The technique of pretending to praise what all in fact condemn, or to value highly what all in fact despise, an aspect of Chaucer's ironic technique in mentioning Cleopatra's ‘unreprovable wyfhod’ and Medea's ‘kyndenesse’, is not adequate to describe the whole of the Legend. There is also Lucrece to be considered, the heroine of which Legend few have believed was not a genuinely ‘good woman’, and the pathos of whose situation Chaucer treats with less ambivalence than that of some of her fellow heroines. The Legend of Lucrece is one of the more admired in the Legend of Good Women. Part of its success is due to the fact that Chaucer here has to deal with a fully worked out narrative from Ovid's Fasti, rather than a fragmentary series of allusions as is the case with those of the Legends derived from the Heroides.

But is Chaucer's treatment of Lucrece all that it seems? Hers was the story of a chaste Roman matron who was raped by her husband's friend and kinsman, the king's son, Tarquin. Out of dread for the posthumous ill-fame with which Tarquin threatened her, Lucretia had offered him no physical resistance, but committed suicide after informing her husband and relatives of what had happened.