She constantly held clandestine interviews with her sister's husband, to whom she unsparingly vilified alike her husband and her sister, asserting that it would have been better for her to have remained unmarried and he a bachelor, rather than for them each to be thus unequally mated, and fret in idleness through the poltroonery of others. Had heaven given her the husband she deserved, she would soon have seen the sovereignty which her father wielded established in her own house.
She rapidly infected the young man with her own recklessness. Lucius Tarquin and the younger Tullia, by a double murder, cleared from their houses the obstacles to a fresh marriage; their nuptials were solemnised with the tacit acquiescence rather than the approbation of Servius.
From that time the old age of Tullius became more embittered, his reign more unhappy. The woman began to look forward from one crime to another; she allowed her husband no rest day or night, for fear lest the past murders should prove fruitless.
What she wanted, she said, was not a man who was only her husband in
name, or with whom she was to live in uncomplaining servitude; the man
she needed was one who deemed himself worthy of a throne, who remembered
that he was the son of Priscus Tarquinius, who preferred to wear a crown
rather than live in hopes of it.
“If you are the man to whom I thought I was married, then I call you my husband and my king; but if not, I have changed my condition for the worse, since you are not only a coward but a criminal to boot. Why do you not prepare yourself for
action? You are not, like your father, a native of
State? Why do you allow yourself to be looked up to as a youth of kingly
stock? Make your way back to