this distant past. In Republican mores and institutions kingship was abhorrent; and remained so, in name at least, during the Empire. On the one hand, Romulus was held to have brought Rome into being more-or-less at a stroke, so complete and purely Roman in its essentials that any acceptable change or reform thereafter must be clothed as restoration. On the other, Romans of the Republic and Empire saw each king as contributing in some distinctive and novel way to the city's fabric and territories, or its social, military, religious, legal or political institutions. Servius Tullius has been described as Rome's "second founder", "the most complex and enigmatic" of all its kings, and a kind of "proto-Republican magistrate". Ancient sources The oldest surviving source for the overall political developments of the Roman kingdom and Republic is Cicero's De republica ("On the State"), written in 44 BC. The main literary sources for Servius' life and achievements are the Roman historian Livy (59 BC – AD 17), whose Ab urbe condita was generally accepted by the Romans as the standard, most authoritative account; Livy's near contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch (c. 46 – 120 AD); their own sources included works by Quintus Fabius Pictor, Diocles of Peparethus, Quintus Ennius and Cato the Elder. Livy's sources probably included at least some official state records, he excluded what seemed implausible or contradictory traditions, and arranged his material within an overarching chronology. Dionysius and Plutarch offer various alternatives not found in Livy, and Livy's own pupil, the etruscologist, historian and emperor Claudius, offered yet another, based on Etruscan tradition. Origins Parentage and birth Most Roman sources name Servius' mother as Ocrisia, a young noblewoman taken at the Roman siege of Corniculum and brought to Rome, either pregnant by her husband, who was killed at the siege: or as a virgin. She was given to Tanaquil, wife of king Tarquinius, and though slave, was treated with the respect due her former status. In one variant, she became wife to a noble client of Tarquinius. In others, she served the domestic rites of the royal hearth as a Vestal Virgin, and on one such occasion, having damped the hearth flames with a sacrificial offering, she was penetrated by a disembodied phallus that rose from the hearth. According to Tanaquil, this was a divine manifestation, either of the household Lar or Vulcan himself. Thus Servius was divinely fathered