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【collation】
The next night, when he knew Lucretia's husband was away, King Tarquin's son crept back to her house alone. With a knife at her throat, he raped her, and swore that if she breathed a word of it, he'd kill her. That would be unnecessary. The next day, too proud to live with her dishonor, Lucretia killed herself. Romans went wild, mobs tore through the streets, and attacked the Etruscans wherever they found them. A stern nobleman named Brutus organized a furious attack on the Etruscan king and his courtiers. They were overwhelmed, and fled for their lives. Romans were finally free of their Etruscan overlords. Lucretia's legacy to Rome was its freedom.
Romans vowed they would never again live under a king. So how exactly were they going to live? How would they govern themselves? Their solution was momentous. They declared that the affairs of Rome would belong to the people that citizens would vote and that Rome would be a Res publica ,a public affair, a Republic. Government would no longer be the business of kings. Rome would be ruled by laws and elected officials. The first two elected leaders called consuls were Brutus and Lucretia's widowed husband.
"And so a king was replaced with, first, two praetors, eventually, two consuls. With two, both of them in an agreement on everything elected annually, so that no one person ever had very much power for very long at all. And this paranoia about kings continues all the way through Roman history."
In ways he never could have imagined, Servius's census has born fruit. The new Republic would be organized according to the voting categories and classes he put in place 40 years earlier. The birth of the republic staked Rome's claim to a place in history.
SPQR was the Republic's banner: Senatus Populus que Romanus: the Senate and people of Rome. It was the ancient world's first representational government. It paved the way for Rome's glories and all democracies to come.
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