THE only part of Italy of which the ethnology is even moderately simple is the part belonging to Sardinia, or Piedmont. Here the original occupancy was Ligurian. Eporedia, the modern Ivrea, is particularly mentioned as a Ligurian town, and, as its name has generally been considered Keltic, it has supplied one of the arguments in favour of the Ligurians being a branch of that stock. Bodencomagus, too, has already been mentioned. The ancient name of the Upper Po, Eridanus, appears to contain the same root as the name Rhodanus, and, perhaps, as Rhenus; whilst Scingo-magus and Rigo-magus give us further instances of the evidently Keltic termination -magus. The parts south of the Po, which alone constituted the true and proper Liguria in the political sense of the term, were reduced between the second and third Punic wars; the following being Niebuhr’s account of them:—

“The Ligurian war is not only insignificant, in comparison with others, but extremely obscure, on account of our want of an accurate geographical knowledge of the country. It has some resemblance to the present undertakings against the Caucasian tribes. The Apennines are not, indeed, as high as the Caucasus, but they offer the same advantages for their inhabitants to defend themselves. The Ligurians were ultimately annihilated, which is always the unavoidable fate of such nations, when a powerful state is bent upon their destruction. The Ligurian tribes extended in reality as far as the river Rhone; but as the Romans were chiefly concerned in securing the frontiers of Etruria, they made themselves masters only of the territory of Genoa. The wars did not extend beyond the river Varus, or the frontiers of Provence, for the hostilities against the Salyes in the neighbourhood of Massilia belong to a later period. The Ligurian tribes defended themselves and their poverty with such resolute determination, that the Romans, who could not expect any rich spoils, aimed at nothing short of extirpating them, or expelling them from their mountains. The consuls, P. Cornelius Cethegus and M. BÆbius Tamphilus, therefore transplanted 50,000 Ligurians into Samnium, where Frontinus, as late as the second century of our own era, found their descendants under the name of the Cornelian and BÆbian Ligurians. The war was brought to a close before that against Perseus. It was especially for the purpose of exercising control over Gaul that the high road of Flaminius, which went as far as Ariminum, was now continued, under the name of via Flaminia, as far as Placentia, and that the whole country south of the Po was so much filled with colonies, that the Keltic population disappeared.”

But the parts to the north of that river were conquered later, the Salassi of the valley of Aosta in the reign of Augustus.

How far the population which I consider to have been allied to the Ligurian on the one side and the Helvetian on the other, may have extended eastwards, is difficult to say; but the Tyrol was the centre of a new stock. This stock was the Etruscan. It is needless to say that we have now before us one of the vexatoe quoestiones of ethnology. The account of Herodotus is as follows:—

“The Lydians state amongst other things that they colonized Tyrsenia; saying thus concerning it. In the days of Atys, the son of Manes, their king, there was a severe famine over the whole of Lydia. For a while the Lydians bore up; but, afterwards, when it would not cease, they sought for a remedy. One invented one thing, one another; and then were found out dice, astragali, the top, and all other kind of games; chess alone being excepted. But when the evil would not abate, but, on the contrary, pressed all the more, the king having divided the whole body of Lydians into two parts, allotted to the one of them to stay at home, and to the other a departure from the country. With the one that had to stay at home, the king himself remained at the head; with the other his son Tyrsenus. They then went to Smyrna, and having contrived a ship and put therein all that was needful for their voyage, they sailed away in search of a living, until, having passed by many nations, they came to the Ombriki, where they settled cities, and where they remain to this day. Instead of Lydians, they changed their name to that of the king’s son, who led them, and, taking this, were called Tyrseni.”—I. 94.

Few passages of antiquity are better known than this, and the criticism which has been bestowed upon it is proportionate to the difficulty of the question upon which it bears. Niebuhr objected to it on negative grounds; or rather, he affirmed the opinion of Dionysius of Halicarnassus who had done so before him; as Xanthus, a native Lydian, and an historian as well, had said nothing about this Tyrsenian migration. And this objection may be strengthened. The statement that the Etruscans of Tuscany called themselves Tyrseni is inaccurate. The native name was Rasena; and Tyrseni was only what their neighbours called them. Yet, according to the Herodotean account, if one name ought to be more national than another, that name was the one derived from their princely leader—Tyrsenus. The stoppage, too, of the expedition at Smyrna, brings the date of the migration inconveniently low.

Prichard admits that “his (Dionysius’s) arguments weigh heavily against the credibility of this story.” For reasons too lengthy to be given here, I wholly disbelieve the Lydian tradition. On the contrary, I lay what many may consider undue stress upon the account of Livy, who says that “the dominion of the Tuscans was widely extended before the prevalence of the Roman arms; their power was predominant on the two seas which embrace Italy on both sides. Of this the names given to these branches of the Mediterranean afford a proof; for the nations of Italy have given to one of these seas the name of Tuscan, from the common appellation of the people, and to the other that of Adriatic, derived from Adria, a Tuscan colony. The Greeks term them Tyrrhenian and Adriatic. The Etruscans, in either territory, possessed twelve cities. Their first settlements were on this side of the Apennines on the lower sea; they afterwards sent out as many colonies as the original country contained principal towns, and these colonies occupied all the country beyond the Po, as far as the Alps, except the corner belonging to the Veneti. The same people, doubtless, gave origin to some of the Alpine nations, particularly to the RhÆti; who, by the nature of the country which they occupy, have been rendered barbarous, and retain nothing of their ancient character, except their language, and that in a corrupt state.”

