Note 639 — Chapter XIV · THE KING’S FIRE

Plutarch, De fortuna Romanorum, 10; Dionysius Halicarnasensis, Antiquit. Rom. iv. 1 sq.; Ovid, Fasti, vi. 627-636; Pliny, Nat. Hist. ii. 241, xxxvi. 204; Livy, i. 39; Servius on Virgil, Aen. ii. 683; Arnobius, Adversus nationes, v. 18. According to the Etruscan annals, Servius Tullius was an Etruscan by name Mastarna, who came to Rome with his friend Caeles Vibenna, and, changing his name, obtained the kingdom. This was stated by the Emperor Claudius in a speech of which fragments are engraved on a bronze tablet found at Lyons. See Tacitus, Annals, ed. Orelli, 2nd Ed., p. 342. As the emperor wrote a history of Etruria in twenty books (Suetonius, Divus Claudius, 42) he probably had some authority for the statement, and the historical, or at least legendary, character of Mastarna and Caeles Vibenna is vouched for by a painting inscribed with their names, which was found in 1857 in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci. See G. Dennis, Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, 3rd Ed., ii. 506 sq. But from this it by no means follows that the identification of Mastarna with Servius Tullius was correct. Schwegler preferred the Roman to the Etruscan tradition (Römische Geschichte, i. 720 sq.), and so, after long hesitation, did Niebuhr (History of Rome, 3rd Ed., i. 380 sqq.). It is fair to add that both these historians wrote before the discovery of the tomb at Vulci.