tal influence by which it was accomplished. The traces of a distinct class of priests, whose origin, although probably Egyptian, is rendered obscure by the same necessity which compelled them to clothe all their doctrines in the mystic veil of symbols and fables, are too evident to admit of any doubt. We shall have occasion to show in the sequel, how long this class preserved its separate station, and how far its power, though modified and restricted, continued to extend. 2. The first inhabitants of Italy dwelt among the mountains and highlands, while the low grounds were as yet unfit to receive or to nourish a permanent population. Descending from thence, as a scarcity of food or the increase of their numbers required, they began to divide themselves into separate tribes, whose members were bound together by those fragile ties, which can alone be formed in these early periods of society. The natural divisions of a country intersected in every direction by rivers and by mountains soon drew those artificial boundary lines between tribes of the same race, of which the influence has been so striking in every age of Italian history. The old writers have, fortunately for us, preserved the memory of a singular custom, by which the foundation of a large proportion of these new colonies was regulated. Before the practice of tillage had become sufficiently general to place them beyond the reach of those casualties, by which a people, half nomad and half agricultural, is so often exposed to extreme want, the Italians were taught to propitiate the deity, whose wrath had been manifested in the failure of their harvests, by sacrificing to him all the productions of the following spring. The young of their flocks and of their herds, and even their own offspring, were mingled together in this bloody atonement. But, as an advancing civilization began to gain upon their manners and their feelings, this dreadful rite was softened, and the products of the sacred spring, instead of being offered in sacrifice to the deity, were set apart for a particular service, which was supposed to have the same effect in appeasing or in averting his wrath. When the children born during the consecrated year had attained to the age of manhood, they set forth under the guidance of chosen members of the priesthood in quest of new habitations. The favor of the deity attended them; and wherever, erecting their altars, they took possession of the soil, the original inhabitants gladly united with those, on whom the seal of the Divinity had been so strikingly set. There also the same observances were held sacred; and these children of the primitive family became the fathers of new and constantly multiplying colonies. It was thus, according to Pliny,* that the Piceni descended from the Sabines; and the Samnites, originating in the same way, gave rise themselves to the Lucani.t The course pursued by the Italians, in the resistance which they opposed to the first invaders of their territory, indicates a certain degree of advancement in civil discipline. They had made some important steps towards social life. They lived in villages and in cots, as is still practised in Switzerland, and in many parts of Europe. These, according as they were more or less favored by their natural situation, grew and became large towns. This was especially the case in the vicinity of the larger water-courses. According to Ælian, there were eleven hundred and ninety-seven of these places, which, by a use of the word which our language will hardly admit of, he calls cities. This progress was nowhere more sensible than in those tracts which border on the Mediterranean. 3. Unfortunately for early Italian history, nearly all the information, that we possess concerning it, has been derived from Greek historians and antiquaries, whose authority has been called in question by the more judicious portion even of their own countrymen. They were followed by the Latins, who, in so many parts of their literature, were little else than close imitators of the Greeks. It was by means of their settlements in southern Italy, that the attention of the Greeks was first directed to this subject; and various were the opinions which they hazarded concerning the origin of the people, whom they found in possession of the soil. Nearly all of them, however, concurred in claiming for themselves the glory of having been the first to occupy it; and the heroes of the Trojan war were hardly more celebrated for their military exploits, than for their supposed colonization of the chief places of the Italian peninsula. Some few of the Romans ventured to throw doubts upon this tradition; nor were there * III. 5. Var. Hist. IX. 16. Strab. V. p. 158. Ed. Casaub. 1587, historians wanting among the Greeks themselves, who were willing to confess its improbability. But antiquity had hallowed it. The people had seized upon it with that avidity, with which national and personal vanity grasps at whatever can serve to ennoble the obscure period of origin; and the fables of Æneas, of Hercules, and of an innumerable host of other chieftains, whose real history is no less uncertain than theirs, became inextricably mingled with the first epochs of Roman and of Italian history. Yet a surer source was open to the Romans. When their great historians wrote, the original languages of the country were still spoken; and contained, as one of the most valuable portions of their literature, the annals and records of all their principal cities. In the times of Varro, the Etruscan annals, written in the eighth century of the nation, a period which, according to the most approved computation, corresponds to the close of the fourth century of Rome, were still in existence. The principal public acts and events, together with the names of the magistrates of each year, were carefully recorded in the pontifical annals. The memory of treaties, and of all other occurrences of more than usual importance, was preserved by inscriptions in bronze or on stone. Here then was the true fount of Italian history. But the Romans, content with the glory of their conquest, and pleased with the ingenious flattery of the Greeks, asked for nothing beyond those gorgeous fictions, which seemed to add new splendor to their triumph. The loss of these documents sets an impassable barrier to modern research upon several curious questions. But the monuments which still remain, and a critical examination of the most judicious among the ancients, have in a measure supplied this deficiency, and enabled our author to place these obscure epochs of his national history upon a more durable foundation, and one more accordant with the principles of enlightened criticism. 