was aut Erasmus, aut Diabolus, and we may now say in the same manner, that unless the Etruscans were old Low Germans of the purest Gothic stock, there is no family of men to whom they could have belonged. The demonstration of this, however, belongs to a later part of the subject. At present we have only to consider the Etruscans as they appear in the peninsula of Italy.

§ 13. The names ETRUSCUS and RASENA cannot be brought to an agreement with TYRSenus.

We have already seen that the Tyrseni or Tyrrheni in Greece and Italy were a branch of the great Pelasgian race, and that although the ancients considered them identical with the Etruscans, the Greek explanation of which their name so readily admits is a proof that they could not have been the exclusively Italian tribe of the Etruscans. Modern scholars, who have adopted the ancient hypothesis of the identity of the Tyrrheni and Etrusci, have endeavoured by a Procrustean method of etymology to overcome the difficulties caused by the discrepancies of name. Thus the distinctive designation Etruscus or Hetruscus is clipt and transposed until it becomes identical with the Latin Tuscus for Tursicus, and synonymous with the Greek Τυρσήνος. On the other hand, the Ρασένα of Dionysius is pronounced a false reading and a mutilated representative of Ταρασένα οι Ταρσένα, which bears the same relation to Τυρσηνὸς that Porsena does to Πορσηνός or Πορσήνας. There is an alluring facility about this emendation, but it is a shock to the most credulous etymologist, when we prefix a syllable to one word and decapitate another in order to bring them both to an agreement with a third designation. In philology, as in other departments of human science, we perceive resemblances before we can be persuaded that they are connected with irreconcilable discrepancies. This we may see in the identification of the word Tuppyvos with another name peculiar to the Etruscans of

1 Müller, Etrusk. I. 71, 72.

2 This view has been successively adopted by Lanzi (Saggio, I. p. 189); Gell (Rome and its vicinity, I. p. 364, 5); Cramer (Ancient Italy, I. p. 161); and Lepsius (u. s. p. 23); and formerly approved itself to my judgment.

Ita

Et

Te

say

Italy, which appears under the form Tapxwviov, Tarkynia, Ταρχώνιον, G Tarquinii. It is perfectly consistent with sound philology to en to say that Tupo- may be a softer form of Tapx-, Tark-, or s, hor Tarq-. But, as I have elsewhere shown, if rapx- or тpaɣhave: and Tupo- belonged to the same root, the latter must be a enins secondary or assibilated form of the other. Now to say nothing

rrhen

gian r

ταρχ τραχ

of the fact that the σ- of τυρσηνός and τύρ-σις belongs to the termination, and is not found in τύραννος, Τίρυνς, Θυρέα, Θύρα bro atov, &c., it is clear that the form Tup-onvos is the only one which was ever known to the Pelasgians in Greece, while the harder form belongs to the later or mixed race in Italy. They must therefore be considered as different words. There is no reason why the names Et-rūria = Et-rusia (cf. Apulus, Apūlia), Et-rus-ci, and Ras-ena should not contain the same root: and we shall see that there are good grounds for retaining these words as the primitive and distinctive designation of a people who invaded and conquered the mixed Tyrrhenians and Umbrians of northern Italy.

tical

name

been

schol

of i

ruste

by t

trus

enti

th th

§ 14. It is explicitly stated by ancient writers that the Etruscans came from Rætia.

Livy, who, as a native of Padua, was likely to be wellinformed on the subject, has left us a statement respecting the Etruscans, which, so far from being hypothetical, is one of the most definite expressions of ethnological facts to be met with in ancient history. Speaking of the Gallic invasion and the attack upon Clusium, he says (V. 33): " nor were the people of Clusium the first of the Etruscans with whom armies of the Gauls fought; but long before this they frequently fought with the Etruscans who dwelt between the Apennines and the Alps. Before the Roman empire was established the power of the Etruscans extended far by land and sea. This is shown by the names of the upper and lower seas by which Italy is girt like an island for while the Italian nations have called the former the Tuscan sea by the general appellation of the people, they have designated the latter the Hadriatic, from Hadria a colony of the Tuscans. The Greeks call these same seas the Tyrrhenian and the Hadriatic. This people inhabited the country extending to both seas in confederacies of twelve cities each, first, twelve cities on this side of the Apennines towards the lower sea,

afterwards, having sent across the Apennines as many colonies as there were capital cities in the mother-country; and these occupied the whole territory beyond the Po, as far as the Alps', except the corner of the Veneti, who dwell round the extreme point of the Hadriatic. There is no doubt that the Alpine nations, especially the Ræti, have the same origin, but these have lost their civilization from their climate and locality, so as to retain nothing of their original type except their spoken language, and not even that without corruption." This distinct and positive statement is repeated by Pliny (H. N. V. 20, 133) and Justin (XX. 5), and is confirmed by relics of art, names of places, and peculiarities of language in the Tyrol, to which the Rætians of Lombardy were driven by the Gauls, and from which they descended in the first instance. Moreover, Stephanus of Byzantium defines the Rati as a Tyrrhenian, that is, in his sense, as an Etruscan race (Ραιτοί, Τυῤῥηνικὸν ἔθνος), and it is quite in accordance with the laws of language to suppose that Ραιτοί and 'Ρασένα are only modifications of the same word It is scarcely necessary to remark that Livy, like all the ancient writers, inverts the relation between the powerful colonists and their uncivilized mother-country.

