Historical glosses were annexed to the surnames of distinguished Romans; that of Publius Valerius the "servant of the people" (-Poplicola-), for instance, gathered around it a whole group of such anecdotes.

Above all, the sacred fig-tree and other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a great multitude of sextons' tales of the same nature as those out of which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the same ground the Mirabilia Urbis.

Some attempts to link together these different tales--the adjustment of the series of the seven kings, the setting down of the duration of the monarchy at 240 years in all, which was undoubtedly based on a calculation of the length of generations,( 16) and even the commencement of an official record of these assumed facts--probably took place already in this epoch.

The outlines of the narrative, and in particular its quasi-chronology, make their appearance in the later tradition so unalterably fixed, that for that very reason the fixing of them must be placed not in, but previous to, the literary epoch of Rome.

If a bronze casting of the twins Romulus and Remus sucking the teats of the she-wolf was already placed beside the sacred fig-tree in 458, the Romans who subdued Latium and Samnium must have heard the history of the origin of their ancestral city in a form not greatly differing from what we read in Livy.