907 



TARQUINIUS. 



TARTAGLIA, NICHOLAS. 



903 



supposed to have existed before it, and to have enabled him to do 

 what he did, so that this increase of the power and dominion of Rome 

 must have taken place previous to his reign, although we do not know 

 how it was effected. Some traditions mentioned (Tacitus, ' AnnaL,' 

 iv. 65) that under Tarquiuius Priscus an Etruscan of the name of 

 Cteles Vibenna came wibli a colony to Rome and settled on the Cioliun 

 Hill, which derived its name from him. 



Lucius TAKQUINIUS SCFERBUS, the seventh and last king of -Rome, 

 was the son of Tarquinius Priscus, and brother of Arung. Tullia, a 

 daughter of Servius Tullius, was married to the gentle Aruns, and her 

 sister to L. Tarquiuius. In concert with Lucius, Tullia murdered her 

 own husband Aruns and her sister, and then married L. Tarquinius. 

 Lucius placed himself at the head of a conspiracy and murdered his 

 own father-in-law, the aged Servius Tullius. Tarquinius, who received 

 the surname of the Haughty or the Tyrant (Superbus), succeeded his 

 father-in-law as king of Rome B.C. 584, without either being elected by 

 the people or confirmed by the senate. 



There is no doubt that the hatred of the very name of king which 

 prevailed at Rome during the republic has greatly contributed to 

 exaggerate the cruelty and tyranny of the last king, and thus to 

 corrupt his history. But notwithstanding all this, it is clear that 

 Tarquin by his talents, both as a general and a statesman, quickly 

 raised Rome to a degree of power which it had never possessed before. 

 The first act attributed to him after his accession is the death of all 

 the senators who had supported the reforms of Servius Tullius, and in 

 order to render his own person safe, he formed an armed body-guard, 

 which always accompanied him. He in fact undid all that Servius 

 had done : he took on himself the administration of justice, put per- 

 sons to death or sent them into exile according to his own pleasure, 

 and kept the whole internal and external administration in his own 

 hands, without either consulting the people or the senate. In order 

 that the senate might sink into insignificance, he never filled up the 

 vacancies which so frequently occurred through his executions, banish- 

 ments, or through the natural death of senators. To secure himself 

 still more, he formed a close connection with the Latins, to one of 

 whom, Octavius Mamilius of Tusculum, he gave his own daughter in 

 marriage. The influence which he thus gained among the Latins was 

 most visible in their assemblies on the Alban Mount by the temple of 

 Jupiter Latiaris, in which Rome also had a vote. Tarquinius, by 

 cunuing and fraud, or, according to others, by force of arms, subdued 

 the towns of Latium and placed Rome at the head of the league 

 (Livy, i. 50,-&c. ; Dionysius, iv. 45, &c.; Cicero, 'De Re PubL,' ii. 24), 

 which was now also joined by the Hernicans and the Volscian towns 

 of Ecetra and Antium. 'The wealthy town of Suessa Pometia was 

 besieged and taken, perhaps because it had refused to join the league. 

 The Latin town of Gabii experienced a similar fate. Sextus, the 

 sou of Tarquin, went thither under the pretext of being a de- 

 serter, and contrived to put himself at the head of the Gabian army. 

 After having put to death or sent into exile the most distinguished 

 citizens of Gabii by the advice of his father, he treacherously surren- 

 dered the town to him. The whole account of the war with Gabii 

 bears the character of a fable, and resembles in many respects other 

 fabulous stories of early Grecian history. The treaty which was formed 

 with Gabii after its surrender was engraved on a wooden shield, and 

 preserved in the temple of Jupiter Fidius to the time of Dionysius of 

 Halicarnassus. Tarquin founded in the conquered territory of the 

 Volscians the two colonies of Signia and Circeii, by which he extended 

 and strengthened the power of Rome. 



Tarquin is said to have been fond of splendour and magnificence. 

 He built the capitol, with the threefold temple of Jupiter, Juno, and 

 Minerva, and adorned it with brazen statues of the gods and of the 

 early kings. (Livy, i. 53; Dionysius, iv. 59; Pliny, 'Hist. Nat.,' 

 xxxiii. 13.) Here also he deposited the oracular books which he had 

 purchased from a Sibyl. After the establishment of the colonies of 

 Signia and Circeii, a fearful omen was seen, which seemed to bode 

 ruin to his family ; and in order to understand its import he sent his 

 two sons, Titus and Aruus, accompanied by his nephew, L. Juntas 

 Brutus, to Delphi. To the question as to which of the three ambas- 

 sadors was to reign at Rome, the Pythia answered : he who should 

 first kiss his mother. Brutus, who had always assumed the appearance 

 of an idiot, understood the oracle, and on landing in Italy, fell down 

 and kissed the earth, the mother of all. Tarquin's coffers were now 

 exhausted by the great works that he had undertaken, and he was 

 tempted to make himself master of Ardea, a wealthy town of the 

 Rutuli. Aa however he did not succeed in his first attack, he laid 

 siege to the town. While this was going on, a dispute arose between 

 the sons of Tarquin and their cousin, C. Tarquinius Collatinus, 

 respecting the virtue of their wives. This led to the violation of 

 the chaste Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, who lived at Collatia, 

 by Sextus, the son of Tarquin. As the highest pride of a Roman 

 woman at this time was her virtue, Lucretia sent for her husband, 

 father, and Brutus, and killed herself in their presence, after having 

 cursed the family of tbi king, and implored her friends to avenge the 

 injury which she had suffered. Brutus immediately marched with an 

 armed force from Collatia to Rome, and roused the people to avenge 

 the indignity and throw off the yoke of the tyrant. The citizens were 

 easily persuaded ; they deprived the king, who was yet in the camp of 

 Ardea, of his imperium, and banished him with his wife and children 



from Rome, B.O. 510. After these occurrences Tarquin hastened to 

 Rome, but finding the gates of the city shut upon him, and learning 

 that he was declared an exile, he retired to Caere, whither he was 

 followed by his son Aruus. His other son Sextus sought a refuge at 

 Gabii, but the citizens, remembering his former treachery, put him to 

 death. The simple fact of the banishment of King Tarquin, which 

 was commemorated at Rome every year by a festival called 'The King's 

 Flight" (Regifugium or Fugalia), is beyond all doubt historical; but 

 what is described as its immediate cause, and its accompanying circum- 

 stances, may be poetical inventions. 



