The reason of Tarquin’s being connected with Etruria was, besides his name, the necessity of accounting for an Etruscan influence on Rome. The Romans made Servius Tullius, who was an Etruscan, a Latin from Corniculum; and vice versa, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was a Latin, an Etruscan. Thus the whole story of his descent is a fiction, and this is also decidedly the case with Tanaquil, inasmuch as the Romans so name every one of the women who were stated to have been Etruscans, it being a common Etruscan name, which is often met with in inscriptions. In the old native tradition Tarquin was married to a Latin woman, Caia Cæcilia, a name which must be traced back to Cæculus the founder of Præneste. Her image was set up in the temple of Semo Sancus; for she was worshipped as the guardian goddess of female domestic virtue. This bears a genuine stamp of nationality. In the old legend, she is such a familiar personage that the girdle of her brazen image was filed off, and the filings were used as remedies.
It is therefore a matter of history, that there was a Latin Tarquinius Priscus; yet he in all likelihood belongs to the Luceres. He introduces the Luceres into the senate; to the two hundred councillors a hundred more are added, summoned by the king as gentes minores after the gentes of the two first tribes; in the rebellion of his son against Servius Tullius, they are his faction. His time seems to be parted from the former one by a great gulf: in his reign, Rome appears under quite a different form from what she had before. The conquests which are ascribed to Ancus Marcius are confined within a very narrow space. He first conquers the mouth of the Tiber, and fortifies Ostia. But now a state of things is mentioned, the consequences of which we still see, even to this hour. To this very day there stands unchanged the great river vault, the Cloaca maxima, with the name of which one incorrectly associates a base meaning. It is not a mere sewer, though it is also used as such. Its real object was no less than that of draining the great branch of the river’s bed, which went forth from the Tiber between the Capitoline, the Aventine, and the Palatine, and between the Palatine and Capitoline, and then extended in marshes to the space between the Quirinal and the Viminal, and of thereby gaining solid ground. This work consisting of three half circles of huge blocks of free stone without mortar, which even to this present moment have not given way the breadth of the back of a knife, drew off the water from the surface, received it under ground, carried it into the Tiber, and formed a firm soil. At the same time, because the Tiber had also muddy banks, a great wall was built as a dyke, the greater part of which is still in preservation. This construction is equal in extent and bulk to the pyramids; in difficulty it very far surpasses them. It is such a gigantic fabric, that one does not comprehend it when one sees it: even the aqueducts of the Emperors are indeed nothing great when compared to it. They were of brick, with a cast of mortar in the middle; but here, all is of hewn Alban freestone, with immensely deep foundations.
Whether the Cloaca Maxima was executed by Tarquinius Priscus, or by his son Superbus, is a point in which the ancients differ from each other, and we also can decide nothing. This much, however, we may say, that the building must have been completed before the town was enclosed within the circuit of the seven hills, and formed a whole; yet this was done by the last king but one, and therefore, if we will avail ourselves of the personification, in the time of Tarquinius Priscus. But such a work could not possibly have been executed with the resources of the State as we know it to have been at that period, when its territory extended from the river about two leagues in breadth, and at most six to eight leagues in length, and consequently was not as large as that of Nuremburg; especially if we think of all the difficulties of an age in which trade and commercial wealth were in no wise in existence. Here are evidently all the intervening stages leaped over, and we see at once an Empire before us quite different from the former one, in which Rome rules far and wide. Of this sway we find no mention in Livy, although he too is astonished at these buildings. Livy fancies that time to be a state of childhood for the city, and is therefore under the same delusion by which Cicero, and the later writers especially are beguiled; that the period of the kings was to be looked upon as the age of Rome’s greatest weakness. Much more correct might be the account given by Dionysius, according to which the Etruscan towns, the Latins, and the Sabines paid homage to Tarquinius Priscus. Only all the narratives of the manner in which this had come to pass are so fabulous, that one cannot be mistaken as to their being invented by those who had wished to solve the riddle. Here history entirely fails us. But whatever relation Tarquinius Priscus may have to the Tuscan legends of the conquests of Tarchon, this much we may say; that Rome itself ruled at that time with an extensive sway, or else that it was the seat of foreign rulers, so that at all events a state of things had existed in which Rome was the centre of a foreign empire.
