Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned from 578 to 535 BC.According to Livy, Ab Urbe Condita; the dates are accepted by most ancient Romans writers. Roman and Greek sources describe his servile origins and later marriage to a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, Rome's first Etruscan king, who was assassinated in 579 BC. The constitutional basis for his accession is unclear; he is variously described as the first Roman king to accede without election by the Senate, having gained the throne by popular and royal support; and as the first to be elected by the Senate alone, with support of the reigning queen but without recourse to a popular vote.
Several traditions describe Servius's father as divine. Livy depicts Servius's mother as a captured Latin princess enslaved by the Romans; her child is chosen as Rome's future king after a ring of fire is seen around his head. The Emperor Claudius discounted such origins and described him as an originally Etruscan mercenary, named Mastarna, who fought for Caelius Vibenna.
Servius was a popular king, and one of Rome's most significant benefactors. He had military successes against Veii and the Etruscans, and expanded the city to include the Quirinal, Viminal and Esquiline hills. He is traditionally credited with the institution of the Compitalia festivals, the building of temples to Fortuna and Diana and, less plausibly, the invention of Rome's first true coinage.
Despite the opposition of Rome's patricians, he expanded the Roman franchise and improved the lot and fortune of Rome's lowest classes of citizens and non-citizens. According to Livy, he reigned for 44 years, until murdered by his daughter Tullia and son-in-law Lucius Tarquinius Superbus. In consequence of this "tragic crime" and his hubristic arrogance as king, Tarquinius was eventually removed. This cleared the way for the abolition of Rome's monarchy and the founding of the Roman Republic, whose groundwork had already been laid by Servius's reforms.Livy, ab urbe condita libri, I
Background Before its establishment as a Republic, Rome was ruled by kings (Latin reges, singular rex). In Roman tradition, Rome's founder Romulus was the first. Servius Tullius was the sixth, and his successor Tarquinius Superbus (Tarquin the Proud) was the last.Based on the reckoning of Roman historians, the Roman kingdom lasted about 250 years; either the list of kings is implausibly short, or their reigns are implausibly long. The earliest kings in particular could represent the attributes and achievements of several distinct personalities. See further discussion in Cornell, 120–121, 226. The nature of Roman kingship is unclear; most Roman kings were elected by the senate, as to a lifetime magistracy, but some claimed succession through dynastic or divine right. Some were native Romans, others were foreign. Later Romans had a complex ideological relationship with this distant past. In Republican mores and institutions kingship was abhorrent; and remained so, in name at least, during the Empire. On the one hand, Romulus was held to have brought Rome into being more-or-less at a stroke, so complete and purely Roman in its essentials that any acceptable change or reform thereafter must be clothed as restoration. On the other, Romans of the Republic and Empire saw each king as contributing in some distinctive and novel way to the city's fabric and territories, or its social, military, religious, legal or political institutions.Cornell, pp. 57–60 Servius Tullius has been described as Rome's "second founder", "the most complex and enigmatic" of all its kings, and a kind of "proto-Republican magistrate".Cornell, pp. 120–121, 226.
Ancient sources The oldest surviving source for the overall political developments of the Roman kingdom and Republic is Cicero's De republica ("On the State"), written in 44 BC.Cornell, p. 2 The main literary sources for Servius's life and achievements are the Roman historian Livy (59 BC – AD 17), whose Ab urbe condita was generally accepted by the Romans as the standard, most authoritative account; Livy's near contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch (c. 46 – 120 AD); their own sources included works by Quintus Fabius Pictor, Diocles of Peparethus, Quintus Ennius and Cato the Elder.Cornell, pp. 6, 199–122. Livy's sources probably included at least some official state records, he excluded what seemed implausible or contradictory traditions, and arranged his material within an overarching chronology. Dionysius and Plutarch offer various alternatives not found in Livy,Cornell, pp. 21–26. and Livy's own pupil, the etruscologist, historian and emperor Claudius, offered yet another, based on Etruscan tradition.For Claudius's theory on Servius's origins, see the text of the Lyons Tablet.
