to abolish the senate altogether, since he believed that every gathering of men and especially of chosen persons who had some pretence of prestige from antiquity, was most hostile to a tyrant.  But as he was afraid that the multitude or else his body-guards themselves, in their capacity as citizens, might by reason of vexation at the change in government revolt, he refrained from doing this openly, but effected it in a conveniently outrageous way.  He failed to introduce any new member into the senate to make up the loss, and to those who were left he communicated nothing of importance.  He called the senators together not to help him in the administration of any important business; no, this very act was to give them a proof of their littleness, and thereby to enable him to humiliate and show scorn for them.  Most of his business he carried on by himself or with the aid of his sons, in the first place to the end that no one else should have any power, and secondly because he shrank from publishing matters involving his own wrongdoing.  He was difficult of access and hard to accost, and showed such great haughtiness and brutality toward all alike that he received the nickname among them of “Proud.”  Among other decidedly tyrannical deeds of himself and his children might be mentioned the fact that he once had some citizens bound naked to some crosses in the Forum and before the eyes of the citizens, and had them shamefully beaten to death with rods.  This punishment, invented by him at that time, has often been inflicted. (Valesius, p. 573.)

3.  Dio in 2nd Book:  “Publicly and by arrangement reviling his father in many unusual ways on the ground that he was a tyrant and was forsworn.” (Bekker, Anecd. p. 155, 1.)

4.  The Sibyl about whom Lycophron is now speaking was the Cumaean, who died in the time of Tarquin the Proud and left behind three or nine of her prophetic books.  Of these the Romans bought either one or three, after the Sibyl’s servant had destroyed the rest by fire because they would not give her as much gold as she wanted.  This they did later and bought up either one that was left over or else three, and gave them to Marcus Acilius to keep.  Him they cast alive into the skin of an ox and put to death because he had given them to be copied:  but for the book or books they dug a hole in the Forum and buried them along with a chest.  (Ioannes Tzetzes, scholia on Lycophr. 1279.)

5. ¶Lucius Junius, a son of Tarquinius’s sister, in terror after the king had killed his father and had moreover taken his property away from him feigned madness, to the end that he might possibly survive.  For he well understood that every person possessed of sense, especially when he is of a distinguished family, becomes an object of suspicion to tyrants.  And when once he had started on this plan he acted it out with great precision, and for that reason was called Brutus.  This is the name that the Latins gave to idiots.  Sent along with Titus and Arruns as if he were a kind of plaything he carried a staff as a votive offering, he said, to the gods, though it had no great value so far as anyone could see. (Mai, p. 139.)