Article: Lotto's Lucretia.(Review)

"How a state is ruined because of women": This is neither a headline from the Washington Post nor a reference to Diana, Princess of Wales. It is the title of chapter 26 of Niccolo Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. "Women have been the causes of much ruin," Machiavelli explains, "and have done great harm to those who govern a city, and have caused many divisions in these [cities]."(1) He illustrates the point by recalling how "the excess done against Lucretia took the state away from the Tarquins," the Etruscan rulers of Rome.(2) The "excess" to which Machiavelli refers is the rape of Lucretia, Collatinus's beautiful and chaste wife, by Sextus Tarquinius, son of the ...

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