Verginia, Lucretia, and the Medieval Livy

The tragic stories of Lucretia and Verginia, taken from the fourteenth-century French version of Livy's History of Rome , presented with facing page English translation. Livy was famous in the Middle Ages for what Dante called his "unerring" history of Rome. Within that history, two episodes were especially well-known, both promoting female virtue while also suggesting how sexual violence could trigger political change. Lucretia commits suicide after her rape, precipitating the fall of the monar