In 440 B.C. the plebeians of Ardea, a city about 20 miles S. of Rome, are described by Livy[1210] as engaged in a struggle with the optimates, and as getting the worst of it. Thereupon the losing party “quite unlike the Roman plebs, ... prepared to besiege the city (_i.e._ Ardea) with a crowd of workmen (opificum), attracted by the prospect of plunder.” The Latin leaves it possible that the crowd of workmen (opificum) with which the plebs of Ardea prepared to besiege their city should be understood as a separate body, conceivably metics or slaves. At Veii in 400 B.C. the artifices are said to have been slaves[1211]. But though in Etruria in 400 B.C. this may have been normally the case, in Latin Ardea forty years earlier we may well have conditions not unlike those that have been inferred above for sixth century Rome. Even if the opifices of Ardea are to be understood as slaves, the united body of plebeians and opifices acting in opposition to the optimates comes nearer to Brutus’ description of the situation at Rome under the Tarquins than does anything that can be found in our historians’ pictures of Rome in the fifth century. Livy is thinking of the Roman plebeians of the early republican period, not of the opifices and lapicidae of the age of the Tarquins, when he says that the plebs of Ardea was quite unlike the Roman plebs[1212]. [Sidenote: The rich Veientine employer who became king of his city in 400 B.C.] In the year 400 B.C. according to Livy the people of Veii, “taedio annuae ambitionis, regem creauere[1213].” Nothing is said by Livy about feelings and parties in Veii itself, except this statement that they were bored with annual elections. All that Livy mentions is the way in which the appointment was received elsewhere in Etruria. The event, he says, gave offence to the peoples of Etruria. Their hatred of kingly power was not greater than that which they felt against the king personally. He had previously made himself generally unpopular by his wealth and arrogance (opibus superbiaque). He had once brought a solemn celebration of the games to a violent conclusion: indignant at having been rejected by the votes of the twelve peoples in favour of another candidate for the priesthood, he had suddenly, in the middle of the performance, withdrawn the workmen (artifices), a great part of whom were his own slaves[1214]. The result of the Veientine’s wealth had been, according to Livy, to make him unpopular. But it is a reasonable inference from Livy’s narrative that he was unpopular only with the aristocrats who continued to control the government in the other cities of Etruria. His accession can hardly have been disagreeable to the Veientines who made him king.