On Friday, the 25^th of March, 2022, our guest at the Forvm Romanvm was Prof. Dr Konstantin Tanev from the Faculty of Law of the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, and the subject of his lecture was „The case of Lucretia: Symbolizing the Political Reality”. Prof. Tanev first gave us the basic information on the legendary case of Lucretia’s rape by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the last Roman king, Tarquin the Proud: according to lore, it was precisely this event that lead the people to rise against the Tarquin family and create a republic. He pointed out that this myth has parallels across Indo-European culture, considered previously by Dumézil, with some important motifs appearing again and again, such as the threat of a false accusation of adultery and the death of the heroine. He compared the female honour of Lucretia and Penelope, as ladies of noble birth, and analyzed several reliefs from the urns of Volterra depicting Lucretia’s suicide and Tarquin’s exile. He also opened up a very important legal question – the fact that metus (fear) was not recognized as an element of rape up until Augustan legal reforms, which explains Lucretia’s reaction. While walking us through a political and economic analysis of this shift in the form of government and the way it was perceived by contemporaries, the professor reminded us that Romans called the period that ensued the period of liberty, and it wasn’t until later that it was dubbed after the Latin word for the state – res publica. In time, traditional mythology was replaced with an ideological image of a society ruled by virtue instead of origin. The post-lecture discussion involved legal and political implications of this story, and its evolution in the Roman society and in Christian Europe, including the opera by Benjamin Britten.