they found in their new Italian seats; these latter having, in their turn, since their immi gration, mixed with the Umbrians, the oldest historical inhabitants of those parts. But, as we said before, this is only the most rational opinion that rose out of an ocean of wild speculation: so far from any authentic proofs having been brought forward in its support, the questiOn stands to-day precisely where it stood when Dionysius wrote:— " The Etruscans do not resemble any people in language and manners." Immense as was their influence on Roman, and, in fact, on European civilization, very little is known with respect to their political history. Chiefly cultivating the arts of peace, they still seem, long after their heroic period, to have been powerful enough to scare away any invader, and this probably is the reason why historians have so little to record of them; but their decline may be said to stand in an inverted ratio to the rise of Rome. The 7th and earlier half of the 6th c. B.C. had been the most powerful and flourishing epoch of the Etruscan state in its widest sense—which then probably had been in existence for four or five hundred years. Whether they had put their 'rarquinii as governors over conquered Rome, or whether, on the contrary, the reign of this Etruscan family would denote the subjugation of Southern Etruria by Rome herself, is not quite clear; but the expulsion of the last Roman king, Tarquinius (Tarchon), called Superbus, was followed, about 507 B.C., by a war between the Etruscans, under Porsena of Clusium, and the Romans, which, although ending in a most ignominious peace, dictated within the walls of Rome, did not bring about the restoration of the Tar 4minian dynasty. From the wars between Veil and Rome, which began in 486, and ended—interrupted only by an occasional armistice-395 B.C., with the destruction of Veii, dates the gradual but sure extinction of Etruria as an independent state. The -Gauls advancing from the north, the Etruscans were forced to conclude a forty years' truce with their adversaries at any price; but these over, and the Romans being engaged with the Samnites, the Etruscans recommenced the hostilities more fiercely than ever. In the course of this last war, the Romans succeeded, 309 B.c., under Q. Fabius Maxi mus, in twice defeating them, and Fabius crossed the Ciminian forest—the frontier sacred from time immemorial; and when, 283 B.C.. P. Cornelius Dolabella had beaten both them and their Gallic auxiliaries in a decisive and sanguinary battle at the Vadi monian lake, Etruria became a Roman province; and about two hundred years later, the Lex Julia conferred upon her inhabitants, as a reward for their fidelity, the right of citizenship. Up' to that time, they had succeeded in keeping up their own singularly •distinct creed, customs, traditions, language—their nationality, in fact; when Sulla, 82 u.c., infuriated by the part they had taken against him, liberally bestowed great por tions of their land upon his veterans; and some fifty years later, Octavianus planted his military colonies there. This wrought and completed the transformation of that mys terious conglomeration of heterogeneous races and tribes, hitherto called Etrurians, into Romans. Once. more, well-nigh 2,000 years after its extinction, the kingdom of Etruria tHetruria) rose before the eyes of the world. The peace of Luneville re-created it, and conferred it on the hereditary prince, Louis of Parma; after whose death, his widow, the infanta Louisa of Spain, administered the government for their son, Charles Louis, up to 1807, when it became a French province. From 1809, it again bore the name of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; and to TUSCANY—which in our days forms a province of the Italian kingdom, as it did of yore—and to ITALY, we refer for its modern history.
We have spoken above of twelve cities as forming the confederacy of Etruria proper. Similar confederacies of twelve cities were established, independently of each other, in the two other Etrurias. The cities themselves, however, cannot be fixed now in all cases. From the fact of more than twelve autonomous ones being recorded in Etruria proper, it would appear that some among these twelve confederates, or populi, possessed more than one capital city, each populus, however, being limited to one representative vote in the general council. The members of the confederacy were bound to appear regularly at an annual religious assembly near the temple of Voltumna, a locality which we are as yet unable to point out. Here great fairs were held for the people; common operations of war being discussed by the principes, and a general-in-chief for the ensu ing year elected from their number. Each city or canton, in the earlier times at least, had a king (Lucumo, Lauchme=Inspired), chosen for life, who at the same time acted as high-priest; and a hereditary nobility, which alone was eligible to the higher offices of state. Next to them, in the political and social scale, came the people, properly so called—free, not subject personally to the nobility; lowest stood a great number of cli ents or bondmen, probably the descendants of subjected original inhabitants. On the the federal interdependence between the cities was far from close. Single cities -carried on wars in which the others took no part; and when the confederacy resolved on general action, there were always some members which, for some reason or other, stood aloof. It -appears from this that the Etruscan constitution was analogous to the Greek and Roman in their earliest stages: the community develops itself into a polls or city, chooses a head, or rather high-priest, and enters into a more or less intimate alli ance with its neighboring cities; but, beside that king of its own, recognizes a common chief only in time of war.
