stamp; the relation also to the Latins bespeaks a Latin lawgiver. He may have been a Corniculan, and have ascended the throne in a manner which was contrary to the established custom. He may have sprung from a marriage of disparagement between one of the Luceres with a woman of Corniculum before the connubium was conceded, and this may be at the bottom of the history of his descent; but a foreigner, or a leader of marauders, he certainly was not. I do not in the least doubt Claudius’ honesty, nor do I impugn the importance of the Etruscan books; yet we must not rate their value too high. What they really were could not be known before Mai discovered the Veronese Scholia on the Æneid (1818). In these are found quotations from two Etruscan historians, Flaccus and Cæcina, which considerably lower our expectations concerning the value of the Etruscan books for the early times. It seems that just as the Romans misunderstood the old Latin history, and substituted the Tyrrhenian one, thus also the Etruscans kept to the traditions of the Tyrrhenians whom they had brought under their yoke, and made Tarchon, him who plays his part in Virgil, and may be met with in the Roman tradition as Tarquinius Priscus, the founder of their empire from Tarquinii. If Claudius had really at hand the old Etruscan rolls written from right to left, of which Lucretius speaks, he was on very slippery ground; but how much more so, if he followed Flaccus and Cæcina, who wrote without any sort of criticism. The books of the Etruscans are for the most part dated too early. Etruria had from the war of Hannibal to that of Sylla, for more than a hundred years, enjoyed profound peace under the supremacy of the Romans; in this time most of the works of Etruscan literature must be placed. Before the Social War, as Cicero states, the sciences flourished all over Italy, of which we have no more any detailed knowledge; certainly histories were written in the whole of Italy, just as in Rome. Now if any one read in the Etruscan books Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna, and chose to put things together, he might have thought with some vanity, “what has become of this Mastarna? very likely he is that Servius Tullius, whose birth has been shrouded in mystery.” Somebody may thus have stumbled upon this idea quite by himself, and Claudius indeed, addle-headed as he was, was sure to believe such a thing. Thus he also says of the _tribuni militares consulari potestate_, “_qui seni sæpe octoni crearentur_.” But there have always either been six of these, half of whom were patricians and half plebeians, or _promiscue_; or else only three patricians, making four with the _præfectus urbi_: once only we know of eight, when the two censors were reckoned with them, as Onuphr. Panvinius has shown.[82] This may have happened once or twice besides; but at all events it was an anomaly. From this we see that Claudius did not understand the Fasti. Our notice of Mastarna therefore is