Hello, and welcome to the history of Rome.

We ended last week in 451 BC with the 12 tables of law written down and the December at

expel.

This week I want to step back a few years to focus on the life of one man, Lucius Quintius

Sintonatus, who has passed into the collective memory as a paradigm of Republican virtue,

even though the decisive moments of his life were almost certainly invented by later historians

to embellish his famous career, and, in the end, nothing he did was particularly unprecedented.

Still, his biography continues to resonate and taken by itself, it is a pretty good story

of a humble man who had absolute power thrust upon him and then remarkably relinquished

that power and returned to his plough, a man who sacrificed everything for the Republic.

Sintonatus was born around 519 BC when the king still reigned and was just a boy when

Brutus and Calatinus expelled the Tarquins.

He was therefore one of the first citizens in Rome who lived his entire life under a Republican

government without strong memories of the monarchy.

He was in the vanguard of a critical generation.

His elders remembered vividly the tyranny of Tarquin and their steadfast Republican principles

reflect a personally developed hatred of monarchy.

They were the victims and would do anything to avoid being victims again.

Sintonatus, however, and those of his generation never personally experienced this victimization.

Once they came of age, the Republic would have to sink or swim on its own merit.

If it would be tyrant and began to acquire too much power, there would be no one to turn

to and say, hey, remember Tarquin?

...