Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/211

VII found inscribed on Etruscan wall-paintings in the forms Tarchnas and Mestrna. They are recognised by most scholars as genuine Etruscan, rather than as Etruscan forms of Latin names.

Now it is not possible to believe that the Romans should have willingly elected a king outside their own patrician gentes. Nor is it easier to believe that the powerful Etruscan aristocracy should never have been able to subdue Rome as they had subdued the original inhabitants of half the peninsula. Though Roman tradition naturally refused to allow that the great Etruscan power, which extended north and south of Latium, had at one time swallowed up the city on the Tiber, it yet unconsciously betrays the secret in many ways. We are justified in believing, in spite of the doubts of many critics, that an Etruscan dynasty ruled for a time in Rome, and ruled with something of the spirit of the tyrant.

Can we make out, in any degree of certainty, what policy these foreign kings pursued? Roman tradition universally ascribed to them some at least of the features of the Greek tyrant; but this tradition, it may be said, is hardly to be trusted, and may be due to the influence of Greeks who read into Roman history the characteristics of their own form of City-State. On the other hand, there must have been a substratum of fact to which such stories could attach themselves. Extension of Roman territory, intercourse with other peoples, especially Greeks and Etruscans, oppression of the aristocracy, development of the army and of the less privileged