Further, to complete the notion of a patriot king, it was said that he had drawn out a scheme of popular government, by which two magistrates, chosen every year, were to exercise the supreme power, and that he himself proposed to lay down his kingly rule to make way for them. It can hardly be doubted that these two magistrates were intended to be chosen the one from the houses and the other from the commons, to be the representatives of their respective orders. [Illustration: RUINS OF A TEMPLE OF SATURN, ROME] But the following tyranny swept away the institutions of Servius, and much more prevented the growth of that society for which alone his institutions were fitted. No man can tell how much of the story of the murder of the old king and of the impiety of the wicked Tullia is historical; but it is certain that the houses, or rather a strong faction among them, supported Tarquinius in his usurpation: nor can we doubt the statement that the aristocratical brotherhoods or societies served him more zealously than the legal assembly of the curiæ; because these societies are ever to be met with in the history of the ancient commonwealths, as pledged to one another for the interests of their order, and ready to support those interests by any crime. Like Sulla in after-times, he crushed the liberties of the commons, doing away with the laws of Servius, and, as we are told, destroying the tables on which they were written; abolishing the whole system of the census, and consequently the arrangement of the classes, and with them the organisation of the phalanx; and forbidding even the religious meetings of the Paganalia and Compitalia, in order to undo all that had been done to give the commons strength and union. Further it is expressly said by Dionysius[e] that he formed his military force out of a small portion of the people, and employed the great bulk of them in servile works, in the building of the circus and the Capitoline temple, and the completion of the great drain or cloaca; so that in his wars, his army consisted of his allies, the Latins and Hernicans, in a much greater proportion than of Romans. His enmity to the commons was all in the spirit of Sulla; and the members of the aristocratical societies, who were his ready tools in every act of confiscation, or legal murder, or mere assassination, were faithfully represented by the agents of Sulla’s proscription, by L. Catilina and his patrician associates. But in what followed, Tarquinius showed himself, like Critias or Appius Claudius, a mere vulgar tyrant, who preferred himself to his order, when the two came into competition, and far inferior to Sulla, the most sincere of aristocrats, who, having secured the ascendency of his order, was content to resign his own personal power, who was followed therefore by the noblest as well as by the vilest of his countrymen, by Pompey and Catulus no less than by Catiline.