The analysis of this extract will verify its importance. The last sentence contains a statement in the way of evidence, and an opinion in the shape of an inference. I admit the former, and demur to the latter. The statement as to the language of the RhÆti being Etruscan, is that of an author whose advantages of time, place, and circumstances were great. As a native of Padua he was as well-placed for knowing how the RhÆtian differed from the Latin as a Lowland Scot is for giving evidence to the distinct character of the Gaelic. On the other hand, he was the adviser and reviewer of an antiquarian work of the Emperor Claudius on the very subject of Etruscan history; so that, his testimony on this point, is that of no common author. He speaks to what he had the means of knowing, and he speaks to a cotemporary fact.

But the inference from this similarity of speech is a different matter; one that the modern investigator, with a wider knowledge of the general phenomena of ethnological distribution, may venture to correct. The occupation of a mountain-range by the inhabitants of a plain country is a reversal of the usual order of events. It is far more likely that the mountaineers should have become refined under the influences of a fertile soil, milder climate, and an enlarged commerce, than that the Etruscans of Etruria should have become rude and barbarous. After all, however, the question is only one of degree. It is no opinion of Livy’s that the RhÆtian Alps were colonized from the Etrurians of Tuscany. Their occupants must have been derived from the plains at their foot, from the Northern Etrurians of the Venetian territory and Lombardy; and whether these extended a little more or a little less in the direction of the Tyrol is unimportant. The primary fact is, that, according to the only cotemporary evidence existing, the Valley of the Adige was as Etruscan as the Valley of the Arno.

How far the Etrurians south of the Tyrol were indigenous populations, or how far they were intrusive conquerors, is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. It is difficult, too, to say where they came in contact with the Ligurians, where they first encroached on the Umbrians, and what boundary separated them from the Venetians and Liburnians. Perhaps, we may give them all Lombardy, the western third of the Venetian territory, Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Ferrara, I think that in all these parts they were intrusive conquerors, and, À fortiori, that they were intrusive conquerors in Tuscany. In Ferrara, and the parts due north of the mouth of the Po, they were, for reasons which will appear in the sequel, necessarily so. In Campania they were comparatively recent colonists.

The western third of the Venetian territory may easily have been Etruscan, RhÆtian, or Etrusco-RhÆtian; the other two-thirds were Liburnian, or Venetian, the country of the Veneti and Liburni. The affinities of these populations, which were closely allied to each other, was with the Illyrians of Dalmatia. In other words, it was only in a political point of view that they were Italians at all. For some of the higher questions of ethnology, however, the Liburni and Veneti are tribes of exceeding importance.

Now, if we are right in supposing the Ligurians to have been Kelts, the earliest historical occupants of Lombardy, Etruscans, and the Liburnians and Venetians members of a distinct stock, we have to go far towards the south before we find the population with which the ideas suggested by the term Italian are connected; before we find a language allied to the Latin, or before we find a civilization and polity akin to that of the Romans. As far as we have gone hitherto, the nations of the Po and Arno are as little Italian as the Basques are Castilian. They have been the nation not out of which, but in spite of which Italy became the country of the Italian language. No immediate affinities have yet been found for Rome.

Language will be the chief test; and of the languages allied to the Latin the most northern were the Umbrian and the Latin itself; the former on the east, the latter on the west coast; the former spoken as far north as the mouth of the Po (in lat. 45°), the latter no further than that of the Tiber (in lat. 42°).

The particular division of those ancient Italian populations of which the language was Umbrian rather than Latin or Oscan, occupied, at the beginning of the historical period, the present districts of Urbino and Perugia, but as there is strong prim facie evidence of their original area having been much wider, as well as traditions (if not historical records) of the Umbrians having suffered considerable displacement both on the north and west, in the direction of Lombardy, and in the direction of Tuscany, Ferrara, the Romagna, parts of Bologna and Tuscany may be added to the Umbrian area in its oldest form. Southwards, too, it may be carried to the March of Ancona, or the northern part of the Upper Picentine. The ancient Umbrians consisted of separate tribes, of which the one first known to the Romans was that of the Camertes. Yet they were, at the earliest times, the cultivators of the soil, and the builders of cities; and as the Umbrians, in general, passed for the oldest occupants, their capital Ameria, was one of the oldest cities of Italy. Pliny gives the date of its foundation as 381 years before the foundation of Rome.

The Umbrians here meant are the people who used the language of what are known as the Eugubine Inscriptions, so called from the place of their discovery, Gobbio, the ancient Iguvium; which the researches of Grotefend and others have shown to be undeniably akin to the Latin.

From the famous Sabines, in the strict sense of the word, and from the Sabine population in its purest form, the Italians who may best claim a descent are those occupants of that part of the states of the church which lies due north of the Campagna di Roma, and is bounded by the Tiber, the Teverone, the Nera, and the Apennines, the country people of the parts about Narri, Otricoli, and Rieti. The Campagna di Roma is pre-eminently Latin.

For the north-western Neapolitans in the Upper Abruzzo, the descent is from the southern Piceni, the Vestini, the Frentani, the Peligni, the Marsi, and other less important tribes, which it is difficult to distribute, i.e., to say, how far they approached the Umbrian type in the north, or the Samnite, in the centre of Italy. It is difficult, too, to say whether some of them were Latin or Oscan most.

All this is difficult, but, except to the minute ethnologist, unimportant. It is enough to remember that when we reach the ancient Samnium and Campania, the type has changed, at least, in respect to language; for the speech is neither Umbrian nor Latin, though the detail of the differences and agreements between the Samnite and Campanian dialects is difficult.

The language itself is the Oscan, or Opican, spoken at different times as far north as the neighbourhood of Rome, and as far south as Bruttium; where, however, it was not indigenous. It was common to Samnium and Campania, but not to Lucania and Apulia, originally. The general name for the nations that spoke it will be Ausonian.

