Tullius had married his two daughters to Tarquinius and Aruns, the grandsons of his predecessor, whose guardianship he had undertaken during their minority. But what tie is strong enough to restrain ambition! his younger daughter Tullia, the most ambitious, and most detestable of her sex, unable to prevail upon her husband Aruns to join in deposing her father, applied to her brother-in-law Tarquinius, whose temper was congenial with her own, and offered to be his wife if he would assert his just right, as she termed it, and attempt to supplant her father. The offer was accepted, and the incestuous match agreed upon, which was soon after completed by the death of her husband and sister, who were privately despatched, that there might be no obstacle remaining. Tarquinius, now the worthy husband of such a wife, attempted in the senate to procure the deposition of Tullius, but failing in his design, at the instigation of his impious wife, he procured the old king to be openly assassinated in the street before his palace, and the unnatural Tullia drove her chariot in triumph over the body of her murdered father. By this complicated scene of adultery, murder, and parricide, Tarquin, surnamed the Proud, forced his way to the throne, and to usurpation added the most execrable and avowed tyranny. The Patricians,[248] who had favoured his usurpation, either from their hatred to Tullius and the Plebeians, or from the hopes of sharing in the government, with which, according to Dionysius, they had been privately allured, were the first who felt the bloody effects of his arbitrary temper. Not only the friends of Tullius, and those whom he suspected as uneasy under his usurpation, but all who were distinguished by their superior wealth fell a sacrifice to his suspicion or avarice. All such were accused, by his profligate emissaries, of many fictitious crimes, but particularly of a conspiracy against his person; the common pretence of all tyrants. As the tyrant himself sat as judge, all defence was useless. Some received sentence of death, some of banishment, and the estates of both were alike confiscated. The greater number of those that were accused, knowing the true motives of the tyrant’s conduct, and despairing of safety, voluntarily left the city; but some of the greatest note were privately murdered by his orders, whose bodies could never be found. When he had sufficiently thinned the senate by the death, or banishment of its most valuable members, he filled up the vacant seats with his own creatures. But as he allowed nothing to be proposed or done there, but in conformity to his orders, he reduced it to an empty form, without the least shadow of power. The Plebeians, who beheld with pleasure the sufferings of the Patricians, which they esteemed a just punishment for their behaviour under the reign of Tullius, were quickly treated with much greater severity.[249] For the tyrant not only abolished all the laws which Tullius had established to