the tenderness we can, train up this youth, who is destined to prove the source of great glory to our family and state.”  From this time the boy began to be treated as their own son, and instructed in those accomplishments by which men’s minds are roused to maintain high rank with dignity.  This was easily done, as it was agreeable to the gods.  The young man turned out to be of truly royal disposition:  nor when a son-in-law was being sought for Tarquin, could any of the Roman youth be compared to him in any accomplishment:  therefore the king betrothed his own daughter to him.  The fact of this high honour being conferred upon him from whatever cause, forbids us to believe that he was the son of a slave, or that he had himself been a slave when young.  I am rather of the opinion of those who say that, on the taking of Corniculum, the wife of Servius Tullius, who had been the leading man in that city, being pregnant when her husband was slain, since she was known among the other female prisoners, and, in consequence of her distinguished rank, exempted from servitude by the Roman queen, was delivered of a child at Rome, in the house of Tarquinius Priscus:  upon this, that both the intimacy between the women was increased by so great a kindness, and that the boy, as he had been brought up in the family from his infancy, was beloved and respected; that his mother’s lot, in having fallen into the hands of the enemy after the capture of her native city, caused him to be thought to be the son of a slave.

About the thirty-eighth year of Tarquin’s reign, Servius Tullius enjoyed the highest esteem, not only of the king, but also of the senate and people.  At this time the two sons of Ancus, though they had before that always considered it the highest indignity that they had been deprived of their father’s crown by the treachery of their guardian, that a stranger should be King of Rome, who not only did not belong to a neighbouring, but not even to an Italian family, now felt their indignation roused to a still higher pitch at the idea that the crown would not only not revert to them after Tarquin, but would descend even lower to slaves, so that in the same state, about the hundredth year after Romulus, descended from a deity, and a deity himself, had occupied the throne as long as he lived, Servius, one born of a slave, would possess it:  that it would be the common disgrace both of the Roman name, and more especially of their family, if, while there was male issue of King Ancus still living, the sovereignty of Rome should be accessible not only to strangers, but even to slaves.  They determined therefore to prevent that disgrace by the sword.  But since resentment for the injury done to them incensed them more against Tarquin himself, than against Servius, and the consideration that a king was likely to prove a more severe avenger of the murder, if he should survive, than a private person; and moreover, even if Servius were put to death, it seemed likely that he would adopt as his successor