In the case of Spurius Maelius there are no such complications. If we accept Livy and Dionysius, Maelius’ policy did not threaten the property of any of the nobles. The fears that he would restore the kingship may have been mistaken, but they were almost certainly genuine. Is there any resemblance between extant accounts of Maelius’ career and the speculations that we have been engaged in as to the early history of the first Tarquin? There is not only a resemblance but a striking one. Maelius was extremely rich: not dives merely but praedives[1190]. When he set about relieving Rome from famine, he was able to do so not only at his own expense but through his own clients and connexions: “buying up corn at his own expense through the agency of his friends (hospitum) and clients[1191].” [Sidenote: Manlius.] Marcus Manlius, the third to be condemned to death for aiming at the throne, need not detain us. He is essentially a military character, like his contemporary Dionysius of Syracuse[1192]. [Sidenote: The republican government changes Tarquin’s artizans into soldiers and makes war a paying (and ultimately a paid) profession:] But the real bulwark of the republic of the fifth century as it appears in the pages of our authors is not the right arm of Servilius Ahala. It is a fundamental change that came over the lower classes of the free population. In a passage of Livy that has already been quoted, Brutus is made to charge the Tarquins with having converted the men of Rome from soldiers into artizans and quarrymen (opifices ac lapicidas). Brutus had just effected a revolution at Rome. To represent a revolution as a return to antiquity was as natural with the Roman as it is with us[1193]. It is possible, though improbable, that the Tarquins had turned the plebeians from soldiers into artizans. The situation clearly indicated by Brutus is that he and his fellow-nobles are turning them from artizans into soldiers. It is not merely in the speeches put by Livy and Dionysius into the mouths of Brutus and his colleagues that we find the establishment of the republic associated with a reorganization of the state upon a military basis. The development of the comitia centuriata as the main organization of the citizens of Rome for political purposes is associated with the beginnings of the republic: the centuries were originally and fundamentally a military organization[1194].