In the first place, there can be no doubt that the Tarquins are real historical personages, and must therefore be conceived of in quite another fashion than the more ancient figures about which the various genealogical legends centre, and whose historical existence is due to personification alone. By adding their names to the older names the pontifices arbitrarily connected two entirely different elements, which ought in reality to be kept quite apart. The more ancient figures only--Romulus, Titus Tatius, Tullus Hostilius, Ancus Marcius, and Servius Tullius--are personifications, and of them only does the statement hold good that they are the representatives of diverse and distinct communities and of diverse elements of nationality. Here as everywhere legend and history meet and mingle, combining into a single line personifications and genuine historical figures, which were originally cognate but not equivalent ideas. As for the actual names of the kings, they, as we shall presently see in individual cases, are either the real names of the communities personified, or appellations taken from special conditions which characterised such communities; they always furnish some pregnant hint concerning the nature of the people personified. It is easy to understand how these names would ultimately stand forth as the names of kings: the “king” was the representative of the community before gods and men, and the nation, if personified, would naturally appear in the status and dignity of its legal representative. Accordingly, in the several Roman kings we must recognise a representation of the several communities under kingly rule which went to make up Rome, set forth under the figure of separate reigning monarchs. Firmly as we must now hold to the kernel of historic truth underlying these regal figures, we must not disregard the possibility that they have been disguised, overlaid, and distorted, to a very great extent, by a quantity of extraneous accessories, mythical and fictitious. The first point which we must bear in mind is that every legend of a nation, race, or community, is intimately connected with the religion of that nation or race. In other words, the legends of the ancestral hero, the eponym, tend to be confounded with the myths of the tribal divinity in course of time, the latter are set to the credit (in part at least) of the hero of the former, and the residuum of actual historic fact in the legend becomes more and more distorted and confused. This holds good in the case of the Roman kings. In considering them therefore these mythical elements must be discarded and left out of account.