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 bistorians 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 1 any very accurate idea of its extent, or of its boundaries. But Italy became, by degrees, the common name; and, although it did not always include Cisalpine Gaul, was generally applied to the whole peninsula. 5. Proceeding now to examine more in detail the situation of the various districts of ancient Italy, the first people who demand our attention, are the Siculi or Siceli. The origin of this, as of all the other tribes of the country, has been variously accounted for. But the most reasonable theory makes them a branch of the Aurunci, who were immediate descendants of the great Oscan family. They were the first who ventured to come down from their native mountains into that district around the Tiber, which is still known as the Roman Campagna, or "Agro Romano." Their possessions reached as far as the base of the Apennines, in the direction of Faleria and Fescinnia. The repeated attacks of the Umbri and other Aboriginals, with whom, according to Dionysius, the Pelasgi were associated in arms, gradually drove the Siculi from their original dwellings to the southern parts of the peninsula; and, unable to make firm the hold, which they had gained at their onset, upon these new territories, they were finally constrained to abandon the mainland and take refuge in Sicily. Here they, in turn, became conquerors, chased the Sicani from the eastern coast, established their own seats in the spots which were thus left vacant, and eventually reduced the whole island under their power. This event is placed by some writers eighty years before the Trojan war; by others, two hundred after it. The certainty of it, however, is in no way affected by the difficulty of fixing its precise date. The memory of the Siculi was preserved in central Italy long after their expulsion; and in Sicily itself the Opician language continued to be spoken in the last days of the kingdom of Syracuse. The Umbri also were mountaineers of Oscan origin. The extent of their early possessions is difficult to determine with accuracy; but the concurrent testimony of the ancients proves, that they occupied large tracts on both sides of the Apennines. A valley in the centre of the lofty chain of Gargano bears, even to this day, the name of " Vale of the Umbri." Perugia was founded by one of their tribes; and Ameria, another of their cities, was built, according to the elder Cato, as early as 381 years before Rome. This was the people by whom the Siculi were driven from their possessions in central Italy; and the Sabines, though a warlike and hardy race, suffered severely from their hostile excursions. But when at length their encroachments had brought them into immediate contact with the Etruscans, they were met by a people who were every way able to cope even with their renowned bravery. The long struggle, that ensued, terminated to the disadvantage of the former, who were henceforth compelled to set bounds to their ambition, and contract their dominions within narrower limits. Thus the Umbria best known in ancient geography extends from the eastern side of the Apennines beyond the Utente, near to the Po, and has for its natural boundaries on the west and the north the course of the Tiber and of the Nera. After their subjection by the Etruscans, all feelings of national animosity seem to have subsided, and the two tribes continued thenceforth to live in a state of union, which originated in political dependence, and was strengthened by a community of religious rites and of civil institutions. 6. History hardly presents an obscurer and more embarrassing question, than that of the Pelasgi-Tyrrheni. Their navigations have been described by the ancients, with the minuteness of history, but with all the coloring of fable. Nor do historians agree in the accounts which they have given of the origin and migrations of this people; some representing them in one light, others in another. The moderns also, with all their learning and research, have gone little further than to form what must at the best be considered as untenable, though ingenious hypotheses. Enough, however, may be gathered with certainty from what has hitherto been written upon this subject, to show that a people bearing the name of Pelasgi made their appearance in Europe at an early period of ancient history; that they bore some part in the revolutions of the peninsula ; that they acquired here the additional appellation of Tyrrheni ; and that their wanderings to and fro, in Asia and in Europe, have a close connexion with many of the events of that obscure age of tradition and of fable. Thus much may be relied on; and the absolute failure of every attempt at minuter detail should convince us of the folly of wasting in idle conjectures the time, which may, with so much more advantage, |