Origins
Parentage and birth Most Roman sources name Servius's mother as Ocrisia, a young noblewoman taken at the Roman siege of Corniculum and brought to Rome, either pregnant by her husband, who was killed at the siege:Livy gives her husband's name as Servius Tullius, chief man of Corniculum ("[...] qui princeps in illa urbe fuerat [...]"); the son is named after the father. See Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.39. Dionysius offers a near identical version as "the most likely". or as a virgin. She was given to Tanaquil, wife of king Tarquinius, and though slave, was treated with the respect due her former status. In one variant, she became wife to a noble client of Tarquinius. In others, she served the domestic rites of the royal hearth as a Vestal Virgin, and on one such occasion, having damped the hearth flames with a sacrificial offering, she was penetrated and impregnated by a disembodied phallus that rose from the hearth. According to Tanaquil, this was a divine manifestation, either of the household Lar or Vulcan himself. Thus Servius was divinely fathered and already destined for greatness, despite his mother's servile status; for the time being, Tanaquil and Ocrisia kept this a secret.Plutarch, Moralia, On the fortune of the Romans, 10, 64: available online (Loeb) at Thayer's website
Early life Servius's birth to a slave of the royal household would have made him a member of Tarquin's extended domestic familia, and a slave himself. Livy describes Servius as a youth already holding an honourable position, as son of a living, noble mother and noble father. He is singled out for special favour when members of the royal household witness a nimbus of fire about his head while he sleeps, a sign of divine favour, and a great portent. In Livy's version, Servius becomes a protégé of the royal family ("like a son") through this event, and later marries their daughter Tarquinia. For Livy, this marriage undermines the traditional narrative in which Ocrisia, and thus her son Servius, are household slaves; Livy asserts that no slave, nor any of slave descent, could have been granted the great honour of marriage into Rome's ruling family.Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.39.Cornell, 131, 132: see Dionysus of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 4.3.
Servius proves a loyal, responsible son-in-law. When given governmental and military responsibilities, he excels in both.Cornell, 131: see Dionysus of Halicarnassus, 4.3. Plutarch, citing Valerius Antias "and his school", names Servius's wife as Gegania: the nimbus of fire appears around the sleeping Servius much later, when Gegania is dying; "a token of his birth from fire".Plutarch, Moralia, On the fortune of the Romans, 10, 64: available online (Loeb) at Thayer's website . Plutarch cites Valerius Antias, Fragment 12; in Peter, Frag. Hist. Rom. p. 154.Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.39: see also Dionysius, 4.
Reign In Livy's account, Tarquinius Priscus had been elected king on the death of the previous king, Ancus Marcius, whose two sons were too young to inherit or offer themselves for election. When Servius's popularity and his marriage to Tarquinius's daughter made him a likely successor to the throne, these sons attempted to seize the throne for themselves. They hired two assassins, who attacked and severely wounded Tarquinius.Livy, Ab urbe condita, 1.40 Tanaquil immediately ordered the palace to be shut, and publicly announced from a palace window that Tarquinius had appointed Servius as regent; meanwhile, Tarquinius died of his wounds. When his death became public knowledge, the senate elected Servius as king, and the sons of Ancus fled to exile in Suessa Pometia.Livy, 1.41. Livy describes this as the first occasion that the people of Rome were not involved in the election of the king. In Plutarch, Servius reluctantly consented to the kingship at the death-bed insistence of Tanaquil.Plutarch, Moralia, On the fortune of the Romans, 10, 64: available online (Loeb) at Thayer's website : see also Ovid, Fasti, 6.627 ff; Livy, 1#39|I.39; Pliny, Natural History, 36 & 70.27.204.
Early in his reign, Servius warred against Veii and the Etruscans. He is said to have shown valour in the campaign, and to have routed a great army of the enemy. His success helped him to cement his position at Rome.Livy, 1.42 According to the Fasti Triumphales, Servius celebrated three triumphs over the Etruscans, including on 25 November 571 BC and 25 May 567 BC (the date of the third triumph is not legible on the Fasti).
Servian reforms
Most of the reforms credited to Servius extended voting rights to certain groups – in particular to Rome's citizen-commoners (known in the Republican era as plebs), minor landholders previously disqualified from voting by ancestry, status or ethnicity. The same reforms simultaneously defined the fiscal and military obligations of all Roman citizens. As a whole, the so-called Servian reforms probably represent a long-drawn, complex and piecemeal process of populist policy and reform, extending from Servius's predecessors, Ancus Marcius and Tarquinius Priscus, to his successor Tarquinius Superbus, and into the Middle and Late Republic. Rome's military and territorial expansion and consequent changes in its population would have made franchise regulation and reform an ongoing necessity, and their wholesale attribution to Servius "cannot be taken at face value".Cornell, pp. 144–147, 173–175, 183 (military character of reforms, especially in census).
Curiate reform and census Until the Servian reforms, the passing of laws and judgment was the prerogative of the comitia curiata (curiate assembly), made up from thirty curiae; Roman sources describe ten curiae for each of three aristocratic tribes or clans, each supposedly based on one of Rome's central hills, and claiming patrician status by virtue of their descent from Rome's founding families. These tribes comprised approximately 200 gentes (clans), each of which contributed one senator ("elder") to the Senate. The senate advised the king, devised laws in his name, and was held to represent the entire populus Romanus (Roman people); but it could only debate and discuss. Its decisions had no force unless approved by the comitia curiata. By the time of Servius, if not long before, the tribes of the comitia were a minority of the population, ruling a multitude who had no effective voice in their own government.Cornell, pp. 115–118.