The intensification of the pre-Hellenic and Hellenic commercial currents into real coloniza tion movements took place on the old foundation of the same very ancient Mediterranean stock. The newcomers were not far from their mother country in which the sons of their own progeni tors continued to live and with which they liked to connect themselves, giving to ther new home the name of Larger Greece Meyiav as. Essen. daily traders and navigators, the Greeks did not give much care to the organization of territory. All these circumstances were ex tremely unfavorable to the establishment by them of an Italian nationality, hence the indig enous population of the south and of Sicily in part underwent a rather superficial assimilation which fell at the first blow and in part relapsed into barbarism.
Very different were the conditions in middle Italy when the Etruscans reached it. Before they, in their turn, conquered it the region inhabited by the old Mediterranean stock had already been conquered by the Umbri, who had an Aryan language and European civilization; and the prehistoric Umbria,. which was consid erably larger than the region which has pre served the name, then underwent a sort of medimvalism, of transformation and of revival. For their part the Etruscans did not have a home country near at hand where their brothers continued to live and with which they could keep up an intercourse. Their motherland was far distant and the connecting links were broken so completely that even to-day it is not possible, except very generally, to identify_ their original home. For that very reason the Etruscans were much better prepared than the Greeks to re gard Italy as their real home and to co-operate in developing a national spirit. But we should also mention the characteristics they show in the monuments which have come down to us. Profoundly religious, connoisseurs of art and excellent technicians, although not gifted with the sublime aesthetic sense toward which Greek art was tending, caring less for nav igation and commerce than for organization of territory, the Etruscans got along better with the simple and rough Umbrians and conferred on them the dignity of a superior civilization, beginning with a true architecture, as shown in houses and tombs and the organization of a city and public and military works, up to a religion pregnant with doctrinal and cosmo logical content. One fact which had a great influence in this connect.on was that the Etrus
cans, unique perhaps among the Mediterranean stocks in this respect, had preserved primitive and homely customs; they honored the hearth and gloried in the maternal name, mentioning it in epigraphs, whereas the Greeks had inherited from the the separation of the two sexes and the very inferior position of women. By this conjunction of favorable circumstances notwithstanding the different language, the Etruscans very soon forgot, or made others for get, that they were strangers; they amalgamated the indigenous elements and assisted in creating that Italic civilization with its sentiment of us domlity, in opposition to the Greek; a sentiment which still existed among the Roman conserva tives at the end of the republic who regarded anything with a flavor of Greek as foreign and reprehensible. Without the Etruscans there would probably not have been a superior Italic civilization opposed to the Greek; there would have been only the contrast between a rudimen tary and semi-barbaric civilization with one more advanced.
The Gallic dominion in the Cisalpine Gaul bounded the Etruscan power on the north and still further circumscribed it by descending into the Cispadana Gaul. There was without doubt a momentary return to a simpler and more primi tive civilization in upper Italy, but it is not at all true that the Gauls did not manufacture their own pottery, metals and other implements; their civilization has merely been less studied because it was ruder; but in certain points its centres of production can be established.
But the Roman eagles were drawing near to the boundaries of Italy; they closed the vista opened up by Italian archaeological material by restoring to uniformity the civilization of the peninsula and its products. Rome, the inheritor of the Etrusco-Italic national spirit, founded its power not so much on commerce and navigation as on the organization of terri tory, on the development of terrestrial com munication, of public works and power and of military and political ordinances. Under the powerful hand of the ruler the old population became uniform in civilization and language. The old name of Italy, born in the extreme south of the peninsula, set up for a moment as the standard of the national spirit in rebellion against the leading city, is taken up by Rome, is carried as far as the Alps and remains through the centuries as the symbol of national unity.