however, was at home, alone except for her maids, and was gravely engaged in the housewifely task of spuming.