Servius Tullius

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Servius Tullius is the sixth of the legendary kings of Rome, the penultimate ruler before the city expelled its monarchy and became a republic. Roman tradition placed his reign in the sixth century BCE — by the received chronology, from 578 to 535 — and credited him with the deepest reordering of the early state: the division of the citizen body by wealth into census classes, the organization of the army and the voting assembly that followed from it, and the great defensive circuit long called the Servian Wall. Whether any single king did these things is doubtful; historians treat the figure as a node where genuine archaic institutions were later gathered under one heroic name (Beard, North & Price 1998). What collects under that name is not a biography in the ordinary sense. It is an account of how a state learns to count itself, told through a man who began as nothing and was lifted, step by step, by powers that did not consult him.

The census and the ordering of the people

The reform that bears his name begins with an act of counting. The census registered every male citizen, fixing for each his property, his tax liability, his place in the army, and the weight his vote would carry — four things bound into one assessment, so that a man’s wealth was at once his obligation and his standing. On that base Servius is said to have built the comitia centuriata, the assembly that voted by hundreds. The citizens were sorted into five classes by property and, above them, the cavalry; each class was broken into centuriae, nominally companies of a hundred, and each century further split between seniores, the older men who held the city, and iuniores, the younger who marched. The unit of the army was made the unit of the vote. To be reckoned in Rome was to be reckoned for war and for the assembly in the same breath.

The arithmetic of the thing was not neutral, and the Romans knew it. The hundred-odd centuries were apportioned so that the wealthy carried far more of them than their numbers warranted: the cavalry and the first class together held close to half the voting units, and since the centuries voted in order from the top down, a decision could be reached and announced before the poorer classes were ever called. The lowest of all, the proletarii — those who owned nothing to assess and were counted only by their heads — were folded into a single century at the bottom, present in the count and almost weightless in it. This is the paradox the tradition built into him on purpose: the man who ranked Romans by property, and tilted the whole machine toward those who had it, was himself, by the same tradition, born with none.

Historians since Theodor Mommsen have doubted that one reign produced this system whole. The classes are reckoned in coined money, in asses, and Rome had no coinage in the sixth century; the figures and the fivefold scheme look like a later state reading its own developed institutions back onto a founding king. Tim Cornell’s reconstruction keeps a historical kernel — a property census and some early centuriate organization are plausibly archaic — while treating the elaborated constitution as the work of generations, attributed to Servius the way laws are attributed to a lawgiver who lends his authority to what came after — the same logic by which Sparta gathered its constitution under Lycurgus, an archaic name made to carry an institution no single man could have built alone. The same conservatism shapes the famous wall. The masonry that still stands near the Termini station, the circuit called Servian, is cut from tufa quarried at Veii — a city Rome did not take until about 396 BCE — and belongs to the rebuilding after the Gauls sacked Rome early in the fourth century. An earthwork and rampart along something like the regal-period line may well be old; the stones a visitor touches are Republican. The name outran the king by two hundred years and more, and went on calling the work his.

The light upon the child

Two legends mark him as touched before he had done anything to deserve it. He was said to have been born of a captive woman in the royal household — his mother Ocrisia, taken when Rome destroyed the Latin town of Corniculum, a slave in the house of the queen Tanaquil — so that the reformer who sorted Romans by what they owned had himself begun owned by another. The cognomen Servius was read, rightly or not, as a memory of that servile origin, the name a man might carry out of the slave quarters. The Romans were of two minds about the descent. The Etruscan tradition gave him another name, Mastarna, and another past as a soldier and companion of kings; the servile birth is the version Rome’s own moralists preferred, the better to make him the king who rose from nothing.

The second legend is fire. As the boy lay sleeping in the palace, flames were seen to play about his head and not burn him. A servant ran for water; Tanaquil held him back, forbade anyone to wake the child, and waited. When Servius woke of his own accord the flame went out with him. The queen, versed in the Etruscan arts of reading signs, took the prodigy at once for what it was: this was no common slave’s son but a light raised up to be a light to the house in its dark hours, a presence kindred to the household’s guardian spirit — the hearth-spirit whose domain overlaps the keeping of the sacred flame entrusted to Vesta. Some versions pushed the kinship further into his conception, saying the household genius — or the fire-god — had fathered him on Ocrisia at the hearth, so that the flame about his head was only declaring what he already was. The motif of fire that crowns without consuming recurs across the ancient world as a token of election, and the Romans read it here in exactly that way: a sign written on the body before the man could earn or refuse it. His rise begins, characteristically, as something done to him.

Fortuna at the small window

What gives him a place beyond Roman political history is his entanglement with the divine, and above all with Fortuna, the goddess of the gift that comes without desert. The tradition held that Servius founded much of her cult at Rome — several of her temples were ascribed to him, among them the shrine in the cattle market by the Tiber, the Forum Boarium, where a paired temple to her and to the dawn-mother Mater Matuta has been excavated and dated to the regal age. Of all the kings he was reckoned her client and her favorite, the man whose every elevation she had granted; the metaphysics of that favor — what it means for fortune to be given rather than earned — belongs to the goddess herself.

