1Next attention was paid to religious matters; 1and because certain public rites had regularly been performed by the kings in person, they appoint a king of sacrifices, so that the kings should not be missed anywhere. 2They made this priesthood subordinate to the pontiff, lest the honour added to the title should in any way stand in the way of liberty, which was then their first concern. 3And I am not sure whether, by fortifying it on every side and in the smallest matters, they did not go too far. 3For the name of one of the consuls, though nothing else about him gave offence, was hateful to the citizens: the Tarquins, they said, had grown too used to kingship; 3the beginning had been made by Priscus; 3then Servius Tullius had reigned; 3Tarquin the Proud, not even forgetting the kingship during the interval, as though it belonged to another, had sought it back by crime and violence as the inheritance of his family; 3now that Superbus had been driven out, the power lay in the hands of Collatinus; 3the Tarquins did not know how to live as private citizens.
3The name did not please them; it was dangerous to liberty. 4This talk, from men gradually sounding out feelings, spread at first through the whole city, and Brutus calls the commons, troubled by suspicion, to an assembly. 5There, first of all, he reads out the people's oath that they would allow no one to be king nor anyone to remain at Rome from whom danger to liberty might come. 5This, he said, must be guarded with all their might, and nothing that bore on it should be disregarded. 5He spoke unwillingly, for the man's sake, and would not have spoken had not love of the state prevailed: he did not believe that the Roman people had recovered full liberty; 6the royal family, the royal name was still not only in the citizen body but even in power; 6that was a hindrance, that was an obstacle to liberty.
7'Do you yourself, Lucius Tarquinius,' he said, 'remove this fear of your own free will. 7We remember, we acknowledge it, you drove out the kings; 7complete your service, take away from here the very name of the kings. 7Your fellow citizens, on my proposal, will not only give you back your property but, if anything is lacking, will generously add to it. 7Go as a friend; 7relieve the state of a fear that is perhaps groundless: people are so convinced that only with the Tarquin family will kingship depart from here.' 8At first astonishment at so strange and sudden a thing had shut off the consul's voice; 8then, as he began to speak, the leading men of the state stand round him and urge the same thing with many entreaties.
8And the others, indeed, had less effect; 9but when Spurius Lucretius, his superior in age and rank, and his own father-in-law besides, began to work on him in various ways, now begging, now persuading, to let himself be overcome by the agreement of the state, the consul, fearing that later, when he was a private citizen, the same fate might befall him along with the loss of his property and some further disgrace besides, resigned his consulship and, having moved all his possessions to Lavinium, left the state. 11Brutus, by decree of the senate, proposed to the people that all members of the Tarquin family should be exiles. 11In the centuriate assembly he had Publius Valerius elected as his colleague, with whose help he had driven out the kings.