Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/74

62 polity, such as no people of Italy, not even the Romans themselves, ever approached.

Niebuhr has expressed a conjecture, that the works of art in bronze and others "were not the produce of the ruling people but of their subject bondmen and that the Etruscans properly so called were no more given to the arts than the Romans." With this conjecture I am prepared to coincide, but in a different point of view, the Etruscans of the time of Roman history being according to my argument a cognate people to the Romans, already a different people to the Lydian settlers, who had been then overrun and subduced in their turn by Gaulish tribes, the same as the ancient or first people of Rome had been. The first people of Rome appear to have been of Greek or Pelasgic origin, and though afterwards amalgamated with their conquerors and still forming the mass of the people, yet the whole course of their history shows us that the Greek Pelasgians were the Plebeian, and the Patricians some Celtic conquerors, who amalgamating their energy with the skill of the conquered formed the future governors of the world. When the Celtic nations overran Etruria, they no doubt imbibed in the course of a few generations such a participation in the refinements of the people they had conquered as to enable them to continue it, for how else can we imagine bondmen executing such works, unless their masters directed and appreciated their labors? Mere bondmen could not be supposed to execute them, and an uncivilized people would not have undertaken them. This consideration then brings us back to the statement of Dionysius on which Niebuhr and his disciples have chosen to rely in preference to every other authority, so much so that Niebuhr uses this extraordinary phrase in introducing the subject of "the story concerning the Lydian emigration of the ancient Tyrrhenians, which Herodotus in one of his less fortunate hours understood of the Etruscans." He goes on to say "Dionysius combats the fallacious assumption with great ability. That the account of Herodotus was not founded on even a Lydian tradition he proves by the unexceptionable authority of Xanthus; that it would deserve no credit, even if it had been a tradition, by the complete difference of the two nations in languages, usages and religion." Vol. i. p. 90. These are Niebuhr's words, but as it is my purpose to support the authority of Herodotus and of the other ancient writers who so unanimously followed him, I have equal right to retort on Niebuhr, that Dionysius and even he himself might also have had their less fortunate hours, and the question to whom the preference should be given in this case, whether Herodotus or Dionysius, may