Then the tradition goes further than patronage. It says that Fortuna loved him. Ovid, telling the story in the Fasti, has the goddess confess a furtive passion and blush that a power of the heavens should desire a mortal man — that of all men he alone was the one for whom she was not blind. She came to him by night through a small window, the fenestra from which a gate of the city took the name Fenestella, the Little Window; and afterward, ashamed, she hid his beloved face beneath a veil. Here the legend touches the cult itself. In the temple stood an old gilded image, said to be Servius, that was kept covered — draped, Pliny reports, in two togas. A mortal king lodged inside a goddess’s temple, robed and venerated, is something close to an apotheosis before the Romans had the formal word for it; and the people had stories to explain the covering: that the goddess had loved the king and could not bear to look on him openly, or that the face beneath was too sacred or too terrible to show. The small window the cult kept stopped up, the statue the cult kept robed: the most honored king of early Rome was remembered through two things deliberately hidden from sight. Ancient writers reported the affair in different keys, some as a tale of the goddess’s signal favor, some uneasily, as something close to a sacred scandal — a man visited in his chamber by a divinity, raised by an intimacy he did not initiate and could not command. Beneath it lay a question the Romans kept circling and never closed: whether good fortune is earned or simply given, and what it means for a man’s whole rise to rest on the favor of a power he cannot hold. Fortuna is not fate — not the fixed allotment that rules a life from before its birth — but its restless cousin, the turning that raises and casts down within a span rather than over it; and Servius is the king the Romans set at that crossing.

The works of the reign

Around the central institutions the tradition hung the rest of a founder’s résumé. To Servius it gave the four urban tribes that organized the city’s space, the first Roman coinage (an anachronism, but a telling one — they wanted the man who valued citizens by money to have minted the money), and a treaty binding Rome to the cities of Latium. The seal of that league was a sanctuary: the temple of Diana on the Aventine, founded as a common shrine for the Latins with Rome at its head, the federal cult by which a rising city dressed its primacy as shared devotion — a Latin counterpart to the great Capitoline temple of Jupiter and Juno that the Tarquins were raising on the other hill to crown the Roman state. Dionysius of Halicarnassus saw, or said he saw, the foundation charter still standing in his day on a bronze pillar in the temple, the old Latin rights of worship engraved on metal. The Aventine itself, the hill of the plebs, sat outside the sacred boundary, and the king who is remembered for folding the poor into the count is fittingly the one who planted their goddess there. So too the dawn-shrines, the Fortuna temples, the wall, the assembly: the tradition arranged him as the architect of the institutional city, the one who turned a settlement into a state with classes and counts and federal cults — and arranged, at every turn, that the architect had not chosen his own elevation. Cicero, surveying the kings in the De Re Publica, kept this double image of him, the wisest orderer of the commonwealth and the king whose own title rested on something other than birth or right.

The dark end

His end was as dark as his beginning was bright, and as little in his own hands. He was murdered, the story goes, in a coup led by his son-in-law Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, who came to the senate-house claiming the throne, flung the old king down the steps when he came to defend it, and sent men to cut him down in the street as he fled toward home. The worst of it came after. His own daughter, Tullia — married to Tarquin, and as ruthless as her husband — drove her carriage through the city, and when the way ran over her father’s body she did not turn aside. The wheels passed over him; his blood marked the carriage and her clothing; she carried the stain home. The street kept the memory in its name ever after, the Vicus Sceleratus, the Street of Crime. The goddess who had loved him, who had come to his window and granted him every height, did nothing to stop the chariot. Favor that arrives without account departs the same way.

The texts and the scholarship

What is known of Servius descends through a small set of narrators who wrote five hundred years and more after the reign they describe. Livy gives the canonical Latin version — the flame, Tanaquil’s reading of it, the reforms, the murder, the chariot — in the first book of his history. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, writing in Greek for a Greek-speaking readership in the age of Augustus, supplies the fullest account of the census and the centuriate classes and is the source closest to a constitutional document. Ovid sets the Fortuna legend in verse in the Fasti, the calendar-poem that follows the Roman year shrine by shrine; the affair, the window, and the veiled image come chiefly from his sixth book. Cicero treats the king as political philosophy in the De Re Publica. Behind all of them stand the Etruscan traditions that knew him as Mastarna, preserved in fragments and most vividly in the painted tomb at Vulci, which show how differently the same figure could be told outside Rome.

The nineteenth-century groundwork is Theodor Mommsen’s, whose History of Rome first argued at length that the Servian constitution as the annalists give it is a retrojection of the developed Republic. The standard modern reconstruction of the regal period is Tim Cornell’s The Beginnings of Rome (1995), whose seventh chapter weighs what in the Servian reforms can be salvaged as genuine archaic institution and what is later attribution. For the religion — the Fortuna cult, the Diana foundation, the logic of a king made the client of chance — the reference is Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price’s Religions of Rome (1998), which reads Servius as exactly the kind of obscure-born, fortune-raised figure a cult of Fortuna would claim as founder. The biographical entry in William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology remains a convenient gathering of the ancient testimonia under one head. The topography of the temples — which shrine of Fortuna stood where, and which the ancients assigned to the king — is laid out in Platner and Ashby’s Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome.

The shape of a conferred life

Read together, the legends compose a single figure, and it is not the self-made founder the modern eye expects. Servius does almost nothing that he chooses. The flame settles on him while he sleeps. The queen reads the sign and raises the slave’s son. The goddess comes to his window and grants him a kingdom and her favor. The census and the centuries and the wall arrive as the works of a reign that fortune itself installed. Even his death is decided by others — the son-in-law on the steps, the daughter in the chariot, the divinity who stands by and lets the wheels turn. The Romans set their greatest institutional king inside a story in which his every height was conferred from outside, by a power that gives and takes without account; the man who taught the city to measure each citizen’s exact worth was himself measured by no merit of his own, only by what a goddess chose to bestow and, at the last, declined to defend. That is the strangeness the tradition guarded behind the covered window and the veiled face: not a lawgiver who mastered his fate, but the one Roman whom Fortune was said to love, lifted as high as her hand could reach and dropped exactly as far.

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