The Oscan is known to us from inscriptions, and is, at the least, as closely allied as the Umbrian to—

The Latin.—I think the Latin was the language of the more southern of the earliest inhabitants of Etruria; so that at the time of the foundation of Rome, important as it was destined to become afterwards, it was in the position of the Cornish of Cornwall about three centuries ago. It may also be compared with the modern Frisian of Friesland, a tongue spoken at present over a small and unimportant area, but one which was once spread far and wide over northern Germany. If the Welsh were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. This opinion is, of course, the result of general ethnological reasoning, rather than the testimony of historians; yet I am not aware of any undoubted fact that it opposes. It stands or falls by the phenomena it explains. The chief of these is the peculiar character of the Latin language.

Is any one prepared to consider it the result of an intermixture of two or more dialects?

Or to limit its original area to a district not twenty miles across?

For myself I do neither one nor the other. I look upon it as a separate and independent mode of speech, even as the Umbrian and the Oscan, and, I cannot think that the Seven Hills of Rome were sufficient to constitute the area of its development. Yet to these it must be limited; for the Etruscan reached below Veii, the Oscan to the neighbourhood of Ardea and PrÆneste, and the Sabine below Cures; and it must be remembered that, however like the two dialects may have been, the Sabine was not Latin.

The Etruscans of Tuscany were an intrusive and foreign population (if this be not admitted the reasoning on it falls to the ground), and the earlier tribes that they dispersed were the Italians of the Latin type; for assuredly, if such Italians, other than those of Latium, ever existed it is in the parts north of the Tiber that they are to be sought in the first instance; since it is there that the evidence of displacement is strongest. Something earlier than the Etruscans of Etruria must have existed in the Patrimonio di San Pietro and the southern part of Tuscany, and these, I imagine to have been Latins—just as Devonshire was once Cornish, and would have been so again, had the Cornishmen been to England, what the Romans were to Italy.

At the same time some extension southwards and eastwards must be allowed; since tradition, perhaps history, makes both the Sabines and the Volscians more or less intrusive. The main extension, however, of the populations of the Latin type was Etruria.

And now, before we go to Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, we must revert to the parts on the Lower Po, the parts which, at the beginning of the historical period, were occupied by Etruscans, more or less displaced by Gauls—partially, at first, wholly, afterwards; the Gauls themselves being about to be superseded by the Romans.

A statement has already been made to the effect that in Ferrara and the country northwards, the Etruscans were necessarily intruders rather than aboriginal inhabitants. The reasons for this statement were reserved. They will now be given.

The earliest populations of the Lower Po must have come under conditions which, unless we suppose them to have been intermediate to the Umbrians and Liburnians, the ancient Etruscans (unless they were themselves similarly intermediate) did not meet. They must have connected the languages allied to the ancient tongues of Central Italy, with those of ancient Noricum—the former being (as is admitted and generally known) allied to the Latin, the latter (as is assumed for the present, but as will be supported by reasons in the sequel) being Slavonic and allied to the Servian, i.e., just what they are now, only in an older stage.

Now, whoever admits the validity of the valuable philological researches of those scholars, who, by showing the extent to which languages apparently as different as the German, the Greek, the Latin, the Lithuanian, or the Russian, are essentially cognate, have reduced the leading tongues of Europe to a single great class, falling, after the manner of the classes in zoology and botany, into definite divisions and subdivisions—a class which, though somewhat inconveniently denominated Indo-European, is still, as far as it goes, a true and natural group—must see the necessity of bringing the languages thus allied into as close geographical contact as possible; since the divisions to which they, respectively, belong, are the two most allied members of the class in question. For that the Sarmatian and classical tongues are nearer each other than the classical and German, the classical and Keltic, notwithstanding the opinions of several eminent scholars to the contrary, is a safe assertion; perhaps it is also the preponderating opinion.

To connect, therefore, the areas where languages thus allied are spoken, by areas belonging to transitional and intermediate populations is an ethnological necessity; and, however much subsequent changes may have obliterated such areas of connexion, however early those changes may have occurred; however complete they may have been; and however much they may have been followed up by others, the original continuity must, at one time or other, earlier or later, have had an existence.

Unless we admit this, we must suppose that similar names for similar objects, and similar inflections for similar moods, tenses, and cases, have been developed independently of community of origin; a doctrine upheld by few, and one which would require the most transcendental philology to support it; a doctrine which, without condemning as unreasonable, we may fairly say has never much influenced the current doctrine of ethnologists.

Admitting it, however, we must recognise a long series of difficult problems; problems that have so rarely been dealt with as to be considered wholly new and foreign; problems that occur whenever two allied tongues are separated from each other by any form of speech other than intermediate. The languages thus related may be ever so like, or ever so unlike; but as long as they are liker to each other than those which intervene, the problem in question will recur, viz., the reconstruction of the state of things that existed before the original separation, and which is implied by the existing points of similarity.

It occurs in Great Britain. No matter how unlike the Scotch Gaelic and the Welsh may be, they are more like than the English that lies between them.

It occurs, as will soon be seen, in the ethnology of Greece.

It occurs in the question before us; leading to the inference that if both the Keltic of the Cisalpine Gauls, and the Etruscan of Circumpadane Etrurians were less unequivocally Indo-European than the Slavonic of the Norici and the Umbrian of the Umbri, the original occupants of the intervening area must have been neither Gauls nor Etrurians, but one of four things—

1. Members of the class to which the Umbrians belonged—

2. Members of the class to which the Norici belonged—

3. Partly Norici and partly Umbrians—

4. Transitional populations sufficiently different from each to constitute a third class, but sufficiently allied to each to be more Norican or more Umbrian than aught else.

