Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/69

Rh North." But in both cases we can perceive that the centres of civilization as in later times developed were all to be traced to the sea-coasts. The first inhabitants of Italy like the first inhabitants of Greece might have been ignorant and barbarous enough to be unacquainted with the sowing of bread-corn, the use of wells or the benefit of fire. But the earliest accounts we have of that peninsula tell us of a people already settled there, known as Tyrrhenians, to whom later writers have wished to give a mysterious character as if of some peculiar origin, possessing a civilization all their own, and distinct from others. They themselves however never seem to have denied their eastern origin, and in Italy always referred their polity to the maritime city of Tarquinia and their hero Tarchon, both names evidently only varying forms of the national appellation Tyrrheni. All the principal writers of antiquity as I said before, with only one exception, Dionysius Halicarnassus, agree in stating unreservedly that this civilized people were originally a colony of Lydians, increased by other migrations of no doubt kindred character. Herodotus gives the history of their settlement in all its detail, and he is followed implicitly by Cicero, Strabo, V. Paterculus, V. Maximus, Seneca, Pliny and Plutarch, and several others. Several writers who had not occasion to refer to them directly in the course of their narratives corroborate their tradition incidentally. Tacitus mentions the Sardians as producing a decree of the Etruscans acknowledging their descent from Lydia. Virgil who as a poet may be objected to as not writing historically, yet may certainly be adduced as a corroborative authority, not only repeats the legend but further on two other occasions calls the Tiber, the Lydian Tiber, an epithet which would have been absurd if it were not understood as applied to a Lydian colonization of its banks. When these and other writers gave their assent to this tradition, there were still extant many native Etruscan authors whose names alone have come down to us. Those histories must have been well known to the Romans, and they could not have given any other account of their origin than what such laborious enquirers as Cicero, Strabo, Pliny and others I have named have repeated. If they had given a different account such writers as these can not be supposed to have wilfully fabricated another history in contradiction to them, without some of them at least hinting the fact and assigning a reason for so doing. But the unanimity which prevails among so many, and the silence as to any doubt of its truth, is the most convincing proof of the authenticity of the narrative and its trustworthiness.