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Tarpeian Rock
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Tarpeian Rock (rupes Tarpeia) was a steep cliff of the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill, overlooking the Roman Forum in Ancient Rome. It was used during the Roman Republic as an execution site. Murderers and traitors, if convicted by the quaestores parricidii, were flung from the cliff to their deaths. Those who had a mental or significant physical disability also suffered the same fate as they were thought to have been cursed by the gods.
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According to legend, when Titus Tatius attacked Rome after the Rape of the Sabines, the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia, daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, governor of the citadel on the Capitoline Hill, betrayed the Romans by opening the city gates for the Sabines in return for 'what they bore on their arms.' She believed that she would receive their golden bracelets. Instead, the Sabines crushed her to death with their shields, and she was thrown from the rock which now bears her name.
About 500 BC, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh legendary king of Rome, leveled the top of the rock, removing the shrines built by the Sabines, and built the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the intermontium, the area between the two summits of the hill. The rock was also the site of the Temple of Saturn, which contained the Roman treasury that Julius Caesar raided in 49 BC
Victims of this punishment included:
- Spurius Cassius Vecellinus, 485 BC
- Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, 384 BC, for sedition
- rebels from Tarentum, 212 BC
- Lucius Cornelius Chrysogonus, freedman of Lucius Cornelius Sulla Felix, managed the proscription to restore the depleted Roman Treasury at or near 82 BC.
- Simon Bar Giora, 70 AD
- Michael Grant, Roman Myths, Scribner's, New York (1971), p. 123.
- Livy Book 1