4. The territories, comprised under the name of ancient Italy, varied at different periods, with the progress of discovery, and with the changes incidental upon conquest. Its primitive name was Saturnia, so called from Saturn, whom the natives revered as the founder of their civil institutions. "Salve magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus!" The Greeks, referring to its geographical position, called it Hesperia, for the same reasons which led them, as their acquaintance with the Mediterranean and with the Atlantic became more accurate, to apply this name to Spain and to the Fortunate Islands. "Est locus, Hesperiam Graii cognomine dicunt, As their intercourse with the different parts of the country gave them a more precise idea of the extent and of the varieties of its population, they began to use the names of the tribes with which they had communication; and it is thus that we find Ausonia, Enotria, Ombrica, and other denominations properly belonging to individual tribes, applied to the whole nation. The name Italy was, at first, confined to the southern extremity of the peninsula, below the gulfs of St. Euphemia and of Squillace. From thence it gradually spread northward; and, in the time of Polybius, was already applied to the whole country, from the Sicilian sea to the Alps. It was used in this extensive sense during the social war; and the inscription Vitelliu, which we read on the money of that period, gives the common, and probably also the original Oscan form of it. Etymologists have, with their usual subtilty, offered various explanations of these names. Italy, from its resemblance in sound to a word of the Greek language, was said to allude to the herds of oxen with which the whole country was filled. Enotria signified the land of wine. Nor is it improbable, that the same usage, which has obtained among modern travellers, of designating particular countries by names indicative of their distinguishing characteristics, may have led to a more ready adoption by the Greeks of these words, which sounded to them so much like expressive terms of their own tongue. But we may safely venture to reject the genealogical origin, with which these, and various other denominations applied to particular parts of the country, were adorned by Grecian and Roman vanity. Ausonia was, properly speaking, a large portion of lower Italy, inclusive of Campania. The same tract was subsequently called Opicia. A considerable part of central Italy was known to the Greeks as Tyrrhenia, without their having The traces of tal influence by which it was accomplished. a distinct class of priests, whose origin, although probably Egyptian, is rendered obscure by the same necessity which compelled them to clothe all their doctrines in the mystic veil of symbols and fables, are too evident to admit of any doubt. We shall have occasion to show in the sequel, how long this class preserved its separate station, and how far its power, though modified and restricted, continued to extend. 2. The first inhabitants of Italy dwelt among the mountains and highlands, while the low grounds were as yet unfit to receive or to nourish a permanent population. Descending from thence, as a scarcity of food or the increase of their numbers required, they began to divide themselves into separate tribes, whose members were bound together by those fragile ties, which can alone be formed in these early periods of society. The natural divisions of a country intersected in every direction by rivers and by mountains soon drew those artificial boundary lines between tribes of the same race, of which the influence has been so striking in every age of Italian history. The old writers have, fortunately for us, preserved the memory of a singular custom, by which the foundation of a large proportion of these new colonies was regulated. Before the practice of tillage had become sufficiently general to place them beyond the reach of those casualties, by which a people, half nomad and half agricultural, is so often exposed to extreme want, the Italians were taught to propitiate the deity, whose wrath had been manifested in the failure of their harvests, by sacrificing to him all the productions of the following spring. The young of their flocks and of their herds, and even their own offspring, were mingled together in this bloody atonement. But, as an advancing civilization began to gain upon their manners and their feelings, this dreadful rite was softened, and the products of the sacred spring, instead of being offered in sacrifice to the deity, were set apart for a particular service, which was supposed to have the same effect in appeasing or in averting his wrath. When the children born during the consecrated year had attained to the age of manhood, they set forth under the guidance of chosen members of the priesthood in quest of new habitations. The favor of the deity attended them; and wherever, erecting their altars, they took possession of the soil, the |