Such is the way in which here, as elsewhere, we must attempt the reconstruction of what may be called areas of original connection.

In the present case, then, north-eastern Italy was originally divided between the true Italians, akin to the Umbri, and the extinct or modified Slavonians of Liburnia and the country of the Veneti.

Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, to which we may now attend, I imagine, in the earliest times, to have been occupied by the ancestors of the Greeks, a doctrine to which I direct the careful consideration of scholars; since it implies a great change in all our preconceived opinions, and not only makes the Hellenes of Greece as foreign to Hellas, as the Anglo-Saxons were once to England, but deduces them from Italy, and that by means of a maritime migration—a maritime migration which implies not only that they were a population foreign to the Greek soil, but that their descendants were a mixed stock; since no mode of migration is less favourable to the purity of the migrant population than a sea-voyage, where space is limited and females are an incumbrance. Such was, undoubtedly, the origin of the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Ægean Islands. Such, I believe, to have been the origin of the Greeks of Peloponnesus and Northern Hellas.

The observations on the relation between the Slavonic and Latin languages have prepared the way to this hypothesis, wherein the necessity of finding a geographical connection between cognate forms of speech recurs.

Now the connection between the Greek and Latin languages is a fact that few have denied, and no one has explained. Unless we derive one from the other, we must refer both to some common source. But the locality of this mother tongue is difficult to fix—so difficult that no satisfactory doctrine concerning it has ever been exhibited. Greece is an eminently small area, and Italy is of no great size; for it must be remembered that the ancient country of the nations whose language was allied to the Latin, and, through the Latin, to the Greek, are not found far north of the Tiber, at the beginning of the truly historical period. The Valley of the Arno was Etruscan; the Valley of the Po, Gallic, Etruscan, and Liburnian; so that the northern boundary of the more western of the two classical languages was the Tiber, and that of the most eastern one the Ambracian Gulf—for farther than this it is not safe to carry Ancient Greece. Perhaps it cannot be carried so far.

Be this, however, as it may, the scholar who recognises the fundamental affinity between the Greek and Latin languages, and at the same time requires either an original geographical continuity or a series of migrations to account for it, has a vast mass of difficulties to deal with: and I cannot think that these have ever been fairly met. The intervening area which lies between the Hellenes and Italians is of no ordinary magnitude. It is not only larger than either Greece or Italy separately, but larger than both put together. It is this if we give it the most favourable conditions imaginable. It is this if we suppose that, on the head of the Adriatic Gulf, there existed in early times a population from which the Italians on one side, and the Greeks on the other, are descended—at the head of the Adriatic Gulf, and no where else.

I limit this hypothetical population to a small area, because, as no trace of its existence can be found, the smaller it is supposed to have been, the more easily its extinction is accounted for; and I place it in a locality equidistant to Greece and Italy, because, by so doing, the amount of its extension is diminished. The more distant we make it, the more improbable that extension becomes; and the larger it is, the more improbable its disappearance. I have put it, then, under the most favourable conditions. Yet, even here, its position is eminently doubtful. The first nations which we meet with in these quarters are the Liburnians; and few have a less claim to be considered either Greek or Italian, or, yet, intermediate to the two.

The bolder doctrine is the assumption of what has been called The Thraco-Pelasgic stock. This maintains that the extinct populations and languages of Thrace, Moesia, and Pannonia were intermediate to those of the two peninsulas, and that, by a sort of divarication, the western extension of their southern members peopled Italy, and the eastern, Greece. This view has the advantage of being difficult to refute—since it is the current belief that the original languages of the three countries in question are extinct, and that, as nothing is known about them, it is as easy to say that they were the mother tongues of the Greek and Latin as aught else. The assumed displacements, however, are enormous; besides which, the ancient Thracians must have been more Greek than were the ancient Italians; which is unlikely.

But the great difficulty in fixing a locality for this Thraco-Pelasgic, or Helleno-Latin language (call it what we will) lies in a reason which the reader of the first chapter of this book may, perhaps, anticipate. It lies in the existence of the Albanian language; a fact, which I said, on the onset, was one of such importance as to require being treated as a special and separate preliminary to the ethnology of Greece and Italy, as well as on its own merits. Whence came this remarkable tongue, and whence the populations who speak it? For a long time both were considered recent introductions,—introductions from Caucasus, perhaps, or from some other locality equally plausible. But this origin is no longer admitted by any competent investigator; and the modern Skipetar, or Albanians, are now looked upon as the descendants of the ancient Illyrians, and of such Epirots as were not truly Greek. So that the Thraco-Pelasgic hypothesis is materially weakened by the inconvenient locality, and the impracticable antiquity of this nation. So awkwardly does it lie, that it fills up full two-thirds of the area required for the hypothetical tongue in question.

Hence the line of such transitional populations as, by connecting Greece and Italy, account for the ethnological affinities of their respective occupants, must not be a straight one. On the contrary, it must trend round the Albanian country, vi Macedon, Thrace, Servia, Croatia, and Carniola.

The assumption of a stream of population from Asia Minor across Turkey, Servia, and the parts to the north of the Adriatic is the Thraco-Pelasgian doctrine modified; since it deduces both tongues from a common source.

The assumption of a similar stream across the islands of the Ægean does the same. Yet each is beset with difficulties. If one fact be better supported than another, it is that the Ægean islands and the Asiatic coast were peopled from Greece rather than vice versÂ.

