Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that answer the question.
Query: Where was Servius Tullius born?
Most Roman sources name Servius' 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:[10] 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 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.[11]
Tarquin's daughter married Servius Tullius, who succeeded him as the sixth king of Rome. After a long and prosperous reign, Tullius was deposed by his own son-in-law, Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the son or grandson of the elder Tarquin. An Etruscan legend told of how Servius, aided by the heroes Aulus and Caelius Vibenna, had defeated and killed a group of enemies, including a certain Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome, perhaps the son of Tarquin the Elder and father of Tarquin the Proud.
Livy also records that one of the leading men of Corniculum, named Servius Tullius, was slain in the capture of the town, and that his pregnant wife was taken captive to Rome, but was exempted from slavery by the Roman queen Tanaquil on account of her rank, and was given a place in the king's household. She gave birth to a son, Servius Tullius, who later married Tarqunius' daughter, and succeeded him as king of Rome.
According to our surviving narratives, the three kings of Rome during the Etruscan occupation were Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius, and Tarquinius Superbus. During this period the army underwent a reformation into a "centurial" army based on socio-economic class. This reformation is traditionally attributed to Servius Tullius, the second of the Etruscan kings. Tullius had earlier carried out the first Roman census of all citizens. Livy tells us that Tullius reformed the army by transplanting onto it the structure derived originally for civil life as a result of this census. At all levels, military service was, at this time, considered to be a civic responsibility and a way of advancing one's status within society.
Tullius, said to have been the son of Servius Tullius, a prince of Corniculum who had fallen in battle against Tarquin, was brought to the palace as a child with his mother, Ocreisia. According to legend, Tanaquil discovered his potential for greatness by means of various omens, and therefore preferred him to her own sons. He married Tarquinia, the king's daughter, thus providing a vital link between the families. Tullius' own daughters were subsequently married to the king's sons (or, in some traditions, grandsons), Lucius and Arruns.
The origins of the prison's names are uncertain. The traditional derivation of "Tullianum" is from the name of one of the Roman kings Tullus Hostilius or Servius Tullius (the latter is found in Livy, Varro, and also Sallust); there is an alternative theory that it is from the archaic Latin "tullius" "a jet of water", in reference to the cistern. The name "Mamertine" is medieval in origin, and may be a reference to a nearby temple of Mars.
Claudius' story of Servius as an Etruscan named Macstarna was published as an incidental scholarly comment within the Oratio Claudii Caesaris of the Lugdunum Tablet. There is some support for this Etruscan version of Servius,[52] in wall paintings at the François Tomb in Etruscan Vulci. They were commissioned some time in the second half of the 4th century BC. One panel shows heroic Etruscans putting foreign captives to the sword. The victims include an individual named Gneve Tarchunies Rumach, interpreted as a Roman named Gnaeus Tarquinius,[2] although known Roman history records no Tarquinius of that praenomen. The victors include Aule and Caile Vipinas – known to the Romans as the Vibenna brothers – and their ally Macstrna [Macstarna], who seems instrumental in winning the day. Claudius was certain that Macstarna was simply another name for Servius Tullius, who started his career as an Etruscan ally of the Vibenna brothers and helped them settle Rome's Caelian Hill. Claudius' account evidently drew on sources unavailable to his fellow-historians, or rejected by them. There may have been two different, Servius-like figures, or two different traditions about the same figure. Macstarna may have been the name of a once celebrated Etruscan hero, or more speculatively, an Etruscan rendering of Roman magister (magistrate). Claudius' "Etruscan Servius" seems less a monarch than a freelance Roman magister, an "archaic condottiere" who placed himself and his own band of armed clients at Vibenna's service,[53] and may later have seized, rather than settled Rome's Caelian Hill. If the Etruscan Macstarna was identical with the Roman Servius, the latter may have been less monarch than some kind of proto-Republican magistrate given permanent office, perhaps a magister populi, a war-leader, or in Republican parlance, a dictator.[54]
Tanaquil also played a role in the rise of Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome. Raising him as her own child, Tanaquil believed Servius would be the next successor to the throne. Her dreams would be realized when, one day Servius was sleeping and his head was surrounded with flames. The fires danced around his head without hurting him and when Servius awoke, the fire disappeared. Taking this as an omen, Tanaquil knew Servius would one day be king. When Tarquin was assassinated, Tanaquil hid his death from her subjects, instead telling them that Tarquin had been wounded and had Servius himself appointed regent until he got better. After gaining the people's respect and commanding the kingship, Servius and Tanaquil announced Tarquin's death. The Senate named Servius king and Tanaquil's son, Arruns Tarquinius, married Servius' daughter, Tullia.
