Tarpeia’s Betrayal:
Reading Sexual Difference in the Augustan City

Denise E. McCoskey (Miami University)

Nearly thirty years into his reign, the well-established princeps Augustus executed what is perhaps the most fully realized example of his elaborate building program:  the Forum of Augustus.  This Forum features two figures that were pivotal for Augustus’ self-representation:  Aeneas and Romulus (Zanker 195).  While both these figures signify for Augustus important stages or episodes along the broader evolution of Roman power, their stories, as some scholars have noted, also contain striking messages about the role of women with regard to this monumental enterprise.  Indeed, given that civil war (with allusions to fratricide) provided a problematic starting point for the origins of the Augustan state, Augustan authors frequently identified a different, albeit equally violent, dynamic at the site of Rome’s political foundations:  female exclusion.  Thus, in the works of Augustan writers like Vergil and Livy, Roman political transformations are enacted through, often at the expense of, women defined as structural and geographic outsiders.  In turn, such origin myths helped justify the devastating Augustan notion of woman’s incompatibility with the new Roman state by giving it a mythical or historical origin.  In this paper, I explore this Augustan use of a gendered past by investigating the ways in which another specific myth of origin worked likewise to establish a fundamental antagonism (one expressed in spatial terms) between women and the Augustan empire.  I will focus specifically on the myth of Tarpeia—as it appears on Augustan coinage and in the work of Propertius—a myth I believe has been greatly underestimated in relation to Augustan geography and propaganda.  For, in the context of Augustan textuality, Tarpeia’s presumed historical betrayal of the city serves as a powerful reminder to its Roman audience of the categorical dangers women (still) presented to the security of the Roman city.