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	24-01-10 @ 23:59 Servius Tullius - Servius Tullius -
Servius Tullius was the sixth legendary king of ancient Rome and the second king of the Etruscan dynasty. The traditional dates of his reign are 578-535 BC. Described in one account as originally a slave, he is said to have married a daughter of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, and succeeded him after the latter's assassination in 579 BC. He was the first king to come to power without the consultation of the plebeians, having gained the throne by the contrivance of Tanaquil, his mother-in-law. In this account (found in Livy) Tullius was anointed as a young child to become king, after a ring of fire was seen around his head. He was then raised as a prince. Incidentally, Livy did not believe that Servius Tullius was born a slave. Livy postulated that Tullius' mother was a princess from Corniculum, a Latin town which had been sacked by the Romans (Livy 4.3.11; cf. Festus 182L). His mother was captured and to pay homage to her regal origins she was allowed to live in the palace. Another version, quoted in a speech to the Senate by Claudius, represented him as a soldier of fortune originally named Macstarna, from Etruria, who attached himself to Caelius Vibenna. After various adventures Caelius was beaten but Macstarna came to Rome with the remnants of his army. Macstarna named the Caelian Hill after his deceased friend, but some suppose Caelius Vibenna to have placed a settlement there. The servile stories can probably be discounted as folk-aetiologic; that is, Livy and others were trying to explain the name Servius, which looks like an adjective of servus, "slave." The adjective, however is servilis, and there is some evidence to support the Macstarna story, which comes from the Oratio Claudii Caesaris of the Lugdunum Tablet and represents an Etruscan explanation being told by the emperor Claudius (a savant in matters Etruscan). The evidence is a painting of Etruscan heroes in the Francois Tomb at Vulci. A figure labelled Mastarna and others labelled the Vibenna brothers (Caile and Avle Vipinas) appear there. If Macstarna was Servius, the questions remain as to why he changed his name, and why he chose that name. After military campaigns against Veii and the Etruscans, he improved the administrative and political organization of Rome. He undertook building projects and expanded the city to include the Quirinal, Viminal and Esquiline hills. Favoring the goddess, Fortuna (perhaps he was thinking of the fate of Vibenna), he built several temples to her as well as to Diana. He also built a palace for himself on the Esquiline. However, as time passed, Servius increasingly favoured the most impoverished people in order to obtain favours from the plebs. His legislation was extremely distasteful to the patrician order, and his reign of forty-four years was brought to a close by a conspiracy in 535 BC headed by his son-in-law Tarquinius Superbus and his own daughter Tullia. The street in which the chariot was driven over Servius ever after bore the name of the "Vicus Sceleratus" (Street of Infamy). It is alleged in Livy that his daughter was driving the chariot that ran over his dying body to add insult to injury. According to traditional Roman history (i.e. as recorded in the works of Livy and Plutarch, among others), Servius Tullius is credited with reforming the army and also radically transforming the Roman constitution. Note that the term "constitution" in this case does not refer to a foundational document like the U.S. Constitution, but rather to the collective unwritten organizational structures and functions of the state: composition of the tribes, army, senate and voting assemblies, tax collection, conduct of official censuses, etc Servius Tullius is often accused in retrospect of being a militarist on the grounds that he organized society along military lines. Such critics view the army as having had a Centuria structure of (theoretically) 100 men per unit, and view Servius as having transmitted that structure to an unwilling populace. However, it now seems clear that the centuria system actually began in the civilian populace, and was then adopted by the army. This circumstance would account for the military centuria as never really having been 100 men at any time in its history. Having classified manpower resources so that he could inventory it, Servius used the same classifications to establish an order of battle. The military selection process picked men from civilian centuriae and slipped them into military ones. Their function in the military depended on their age, experience, and the equipment they could afford; the wealthier men of combat age were armed as hoplites, heavy infantry with helmet, greaves, breastplate, shields (clipeus), and spears (hastae).[1] A class thus became a line of battle in the phalanx formation.[2] Specialists were chosen from the 5th class. Officers were not part of the class selection process but were picked beforehand, often by vote of the civilian century. The centuries must have had a local character like that of the army of the North in the American civil war. King Servius Tullius, according to the Roman historians, initiated the first census. The noun comes from the participle of the Latin verb, censere, "to judge" or "to estimate". The census was an estimation of the total personal assets of Rome. Servius Tullius used it as a gauge of military capability. The Roman census as practiced by Servius was quite different from our census, which aims at counting and locating people. Servius made sure those functions were performed, but he was primarily interested in property assessments. Dividing the populace into classes according to their wealth, he used the census to determine the number of potential soldiers and the amount of arms and equipment they could provide to Rome, as the army at that time was primarily funded by private, not public resources. Servius wanted to know who could fund what, who was bearing an unfair burden, and who may have been shirking their responsibilities to the kingdom. Neither the census nor the classification significantly altered social status in Rome. Servius ordered that Roman senators must own at least 800,000 sesterces to sit in the Senate, although the senators already all owned that and much more. Similarly, Roman equites or knights, needed to own at least 400,000 sesterces, but there is no record of equites being disenfranchised because of a lack of property or assets. Instead, business went on as usual at Rome; the central difference being that some of the richer outsiders could now attend the Assembly and had to be treated as citizens, a circumstance the patricii found hard to accept (with some notable exceptions, including Servius himself). Today the census is conducted by hiring large numbers of census takers. However, in Servius' time, the administration of the state was the responsibility of its citizens. People were assembled by tribe in the Campus Martius; each man had to state under oath to the registrar, or censor, or his assistants his name, address, social rank, family members, servants, tenants, and property. This information was then recorded by the registrar. Servius intended the process to be repeated every five years, but the growing population of Rome made that impossible. It has been estimated that Servius enrolled about 80,000 men (not the population of Rome, but only of free males). By the time of Augustus, the census had reached four million. Servius Tullius supposedly built a great wall around Rome, as the previous walls were not large enough for the growing city. In modern Rome, a portion of remaining wall is said to be part of the Servian Wall. The walls that can be seen are the walls of Rome rebuilt after the sack of Rome in 390/387 BC by the Gauls. Many doubt whether he really did enlarge the walls.