Tarquin however did not give up the hope of recovering what he 

 had lost. He first sent ambassadors to Rome to demand the surrender 

 of his moveable property. During their stay in the city the amba-sa- 

 dors formed a conspiracy, in which young patricians chiefly are said to 

 have joined them. The conspirators were discovered and put to 

 death, and the moveablo property of the royal family was given up to 

 the people, in order to render reconciliation impossible. The king id 

 said to have found favour and protection with the inhabitants of 

 Caere and Tarquinii, and with the Veientines, and to have led the 

 united forces of these people against the Romans, who however 

 defeated their enemies near the forest of Arsia. Brutus fell in this 

 battle in single combat with Aruns. Tarquin now sought and found 

 assistance at Clusium, which was then governed by the mighty Lar 

 Porsena. [PORSENA.] During the war of this chieftain with Rome 

 Tarquin is entirely lost sight of in the narrative of the historians; but 

 after its conclusion we find him supported by the Latins, and waging 

 a fresh war against the Romans under the Latin dictator Octavius 

 Mamilius of Tusculum. The battle near lake Regillus (B.C. 496), in 

 which the king lost his only surviving son, decided the whole contest. 

 The account of the detail of this battle is as fabulous as any part of 

 the early history of Rome, and formed, as Niebuhr supposes, the con- 

 cluding part of the ' Lay of the Tarquins.' The aged king, now 

 deprived of all his hopes, retired to Cumae, which was then governed 

 by the tyrant Aristodemus, where he died the year following, B.C. 495. 



(Livy, ii. 19, &c. ; Dionysius, vi. 2, &c. ; Niebuhr, 'Hist, of Rome,' 

 i. p. 555, &c.) 



Lucius TARQUINIUS COLLATINUS, the son of Egerius, and the hus- 

 band of Lucretia. After the banishment of the king he was elected 

 consul together with L. Junius Brutus. But the people beginning 

 to suspect that he might perhaps be tempted to follow the example 

 of his kinsman, and endanger the freedom of the young republic, he 

 was compelled to abdicate, and to submit to the sentence of exile, 

 which was now pronounced upon the whole family of the Tarquinii. 

 (Livy, L 57, 60 ; ii. 2.) 



TARRENTE'NUS PATERNUS, a Roman jurist, was Pnefectus 

 Prsetorio under Commodus, by whom he was put to death. (Lam- 

 prid., ' Commod.' 4.) He wrote four books 'De Re Militari,' from 

 which there are two excerpts in the Digest. He is mentioned by 

 Vegetius (' De Re Militari,' i. 8.) 



TARTA'GLIA, NICHOLAS, a learned Italian mathematician, who 

 was born at Brescia about the beginning of the 16th century. When 

 he was six years of age his father, who followed the humble occupa- 

 tion of a messenger or carrier, died, leaving him in indigent circum- 

 stances, and without education. Even his family name is unknown, 

 and that which he bore (designating one who stammers) was given 

 him in derision by his young companions in consequence of an impe- 

 diment in his speech arising from a wound which he received on his 

 lips from a soldier, when the French army under Gaston de Foix 

 relieved Brescia in 1512. 



No account has been transmitted of the means by which Tartaglia 

 obtained a knowledge of the rudiments of science, and it is probable 

 that he owed but little to a preceptor. His own exertions, aided only 

 by a mind endowed with the power of readily comprehending the 

 processes of mathematical investigation, enabled him at length to 

 attain the highest rank among the geometers of his time. Having 

 passed several years as a teacher at Verona and Vicenza, he was 

 appointed professor of mathematics at Brescia, and in 1534 he removed 

 to Venice, where he held the like post till hia death, which took placo 

 in 1557. 



Tartaglia wrote on military engineering and on natural philosophy, 

 but it is on his talents as an algebraist that his fame principally rests. 

 In that age it was the custom for mathematicians to send difficult 

 propositions to each other for solution, as trials of skill ; and in the 

 work entitled * Quesiti ed Invention! Diverse,' which Tartaglia pub- 

 lished in 1546, there are contained some interesting accounts of the 

 circumstances connected with the algebraic questions which he had 

 received and answered. Among these are his investigations relating 

 to equations of the third degree ; and the solutions of two cases, in 

 which both the second and third powers of the unknown quantity are 

 involved, are shown to have been discovered in 1530, on the occasion 

 of a question proposed by a person who kept a school at Brescia : 

 Tartaglia states also that, in the year 1535, he found out the solutions 

 of two equations, in which the first and third powers of the unknown 

 quantity enter without the second, while preparing himself for a 

 public contest with Antonia Maria Fiore, who then resided at Venice, 

 and who had challenged him to a competition, in which each was to 

 solve as many as he could of thirty questions to be proposed by the 

 other. It is added that Tartaglia, in two hours, answered all those 



