Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/73

Rh, Samnites, Sabines, Sabellians or others, were all cognate people, and therefore all at the almost only spoke different dialects of the same language. Pliny says the Umbri were the earliest and most widely spread race, and that from them the Lydian colonists took 300 towns. These colonists then were not by any means the first inhabitants of Italy, but they probably chose to invade that country, finding it fertile and pleasant for habitation and also an abundance of slave labor to carry out the stupendous works they contemplated. It is the character of these works which gives to this extraordinary people their principal interest. Ancient writers have said little or nothing comparatively respecting them. We know them principally ourselves from their remains, and the modern traveller and scholar looks with astonishment on works which ancient writers have scarcely condescended to mention. We exhume their remains and find in their tombs and on their vases representations of scenes of every day life, which prove them to have been a highly refined people, for though nude figures are constantly introduced, there is nothing given of the gross or licentious. If we turn to the remains of their public works or buildings, we find still greater causes of admiration. We find that they gave their attention not so much to temples, baths, amphitheatres and other works of the like character, as to objects of public utility especially combined with sanitary considerations. Their walls, roads, bridges, sewers and aqueducts, were all upon the grandest scale and of the wisest construction. Their plans for draining and clearing their marshes, for carrying off in gigantic tunnels the water that otherwise would have gathered on their heights and inundated the country, utilizing it at the same time for the irrigation of their fields in summer, show a forethought and energy beyond that exhibited by any other people history has recorded. But they also prove an astonishing command of labor, which must have been slave labor, to enable them to carry such gigantic undertakings into effect, and this coincides with the accounts given us of their conquests over the original inhabitants of the country, whom they thus reduced to slavery and whom perhaps they could only keep in subjection by a systematic employment.

Such were the people whom so many later writers have wished to connect with the wild and uncultivated nations of the North, forgetting in that case to account for the extraordinary circumstance that they should be savages in their own countries, and yet when descending into Italy should have at once assumed a state of civilizations and notions of