Priscus was succeeded by his son-in-law Servius Tullius, Rome's second king of Etruscan birth, and the son of a slave. Like his father-in-law, Servius fought successful wars against the Etruscans. He used the booty to build the first wall all around the Seven Hills of Rome, the pomerium. He also reorganized the army.
In Livy's history, Servius Tullius had two daughters, Tullia the Elder and Tullia the Younger. He arranged their marriage to the two sons of his predecessor, Lucius Tarquinius and Arruns Tarquinius. The younger Tullia and Lucius Tarquinius Priscus procured the murders of their respective siblings, married, and conspired to remove Servius Tullius. Tullia encouraged Lucius Tarquinius to secretly persuade or bribe senators, and Tarquinius went to the senate-house with a group of armed men. Then he summoned the senators and gave a speech criticising Servius: for being a slave born of a slave; for failing to be elected by the Senate and the people during an interregnum, as had been the tradition for the election of kings of Rome; for being gifted the throne by a woman; for favouring the lower classes of Rome over the wealthy; for taking the land of the upper classes for distribution to the poor; and for instituting the census, which exposed the wealthy upper classes to popular envy.[41]
Servius Sulpicius Camerinus Cornutus (probably born c. 540 BC, still living 463 BC) was consul at Rome in the year 500 BC with Manius Tullius Longus. The short form of his name is Camerinus, 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus recounts a local story regarding the birth of king Servius Tullius. In it, a phallus rose from the hearth of Vesta in Numa's palace, and Ocresia was the first to see it. She immediately informed the king and queen. King Tarquinius, upon hearing this, was astonished; but Tanaquil, whose knowledge of divination was well-known, told him it was a blessing that a birth by the hearth's phallus and a mortal woman would produce superior offspring. The king then chose Ocresia to have intercourse with it, for she had seen it first. During which either Vulcan, or the tutelary deity of the house, appeared to her. After disappearing, she conceived and delivered Tullius. This story of his birth could be based off his name as Servius would euphemistically mean "son of servant", because his mother was a handmaiden.
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' popularity and his marriage to Tarquinius' 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.[16] 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.[17] 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.[18]
His name is very similar to that of Latin god Volcanus, who himself was considered to be the father of Caeculus and Servius Tullius, not to mention Romulus in the version transmitted by Promathion, which is very similar to the legend of Servius.
Servius Tullius was the legendary sixth king of Rome, and the second of its Etruscan dynasty. He reigned 575–535 BC.[1] 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. Servius is said to have been the first Roman king to accede without election by the Senate, having gained the throne by popular support; and the first to be elected by the Senate alone, without reference to the people.
Each of Rome's legendary or semi-legendary kings was associated with one or more religious institutions still known to the later Republic. Tullus Hostilius and Ancus Marcius instituted the fetial priests. The first "outsider" Etruscan king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, founded a Capitoline temple to the triad Jupiter, Juno and Minerva which served as the model for the highest official cult throughout the Roman world. The benevolent, divinely fathered Servius Tullius established the Latin League, its Aventine Temple to Diana, and the Compitalia to mark his social reforms. Servius Tullius was murdered and succeeded by the arrogant Tarquinius Superbus, whose expulsion marked the beginning of Rome as a republic with annually elected magistrates.
