And [Diodorus] goes on to say that that Ascanius made Alba the capital of his kingdom and subdued no small number of the inhabitants round about; he became a famous man and died after a reign of thirty-eight years.
At the end of this period, there arose a division among the people, on account of two men who were contending with each other for the throne.
For Julius, since he was the son of Ascanius, maintained that his father's kingdom belonged to him.
But Silvius, the brother of Ascanius and, furthermore, a son of Aeneias by Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus (whereas Ascanius was a son of Aeneias by his first wife, who was a Trojan woman), maintained that the kingdom belonged to him.
Indeed, after the death of Aeneias, Ascanius had plotted against the life of Silvius; and it was while the latter as a child was being reared by some herdsmen on a mountain, to avoid this plot, that he came to be called Silvius, after the name of the (?) mountain, which the Latins call Silva.
In the struggle between the two groups, Silvius finally received the support of the people and gained the throne.
- However Julius, although he did not acquire the supreme power, was made pontifex maximus and became a kind of second king; (287) he was the ancestor, so we are told, of the Julian family, which survives in Rome even to this day.