Yale's course Let This Be a Lesson turns to Gavin Hamilton, a Scottish painter working in Rome who was also an art dealer, excavator, and tour guide, for its sixth lecture. The subject is Hamilton's neoclassical painting of the death of Lucretia, drawn from Livy's account of early Rome, in which a virtuous woman's suicide after assault spurs her male relatives to avenge her and overthrow the monarchy. The lecturer traces how Hamilton composed the scene for maximum moral and dramatic force, comparing his figures and staging to Spartan austerity and to later artists who borrowed his blunt eloquence as a model for history painting. The talk situates Hamilton within Rome's international art world and the eighteenth century's turn toward stern, exemplary subjects from Roman history, using close visual analysis of the canvas alongside its literary source.