So serious, then, are the difficulties involved in the notion of either a continuous Helleno-Italian population originally extended from Greece to Italy but subsequently displaced, or an isolated intermediate locality from which both Hellenes and Italians were given-off as colonies, that I would rather believe that the likeness between the Greek and Latin languages proved nothing more than is proved by the presence of Norman-French words in English (viz., simple intermixture and intercourse) than admit it. I do not ask the reader to go thus far. I only request him to compare the size of the Greek and Italian areas with the size of the parts between them, which are neither one nor the other. This will lead him to the threshold of the difficulties involved in the usual views as to the origin of the Hellenic population within Hellas itself; and, provided that he be willing to examine patiently rather than reject hastily, an apparent paradox, it will also prepare him for a train of reasoning of which the result will be a Greece, or Hellas, as different from the Greece or Hellas of the current historians, as England is different from Britain. By which I mean that, if, by the term Greece we denote the present kingdom of King Otho, irrespective of its population, and with a view only to the portion of the earth’s surface that it constitutes, the Hellenes will come out Greek, just as the Anglo-Saxons are British, i.e., not at all. Instead of this, the true and primitive Greeks will be the analogues of the now extinct or modified Britons of Kent and Northumberland, the Hellenes being those of the Angle, Frisian, and other Germanic conquerors of our island.

But to catch it in its full clearness, the point of view from which the physical history of the Hellenes is to be contemplated, the critic should go somewhat further than this, and attempt his own reconstruction of the state of those European populations which existed when the Greek and Latin languages, with their several points of likeness and difference, were first developed.

Let him try to do this by assuming that the necessary movements and displacements were made by land, and he will find that it must be by ringing changes upon such suppositions as the following—

• 1. Occupancy of Greece from Italy.
• 2. Occupancy of Italy from Greece.
• 3. Extension into Greece, on one side, or—
• 4. Into Italy, on one side, or—
• 5. Into both Greece and Italy—from some common point different from each.
• 6. Absolute continuity of a Helleno-Latin population from Calabria to the Morea.

In each of the first two alternatives there is the displacement of some population earlier than the one—Greek or Italian, as the case may be—which we supposed to have been immigrant.

In the three next there is the same; with the additional difficulty of fixing the point from which the migrations diverged.

In the last there is the enormous displacement requisite to account for the utter absence of any population transitional to the Hellenic and Italian north of the Po on one side, and the Peneus on the other.

But this—as, indeed, are all the others—is reducible to a question of displacement.

Now it is the last four of the previous alternatives that are the most complicated. They are also those to which the current opinions most incline. The term Thraco-Pelasgic indicates this: since it shows that, instead of deriving the Greeks from the Italians, or the Italians from the Greeks, both are deduced from a third population.

Upon this third population we must concentrate our attention; and define our ideas as to its conditions.

If continuous, it must have been of considerable magnitude: and even if isolated, it can scarcely have been very small. Now the greater we make it the more mysterious is its present non-existence.

It must have spoken a language intermediate in character to the Hellenic and Italian. Unless it did this it is of no avail. To be simply like the Greek is not enough; nor yet to be what is called Indo-European. It must be sufficiently transitional in character to act as a link.

It must have been either ancient Albanian, which it cannot have been, ancient Thracian, which it is unlikely to have been, or, some third language winding itself into continuity between the most south-western Thracians and the most north-eastern Illyrians, i.e., populations akin to the Skipetar.

So much for its conditions on the side of Greece. As it approached Italy they must been equally mysterious. Unless we suppose the Liburnians and Venetians to have spoken such a tongue it must have lapped round the area of the northern populations of the Adriatic, so as to be thrown considerably westwards. But, to all appearances, Circumpadane Etruria began where the Veneti and Liburni left off.

The special classical scholar best knows how far the Pelasgi—how far, indeed, any ancient populations—fulfil these conditions. Of course, by assuming an unlimited amount of displacement and migration they can be made to do so. But such assumed displacements may be illegitimately large. Whether they are so or not depends upon the extent to which they are necessary.

Such is a sketch of the difficulties involved in the hypothesis that Greece and Italy were appropriated by similar populations by means of migrations by land.

A little consideration will show that by looking to the sea as the medium of communication we get rid of the gravest of the previous difficulties; though it must be admitted that we get another in the place of it. It may fairly be urged that conquests by sea are less complete and perfect than those by land; so that though they may be admitted as explanatory of settlements on the coast, they are insufficient to account for the reduction of the more inland and mountainous parts of a country. This is an objection as far as it goes: yet it would be hazardous to say that either Greece was more purely Hellenic, or Italy more exclusively Italian, at the beginning of their respective historical areas, than England was Anglo-Saxon in the reign of Alfred. Yet the Anglo-Saxon conquest was maritime.

That, at the very earliest dawn of the historical period, there was a great amount of Greek elements in Southern Italy is universally admitted; the only doubtful point being as to the way of explaining them. They fall into two classes—

1. Those that are accounted for by colonization from Greece to Italy within the historical period.

2. Those that are not so explained.

It is the latter upon which a partial confirmation of the doctrine of the present chapter is based.

a. The Æolus of Homer, who in spite of some difficulties of detail, we must look upon as the eponymus of Æolia, has his residence in the islands off the south coast of Italy; and, it must be remembered, that, except so far as this Æolus is the eponymus he is here considered to be, Homer knows nothing of the Æolians.

b. The Ionian Sea is the sea that washes the coasts of Italy, and not the sea which comes in contact with the shores of Ionian Asia.

c. Old geographical names, significant in the Greek language, are commoner in Southern Italy and Sicily, than in Greece itself; as Phalacrium Promontorium, Nebrodes Mons, Clibanus Mons, Petra, Xiphonia Promontorium, Crotalus Fluvius, &c. Nowhere are these commoner than in the Sicanian country, the part generally considered the most barbarian, but, more probably, the part where the character of the aborigines survived longest—Panormus, Ercta, Bathys Fluvius, Cetaria (probably a fishery), Drepanum, Selinus, Ægithallus. Almost all the islands have names more or less Greek, Strongyle, Phoenicodes, Ericodes, and a great number ending in -usa, as Pithec-usa, &c. Ortygia, is mentioned by Hesiod.