The Etruscans were, as a people, less warlike than any of their neighbors, especially the Romans, and conspicuous is their want of anything like cavalry. Theirs was also the un-Italic custom of hiring soldiers, and their energies seem principally to have been directed to the more pi-ofitable occupations of trade and agriculture. One of the chief articles of their commerce was amber, which Germans brought from the Baltic to Etruria Circumpadana, whence it was conveyed to Greece by sea. In the western parts of the Mediterranean, they were formidable as pirates; while they were welcomed by the Carthaginians and the Greeks of Magna Grwcia, as importers of indigenous products of nature and art, which they exchanged for the wealth of the cast and south. That their commerce within Italy must have been very extensive, appears from the fact, that all the states of central Italy adopted their system of coinage, based, like their tables of weights and measures, and many of their political institutions, on the duodecimal system.
The striking contrast between the Etruscans and their Italic and Greek neighbors, which appears in the short thickset frames, the large heads and bulky extremities of the former, and the slender limbs and graceful harmony in the whole structure of the latter, and which runs with equal distinctness through the intellectual lives of the three nations, manifests itself nowhere with greater power than in their religions. Equally distant from the abstract, clear rationalism of the Latins, and the plastic joyfulness of Hellenic image-worship, the Etruscans were, as far as their dumb fragments show—for what we find on them of human words we do not understand—chained in a dark and dotard mysticism, such as a blending of a half-forgotten eastern symbol-service with barbarous religious practices of northern savages, grafted upon archaic Greek notions, might produce. In their pantheon, the predominance belongs to the evil, mischievous
gods; their prisoners are welcome sacrifices to the heavenly powers; they have no silent depths where the " good spirits" of their departed dwell, but a hell of the most hideous description, and a heaven where permanent intoxication is the bliss that awaits the virtuous. They divide their gods into two classes, and they place them in the most northern, and therefore most immovable point of the world, whence they can best over look it. The upper section is formed by shrouded, hidden gods (Involuti), of uncertain number, who act awfully and mysteriously, and twelve lower gods of both sexes, called Consentes, Complices. Tinia (Zeus, Jupiter) is the chief of these latter, and stand3 between the two divisions of the gods, receiving orders for destruction from the upper ones, while the lower ones form his ordinary council, and obey his behests. Nine of these (Novensiles) hurl lightnings at various times and with peculiar effects. The three of these deities which seem to have been the principal objects of worship were Tin in himself, armed with three different kinds of lightning, Cupra (Hera or Juno) and Menrfa (Minerva, Pallas Athene). Gods most peculiarly Etruscan are Vejovis, an evil Jupiter, whose thunder-bolts have the power to deafen, and Nortia, the goddess of fate, also called Lasa Mean. Besides these, they put a host of demons over the different portions of the creation:—the heavens, the earth, and the lower regions (Penates, Lares, and Manes). Their deities have generally wings; and before the Assyrian bulls had come to light, some antiquaries established from this a connection with the Hebrew winged cherubim. Characteristic in the highest degree is their " disciplina" or art of "divination." This had been revealed by Tages, a grandson of Jupiter, who was dug out near Tarquinii, in the shape of a child-like dwarf with gray hair—a most striking caricature of these both childish and senile practices—and who died immediately after having communicated these mysteries. They were at first the property of the noble families; but in the course of time, as others were initiated, and schools for priests were founded, these mystical and awe-striking teachings came to be written clown. It is saddening to observe here again in what monstrous insanities the spirit of man occa sionally revels, and that, too, in the province of what is noblest and highest—religion. The " disciplina" was developed into an exact science, fully as minutely and casuist ically sharpening its points and splitting its hairs as Hindu or Mohammedan theology would. It taught what gods hurled the different kinds of lightning; how, by the color and the peculiar quarter'of the sky, the author of the bolt might be recognized; whether