Another undertaking quite as enigmatical is assigned to the same reign of Tarquinius Priscus. It is said that Tarquin had wished to double the Romulean Tribus, that is to say, to add three new tribes bearing his own and his friend’s names. To this the Augur Attius Navius had objected, as three tribes were enjoined by the auspices. Probably the legend was not as Livy, but as Dionysius has it; that Tarquin had himself cut through the whet stone, and in doing so had wounded his hand. The king had not indeed then formed three new tribes, but had annexed new centuries to the old ones. In this legend therefore the immutability of the tribes is spoken of, as well as the intention of the ruler to double the community by new citizens, which scheme the old citizens set their face against, pleading the sacred character of the original number. But we see here a ruler, who is not a mere magistrate, but governs by arbitrary force:—he yields as to the form, but alters the substance, making second centuries. Centuries and tribes are originally the same thing, since the tribus had a hundred clans. How it was with the second centuries is utterly hidden from us. One hypothesis is this, that as many of the old clans had died away, Tarquin formed new ones; for instance, that when the Ramnes had dwindled to fifty, he added to fill up the number fifty new clans, as secundi Ramnes. We have the example of the Potitii, who became extinct in the time of Appius Claudius, though they still consisted, as we are told, of twelve families. The rolls of exclusive families show with what rapidity they become extinct. In Styria there were formerly two thousand noble families, and now there exist scarcely a dozen of them; in the duchy of Bremen, the equestrian body admissible to the diet dwindled within fifty years to half its number, merely because they intermarried only with those of their own cast. In Luneburg the government formerly belonged to the noble houses; now there is only one house left. Perhaps Tarquin collected the remnants of the old Curies, and then made up clans which were wanting. What recommends this supposition is this, that there remained some difference between the old and new clans. Certainly the new centuries had not the weight which they would have had as independent tribes.
It is a very uncertain thing to seek allegories in historical statements, and to try and draw from them again historical facts. Thus as Ancus Marcius is the founder of the plebes, and the murder of Tarquin is said to have been brought about by the Marcii, one might surmise that Tarquin, who was one of the Luceres and had introduced them into the senate, had perished owing to rebellion of the plebeians. Yet this is one of the most hazardous hypotheses, and therefore I did not choose to have it printed. In proffering it, I support myself on a credit to which he may lay claim, who for eighteen years has almost incessantly devoted himself to these researches, after having been fondly attached to them for many a year before.
The legend which makes Tarquin the acknowledged chief of the twelve Etruscan towns, leads us to speak of the Etruscans. They are perhaps of all the nations of antiquity that on which the most different disquisitions have been made with the smallest apparatus of authorities, and about which also the greatest number of deceptions have been circulated. The forgeries of one Annius of Viterbo, of one Inghirami, and others, are impudent in the highest degree; and yet they have nevertheless become the sources of many later works. By them Dempster, and by him Winkelmann in his turn, was led astray. In the eighteenth century, the Italians did not indeed forge any more documents; but with the greatest recklessness they gave themselves the air of being able to explain what could never be explained. Indeed, many written documents existed of the Etruscans; yet only a few great ones. Five years ago an altar was dug up, written all over on three sides; a cippus in Perugia; a coffin at Bolsena, &c.; and descriptions have been published of them, some separately, and some collectively; especially by Lanzi. On works of art also, inscriptions are found. To interpret these is a matter of great interest, since, if we could read them, much light would dawn upon us; but this has given rise to the definite presupposition that they were capable of being explained, and thus the most arbitrary things were done. Eastern languages, and the Celtic were applied to it; at last Lanzi acted on the supposition that it was a sort of Greek, and, in defiance of all the rules of grammar, he formed at his own pleasure a spurious Greek. With all these relics, we stand without knowing any thing, as we did with regard to the hieroglyphics, until Champollion arose. Long inscriptiones bilingues only could help us out. We may positively assert that the Etruscan has not the least resemblance to the Latin and Greek, nay, to any language which is known to us, as Dionysius already has justly observed. This passage of Dionysius has purposely been overlooked, or its absolute meaning has been wrested into a conditional one. The Umbrian on the Eugubian tablets, has some resemblance to the Latin.