d. The names which, in Greek, end in - -?e?? take, in Southern Italy, the older forms in -ntum—as ?a??e??, Maleventum; S???e??, Solventum.

e. The Greeks themselves recognise the existence of colonies planted by their forefathers in Italy long anterior to the beginning of the historical period, e.g., that of CumÆ, seventeen generations before the Trojan war. This may fairly be construed into an admission of their ignorance as to their origin.

f. The epithet Magna in Magna GrÆcia as applied to Southern Italy, is an adjective which in every other instance of its use, denotes the mother country—the colony being designated by the contrary epithet little.

g. The cultus of the eminently Greek goddess, Demeter, was in the eminently Sikel district of Henna.

h. The recognition of Xuthus, the father of Ion, an eponymus strange to Hellenic Greece, as one of the six sons of Æolus, in the Sicilian genealogies, genealogies which are evidently of independent origin.—“Xuthus was king over the Leontine country which, even now, is called Xuthia; Agathyrnus, of the Agathyrnian country, who built the city called after him, Agathyrnus.”—Diod. Sic. v. 8.

The foregoing facts are unimportant and unsatisfactory if taken by themselves. Neither do they constitute the main argument in favour of the Italian origin of the Greeks. That lies in the necessity of effecting a geographical continuity between the Greek and Latin languages, and the inordinate difficulty of doing so by means of an extension of either of the areas northwards.

The weightiest objection to it is the following. If the southern Italians were so closely allied to the Greeks as the present doctrine makes them, how came the later colonists not to discover the affinity? Surely the settlers at Croton, Sybaris, Thurii, and the towns of Sicily, would not have failed to find out that they had cast their lot amongst cousins and kinsmen of their own stock, if such had actually been the case. They would have found out that the populations with which they came in contact spoke Greek—possibly with solecisms—but still Greek. I reply to this by stating that, if, in (say) the reign of Edward the Confessor, the English descendants of the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries had colonized the coasts of their mother country, they would not, unless they had hit upon a few exceptional localities, have found out, from the evidence of language or manners, that they had revisited the land of their fathers. The language had changed, and the population had been mixed and displaced. The Franks had conquered the tribes originally akin to the Saxons. Now that which the Franks did with the Saxons of Germany, the Lucanians and Bruttians seem to have done with the original Greeks of Italy. Such is the doctrine; such the chief objection to it; and such the answer.

Another arises from the following words:—???tt??, ??p????, pat???, ??t????, ??t??, ????, and ??p?de?. They are glosses from the Greek writers of Sicily. They are not Greek. They are Latin—cubitus, lepus, patina, catinus, mutuum, gelu, nepotes. I admit this to be weighty. Nevertheless, as the Sicilian dialects are considered to connect the Greek with the Latin, their presence is not conclusive. Besides this, the Sikeli were, probably, more Italian than the Sikani.

There were Epirote (Skipetar) elements in Southern Italy; since several names were common to both sides of the Ionian Sea—Chaones, Molossi, Acheron, Pandosia.

There were Pelasgians (whatever the Pelasgians may have been) also; as is to be inferred from the mention of the slaves of the colonists being so called.

The name by which the south Italian stock, the parent stock of the Hellenes, is best denoted is uncertain. The adjective Œnotrian, from the Œnotri, is suggested.

It is wholly unnecessary to assume the existence of a new stock for the population of ancient Sicily. The south Italians seem to have extended themselves to the island, and when we first find them there, we also find fresh evidence of their Greek character, as has already been shown in the geographical names of the Sikanian area.

At the same time they must have fallen into two or more well-marked varieties; varieties which are easily accounted for. There were the earliest occupants of the island, and there were recent immigrants from Italy, differing from each other as the present Danes of Iceland do from the native Icelanders. For in this way I interpret the difference between the Sik-eli and the Sik-ani, not doubting that both come from the same root; although the authority of Thucydides is against this view.

Thucydides’s account is as follows. In the western part of the island were the Sikani, from the river Sikanus, driven thence by the Iberians. Then came the Sikeli, driven from Italy by the Opiki. Thirdly, there were the Elymi of Eryx and Egesta, who were originally Trojans, but who escaped to Sicily, and settled themselves on the Sikanian frontier, having built the cities of Eryx and Egesta. A few Phocians (also from Troy) joined them, having first gone over to Libya. The Phoenicians held certain settlements on the southern coast; Motye, Soloeis, and Panormus. Lastly, came the SikeliÔts, or Greeks of Sicily, whose colonies were as follows—

A reference to his own text justifies our disbelief in the essential difference between the Sikani and the Sikeli, implied by Thucydides. That such was the case was the opinion of only the historian; whilst, on his own showing, it was not the opinion of the Sicanians themselves. After the Cyclopes and LÆstrygones the “Sikani are the first inhabitants. As they say themselves, they are even earlier, being autokhthones; but, in real truth, they are Iberians from the river Sikanus, driven out by the Ligyes; and from them the island as well was named Sikania, being first called Thrinakria.”[8] The Iberic doctrine is evidently an inference from the name of the river; an inference which the incompatible opinion of the Sikanians themselves opposes, and, in my mind, outweighs. But the objections do not end here. The evidence of Diodorus is as follows; i.e., that Philistus supported the Thucydidean view, but that TimÆus proved him wrong, and clearly showed that they were Autokhthones. Hence, the testimony that we set against that of Thucydides is the testimony of an equally competent local antiquary, though an inferior general historian: for less influence than this cannot well be attributed to the name of TimÆus.

