We now come to the Etruscans, the most singular people of the peninsula. This people called themselves Rasena, or Rasenna—a name that reminds us of the Etruscan surnames Porsenna, Vibenna, Sisenna. At one time they possessed not only the country known to the Romans as Etruria (that is, the country bounded by the Macra, the central Apennine ridge, and the Tiber), but also occupied a large portion of Liguria and Cisalpine Gaul; and perhaps they had settlements in Campania. In early times they possessed a powerful navy, and in the primitive Greek legends they are represented as infesting the Mediterranean with their piratical galleys. They seem to have been driven out of their trans-Apennine possession by early invasions of the Gauls; and their naval power never recovered the blow which it received in the year 480 B.C., when Gelo, tyrant of Syracuse, defeated their navy, combined with that of Carthage, on the same day on which the battle of Salamis crippled the power of Persia.[2]
But who this people were, or whence they came, baffles conjecture. It may be assumed as certain, that Hellenic settlers came in by sea from the western coasts of Epirus, which are distant from Italy less than fifty miles; and that the Opican, Umbrian, and Sabellian races came in from the north by land. But with respect to the Etruscans all is doubtful. One well-known legend represents them as Lydians, who fled by sea from Asia Minor to avoid the terrible presence of famine. Another indicates that they came down over the Alps, and the origin of their name Rasena is traced in Rætia. On the former supposition, Etruria was their earliest settlement, and, pushing northward, they conquered the plain of the Po; on the latter, they first took possession of this fertile plain, and then spread southward over the Apennines.
Their language, if it could be interpreted, might help to solve the riddle. But though characters in which their inscriptions are written bear close affinity to the Greek and Roman alphabets, the tongue of this remarkable people has as yet baffled the deftest efforts of philology.
Of the Greek settlements that studded the coast of lower Italy, and gave to that district the name of Magna Græcia, little need here be said. They were not planted till after the foundation of Rome. Many of them, indeed, attained to great power and splendour; and the native Osco-Pelasgian population of the south became their subjects or their serfs. Sybaris alone, in the course of two centuries, is said to have become mistress of four nations and twenty-five towns, and to have been able to raise a civic force of 300,000 men. Croton, her rival, was even larger. Greek cities appear as far north as Campania, where Naples still preserves in a corrupt form her Hellenic name, Neapolis. The Greek remains discovered at Canusium (Canosi) in the heart of Apulia, attest the extent of Hellenic dominion. But the Greeks seem to have held aloof from mixture with the native Italians, whom they considered as barbarians. Rome is not mentioned by any Greek writer before the time of Aristotle (about 340 B.C.).
From the foregoing sketch it will appear that Latium formed a kind of focus, in which all the different races that in past centuries had been thronging into Italy converged. The Etruscans bordered on Latium to the west; the Sabines, with the Umbrians behind them, to the north; the Æquians and Volscians, Oscan tribes, to the northeast and east; while Hellenic communities are to be traced upon the coast lands. We should then expect beforehand to meet with a people formed by a commixture of divers tribes; and this expectation is confirmed.
Tradition tells us that the aborigines of Latium mingled in early times with a people calling themselves Siculians; that these Siculians, being conquered and partly expelled from Italy, took refuge in the island, which was afterwards called Sicily from them, but was at that time peopled by a tribe named Sicanians; that the conquering people were named Sacranians, and had themselves been forced down from the Sabine valleys in the neighbourhood of Reate by Sabellian invaders; and that from this mixture of aborigines, Siculians, and Sacranians arose the people known afterwards by the name of Latins. Where all is uncertain, conjecture is easy. But all conjectures bear witness to the compound nature of the Latin nation.b
BEGINNINGS OF ROME AND THE PRIMITIVE ROMAN COMMONWEALTH
About fourteen miles upstream from the mouth of the river Tiber, and on either bank of the latter, rise gentle slopes, the higher on the right, the lower on the left; to the latter for at least two and a half thousand years the name of the Romans has been affixed. It cannot, of course, be positively declared how and when it arose, it is only certain that in the oldest form of the name known to us, the inhabitants of the province were not called Romans but—with a change of pronunciation natural enough in the more ancient stages of a language but not continued in the Latin known to us—Ramnians or Ramnes; an eloquent witness to the immemorial antiquity of this name. The exact derivation cannot be determined; it is possible that the Ramnes are the people of the stream. But they did not dwell alone on the bank of the Tiber. In the oldest classification of the Roman citizens, we find traces showing that the nation derived its origin from the fusion into a single commonwealth of three once apparently independent tribes, the Ramnes, the Tities, and the Luceres: that is, from a synoikismos like that whence Athens arose in Attica.[3]
Again, after the union, each of these three ancient communities, which had now become demes, owned a third of the common lands, and was similarly represented in the militia as well as in the council of the elders, whilst in the religious organisation the numbers of the six vestal virgins, the three high priests of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, are apparently to be referred to this threefold division.
The most wanton absurdities have been founded on the existence of the three elements into which the ancient Roman commonwealth was divided; the irrational idea that the Roman nation was a mixed race is connected with it, and its supporters labour in various ways to represent the three great Italian races as the component elements of ancient Rome, and to transform the people which developed its speech, its government, and its religion with a purity and national spirit attained by few others, into a confused mass of Etruscan, Sabine, Hellenic, and, still worse, even Pelasgic elements. Setting aside the sometimes contradictory, sometimes groundless hypotheses, all that can be said concerning the nationality of the various elements of the ancient Roman commonwealth may be summed up in a few words. That the Ramnes were of Latin origin cannot be doubted, since they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth and maintained the chief place amongst the three tribes, so that they must have decided the nationality of the united community.
As to the descent of the Luceres, nothing can be said except that there is no obstacle to their being regarded as a Latin tribe like the Ramnes. On the other hand the second of these tribes is unanimously derived from that of the Sabines, doubtless on the authority of a respectable and authentic tradition of the “Titian brotherhood” which claimed to have been founded on the admission of the tribe to the confederacy for the preservation of its peculiar national ritual. Traces of such an aboriginal Sabine worship are in fact to be found in Rome; as for instance the honouring of Maurs or Mars and of Semo Sancus, side by side with the corresponding Latin Dius Fidius. It was at a very remote period, when the Latin and Sabine tribes were yet unquestionably far less distinctly unlike in language and customs than were the Roman and the Samnite later, that a Sabellian community entered into a Latin tribal union; exactly in the same way that some centuries afterwards the Sabine clan of Attus Clanzus, or Appius Claudius, and his clients emigrated to Rome, obtained a grant of land on the right bank of the Anio and was soon completely absorbed into the Roman community.