Page:The history of Rome. Translated with the author's sanction and additions.djvu/53

Rh they must probably therefore before their separation have reached the coast of the Black Sea or of the Caspian. By what route from those regions the Italians reached the chain of the Alps, and where in particular they were settled while still united with the Hellenes and them alone, are questions that can only be answered when the problem is solved by what route, whether from Asia Minor or from the regions of the Danube, the Hellenes arrived in Greece. It may at all events be regarded as certain, that the Italians, like the Indians, immigrated into their peninsula from the north. (P. 11.)

The advance of the Umbro-Sabellian stock along the central mountain ridge of Italy, in a direction from north to south, can still be clearly traced; indeed, its last phases belong to purely historical times. Less is known regarding the route which the Latin migration followed. Probably it proceeded in a similar direction along the west coast, long, in all likelihood, before the first Sabellian stocks began to move. The stream only overflows the heights when the lowlands are already occupied; and only through the supposition that there were Latin stocks already settled on the coast, are we able to explain why the Sabellians should have contented themselves at first with the rougher mountain districts, from which they afterwards issued and intruded, wherever it was possible, between the Latin tribes.

It is well known that a Latin stock inhabited the country from the left bank of the Tiber to the Volscian mountains; but these mountains themselves, which appear to have been neglected on occasion of the first immigration when the plains of Latium and Campania still lay open to the settlers, were, as the Volscian inscriptions show, occupied by a stock more nearly related to the Sabellians than to the Latins. On the other hand, Latins probably dwelt in Campania before the Greek and Samnite immigrations; for the Italian names Novla or Nola (new-town), Campani Capua, Volturnus (from volvere, like Juturna from juvare), Opsci (labourers), are demonstrably older than the Samnite invasion, and showthat, at the time when Cumæ was founded by the Greeks, an Italian and probably Latin stock, the Ausones, were in possession of Campania. The primitive inhabitants also of the districts which the Lucani and Bruttii subsequently occupied, the Itali proper (inhabitants of the land of oxen), are associated by the best observers not with the Iapygian, but with the Italian stock; and there is nothing to hinder