Perspectives On and Of Livy's Tarpeia - EuGeStA

196 TaRa WeLCh
tate spem partus adimit. sed debebatur, ut opinor, fatis tantae origo urbis
maximique secundum deorum opes imperii principium. vi compressa
vestalis cum geminum partum edidisset, seu ita rata, seu quia deus auctor
culpae honestior erat, Martem incertae stirpis patrem nuncupat. sed
nec di nec homines aut ipsam aut stirpem a crudelitate regia vindicant:
sacerdos vincta in custodiam datur, pueros in profluentem aquam mitti
iubet (1.3.11-1.4).
he (amulius) added crime to crime. he killed the male stock of
his brother. as for his niece Rhea silvia, when he named her a vestal
virgin (pretending it to be an honor) he took away from her hope of
offspring through her perpetual virginity. But the origin of such a great
city as ours was indebted to the fates, the origin and the beginning of the
greatest empire after the resources of the Gods. When the vestal, having
been taken by force, delivered twin sons, she named Mars as the father
of her uncertain offspring, either because she believed it to be the case
or because a divine instigator of her onus seemed more honorable. But
neither gods nor men shielded the mother herself or the offspring from
the king’s cruelty; the priestess was bound and sent into custody, and the
boys he ordered to be thrown into the running river.
Note in this episode two instances of the now familiar pairing of
deception and the difficulty of seeming. first, amulius made Rhea silvia
a vestal virgin under the guise of honoring her, but his aim was really to
prevent her from producing Numitor’s heir. I draw attention to the fact
that Rhea is a virgin precisely because amulius wanted to close off any
possibility that she reproduce; he wanted extreme control over the ways
the larger family would be open to expansion. Like the other women we
have considered here, Rhea silvia “goes outside” to produce the first true
Roman offspring. Livy speculates about Rhea’s naming of Mars as the
twins’ father in a way that renders that paternity doubly suspect: either
(Mars was or was not the father but) she thought it was so (seu ita rata);
or (he was not the father, she knew he was not, but) she thought that
naming him would lessen the burden of her culpability (seu quia deus
auctor culpae honestior erat). This pair of possibilities is the first instance
of “twinning” in the story about twins, and like the concept of twins it
exploits the meeting point between similarity and difference. as further
indication of Livy’s equivocation he calls the babies incertae stirpis. These
phrases together suggest just how powerful (and dangerous) the woman is
in opening up a society to newcomers through her ability to incorporate
external bloodlines. exiled Romulus and Remus will turn out to have
something regal in them that confirms, or at least suggests, their maternal
regal heritage (aetatem eorum et ipsam minime seruilem indolem, 1.5.6),