This high honour conferred upon him, from whatever cause, prevents us from believing that he was the son of a slave, and that he had himself been a slave when young.

I am rather of the opinion of those who say that, on the taking of Corniculum, the wife of Servius Tullius, who had been the leading man in that city, being pregnant when her husband was slain, being known among the other female prisoners, and, in consequence of her high rank, exempted from servitude by the Roman queen, was delivered of a child at Rome, in the house of Tarquinius Priscus.

Upon this, that both the intimacy between the ladies was improved by so great a kindness, and that the boy, having been brought up in the house from his infancy, was beloved and respected; that his mother's lot, in having fallen into the hands of the enemy, caused him to be considered the son of a slave.
40.

About the thirty-eighth year of Tarquin's reign, Servius Tullius was in the highest esteem, not only with the king, but also with the senate and people.

At this time the two sons of Ancus, though they had before that always considered it the highest indignity that they had been deprived of their father's crown by the treachery of their guardian, that a stranger should be king of Rome, who was not only not of a civic, but not even of an Italian family, yet now felt their indignation rise to a still higher pitch at the notion that the crown would not only not revert to them after Tarquin, but would descend even lower to a slave, so that in the same state about the hundredth year[50] after Romulus, descended from a deity, and a deity himself, occupied the throne as long as he lived, a slave, and one born of a slave, should now possess it.