Orthodox Roman tradition always admitted that she was a Vestal, but naturally enough represented her as the king’s daughter rather than his slave. The god Mars, it was said, got her with child as she drew water in his sacred grove.[642] However, when we compare this legend with the similar story of the birth of Servius, we may suspect that Promathion has preserved, though perhaps in a perverted form, an old feature of the Latin kingship, namely, that one of the king’s parents might be, and sometimes was, a slave. Whether that was so or not, such tales at least bear witness to an old belief that the early Roman kings were born of virgins and of the fire. Similarly Caeculus, the founder of Praeneste, passed for a [Sidenote: Legend of the birth of Caeculus from the fire.] son of Vulcan. It was said that his mother conceived him through a spark, which leapt from the fire and struck her as she sat by the hearth. She exposed the child near a temple of Jupiter, and he was found there beside a fire by some maidens who were going to draw water. In after-life he proved his divine birth by working an appropriate miracle. When an infidel crowd refused to believe that he was the son of a god, he prayed to his father, and immediately the unbelievers were surrounded with a flame of fire.[643] More than this, the whole of the Alban dynasty appear to have traced their descent from a Vestal, for the wife of King Latinus, their legendary ancestor, was named Amata[644] or Beloved, and this was the regular title bestowed on a Vestal after her election,[645] a title which cannot be fully understood except in the light of the foregoing traditions, which seem to shew that the Vestals were regularly supposed to be beloved by the fire-god. Moreover, fire is said to have played round the head of Amata’s daughter Lavinia,[646] just as it played round the head of the fire-born Servius Tullius. As the same prodigy was reported of Julus or Ascanius, the son of Aeneas,[647] we may suspect that a similar legend was told of his miraculous conception at the hearth.