As noticed just above before he became king he had also been the employer and actually the owner of a great proportion of the “artifices” of the city. It is nowhere stated that the artifices helped to make him king in Veii as they had helped to make him unpopular in the rest of Etruria: but the important part played by the opifices at Ardea a generation previously suggests that this may well have been the case. If the events took place as recorded it is hard to believe that there was not some connexion between the Veientine’s royal power and his previous riches and control of the skilled labour of the city[1215]. [Sidenote: II. The credibility of the narrative.] So far we have been assuming that the extant accounts of the Tarquins have a historical basis. That assumption, as remarked already, is by no means beyond dispute. Not a statement has been quoted so far in this chapter that has not within the last century been pronounced to be historically worthless. Recently however there has been a movement to treat the narrative with much more respect than it generally received a generation ago. The new attitude is not merely a reaction against the excessive scepticism of the nineteenth century. Largely it is based on fresh evidence, mainly archaeological. Inscriptions show that writing was no extraordinary accomplishment at Rome in those early days. Excavations of cities that have been sacked make it most unlikely that the sack of Rome in 390 B.C. meant the complete destruction of the city records. In the face of facts like these more weight is now given to passages where our authorities for the history of sixth and fifth century Rome allude to more or less contemporary records, whether Roman or Greek. The evidence for falsification and invention is indeed considerable, but it is now for the most part realized that the critics of the nineteenth century greatly overestimated its application. The credibility of early Roman history is too big a subject to deal with at all adequately in a work like this. It is necessary however to examine more in detail those parts of the narrative with which this enquiry is more particularly concerned. [Sidenote: The historical existence of the Tarquins has been denied, _e.g._ by Pais.]