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ETRURIA.

greatest and most powerful city of Etruria, with 100,000 inhabitants, which carried on seven wars with Rome; Clusium (Kamars, Chiusi), the chief of which, Porsena, as principal commander of the Etruscan troops, dictated a humiliating peace to Rome after she had expelled the Tarquins; Perusia (Perugia), destroyed in the Perusian civil war (40); Arretium (Arezzo), birthplace of Mæcenas. Of other not sovereign places may be mentioned Luca (Lucca), Pisa (Pisa), on the Arnus, with the Portus Pisanus, now Leghorn, and Florentia (Firenze, Florence), on the Arnus.

To what nation the inhabitants-called Etruscans (= Exteri, strangers) or Tuscans in the Roman, Tyrrheni or Tyrseni (Turrēnoi, Tursenoi) in the Greek, and Rasena (Tesne Rasne) in their own language—originally belonged, and what country they came from, is a question which was debated many hundred years before Christ, and is not settled yet. All the most ancient writers, save one of the most trustworthy, Dior.ysius of Halicarnassus, implicitly follow Herodotus, who-confounding them, perhaps, as is his wont, with the Lydian Turrenoi, or inhabitants of the city of Tyrrha-pronounces them to be Lydians, although there is not the slightest similarity between these two nations, and although Xanthus, the Lydian historian, knows nothing what ever about a fabled famine of eighteen years' duration in Lydia, followed by an emigration to Italy under a Prince Tyrrhenus. Dionysius himself offers no opinion; he calls them an indigenous racewhich means nothing; and it is surprising that some modern investigators should, despairing of a rational solution of the old riddle, have fallen back upon this evasive theory of autochthons.' Thucydides, in first mixing up the Torrhebian pirates with the Pelasgian fillibusters, gave rise to the most hopeless confusion about their very name. As to the innumerable theories and hypotheses that have been put forward since his day, we will only mention that while Ciampi and Collar hold them to be of Slavonic origin, Fréret calls them Celts; Micali, Albanese; Lami, Pfitzmaier, and Stickel, Semitics; and others variously make them Goths, Scandinavians, Basques, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Armenians. The most rational and generally accepted opinion is that of Niebuhr-modified more or less by Ottfried Müller, Lanzi, Lepsius, Steubof their being, when they first appear in history, a mixture of an eastern tribe, which had settled for a while in the Rhætian Alps (the Tyrol of to-day), and Pelasgians, whom they had found in their new Italian seats; these latter having, in their turn, since their immigration, mixed with the Umbrians, the oldest historical inhabitants of those parts. But, as we said before, this is only the most rational opinion that rose out of an ocean of wild speculation: so far from any authentic proofs having been brought forward in its support, the question stands to-day precisely where it stood when Dionysius wrote:The Etruscans do not resemble any people in language and manners.'

over conquered Rome, or whether, on the contrary, the reign of this Etruscan family would denote the subjugation of Southern Etruria by Rome her self, is not quite clear; but the expulsion of the last Roman king, Tarquinius (Tarchon), called Superbus, was followed, about 507 B. C., by a war between the Etruscans, under Porsena of Clusium, and the Romans, which, although ending in a most igno. minious peace, dictated within the walls of Rome, did not bring about the restoration of the Tarquinian dynasty. From the wars between Veii and Rome, which began in 486, and ended-interrupted only by an occasional armistice-395 B. C., with the destruction of Veii, dates the gradual but sure extinction of Etruria as an independent state. The Gauls advancing from the north, the Etruscans were forced to conclude a forty years' truce with their adversaries at any price; but these over, and the Romans being engaged with the Samnites, the Etruscans recommenced the hostilities more fiercely than ever. In the course of this last war, the Romans succeeded, 309 B. C., under Q. Fabius Maximus, in twice defeating them, and Fabius crossed the Ciminian forest-the frontier sacred from time immemorial; and when, 283 B. C., P. Cornelius Dolabella had beaten both them and their Gallic auxiliaries in a decisive and sanguinary battle at the Vadimonian Lake, Etruria became a Roman province; and about two hundred years later, the Lex Julia conferred upon her inhabitants, as a reward for their fidelity, the right of citizenship. Up to that time, they had succeeded in keeping up their own singularly distinct creed, customs, traditions, language their nationality, in fact; when Sulla, 82 B. C., infuriated by the part they had taken against him, liberally bestowed great portions of their land upon his veterans; and some fifty years later, Octavianus planted his military colonies there. This wrought and completed the transformation of that mysterious conglomeration of heterogeneous races and tribes, hitherto called Etrurians, into Romans. Once more, well-nigh 2000 years after its extinction, the kingdom of Etruria (Hetruria) rose before the eyes of the world. The peace of Luneville re-created it, and conferred it on the hereditary prince, Louis of Parma; after whose death, his widow, the Infanta Louisa of Spain, administered the government for their son, Charles Louis, up to 1807, when it became a French province. From 1809, it again bore the name of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany; and to TUSCANY-which in our days forms a province of the Italian kingdom, as it did of yore-and to ITALY, we refer for its modern history.

We have spoken above of twelve cities as forming the confederacy of Etruria Proper. Similar confederacies of twelve cities were established, independently of each other, in the two other Etrurias. The cities themselves, however, cannot be fixed now in all cases. From the fact of more than twelve autonomous ones being recorded in Etruria Proper, it would appear that some among these Immense as was their influence on Roman, and, twelve confederates, or populi, possessed more than in fact, on European civilisation, very little is known one capital city, each populus, however, being with respect to their political history. Chiefly limited to one representative vote in the general cultivating the arts of peace, they still seem, long council. The members of the confederacy were after their heroic period, to have been powerful bound to appear regularly at an annual religious enough to scare away any invader, and this prob- assembly near the temple of Voltumna, a locality ably is the reason why historians have so little to which we are as yet unable to point out. Here record of them; but their decline may be said to great fairs were held for the people; common operastand in an inverted ratio to the rise of Rome. The tions of war being discussed by the principes, and a 7th and earlier half of the 6th c. B. C. had been the general-in-chief for the ensuing year elected from most powerful and flourishing epoch of the Etruscan their number. Each city or canton, in the earlier state in its widest sense which then probably times at least, had a king (Lucumo, Lauchme = had been in existence for four or five hundred years. Inspired), chosen for life, who at the same time acted Whether they had put their Tarquinii as governors | as high-priest; and a hereditary nobility, which alone

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was eligible to the higher offices of state. Next to them, in the political and social scale, came the people, properly so called-free, not subject personally to the nobility; lowest stood a great number of clients or bondmen, probably the descendants of subjected original inhabitants. On the whole, the federal interdependence between the cities was far from close. Single cities carried on wars in which the others took no part; and when the confederacy resolved on general action, there were always some members which, for some reason or other, stood aloof. It appears from this that the Etruscan constitution was analogous to the Greek and Roman in their earliest stages: the community develops itself into a polis or city, chooses a head, or rather high-priest, and enters into a more or less intimate alliance with its neighbouring cities; but, beside that king of its own, recognises a common chief only in time of war.

The Etruscans were, as a people, less warlike than any of their neighbours, especially the Romans, and conspicuous is their want of anything like cavalry. Theirs was also the un-Italic custom of hiring soldiers, and their energies seem principally to have been directed to the more profitable occupations of trade and agriculture. One of the chief articles of their commerce was amber, which Germans brought from the Baltic to Etruria Circumpadana, whence it was conveyed to Greece by sea. In the western parts of the Mediterranean, they were formidable as pirates; while they were welcomed by the Carthaginians and the Greeks of Magna Græcia, as importers of indigenous products of nature and art, which they exchanged for the wealth of the East and South. That their commerce within Italy must have been very extensive, appears from the fact, that all the states of Central Italy adopted their system of coinage, based, like their tables of weights and measures, and many of their political institutions, on the duodecimal system.

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hurl lightnings at various times and with peculiar effects. The three of these deities which seem to have been the principal objects of worship were Tinia himself, armed with three different kinds of lightning, Cupra (Hera or Juno) and Menrfa (Minerva, Pallas Athene). Gods most peculiarly Etruscan are Vejovis, an evil Jupiter, whose thunderbolts have the power to deafen, and Nortia, the goddess of Fate, also called Lasa Mean. Besides these, they put a host of demons over the different portions of the creation :-the heavens, the earth, and the lower regions (Penates, Lares, and Manes). Their deities have generally wings; and before the Assyrian bulls had come to light, some antiquariee established from this a connection with the Hebrew winged cherubim. Characteristic in the highest degree is their disciplina' or art of divination.' This had been revealed by Tages, a grandson of Jupiter, who was dug out near Tarquinii, in the shape of a childlike dwarf with gray hair—a most striking caricature of these both childish and senile practices-and who died immediately after having communicated these mysteries. They were at first the property of the noble families; but in the course of time, as others were initiated, and schools for priests were founded, these mystical and awestriking teachings came to be written down. It is saddening to observe here again in what monstrous insanities the spirit of man occasionally revels, and that, too, in the province of what is noblest and highest-religion. The disciplina' was developed into an exact science, fully as minutely and casuistically sharpening its points and splitting its hairs as Hindu or Mohammedan theology would. It taught what gods hurled the different kinds of lightning; how, by the colour and the peculiar quarter of the sky, the author of the bolt might be recognised; whether the evil denoted was a lasting or a passing one; whether the decree was irrevocable or could be postponed; how the lightning was to be coaxed down, and how it was to be buried. This was the speciality of the Fulgurales. The Haruspices had as their share the explanation of portents, prodigies, monsters, the flight and cries of birds, the entrails of sacrificial animals; while others ministered in the holy rites at the foundation of cities, the building of gates, houses, &c. Their ceremonies (a word derived from their town Care) were endless and silly, but the show and pomp with which their priests knew how to surround these juggleries, and from which the Romans largely borrowed, made them acceptable in the eyes of the herd; and although Rome herself, with all her augurs, called Etruria 'the mother of superstition,' there was a certain odour of tithes and fees about these rites which made many anxious to 'preserve religion in its primeval purity.'

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The striking contrast between the Etruscans and their Italic and Greek neighbours, which appears in the short thickset frames, the large heads and bulky extremities of the former, and the slender limbs and graceful harmony in the whole structure of the latter, and which runs with equal distinctness through the intellectual lives of the three nations, manifests itself nowhere with greater power than in their religions. Equally distant from the abstract, clear rationalism of the Latins, and the plastic joyfulness of Hellenic image-worship, the Etruscans were, as far as their dumb fragments shew-for what we find on them of human words we do not understand-chained in a dark and dotard_mysticism, such as a blending of a half-forgotten Eastern symbol-service with barbarous religious practices of northern savages, grafted upon archaic Greek notions, might produce. In their Pantheon, the predominance belongs to the evil, mischievous gods; their prisoners are welcome sacrifices to the heavenly powers; they have no silent depths where thegood spirits' of their departed dwell, but a hell of the most hideous description, and a heaven where permanent intoxication is the bliss that awaits the Virtuous. They divide their gods into two classes, and they place them in the most northern, and therefore most immovable point of the world, whence they can best overlook it. The upper section is formed by shrouded, hidden gods (Involuti), of uncertain number, who act awfully and mysteriously, and twelve lower gods of both sexes, called Consentes, The high degree of civilisation which the EtrusComplices. Tinia (Zeus, Jupiter) is the chief of these cans possessed long before Rome was heard of, is latter, and stands between the two divisions of the testified by innumerable works of mason'y and art gods, receiving orders for destruction from the upper The Etruscans were of an eminently practical turn ones, while the lower ones form his ordinary council, of mind, and domestic, like the north rustig to and obey his behests. Nine of these (Novensiles) | their priests for reconciliation with the gods, who

In the entire absence of anything like a genuive Etruscan account, even the outlines of the relation between their religion and that of the Greeks on the one hand, and the Romans on the other, are exceedingly difficult to trace; so much, however, is certain, that they adopted and assimilated many points of archaic Greek theology, and clothed them in a garb of their own, and that this process was gone through and repeated still more completely by the Romans, in their turn, with respect to the religious notions of the Etruscans. The articles on Greek and Roman religion will furnish further information on this point.

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always seemed irate, but whose angry decrees could easily be foreseen and averted, they set to work in developing the inner resources of the country, and in making the best use of their intercourse with foreign countries. They thus became eminent in agriculture, navigation, military tactics, medicine, astronomy, and the like; and in all these, as well as in some of the very minutiae of their dress and furniture, the Romans became their ready disciples and imitators. The division of the year into twelve months, of the months into kalends and nones and ides, the designation of the numerals, were Etruscan; from the saine source were derived the toga prætexta as well as the pomp of triumphs, the lictors and apparitors, down to the ivory curule chairs. The towns of the Etruscans were clean and healthy, owing to their perfect system of drainage and sewerage; they tunnelled and excavated, they embanked and irrigated, they turned swamps into cities, changed the course of streams, and excelled in all kinds of useful public and private works. Their ideal was not the beautiful or the spiritual, but a comfortable, and, if possible, luxurious existence. As a special proof of their love for their own hearth, a quality probably imported from the north, we might adduce their invention of the atrium, the common sitting-room of the family, where the master of the house sat surrounded by his penates and the figures of his ancestors, while the wife and her handmaidens plied the labours of the loom or the distaff. As in the Germanic nations, woman stood in high estimation. She was the companion, not the slave of the husband, and thus had certainly not a little share in the softening of their primitive wildness, and in counteracting the sombreness of their creed. That we find them even in their tomb-paintings engaged in convivial carousings, dancing, races, athletic games, and that they liked their very worship accompanied by the sound of flutes, horus, and trumpets, only shews that that glorious sky of theirs, their intercourse with the nations, their wealth and culture, had gradually caused their antique and gloomy austerity to wear off, even as it wore off with the Romans and other peoples; for to assume with some that the boisterous scenes to which we allude were caused more or less by the despair arising from the loss of their independence, would be going somewhat too far. Licentiousness is the sure forerunner of the fall of a nation, but a whole people does not take refuge in enjoyment when their all is lost. We know little of Etruscan literature; it seems to have consisted mostly of rituals, religious hymns, and some historical works. Whether the Fescennines, certain mocking-songs, sung in alternate verses, with musical accompaniment, at nuptials, originated with them or not, is not decided.

We have alluded to the high proficiency of this people in architecture; they were, in fact, so renowned in this craft throughout the antique world, that, as Solomon called Phoenicians to Jerusalem to build his temple, so the Romans sought in Etruria the framers of their grandest masonic structures, such as the Cloaka Maxima, the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol, &c. The peculiarly fantastic, and, withal, powerful mind which speaks in all their institutions, equally pervades their architectural productions; but, at the same time, everything they built, they built either for practical or pious purposes. We cannot here enter into a discussion of their manner as it appears in various epochs, but it never reached anything like a distinct national completeness, their eagerness to profit by foreign examples not allowing them to develop it to the full unalloyed. Of their walls and gates, temples and porticoes, theatres and amphitheatres,

bridges and sewers, gigantic, and, in the earliest times, cyclopean-evidently erected, in Eastern fashion, by hosts of slaves-very little is extant in so complete a form as to give us an exact insight into their mode of construction; and were it not for their tombs, our knowledge would be exceedingly limited. These form one of the most peculiar features in Etruscan antiquities. Hewn in rocks, either below the ground or in the face of a cliff, they were adorned outside with a somewhat Egyptian façade of a temple or a house, which the insides themselves most exactly reproduce, with all their internal decorations, furniture, and utensils. Of the paintings which run round the walls, and which are our safest and most complete guides to the inner life of this nation, we will say more presently. We must not, in conclusion, omit to mention that their temples bore in primitive times, and always retained, in some measure, so far as we can judge, the unfinished character of the wood-buildings of northern mountain tribes-a square, half-house, half-fortification, overloaded with quaint ornamentation.

In their plastic and pictorial arts, Winckelmann has established three distinct styles-to which Dennis has added a fourth-viz., the Egyptian, with Babylonian analogies, the Etruscan or Tyrrhene proper, the Hellenic, and that of the decadence. Characteristic of the first style are the prevalence of straight lines, right angles, faces of an oblong, contracted oval, with a pointed chin, eyes mostly drawn upwards, the arms hanging close to the side, the legs close together, the drapery long, in straight parallel lines, the hair disposed in tiers of curls. In this style, the attitude is constrained, the action stiff and cramped. The progress shewn by the second style is the greater attention bestowed on the delineation of the muscles, which swell out in disproportionate prominences on the now almost entirely nude body. The two remaining styles explain themselves. Their statuary, as it appears chiefly on sarcophagi and cinerary urns, suggests likewise an Egyptian origin. The figures are those of their own mystical and awful Hades, instead of the Bacchic processions of Greece and Rome. The grouping follows rather a pictorial than a plastic principle; the motion is hasty and forced; but the features of the deceased, hewn on the lid, have all the rude accuracy of a spiritless portrait. Statues of deities in wood and stone have indeed been found, but very rarely. Of high renown were their ornaments and utensils in baked clay (terra cotta), in the manufacture of which objects the Veientes were especially famous. Rome, at a very early period, possessed of this material a quadriga and the statue of Summanus, made by Etruscans. Of the art of working in bronze, the Etruscans were supposed to be the inventors: that they brought it to a very high degree of perfection, is evident from the examples which remain to us. Statues and utensils were manufactured and exported in immense quantities, not only to Rome, but to every part of the known world. Of figures on a large scale still extant, we may mention the renowned She-wolf of the Capitol, the Chimera in the Museum of Florence, the Warrior of Todi in the Etruscan Museum of the Vatican; a portrait-statue of an Orator, with the inscription Aule Meteli, in Florence; and the Boy with the Goose at Leyden. The various objects of ornament and use, founa in great numbers in tombs, such as candelabra, cups, tripods, chaldrons, couches, discs; articles of armour, as helmets, cuirasses, &c.; musical instruments, fans, cists or caskets, are most of them models of exquisite finish and artistic skill. Their gems are as numerous as those of Egypt, and, like

