Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/268

248 Tarquinii. There is as little trace of any direct imitation of oriental models as there is of an independently-developed form of art. The Etruscan lapidaries adhered to the form of the beetle or scarabæus, which was originally Egyptian; but scarabæi were also used as models in carving in Greece in very early times (e. g. such a beetle-stone, with a very ancient Greek inscription, has been found in Ægina), and therefore they may very well have come to the Etruscans through the Greeks. The Italians may have bought from the Phœnician; they learned only from the Greek.

To the further question, from what Greek stock the Etruscans in the first instance received their art-models, a categorical answer can as little be given as to the similar inquiry regarding the alphabet; yet there subsisted relations of a remarkable kind between the Etruscan and the oldest Attic art. The three forms of art, which were practised in Etruria at least in after times very extensively, but in Greece only to an extent very limited, tomb-painting, mirror-designing, and graving on stone, have been hitherto met with on Grecian soil only in Athens or Ægina. The Tuscan temple does not correspond exactly either to the Doric or to the Ionic, but in the more important points of distinction, in the course of columns carried round the cella, as well as in the placing of a separate pedestal under each particular column, the Etruscan style follows the more recent Ionic; and it is this same Ionico-Attic style of building still pervaded by a Doric element, which in its general scheme stands nearest of all the Greek styles to the Tuscan. In the case of Latium there is an almost total absence of any reliable traces of intercourse bearing on the history of art. If it was (as must indeed very evidently have been the case) the general relations of traffic and intercourse that determined also the introduction of models in art, it may be assumed with certainty that the Campanian and Sicilian Hellenes were the master-instructors of Latium in art as in the alphabet; and the analogy between the Aventine Diana and the Ephesian Artemis is at least not inconsistent with such an hypothesis. Of course the older Etruscan art also served as a model for Latium. As to the Sabellian tribes, if Greek architectural and plastic art reached them at all, they must, like the Greek alphabet, have come to them only through the medium of the more western Italian stocks.

If, in fine, we are to form a judgment respecting the