Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/152

132 account as deserving credit in all its details, it only shows that the Etruscans had taken part in a great plundering expedition. It is far more important to observe that south of the Tiber no Etruscan settlement can be pointed out as having owed its origin to founders who came by land; and that no indication whatever is discernible of any serious pressure by the Etruscans upon the Latin nation. The possession of the Janiculum and of both banks of the mouth of the Tiber remained, so far as we can see, undisputed in the hands of the Romans. As to the migrations of bodies of Etruscans to Rome, we find an isolated statement drawn from Tuscan annals, that a Tuscan band, led by Cælius Vivenna of Volsinii and after his death by his faithful companion Mastarna, was conducted by the latter to Rome, and settled there on the Cælian Mount. We may hold the account to be trustworthy, although the addition that this Mastarna became king in Rome under the name of Servius Tullius is certainly nothing but an improbable conjecture of the archaeologists who busied themselves with legendary parallels. The name of the "Tuscan quarter" at the foot of the Palatine (P. 53) points to a similar settlement.

It can hardly, moreover, be doubted that the last regal family which ruled over Rome, that of the Tarquins, was of Etruscan origin, whether it belonged to Tarquinii as the legend asserts, or to Cære where the family tomb of the Tarchnas has recently been discovered. The female name also Tanaquil or Tanchvil, interwoven with the legend, while it is not Latin, is common in Etruria. But the traditional story, according to which Tarquin was the son of a Greek who had migrated from Corinth to Tarquinii, and came to settle in Rome as a metoikos, is neither history nor legend, and the historical chain of events is manifestly in this instance not entangled merely, but completely torn asunder. If anything at all can be deduced from this tradition beyond the bare and really unimportant fact that a family of Tuscan descent were the last who swayed the sceptre in Rome, it can only be held as implying that this dominion of a man of Tuscan origin should neither be viewed as a dominion of the Tuscans or of any one Tuscan community over Rome, nor conversely as a dominion of Rome over southern Etruria. There is, in fact, no sufficient ground either for the one hypothesis or for the other. The history of the Tarquins was acted out in Latium, not in Etruria; and Etruria, so far