sovereign. Whatever confidence he may have derived from this vote, his
place was not secure, and his fatal enemy proved to be in his own
household.

It happened that of the two husbands of the daughters of Servius, one
was ambitious and unprincipled, and the other quiet and peaceable. The
same was true of their wives, only the unprincipled wife found herself
mated with the well-behaving husband. Now the wicked wife agreed with
the wicked husband that they should murder their partners and then
marry together, thus making a pair, both members of which should be
ambitious and without principle. This was accomplished, and then the
wicked wife, whose name was Tullia, told her husband, whose name was
Lucius Tarquinius, that what she wanted was not a husband whom she
might live with in quiet like a slave, but one who would remember of
whose blood he was, who would consider that he was the rightful king;
and that if _he_ would not do it he had better go back to Tarquinii or
Corinth and sink into his original race, thus shaming his father and
Tanaquil, who had bestowed thrones upon her husband and her son-in-law.
The taunts and instigations of Tullia led Lucius to solicit the younger
patricians to support him in making an effort for the throne. When he
thought he had obtained a sufficient number of confederates, he one day
rushed into the forum at an appointed time, accompanied by a body of
armed men, and, in the midst of a commotion that ensued, took his seat
upon the throne and ordered the senate to attend "King Tarquinius."
That august body convened very soon, some having been prepared
beforehand for the summons, and then Tarquinius began a tirade against
Servius, whom he stigmatized as "a slave and the son of a slave," who
had favored the most degraded classes, and had, by instituting the
census, made the fortunes of the better classes unnecessarily
conspicuous, so as to excite the envy and base passions of the meaner