​LUCRETIA, a Roman lady, wife of Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, distinguished for her beauty and domestic virtues. Having been outraged by Sextus Tarquinius, one of the sons of Tarquinius Superbus, she informed her father and her husband, and, having exacted an oath of vengeance from them, stabbed herself to death. Lucius Junius Brutus, her husband’s cousin, put himself at the head of the people, drove out the Tarquins, and established a republic. The accounts of this tradition in later writers present many points of divergence.