The statement respecting the Phocians is remarkable. It shows the existence of Greeks anterior to the colonial era; Greeks whose presence was inexplicable, except under the idea of a return from a doubtful expedition.

Who the ElymÆans really were is uncertain. Assuming that they constituted a variety of the Sicilian population, and asking whence they may best be derived, the answer is Sardinia—Middle Italy, and Mauritania. In this latter case they belong to the original Libyan, GÆtulian, Numidian or Mauritanian stock, rather than the Punic. Or they may have been Tuscans. Possibly, Phoenicians direct from Phoenicia, or Canaanites, or Jews.

That true Mauritanians, as opposed to the Phoenicians of Carthage, existed, in at least one Sicilian locality, is a reasonable inference from the name of a town on the eastern coast—Thapsus. This is a word which now only occurs on the northern coast of Africa, but has a meaning in the modern Berber, where thifsah means sand; a likely name for the low coast of the part which Virgil calls Thapsum jacentem.

In the ElymÆan country were two rivers, one called SimoÏs, and the other Scamander. How they came to be called so is unknown. The effect was to engender the story of the Trojan colony; unless, indeed, we choose to argue that such a phenomenon proves too much, and is evidence in favour of the reality of a Trojan war, and a subsequent dispersion of Trojan colonists. Or they have been Sardinian Tli-enses.

The Carthaginian blood in Sicily was certainly foreign, and the ElymÆan was probably so. That of the Sikels was allied to the older Sikanian; perhaps, as the Danish of the Northmen in England was to that of the Anglo-Saxons. Such were the elements that came into the island. But, according to our hypothesis, there was an efflux out of it, to Æolian and Ionian Greece, and, perhaps, to some of those parts of Asia and the Ægean sea-board, which are claimed by the Hellenes as colonies from their own shores. Subsequent to this there went on the contest between the Sikani and Sikeli, even as the struggle between the Danes and Saxons went on in Alfred’s time; whilst Sikeliot Greeks and Phoenicians were making settlements on the coasts, and meditating a contest for the supremacy over both. First from Sicily and Southern Italy to Greece; then from Greece to Sicily and Southern Italy—such is the hypothetic line of migration, analogies to which may be found elsewhere. Sumatra, for instance, and the Malaccan Peninsula are considered to stand in the same relation. The island (Sumatra) is first peopled from the Peninsula, the tribes then occupying it being comparatively rude and savage. But, in the island, civilization increases, just as the South Italians are supposed to advance in their social condition when transplanted to Hellenic soil. Thirdly, the islanders (the Sumatrans), after the development of a powerful kingdom, make settlements on the mother-country (the Peninsula of Malacca), and (an important circumstance in our criticism) partly from the effect of changes upon themselves, and partly from changes in the parent stock, no recognition of the original affinity takes place. The aborigines of Malaya look upon their sovereigns of the sea-coast as strangers, themselves being considered what a Greek would call barbarians. The true affinity is only known to the European ethnologists. So far, then, is the present hypothesis from being deficient in analogies to support it.

The historical period begins with the contest between the Greeks and the Carthaginians as to who should hold in vassalage the Sikeli and Sikani; with a subordinate series of jealousies between the Doric and Ionic branches of the Greeks. Until about 300 B.C., the struggle is, comparatively, uncomplicated. Afterwards, however, the free introduction of mercenaries from Southern Italy, of Opican, Samnite, and Lucanian origin, engenders new elements of admixture. The Carthaginian power attains its height about this time. Then the island becomes the battle-field between the two republics, and from 250 B.C., to 450 A.D. (in round numbers), a period of 700 years, Sicily is a Roman province.

That the legionaries and officials were Roman in their political relations only, is nearly certain. Ethnologically they must have been chiefly South Italian. And the female part must have been native Sicilian. What does this mean—Greek, Carthaginian, Sikanian, or Sikelian? Any one in particular, or a little of each? The paramount fact for this question is the evidence to the existence of Sikeli and Sikani up to the reduction of the island. From then we hear no more of them: not, however, because they are known to have become extinct, but because their relations to Greece have ceased, and the historians who might mention them are wanting. Rome had no contemporary literature; and when it had, the Sicilian was known only as opposed to the Roman; for the writers use the word Siculi, in a general sense, making no distinction between the Sikel, the Sikan, and the Sikeliot. They were treated, however, as Greeks, not as barbarians; and the Latin language was not forced upon them. This is an inference from more than one expression in Cicero’s Oration against Verres, where they are spoken of as Greek.—“Novum est in Siculis, quidem, et in omnibus GrÆcis monstri simile.”—ii. 11. 65. Again, “Itaque eum non solum patronum istius insulÆ sed etiam sotera inscriptum vidi Syracusis.”—Ibid. 63.

If the Romans disturbed the ethnology but little, the question is reduced to the extent to which the Greek colonies either displaced the earlier inhabitants, or effected an intermixture. Of Ducetius, a Sikel king, powerful in the middle of the island, we hear in the times between Gelon and the Athenian invasion; and of other less important chiefs (some with Greek names), we hear until the first Punic war. They are always, however, Sikel. Of the Sikanians, ElymÆans, and the so-called Phocian Greeks, little or nothing is said. At the downfall of the Roman Empire, Sicily seems to have been Greek in speech, and Sikelo-Sikanian, strongly crossed with Greek, in blood. Then came the piracies of Genseric and his Vandals; then the invasion of the Goths of Theodoric; then the island is reconquered by Belisarius as a general of the Eastern empire; none of which events were of much ethnological importance. Not so the events of the ninth century. The Arab conquest was a physical as well as a moral influence.

