Background
Brutus was born in Ancient Rome in 545.
Brutus was born in Ancient Rome in 545.
Brutus is said to have overthrown the monarchy by expelling his uncle, King Tarquin the Proud, after the latter's son caused a great furor by raping and forcing the suicide of the noble Lucretia. According to legend, Brutus had been Tarquin's equerry and now became Rome's first consul, with Tarquinius Collatinus, Lucretia's husband, as his colleague. Brutus is probably an historical figure, but everything told of him smacks of the miraculous and the mythical. In his youth he avoided death at Tarquin's hands by supposedly feigning idiocy (whence his surname Brutus). Then, again according to legend, when the Delphic oracle announced to him and Tarquin's sons that he who first kissed his mother would rule Rome after Tarquin, Brutus stumbled and kissed the earth (terra mater). After becoming consul he is supposed to have humanized certain primitive cults, created the rex sacrorum (an office upon which were bestowed the religious functions once belonging to the king), expanded the senate, and introduced several of the practices used by the Roman republic, including the alternation of the fasces, the symbols of authority, between the two consuls. Other stories, probably spurious, tell us that he drove his colleague Collatinus from Rome, passed a law exiling all Tarquins, and even executed his own sons for plotting to restore the monarchy. According to these accounts he died fighting the Etruscans, who were trying to reinstate Tarquin.
Lucius Junius Brutus is held to have ousted the despotic Etruscan king Lucius Tarquinius Superbus from Rome in 509 and then to have founded the Roman Republic. He is said to have been elected to the first consulship in that year and then to have condemned his own sons to death when they joined in a conspiracy to restore the Tarquins.
Lucius had two sons: Tiberius Junius Brutus and Titus Junius Brutus.
