Rape of the Sabine women
According to Roman historian Livy, the abduction of Sabine women occurred in the early history of Rome shortly after its founding in the mid-8th century BC and was perpetrated by Romulus and his predominantly male followers; it is said that after the foundation of the city, the population consisted solely of Latins and other Italic peoples, in particular male bandits.
According to Livy, many people from Rome's neighboring towns – including Caenina, Crustumerium, and Antemnae – attended the festival along with the Sabines, eager to see the newly established city for themselves.
[5] All of the women abducted at the festival were said to have been virgins except for one married woman, Hersilia, who became Romulus's wife and would later be the one to intervene and stop the ensuing war between the Romans and the Sabines.
Roman colonists were subsequently sent to Antemnae and Crustumerium by Romulus, and many citizens of those towns, particularly the families of the captured women, also migrated to Rome.
Tatius almost succeeded in capturing Rome, thanks to the treason of Tarpeia, daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, Roman governor of the citadel on the Capitoline Hill.
At this point in the story, the Sabine women intervened: [They], from the outrage on whom the war originated, with hair dishevelled and garments rent, the timidity of their sex being overcome by such dreadful scenes, had the courage to throw themselves amid the flying weapons, and making a rush across, to part the incensed armies, and assuage their fury; imploring their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, "that as fathers-in-law and sons-in-law they would not contaminate each other with impious blood, nor stain their offspring with parricide, the one their grandchildren, the other their children.
According to Livy, Romulus spoke to each of them in person, declaring "that it was all owing to the pride of their parents in denying right of intermarriage to their neighbours.
They would live in honourable wedlock, and share all their property and civil rights, and – dearest of all to human nature – would be the mothers of freemen.
"[4] Scholars like Dionysius of Halicarnassus argue that it was an attempt to secure an alliance with the Sabines through the women's newly founded relationships with Roman men.
In Cicero's work De re publica, he reiterates Livy's view that the plan to abduct the Sabine women at the festival was done in order "to strengthen the new state" and "safeguard the resources of his kingdom and people.
"[11] Unlike Livy, Cicero, and Dionysius, Ovid sees the abduction of the Sabine as an avenue for the men of Rome to fulfill their sexual desires rather than an attempt at taking wives to produce children for the city.
Theodor Mommsen (as well as later historians such as Jacques Poucet [fr]) believed that the story was likely spread during the later fourth century BC after the Samnite Wars as a tale to explain the assimilation of Samnites into Rome after a combination of wars and alliances, and sending similar events into the distant past.
It was also an example of a battle subject in which the artist could demonstrate his skill in depicting female as well as male figures in extreme poses, with the added advantage of a sexual theme.
[13] Originally intended as nothing more than a demonstration of the artist's ability to create a complex sculptural group, its subject matter, the legendary rape of the Sabines, had to be invented after Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, decreed that it be put on public display in the Loggia dei Lanzi in Piazza della Signoria, Florence.
The proposed site for the sculpture, opposite Benvenuto Cellini's statue of Perseus, prompted suggestions that the group should illustrate a theme related to the former work, such as the rape of Andromeda by Phineus.
According to the Met, the subject matter of Poussin's work allowed him to highlight his understanding of pose and gesture as well as his knowledge of Roman architecture.
Rubens emphasizes the violence of the abduction and sexualizes it by depicting women with exposed breasts and a soldier lifting up a woman's skirt.
Johann Heinrich Schönfeld painted a version of this subject entitled The Rape of the Sabine Women in the late 1630s.
[21] The painting depicts Romulus's wife Hersilia – the daughter of Titus Tatius, leader of the Sabines – rushing between her husband and her father and placing her babies between them.
[citation needed] The English 19th-century satirical painter John Leech included in his The Comic History of Rome a depiction of the rape of the Sabine women, where the women are portrayed, with a deliberate anachronism, in Victorian costume and being carried off from the Corona et Anchora ("Crown and Anchor", a common English pub sign in seafaring towns).
He was most interested in the great works of the Italian Renaissance and of his own classical French heritage, hence this detailed copy of Poussin's painting.
Pablo Picasso visited this theme in his several versions of the Rape of the Sabine Women (1962–63), one of which is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
These conflate the beginning and end of the story, depicting the brutish Romulus and Tatius ignoring and trampling on the exposed figure of Hersilia and her child.
The midrash Sefer haYashar (first attested in 1624) portrays the story as part of a war between the Sabines, descended from Tubal, and the Roman Kittim (Jasher 17:1–15).
Later adapted into the 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, it tells the story of seven gauche but sincere backwoodsmen, one of whom gets married, encouraging the others to seek partners.
Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) features a group of all-male players offering to put on a performance of The Rape of the Sabine Women, to the disgust of the title characters.
[32] The latest adaptation is a film without dialogue, The Rape of the Sabine Women, which was produced in 2005 by Eve Sussman and the Rufus Corporation.
