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Updated: June 15, 2025
There were, among the Roman youth, several young men of no mean families, who, during the regal government, had pursued their pleasures without any restraint; being of the same age with, and companions of, the young Tarquins, and accustomed to live in princely style.
They declared that the Tarquins had been too much habituated to sovereignty; that it had originated with Priscus: that Servius Tullius had reigned next; that Tarquinius Superbus had not even, in spite of the interval that had elapsed, given up all thoughts of the kingdom as being the property of another, which it really was, but thought to regain it by crime and violence, as if it were the heirloom of his family; that after the expulsion of Superbus, the government was inthe hands of Collatinus: that the Tarquins knew not how to live in a private station; that the name pleased them not; that it was dangerous to liberty.
"These Tarquins," he said, "are overmuch accustomed to kingship. For Tarquin the elder reigned in Rome, and though after him another, even Servius, was king, yet did not his son forget the kingdom of his father, but took it for his own.
In this humor, our ancestors banished Collatinus, in spite of his innocence, because of the suspicion that attached to his family, and all the rest of the Tarquins, on account of the unpopularity of their name. In the same humor, Valerius Publicola was the first to lower the fasces before the people, when he spoke in the assembly of the people.
After perpetually immolating the Tarquins and the Pisistratids in inflated grandiloquence, they would go to lick the dust off a tyrant's shoes.
And in the first place we see how women have been the occasion of many divisions and calamities in States, and have wrought great harm to rulers; as when, according to our historian, the violence done to Lucretia drove the Tarquins from their kingdom, and that done to Virginia broke the power of the decemvirs.
For from the time of the Tarquins to that of the Gracchi, a period of over three hundred years, the tumults in Rome seldom gave occasion to punishment by exile, and very seldom to bloodshed.
But now, when the whole Tuscan league, taking advantage of the confusion and the weakness of the Roman state after the expulsion of the Tarquins, renewed its attack more energetically than before under the king Lars Porsena of Clusium, it no longer encountered the wonted resistance. It seemed as if the union of Italy under Tuscan supremacy was not far distant.
The great horns of the cow were long after shown in the temple of Diana on the Aventine, where Romans, Sabines, and Latins every year joined in a great sacrifice. The two daughters of Servius were married to their cousins, the two young Tarquins. In each pair there was a fierce and a gentle one.
We may not on this account call him absolutely a democrat or include him in that opposition party which found its champion in Manius Curius; in him on the contrary the spirit of the ancient and modern patrician kings predominated the spirit of the Tarquins and the Caesars, between whom he forms a connecting link in that five hundred years' interregnum of extraordinary deeds and ordinary men.
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