1.46
Servius was now confirmed
on the throne by long possession. It had, however,
come to his ears that the young Tarquin was giving
out that he was reigning without the assent of the
people. He first secured the goodwill of the plebs
by assigning to each householder a slice of the land
which had been taken from the enemy. Then he was
emboldened to put to them the question whether it
was their will and resolve that he should reign. He
was acclaimed as king by a unanimous vote such as no
king before him had obtained. This action in no
degree damped Tarquin's hopes of making his way to
the throne, rather the reverse. He was a bold and
aspiring youth, and his wife Tullia stimulated his
restless ambition. He had seen that the granting of
land to the commons was in defiance of the opinion
of the senate, and he seized the opportunity it
afforded him of traducing Servius and strengthening
his own faction in that assembly. So it came about
that the Roman palace afforded an instance of the
crime which tragic poets have depicted, with the
result that the loathing felt for kings hastened the
advent of liberty, and the crown won by villainy was
the last that was worn.
This Lucius Tarquinius -whether he was the
son or the grandson of King Priscus Tarquinius is
not clear; if I should give him as the son I should
have the preponderance of authorities -had a
brother, Arruns Tarquinius, a youth of gentle
character. The two Tullias, the king's daughters,
had, as I have already stated, married these two
brothers; and they themselves were of utterly unlike
dispositions. It was, I believe, the good fortune of
Rome which intervened to prevent two violent natures
from being joined in marriage, in order that the
reign of Servius Tullius might last long enough to
allow the State to settle into its new constitution.
The high-spirited one of the two Tullias was annoyed
that there was nothing in her husband for her to
work on in the direction of either greed or
ambition. All her affections were transferred to the
other Tarquin; he was her admiration, he, she said,
was a man, he was really of royal blood. She
despised her sister, because having a man for her
husband she was not animated by the spirit of a
woman. Likeness of character soon drew them
together, as evil usually consorts best with evil.
But it was the woman who was the originator of all
the mischief. She constantly held clandestine
interviews with her sister's husband, to whom she
unsparingly vilified alike her husband and her
sister, asserting that it would have been better for
her to have remained unmarried and he a bachelor,
rather than for them each to be thus unequally
mated, and fret in idleness through the poltroonery
of others. Had heaven given her the husband she
deserved, she would soon have seen the sovereignty
which her father wielded established in her own
house. She rapidly infected the young man with her
own recklessness. Lucius Tarquin and the younger
Tullia, by a double murder, cleared from their
houses the obstacles to a fresh marriage; their
nuptials were solemnised with the tacit acquiescence
rather than the approbation of Servius.