Kings and Consuls

From the beginning, kings ruled Rome; Lucius Brutus established freedom and the consulship. So wrote the Roman historian Tacitus in the second century AD, but the view was orthodox. It is still widely accepted today. But how could the Romans of later times have possibly known anything about the origins of Rome, the rule and subsequent expulsion of their kings or the creation of the Republic when all those events took place centuries before anyone wrote any account of them? And just how useful ar