Tarpeian Rock


The Rock of Tarpeia is a steep cliff on the south side of the Capitoline Hill that was used in Ancient Rome as a site of execution.
Adjudicated murderers, traitors, perjurors, and larcenous slaves, if convicted by the quaestores parricidii, were flung from the cliff to their deaths. The cliff was about 25 meters high.

Roman legend

According to early Roman histories, when the Sabine ruler Titus Tatius attacked Rome after the Rape of the Sabines, the Vestal Virgin Tarpeia, daughter of Spurius Tarpeius, governor of the citadel on the Capitoline Hill, betrayed the Romans by opening the Porta Pandana gate for Titus Tatius in return for "what the Sabines bore on their arms". In Book 1 of Livy's Ab Urbe Condita, the Sabines "having been accepted into the citadel, killed her, having been overwhelmed by weapons, and "scuta congesta", meaning, "they heaped up shields ". The invaders crushed her to death with their shields, and her body was buried in the rock that now bears her name. Regardless of whether or not Tarpeia was buried in the rock itself, it is significant that the rock bore the name of the traitress.
About 500 BC, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh legendary king of Rome, levelled the top of the rock, removing the shrines built by the Sabines, and built the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus on the intermontium, the area between the two summits of the hill. The rock itself survived the remodelling and was used for executions well into Sulla's time. However the execution of Simon bar Giora in AD 71 was as late as the time of Vespasian.
There is a Latin phrase, Arx tarpeia Capitoli proxima, a warning that one's fall from grace can come swiftly.
To be hurled off the Tarpeian Rock was, from a certain perspective, a fate worse than mere death because it carried with it the stigma of shame. The standard method of execution in ancient Rome was by strangulation in the Tullianum. The rock was reserved for the most notorious traitors and as a place of unofficial, extra-legal executions such as the near-execution in 491 BC of legendary then-Senator Gaius Marcius Coriolanus by a mob whipped into frenzy by a tribune of the plebs.

Notable victims

Victims of this punishment included:
"Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,/
Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger/
But with a grain a day; I would not buy/
Their mercy at the price of one fair word."

"we/ Even from this instant, banish him our city,/
In peril of precipitation/
From off the rock Tarpeian, never more/
To enter our Rome gates."

  • In Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote the image of Nero watching the burning of Rome is related to the fires of passion. In Part 1, Chapter 14 Ambrosio accuses Marcela of being a cruel Nero. In Part 2, Chapter 44, Altisidora accuses Don Quixote of being a new Nero who watches her burn with love from the Tarpeian Rock: "No mires de tu Tarpeya / este incendio que me abrasa / Neron manchego del mundo."
  • In Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, a character is murdered by another character by being thrown from the Tarpeian Rock.
  • In The Cantos, Ezra Pound includes reference to the "Rupe Tarpeia" in "Notes for CXVII etc seq.": "Under the Rupe Tarpeia/ weep out your jealousies--/ To make a church/ or an altar to Zagreus/ Son of Semele/ Without jealousy/ like the double arch of a window/ Or some great colonnade."
  • The Tarpeian Cliff is mentioned multiple times in I, Claudius by Robert Graves, as a place of execution by hurling over the edge.
  • In Asterix and the Laurel Wreath, the jailer at the Circus Maximus remarks to Asterix and Obelix that, while they are getting a gourmet feast leading up to the day they are thrown to the lions: "Those who are thrown from the Tarpeian Rock are given solid, heavy food."
  • In the HBO TV series Rome, Julius Caesar refers to the site while trying to motivate his soldiers to march to Rome in opposition to the Senate.
  • In A Capitol Death by Lindsey Davis, three deaths involve falls from the Tarpeian Rock.