“With a fleet of one hundred ships and an army of seven hundred horse, and ten thousand foot, the Arabs landed at Mazara, but after some partial victories, Syracuse was delivered by the Greeks, and the invaders reduced to the necessity of feeding on the flesh of their own horses; in their turn they were relieved by a powerful reinforcement of their brethren of Andalusia: the largest and western part of the island was gradually reduced, and the commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved about fifty years the faith which she had sworn to Christ and to CÆsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering-rams and catapultÆ, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary. The deacon, Theodosius, with the bishop and clergy, was dragged in chains from the altar to Palermo, cast into a subterranean dungeon, and exposed to the hourly peril of death or apostasy; his pathetic, and not inelegant complaint, may be read as the epitaph of his country. From the Roman conquest to this final calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the primitive isle of Ortygia, had insensibly declined; yet the relics were still precious; the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of gold (about four hundred thousand pounds sterling), and the captives must have out-numbered the seventeen thousand Christians who were transported from the sack of Tauromenium into African servitude. In Sicily, the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and fifty towns of Calabria and Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be defended by the name of the CÆsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy and glorious accession to the empire of the prophet; but the caliphs of Bagdad had lost their authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces of Africa; their emirs of Sicily aspired to independence, and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory inroads.”[9]

A.D. 1029, Aversa was founded; a fact common to the history of both Sicily and Southern Italy; from which the rule of the Normans in Sicily, Apulia, and Calabria dates. Its details are those of a romance; the deeds of a small but unscrupulous body of adventurers, too few to impress any new character on the stock with which they came in contact. Still they require mention, though but a handful of men. They were of mixed blood themselves; Scandinavian on the fathers’, French on the mothers’, side; French, too, in speech. They were recruited by heterogeneous accessions from Southern Italy.

The beginning of the thirteenth century sees the break-up of the Norman power, and Sicily transferred to the empire; one of the more notable facts of this transfer being the removal of sixty thousand Saracens to Nocera, in the south of Italy. Saracen, however, though it means Mahometan, by no means, necessarily, means Arab. Then we have the dominion of the French, ending with the Sicilian Vespers, and the death of eight thousand of them. Catalonians, Genoese, Modern Greeks, and Albanians (?) complete the list of the elements of intermixture in Sicily; notwithstanding which, and notwithstanding all the previous immigrations, I believe the basis of the stock to be Sikel chiefly, and next to Sikel, Greek.

With continental Italy the elements of admixture, until the time of Odoacer, were due to the barbarian legions in the service of Rome, rather than to the inroads of any barbarian conquerors; since Alaric, with his Visigoths, Radagaisus, with his medley of Slavono-Germans, Genseric with his Vandals, and Attila with his Huns, made but ephemeral impressions. Of the army, however, of Radagaisus, a large proportion was sold as slaves. Odoacer’s conquest was somewhat more permanent; whilst the elements he introduced are uncertain. Reasons, however, may be given for referring the Skiri, at least, and possibly the Heruli and Rugii to the same stock as the Huns and Bulgarians—the Turk, a stock from which few grafts were transplanted to Italy; though a Bulgarian colony in Samnium was existing in the time of the Lombards, and possibly a few other similar offsets besides.

The Gothic conquest, however, was not only permanent, but it was the first of three from the same stock. Themselves, probably, of mixed blood, having taken it up during their various settlements on the Lower and Middle Danube, from the Slavonians and Turks of the countries with which they came in contact, the Ostrogoths, to the amount of not less than two hundred thousand, settled in the most favoured parts of the country, and, dominant as they were amongst a population of serfs, must have played much the same part in Italy as the Normans did in England. And when Italy is recovered by Narses and Belisarius, more than one hundred and fifty years after, they are only ejected from power—not bodily put out of the land.

As has been stated already, they were only the first of three—we may say of four—hordes of invaders, each of which was more or less Germanic; for the Lombard dominion rapidly succeeded the Ostrogoth, and, besides this, partial invasions of Bavarians, Suabians, and Alemanni were, for a time, successful. But the Lombards ruled over all Italy with the exception of the Exarchate of Ravenna, till the conquest by Charlemagne, and over the present kingdom of Naples, under the name of the Duchy of Beneventum, until the Norman Conquest. Of all the Germanic elements, the Lombard is possibly the greatest. But it was no pure strain.

The infusion of Slavonic and Turk blood amongst the followers of Alboin was considerable.

For Calabrian and Apulian Italy the history is nearly the same as that of Sicily.

Now, if after the sketch of these numerous elements of intermixture we ask which part of Italy is most Roman, the answer gives but a small proportion of that illustrious blood. Taking the narrowest view of the question, and distinguishing the Latin area from the Oscan, Umbrian, and Etruscan, the amount is inordinately insignificant—and Rome itself was but a mixture. By generalizing, however, our language, and making Roman identical with Italian, we gain a larger area, coinciding pretty closely, though not exactly, with the States of the Church. This is the least mixed part of Italy, as well as the most Italian; the least mixed because it is south of the pre-eminently German, and north of the pre-eminently Arab area of invasion, and the most Italian, because the original basis was Umbrian, and Sabine rather than Etruscan, Gallic, Ligurian, or Œnotrian.

Piedmont, perhaps, is the next in order of comparative purity; at least, as far as modern intermixture is concerned: the oldest basis being Ligurian.

In Lombardy the elements are Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, and Lombard; in the Venetian territory, Umbrian, Etruscan, Gallic, Roman, Ostrogoth, Lombard, and Slavonic (Liburnian); in the kingdom of Naples, Ausonian and Œnotrian, with Greek, Arab, and Norman superadditions.