An amusing excerpt from Livy...

From Livy's Early history of Rome...


Tarquin - or Lucius Tarquinius, son or grandson (probably the former) of Tarquinius Preiscus - had a brother called Arruns, a mild-mannered young man. The two brothers, as I mentioned before, had married Servius' daughters, both of them named Tullia but in character diametrically opposed to each other. By what I cannot but feel was the luck of Rome, it so happened that the two fiercely ambitious ones, Tarquin and the younger Tullia, did not, in the first instance, become man and wife; for Rome was thereby granted a period of reprieve; Servius' reign lasted a few years longer, and Roman civilization was able to advance.

The younger Tullia was bitterly humilitaed by the weakness of her husband Arrans, and fiercely resented his lack of ambition and fire. It was to Tarquin that the whole passion of her nature turned; Tarquin was her hero, Tarquin her ideal of a true man and a true prince. Her sister she despised for failing to support with a woman's courage the husband she did not deserve. There was a magnetic power in evil; like draws towards like, and so it was with Tarquin and the younger Tullia.

It was the woman who took the first step along the road of crime. Whispers passedbetween her and her sister's husband; their secret meetings grew more frequent, their talk less guarded. Soon she was pouring into his ears the frankest abuse of her sister and Arruns, while Tarquin, though one was his brother and the other his brother's wife, let here talk on. 'You and I,' she said, 'would have been better single than bound in a marriage so incongruous and absurd, where each of us is forced by a cowardly partner to fritter our lives away in hopeless inactivity. Ah! if God had but given me the husband I deserve, I should soon see in my own house that royalty which I now see in my father's!'

The bold words struck and answering fire. Two deaths soon followed, one close upon the other, and Tarquin found himself a widower, Tullia a widow. The guity pair were then married - the king not preventing, but hardly approving, the match.


I love Livy's phrasing there -- almost like a sinister kind of Wodehouse.

Note to my fellow writers the use of the passive. The passive voice takes all responsibility for the action away from the sentence -- exactly what Livy's using for a sort of dry ironic humor. But most people use the passive voice far too much. Beware the passive voice, my son.