Through the assaults of riot, fire, earthquake, poverty, popes, barbarians, limekilns, wind, rain, and earth, the foundations have endured. * * * * * The literary tradition tells us how Rome’s Etruscan monarchy fell: of Tarquin’s despotism and his son’s rape of Lucrece, daughter of a Roman aristocrat, whose husband avenged her and allegedly became one of Rome’s first pair of consuls. It tells us how the Roman nobles rose, drove out the Tarquins, and founded the Roman Republic. Archaeology cannot confirm the traditional date (indeed the founding of temples, Etruscan style, continues, as we saw, for half a century after 509). But about the middle of the fifth century the contents of the tombs on the Esquiline begin to grow mean and shabby. Contact with Etruria has been cut off, and the Romans make a virtue of necessity, pass sumptuary laws against excessive display, and practice simplicity and frugality. The late fifth century B.C. in Rome, as archaeology reveals it, is a period of isolation, stagnation, and retrenchment. Hardly had the new Roman Republic rallied to conquer Veii (traditionally in 396 B.C., after a ten-year siege, like Troy’s), when the Gauls descended from the north with fire and sword. Rome bought them off, and, resisting the temptation to move to Veii, fell to rebuilding, mindful of how its ancestors had built their city up out of forest and swamp; in love with their protecting hills, their fruitful open spaces, their busy river. The building was done planlessly; the main concern was to strengthen defenses. The primitive Rome of separate villages on the hills had been defended, at most, by separate palisades and ditches. It is with King Servius that literature associated the Rome of impressive buildings and a beetling wall, of squared stone, sturdy enough to repel all invaders. With how much justification Roman historians called the wall “Servian,” we are now to learn. The tradition associates Rome’s earliest wall with Servius Tullius, who falls between the two Tarquins, and certain surviving traces of earthwork and masonry, plus the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Drain through the Forum, are assigned by some archaeologists to the sixth century. Indeed until 1932 most scholars accepted the sixth-century date for the whole early circuit. But in that year the Swedish archaeologist Gösta Säflund (who seven years later was to explode Pigorini’s myth about the _terremare_) published the results of some painstaking fieldwork which radically changed the picture.