Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
The name of the "Tuscan quarter" at the foot of the Palatine points further to Etruscan settlements in Rome. The Tarquins It can hardly, moreover, be doubted that the last regal family which ruled over Rome, that of the Tarquins, was of Etruscan origin, whether it belonged to Tarquinii, as the legend asserts, or to Caere, where the family tomb of the Tarchnas has recently been discovered.
In the middle of the five centuries of her republic came the Punic wars and the intimate association with Greece which made the last half of her history as a republic so different from the first half; and in the kingdom, which preceded the republic, there was a similar coming of foreign influence, which made the later kingdom with its semi-historical names of the Tarquins and Servius Tullius so different from the earlier kingdom with its altogether legendary Romulus, Numa, Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Martius.
Ottfried Müller looked upon the Etruscans as the inventors of the vault; he believed that the Greek builders learnt the secret from the early inhabitants of Italy, and that the arches of the Roman Cloaca Maxima built by the Tuscan architects of the Tarquins, were the oldest that had come down to us from antiquity.
Expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome It was in this latter way that the monarchy was terminated in Rome. For however much the history of the expulsion of the last Tarquinius, "the proud," may have been interwoven with anecdotes and spun out into a romance, it is not in its leading outlines to be called in question.
In the second circle on the other side are Damon and Phintias, whose unexampled friendship is so well known, and with them is Dionysius, Tyrant of Sicily; and beside these figures sits Brutus, who from love of his country condemned his two sons to death, because they were conspiring to bring the Tarquins back to their country.
Such were the transactions at home and abroad during the first year after the expulsion of the kings. After this Publius Valerius, for the second time, and Titus Lucretius were elected consuls. By this time the Tarquins had fled to Lars Porsina, King of Clusium.
The letters, given to be a pledge of their sincerity, discovered the plot; for when, the day before the ambassadors set out to the Tarquins, they had supped by chance at the house of the Vitellii, and the conspirators there in private discoursed much together concerning their new design, as is natural, one of the slaves, who had already perceived what was going on, overheard their conversation; but waited for the occasion when the letters should be given to the ambassadors, the detection of which would prove the transaction; when he perceived that they were given, he laid the whole affair before the consuls.
The expulsion of the Tarquins was not, as the pitiful and deeply falsified accounts of it represent, the work of a people carried away by sympathy and enthusiasm for liberty, but the work of two great political parties already engaged in conflict, and clearly aware that their conflict would steadily continue the old burgesses and the metoeci who, like the English Whigs and Tories in 1688, were for a moment united by the common danger which threatened to convert the commonwealth into the arbitrary government of a despot, and differed again as soon as the danger was over.
Nor did they dread their enemies only, but even their own citizens, lest the common people of Rome, smitten with fear, should, by receiving the Tarquins into the city, accept peace even at the price of slavery. Many concessions were therefore granted to the people by the senate during that period by way of conciliating them.
They may have their turn next, when we are worn out. Browning has made John the Smith a memorable type. Rome was a clean city in those days. One of the Tarquins had built the great arched drain which still stands unshaken and in use, and smaller ones led to it, draining the Forum and all the low part of the town.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking