and described them as the Tyrrheni, who once dwelt in the island of Lemnos.* From other sources we learn, that these Tyrrheni, or Pelagi, as they are often called, had built for the Athenians the wall which surrounded their acropolis; but being afterwards driven out of Attica, are said to have retired to the island of Lemnos and Imbros. The father of Pythagoras is said to have been one of these Tyrrhenians.

Here, then, is sufficient evidence of the existence of the Tyrrheni as a people, known to the Greeks, under that specific appellation, though they are frequently designated by the generic name of Pelasgi; and if we admit that it was this people, which at an early period migrated from Thrace and the north of Greece into Italy, there will be found no better system for reconciling the various and contradictory opinions which have been entertained on this point of history by many writers, both in ancient and modern times.

Where historical records fail, the analysis of language is the only clue, it must be allowed, which can enable us to trace the origin of ancient nations with any probability of success; but when the results are so much at variance with each other, much doubt must, of necessity, attach to the process by which those results have been obtained. The knowledge of the ancient languages of Italy, of which the Latin must be considered as a dialect only, though it became the prevailing one, is comparatively of recent date. The Etruscan alphabet, the characters of which are the same as that of the Umbrian and Oscan dialects, had not been identified and made out with certainty till within the last fifty years; for the inscribed monuments of these people being rare and scanty, it has been a work of time as well as of great industry and sagacity, to draw any well established conclusion from them. These two last qualities, we think eminently displayed in the learned work of Lanzi, on the Etruscan and other dialects of Italy; and it is but a small part of the praise due to him to say, that in his essay he has done more towards making us acquainted with this curious branch of philology, than all the writers who had preceded

*Thucydides, iv., 109.

↑ Herodotus, iv., 145.

him. The analogy which subsists between the forms, Tusci,. Osci, and Volsci, would furnish a presumption of the indigenous origen of the former, but that point seems abundantly established by the fundamental similarity of language which has been discovered to exist between the Etruscan and the other native dialects of Italy.

Having thus far tried to explain the origin of the Tuscan people, it remains for us to see how far their improved civilization and political superiority can be traced to the settlements formed by the Tyrrhenians amongst them. But as it will be naturally asked how we are to suppose that this people arrived in Italy, and at what period, we feel it necessary, first of all, to say a few words respecting that part of their history.

The easiest and most obvious way by which the Tyrrheni, coming from Thrace and the north of Greece, may be supposed to have reached Italy, would be by the Danube, and then by the Save up to the Italian Alps, and the head of the Adriatic. It is on this sea, doubtless, that history, however faint in its records of these transactions, places their first settlements, whether they reached it by land or in a fleet. They were unquestionably a maritime people, and their first. settlements, Hadria, Spina, and Ravenna were seaport towns. If we follow the plain thread of history, divested of the romantic circumstances which Dionysius has interwoven in his narrative of the transactions of the Pelasgi with the Aborigines, it will appear that the former gradually advanced from the Po into the country of the Umbria, who being then at war with the Siculi, gladly received their assistance, and after the expulsion of the enemy, gave them settlements and lands in the newly acquired territory, which was Etruria proper. In the history of these events we adhere chiefly to the authority of Philistus, the Sicilian historian, who makes the Siculi of Ligurian origin, and states that the people who expelled them were the Umbri and Pelasgi, that being the most rational and intelligible account of this early revolution. According to the same historian, the migration of the Siculi took place about eighty years before the siege of Troy; so that we shall not be very far from the mark in assigning the

date of about one hundred years before the Trojan war, to the settlement of the Tyrrheni in Etruria.

Here, then, they founded, with the assistance of the natives, their first twelve cities, and if we conceive this people bringing with them all the improvements in war navigation, and general civilzation, which Greece was then beginning to derive from her proximity to the East and to Egypt, into a country only inhabited, and that partially, by rude and savage clans, we shall easily form an idea of the great and rapid influence which they would exercise over the moral and political state of Italy. We must suppose them to have been joined, from time to time, by numerous bands of Pelasgi, adventurers like themselves, as Ephorus represented them, who would flock from different parts of Greece to any country where renown and profit were to be acquired. The Tyrrhenian pirates, who had hitherto infested the Ægean, would naturally retire, when that sea was protected by the navy of Minos, to the seas of Italy, to exercise there the habits which they had acquired from the Phoenicians, and which remained so long a characteristic of their nation. We learn from Strabo,* that the Greeks did not venture to send colonies into Sicily till long after the fall of Troy, owing to the dread inspired by those formidable depredators. From the traditions preserved by Lycophron, it would appear that they formed settlements on almost every part of the coast washed by the Tyrrhenian sea. Their colonies in Campania and in Lucania, where Pæstum is supposed to have been founded by them, as well as others, on the shores of the Adriatic, also sufficiently attest their busy and enterprising spirit. They seem, in fact, to have spread themselves over all Italy, and in that sense we may, perhaps, take the assertion of Livy,t to be true, that the Tuscan name had reached every part of the peninsula and its seas before the arrival of Eneas.

But it was in Etruria, properly so called, that the Tyrr heni laid the first foundation of this power, and established under Tarchon their leader, a confederacy of twelve cities.

*Strabo, v. 221.

† Livy, xi., 567.

↑ Strabo, v., 219.

Strabo represents the Tuscans as being perpetually engaged in hostilities with the Umbri, from whom they were only seperated by the Tiber; and we are led to infer, that the advantage rested decidedly with the former people, since he goes on to state that they gradually extended the confines of their territory, and finally possessed themselves of the plains waterd by the Po. It is to this acquisition of dominion that Pliny* probably refers, when he reports that the Tuscans wrested no less than three hundred cities from their Umbrian antagonists. In the prosecution of their successful career, the Tuscans having arrived on the shores of the Adriatic, obtained possession, also, of the original Tyrrhenian settlements of Hadria and Spina, which the Tyrrheni, being too weak to defend them, abandoned, as Strabo relates, to the invaders, while Ravenna fell into the hands of the Umbri.†

The numerous discoveries of national monuments which have been made in Etruria confirm the fact that we are insisting upon, and point out that part of Italy as the original seat and abode of the Etruscans: while very few remains of this kind have been discovered in Piedmont and Lombardy. It is in Etruria that we can best trace the influence of the Tyrrhenian colony, in changing the habits and improving the condition of its natives. It is to the Tyrrheni that we would ascribe that mixture of religons of Greece and Italy which is known to have obtained in the Etruscan rites. Thus, with the deities peculiar to the country, such as Voltuma, Narcia, and the Dii Consentes, we find they worshipped Aplu, or the Pelasgian Apollo, Thurms, or Hermer, Juno, Minerva, and other divinities common to the Greeks.

Of the influence of the Pelasgi in the language of Italy there seems no question, the fact being admitted by ancient as well as modern writers. We are inclined to think that the Tyrrheni introduced the Pelasgic characters into Etruria and Umbria, and likewise communicated them to the Oscans, whose characters are somewhat more rude and uncouth. 'Tacitus, however, seems to say, that letters were brought by Damaratus of Corinth; but Gori and Lanzi think, and it

* Pliny, iii, 14.

↑ Strabo, v., 214.

+ Micali, ii., 22.

seems more natural so to interpret Tacitus, that Damartus only improved the Etruscan alphabet by the addition of some letters. We must leave it to philologists to examine the causes which operated differently in forming the dialects of Etruria and Latium. But it seems that the difference which at first might not be considerable, gradually increased from the various elements which the latter received into its composition, while the former remained uncultivated and stationary. In proof of this it may be noticed, that the Etruscans retained the ancient mode of writing from right to left, while the Latins, together with new characters, adopted that arrangement which has since generally prevailed. These are the principal points in which the effects of the Tyrrhenian colony are visible in improving and civilizing Etruria. With respect to particular customs we are too little acquainted with the history of that country to distinguish what was indigenous, and what borrowed; but it seems sufficient to know that they infused a spirit of enterprise and conquest into the nation in which they had been adopted; spirit which long prevailed and increased after the original Tyrrheni had removed or disappeared, as they are said to have done, towards the period of the Trojan war.†

Commerce, and the cultivation of the fine arts, for which this inventive people appear to have had a natural turn, would add to their refinement, and complete their superiority over the other comparatively barbarous tribes of Italy; circumstances which will account for their having been distinguished by the Greeks from the days of Hesiod to those of Thucydides and Aristotle, when Rome was unknown, or was thought to be a Tyrrhenian city. Whether it was really so may be a matter of speculation, in which it will not be forgotten how much she borrowed from Etruria in the formation of her religious and political institutions, and in the detail of her civil and military economy. Had the Tuscans formed a regular and effective plan for securing their conquests and strengthening their confederacies, they would have been the masters of Italy. But their enterprises, after a certain period, seem to have been desultory, and their meas