the evil denoted was a lasting or a passing one; whether the decree was irrevocable or could be postponed; how the lightning was to be coaxed down, and how it was to be buried. This was the specialty of the Fulgurales. The Haruspices had as their share the explanation of portents, prodigies, monsters, the flight and cries of birds, the entrails of sacrificial animals; while others ministered in the holy rites at the founda tion of cities, the building of gates, houses, etc. Their ceremonies (a word derived from their town Caere) were endless and silly, but the show and pomp with which their priests knew how to surround these juggleries, and from which the Romans largely borrowed, made them acceptable in the eyes of the herd; and although Rome herself, with all her augurs, called Etruria " the mother of superstition," there was a certain odor of tithes and fees about these rites which made many anxious to " preserve religion in its primeval purity," In the entire absence of anything like a genuine Etruscan account, even the outlines of the relation between their religion and that of the Greeks on the one hand, and the Romans on the other, are exceedingly difficult to trace; so much, however, is certain, that they adopted and assimilated many points of archaic Greek theology, and clothed them in a garb of their own, and that this process was gone through and repeated still more completelx py the Romans, in their turn, with respect to the religious notions of the Etruscans. The articles on Greek and Roman religion will furnish further mation on this point. • The high degree of civilization which the Etruscans possessed long before Rome was heard of, is testified by innumerable works of masonry and art. The Etruscans were of an eminently practical turn of mind, and domestic, like the north. Trusting to their priests for reconciliation with the gods, who always seemed irate, but whose angry decrees could easily be foreseen and averted, they set to work in developing the inner resources of the country, and in making the best use of their intercourse with foreign countries. They thus became eminent in agriculture, navigation, military tactics, medi cine, astronomy, and the like; and in all these, as well as in some of the very minutim of their dress and furniture, the Romans became their rec.dy disciples and imitators. The division of the year into 12 months, of the monthsintc xalends and nones and ides, the designation of the numerals, were Etruscan; from the same source were derived the toga prcetexta as well as the pomp of triumphs, the lietors and apparitors, down to the ivory curule chairs. The towns of the Etruscans were clean and healthy, owing to their perfect system of drainage and sewerage; they tunneled and excavated, they embanked and irrigated, they turned swamps into cities, changed the course of streams, l and excelled in alkinds of useful public and private works. Their ideal was not the beautiful or the spiritual, but a comfortable, and, if possible, luxurious existence. As a special proof of their love for their own hearth, a quality probably imported from the north, we might adduce their invention of the atrium, the common sitting-room of the family, where the master of the house sat surrounded by his penates and the figures of his ancestors, while the wife and her handmaidens plied the labors of the loom or the distaff. As in the Germanic nations, woman stood in high estimation. She was the companion, not the slave of the husband, and thus had certainly not a little share in the softening of their primitive wildness, and in counteracting the somberness of their creed. That we find them even in their tomb-paintings engaged in convivial carousings, danc ing, races, athletic games, and that they liked their very worship accompanied by the sound of flutes, horns, and trumpets, only shows that that glorious sky of theirs, their intercourse with the nations, their wealth and culture, had gradually caused their antique and gloomy austerity to wear off, even as it wore off with the Romans and other peo ples; for to assume with some that the boisterous scenes to which we allude were caused more or less by the despair arising from the loss of their independence, would be going somewhat too far. Licentiousness is the sure forerunner of the fall of a nation, but a whole people does not take refuge in enjoyment when their all is lost. We know little of Etruscan literature; it seems to have consisted mostly of rituals, religious hymns, and some historical works. Whether the Fescennines, certain mocking-songs, sung in alternate verses, with musical accompaniment, at nuptials, originated with them or not, is not decided.