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.[3] 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.[4] 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".[5]
Manius Tullius Longus was consul at Rome in 500 BC, with Servius Sulpicius Camerinus Cornutus.
When Servius Tullius arrived at the senate-house to defend his position, Tarquinius threw him down the steps and Servius was murdered in the street by Tarquin's men. Soon after, Tullia drove her chariot over her father's body. For Livy, Tarquinius' impious refusal to permit his father-in-law's burial earned him the sobriquet Superbus (“arrogant” or “proud”),[42] and Servius' death is a "tragic crime" (tragicum scelus), a dark episode in Rome's history and just cause for the abolition of the monarchy. Servius thus becomes the last of Rome's benevolent kings; the place of this outrage – which Livy seems to suggest as a crossroads – is known thereafter as Vicus Sceleratus (street of shame, infamy or crime).[43] His murder is parricide, the worst of all crimes. This morally justifies Tarquin's eventual expulsion and the abolition of Rome's aberrant, "un-Roman" monarchy. Livy's Republic is partly founded on the achievements and death of Rome's last benevolent king.[44]
Most ancient writers regarded Tarquin as the father of Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last King of Rome, but some stated that the younger Tarquin was his grandson. As the younger Tarquin died about 496 BC, more than eighty years after Tarquinius Priscus, chronology seems to support the latter tradition. An Etruscan legend related by the emperor Claudius equates Servius Tullius with "Macstarna" (apparently the Etruscan equivalent of the Latin "magister"), a companion of the Etruscan heroes Aulus and Caelius Vibenna, who helped free the brothers from captivity, slaying their captors, including a Roman named Gnaeus Tarquinius. This episode is depicted in a fresco at the tomb of the Etruscan Saties family at Vulci, now known as the François Tomb. This tradition suggests that perhaps the sons of the elder Tarquin attempted to seize power, but were defeated by the regent, Servius Tullius, and his companions; Tullius would then have attempted to end the dynastic struggle by marrying his daughters to the grandsons of Tarquinius Priscus. However, this plan ultimately failed, as Tullius was himself assassinated at the instigation of his son-in-law, who succeeded him.
Servius Tullius, who most like originally was an Etruscan soldier of fortune, identified the disadvantages of an army recruited from landowners: such an army depended heavily on a large farmer-class of citizens to provide troops. So Tullius pressed for reforms that granted veterans land. Although he was assassinated he did establish the precedent of granting land to veterans.
Some Roman historians believed Servius Tullius responsible for Rome's earliest true, minted coinage, replacing an earlier and less convenient currency of raw bullion. This is unlikely, though he may have introduced the official stamping of raw currency.[34] Money played a minimal role in the Roman economy, which was almost entirely agrarian at this time. Debt and debt bondage, however, were probably rife. The form of such debts had little resemblance to those of cash-debtors, compelled to pay interest to money-lenders on an advance of capital. Rather, wealthy landowners would make an "advance loan" of seed, foodstuffs or other essentials to tenants, clients and smallholders, in return for a promise of labour services. The terms of such "loans" compelled defaulters to sell themselves, or their dependants, to their creditor; or, if smallholders, to surrender their farm. Wealthy aristocratic landholders thus acquired additional farms and service for very little outlay.[35] Dionysius claims that Servius paid such debts "from his own purse", and forbade voluntary and compulsory debt bondage.[36] In reality, these practices persisted well into the Republican era. Livy describes the distribution of land grants to poor and landless citizens by Servius and others as the political pursuit of popular support from citizens of little merit or worth.[37]
He abolished all of Servius Tullius's laws on obligations and contracts.
Tarquinius was the son of the fifth king, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. In around 535 BC Tarquinius, together with his wife Tullia Minor (one of the daughters of the then king Servius Tullius) arranged the murder of Servius, and Tarquinius became king in his place.
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.[19] 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).