ETRURIA.

them, cut into the form of the scarabæus or beetle. side, the front or convex side being highly They were exclusively intaglios, and of cornelian, polished. These ranged over all the phases of sardonyx, and agate. On these the Etruscan Etruscan art, and are especially and peculiarly artists represent groups from the Greek mythology, Etruscan. None but Etruscan inscriptions have or the heroic cycle, bereft, as they seem to have ever been found upon them. They will, no doubt, been, of heroic legends of their own. They prove eventually of the highest importance, not only are most frequently found at Chiusi and Vulci, by enabling us to follow the gradations of artistic and were worn as charms and amulets. Special development step by step, but by turnishing us mention should be made of the metal specula, with lists of names of gods and persons, and, it or mirrors, with figures scratched upon the concave may be, of objects.

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Etruscan Mirror from Vulci, with Phuphluns (Bacchus), Semla (Semele), and Apulu (Apollo).

Half size. After a drawing by Mr George Scharf.

most vivid of colours all round-dancing, feasting, loving, hunting. The Etruscans of later times had learned in the school of the Hellenes to dread death less, and to think of the other world as one of continued joyfulness.

Of the vases and urns which are found in innu- | shew. Life in its merriest aspects gleams in the merable quantities in Etruscan tombs, we cannot treat here, as they are admitted on all hands to be, with very few exceptions, Greek, both in design and workmanship; we must refer the reader to the special article on VASES; but a few words may be added on the before-mentioned tomb-paintings. They are found chiefly in the cemeteries of Tarquinii and Clusium; and they are all the more important, as they lead us with minute accuracy from the very cradle of the individual, through the various scenes of his entire life, to its close; and this throughout the existence of the nation itself, beginning before the foundation of Rome, and ending in the Empire; while we follow the style in its gradual development from the Egyptian to Græco-Roman perfection. One of the annexed specimens, taken from a tomb at Corneto, represents a death-bed scene; but most of the other paintings, especially at Tarquinii, are of very different description, as the other specimens

We conclude with the Etruscan language. Brevity on that point will be the more pardonable, as our real knowledge of it is next to none. Scarce as the inscriptions themselves are, still one might have supposed that our days, which have seen the riddle of the cuneiform character solved, might have decided ere now whether the Etruscan be aboriginal' or Celtic, Slavonic or Albanese, Greek or Rhætian, Latin or Semitic, Turanic or Armenian, hieroglyphs, or any other of the languages which the different savans have pronounced it to be. Our present information with respect to this pec idiom consists in the following items:-It has twenty-one letters, like the ancient Greek, and

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on Etruria and Etruscans, we will mention Diodorus, Strabo, Dionysius, Athenæus, Cincius in his Annals, Cato in Origines, Varro 'in De Lingua well as the Emperor Claudius' twenty books of Latina. Aulus Cecina's De Etrusca Disciplina, as Tyrrhenian history, are lost, but some portions of them have survived, embodied in contemporaneous In modern times, we have and later works. Dempster, Etruria Regalis (Florence, 1723-1724); Gori, Museum Etruscum (Florence, 1737-1773); Inghirami, Monumenti Etruschi (1821-1826); Micali, Storia degli antichi popoli Italiani; Ottfried Müller,

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