§ 15. This view of the case is after all the most reasonable. Now if we are to adopt the old statement that the Etruscans, properly so called, were the same stock with the Rætians-and if we reject it there is nothing in ancient history or geography which we can with confidence accept3-there will be no difficulty in understanding the relation between the Etruscans and the other Italian tribes. Long after the Tyrrheno-Pelasgians had established their civilisation on both sides of the Tiber, and had conquered the Umbrian mountaineers in the north, but yielded to the Oscan or Sabine highlanders in the south, long after this time a Rætian tribe sallied forth from the plains of Lombardy, where

1

Among other places Mantua is expressly mentioned as a Tuscan city; Virgil, Æn. X. 198-200.

2 Compare, for example, the cognate German words reiten and reisen. 3 Abeken says (Mittel-Italien, p. 21): "diese Meinung, von Niebuhr zuerst entschieden ausgesprochen, wird auch die herrschende bleiben." This view was first maintained by Freret (Acad. d. Inscr. t. XVIII).

it was settled in unbroken connexion with sister tribes in the Tyrol and south-western Germany, and not only effected a permanent conquest of Umbria, but also settled itself as a military aristocracy among the civilized Tyrrhenians on the right of the Tiber. These conquerors included in their progress the Tyrrheno-Latin city, Rome, which had just shaken off the influence of the Tarquinii, but they lost this and their other acquisitions beyond the Tiber, in consequence of a defeat which the dominant Clusians sustained at Aricia. In every feature of this Etruscan invasion we may observe an analogy to the similar proceedings of the Gallic tribes, who at a still later period descended into Lombardy from the west. They succeeded in breaking through the continuity of the Rætian settlement by establishing themselves in the territory afterwards called Cisalpine Gaul. They also invaded Umbria and Etruria, besieged the imperial city of Clusium, and even sacked Rome. But they were borne back again, not without a severe struggle, to the region from which the Etruscans started, and the city of the Seven Hills was to each of these northern invaders the limit of their progress to the south.

§ 16. It is confirmed by all available evidence, and especially by the contrast between the town and country languages of ancient Etruria.

This view with respect to the Rætian invasion of a country previously occupied by Tyrrheno-Umbrians is fully supported by all the remains of their language, and by all that we know about this idiom. The details of this subject belong to a future chapter. It is sufficient to mention in this place that the Etruscan language, as exhibited in the fragments which have come down to us, consists of three separate or separable elements. We have either words which admit of a direct comparison with Greek and Latin, and these we will call the Tyrrheno-Pelasgian element of the language; or words which present affinities to the Umbrian and Oscan dialects; or words which resemble neither of the other, but may be explained by the Gothic affinities, which, for other reasons, we should be led to seek in the language of the Rætians. The first element appears most in the words quoted with an explanation by Roman writers, that is, in words of the southern Etruscans, who were to the last the purest representa

tives of the Tyrrheno-Pelasgians. We find the same kind of words in inscriptions from the same district. On the other hand, in the great cities of northern Etruria, and especially in the highlands of Umbria, we either find a mixed idiom, or must seek our explanations from the Gothic idioms to which I have referred. If the Etruscans, properly so called, did not establish themselves permanently or in very great numbers much to the south of Volsinii, and if in all their conquests to the south-west of their territory they rather occupied the cities than peopled the fields,— and both these appear on the face of their history,—it will follow that the Tepioiko in South Etruria, as in Laconia after the Dorian invasion, and in England after the Norman conquest, would retain their original, that is, their Tyrrheno-Pelasgian dialect. This fact is illustrated by two incidents to which Lepsius has referred with a somewhat different object'. Livy tells us (X. 4,) that in the year 301 B. c. the legate Cn. Fulvius, serving in Etruria, escaped an ambush and detected some pretended shepherds who would have led him into it, by learning from the men of Care who acted as his interpreters, that the shepherds spoke the town language, not that of the country, and that their outward appearance did not correspond to that of rustics. The same author informs us (IX. 36,) that in the year 308 B. c. a Roman nobleman and his slave, who had learned Etruscan at Cære, travelled through the Ciminian forest and as far as the Camertes who lived around Clusium, and that they escaped detection on this journey which carried them through the whole extent of southern Etruria. From these two incidents we infer that the town dialects of the Etruscans differed more or less from those of the country people, and that the country dialect about Cære, which must have been Tyrrheno-Pelasgian, was intelligible to the country people as far north as Clusium. This is quite in accordance with the parallel cases of the Saxons as subjected to the Normans, and the Achæans as reduced to vassalage by the Dorians; and the agrestes Etruscorum cohortes mentioned by Livy (IX. 36,) and the bands of TevéσTaι or feudal retainers, whom the Etruscan nobles (oi duvatáτato) took with them to battle, (Dionysius, IX. 5,) indicate the same distinction which is always observable in an aristocracy of conquest.

1 U. s. p. 32.