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The property of the state, however, was not identified with the private property of the king; which, judging from the statements regarding the extensive landed possessions of the last Roman royal house, the Tarquins, must have been considerable. The ground won by arms, in particular, appears to have been constantly regarded as property of the state.
About the time of the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome the Etruscan power had reached its height. The Tuscans, and the Carthaginians who were in close alliance with them, possessed undisputed supremacy on the Tyrrhene Sea.
This dissimulation remained undetected, and its causes concealed, while the Tarquins lived; for the nobles dreading the Tarquins, and fearing that the people, if they used them ill, might take part against them, treated them with kindness.
The following legend of the Sibyl is fixed at a later date. In the reign of one of the Tarquins there appeared before the king a woman who offered him nine books for sale. The king refused to purchase them, whereupon the woman went away and burned three of the books, and returning offered the remaining books for the same price she had asked for the nine.
Brutus, according to a decree of the senate, proposed to the people, that all the family of the Tarquins should be banished from Rome; and in an assembly by centuries he elected P. Valerius, with whose assistance he had expelled the kings for his colleague.
Brutus, according to a decree of the senate, proposed to the people, that all who belonged to the family of the Tarquins should be banished from Rome: in the assembly of centuries he elected Publius Valerius, with whose assistance he had expelled the kings, as his colleague.
The history of the Tarquins had its arena in Latium, not in Etruria; and Etruria, so far as we can see, during the whole regal period exercised no influence of any essential moment on either the language or customs of Rome, and did not at all interrupt the regular development of the Roman state or of the Latin league.
Before the foundation of the city, Italy was of no account with the older empires. In less than two hundred and fifty years a great Italian power grows up on the banks of the Tiber, imbued to some extent with the civilization of Greece, which it receives through Etruria and the Tarquins. But the growth of Rome under the kings was too rapid for its moral health.
Aulus Postumius the dictator, and Titus Aebutius his master of the horse, setting out with a numerous army of horse and foot, met the enemy's forces at the Lake Regillus, in the territory of Tusculum, and, because it was rumoured that the Tarquins were in the army of the Latins, their rage could not be restrained, so that they immediately came to an engagement.
Such were the principal articles in this commercial treaty; from it, it appears, that so early as the year 503 before Christ, the first year after the expulsion of the Tarquins, and twenty-eight years before the invasion of Greece by Xerxes, the Carthaginians were in possession of Sardinia, and part of Sicily; that they were also acquainted with, and had visited the coasts of Italy; and there are expressions in the treaty, which render it highly probable that the Carthaginians had, before this period, attempted to establish, either for commerce or conquest, colonies and forts in Italy: it is also evident that they were acquainted with the art of fortification.
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