Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/168

148 the Cærite coast, Pyrgi (near S. Severa) and Alsium (near Palo), the Greek origin of which is indicated beyond possibility of mistake, not only by their names, but also by the peculiar architecture of the walls of Pyrgi, which differs essentially in character from that of the walls of Caere and the Etruscan cities generally. Æthalia, the "fire-island," with its rich mines of copper and especially of iron, probably sustained the chief part in this northern commerce, and there in all likelihood the foreigners had their central settlement and seat of traffic with the natives; the more especially as they could not have found the means of smelting the ores on a small and not well-wooded island without intercourse with the mainland. The silver mines of Populonia also on the headland opposite to Elba were perhaps known already to the Greeks, and wrought by them.

If, as was undoubtedly the case, the foreigners, ever in these times intent on piracy and plunder as well as trade, did not fail, when opportunity offered, to levy contributions on the natives and to carry them off as slaves, the natives on their part exercised the right of retaliation; and that the Latins and Tyrrhenes retaliated with greater energy and better fortune than their neighbours in the south of Italy, is attested not merely by the legends to that effect, but by the practical result. In those regions the Italians succeeded in resisting the foreigners, and in retaining, or at any rate soon resuming, the mastery not merely of their own mercantile cities and seaports, but also of their own seas. The same Hellenic invasion which crushed and denationalized the races of the south of Italy, directed the energies of the people of Central Italy (very much indeed against the will of their instructors) towards navigation and the founding of towns. It must have been in this quarter that the Italians first exchanged the raft and the boat for the oared galley of the Phœnicians and Greeks. Here too we first encounter great mercantile cities, particularly Cære in southern Etruria and Some on the Tiber, which, if we may judge from their Italian names as well as from their being situated at some distance from the sea, were, like the exactly similar commercial towns at the mouth of the Po, Spina and Hatria, and Ariminum further to the south, certainly not Greek, but Italian foundations. It is not in our power, as may easily be supposed, to exhibit the historical course of this earliest reaction of Italian nationality against foreign assault;