Dionysius had this information, that the Etruscans considered themselves as an indigenous people, which descended from no other, and, knowing nothing of the name of Tyrrhenians and Etruscans, called themselves Rasena.[63] Of the traditions of the Greeks they knew nothing. Yet the latter had two distinct traditions concerning the Tyrrhenians, which they referred to the Etruscans; the one, that of Hellanicus, that the Pelasgians from Thessaly had settled at the mouth of the Po, at Spina, from whence they had crossed over the mountains to Etruria; the second, that of Herodotus, according to which the Lydians at the time of Atys, were visited by a famine, so that part of the people under Tyrrhenus were obliged to emigrate to Italy. Dionysius controverts the latter statement in that good style of criticism which we sometimes find in him, on the ground that neither the language nor the religion of the Etruscans bore any resemblance to those of the Lydians; and that neither the Etruscans, nor the Lydian writer Xanthus,—whose work, as O. Müller shows, was unjustly suspected among the Greeks of not being genuine,—know any thing about it. Dionysius in this judged rightly, because he did not work from books, but from immediate observation. With the other tradition he deals differently: he does not altogether drop it; but he refers it, not to the Etruscans, but to the aborigines. The Italian antiquaries, on the contrary, stuck to the Lydian tradition; or they also referred the emigration of the Pelasgians from Thessaly to the Etruscans, and said, in spite of all the assertions of Herodotus, that the inhabitants of Cortona (Croton) were not at all different from the people of the neighbourhood. And here I will now set forth the simple results of my researches concerning the Etruscans. I have (in the new edition of the first volume of my Roman history) shown that the name of Tyrrhenians was transferred by the Greeks to the Etruscans, as we use that of Britons when speaking of the English, or that of Mexicans and Peruvians, of the Spaniards in America; because those nations dwelt originally in these countries, whilst a newly immigrating people founded quite a new order of things, and that so completely that we no more recognise any traces of an earlier condition, than if the former had never existed. The Tyrrhenians were quite a different people; yet they inhabited the shores of Etruria, as well as the whole coast to the south, as far as Œnotria proper, i. e. Calabria and Basilicata. These Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians, as well as those of the Peloponnesus and Thessaly: and when Sophocles speaks of Τυῤῥηνοὶ πελασγοί in Argos; when in Æschylus king Pelasgus, son of Palæchthon, rules in Argos; when Tyrrhenians, according to Thucydides, reside near Athos, and in Lemnos, and, according to Herodotus, in Attica near the Hymettus, these are all branches of one and the same stock. In Asia Minor we must fill up the gap in history after the destruction of Troy by making the Lydians, Carians, and Mysians, push forward from the interior country nearer to the coast in the neighbourhood of the fallen city, partly subjugating, partly expelling, the Meonians and other Pelasgian nations. The Meonians, who are always distinguished from the Lydians, are likewise Tyrrhenians, and are called so by Ovid in the Bacchian fable. Now these Tyrrhenians have given to the coast of Western Italy and to the Tyrrhenian Sea their names: the Romans call them Tusci. Both names passed to the Rasena, who came down the Alps as conquerors. Thus the whole statement of Herodotus becomes clear. It is a usual genealogical explanation to show how Tyrrhenians could have been in Lydia, and also in Italy. This opinion is now generally received in Germany and in England.
The only difficulty, which indeed does not damage the evidence for this representation, but is surprising as a fact, is this, that after the Etruscan conquest of the Tyrrhenian country, the language of the Rasena is the only one preserved on so many monuments; and that no trace of inscriptions is to be seen in the tongue which was akin to the Greek, as we must presume the Tyrrhenian to have been. But, in the first place, these inscriptions were almost all of them found in the interior of the country near Perugia, Volterra, Arrezzo, &c., where the original population was Umbrian; and on the sea coast near Pisa, Populonia, Cære, Tarquinii, and elsewhere, only in very small numbers. Some have been lately discovered near Tarquinii, but they have not yet been published: one might therefore say, that if no Tyrrhenian inscriptions have yet been met with, they may still be found. But no stress is to be laid on such special pleading. In conquests which bring a heavy yoke upon the conquered, the language of the vanquished often becomes wholly extinct. In Asia and many other countries, the use of the native tongue was forbidden, in order to prevent treason. The Moors were in many respects mild rulers in Spain, and the country flourished under their sway; yet in Andalusia, at the advance of the Christians, a king forbade his people on pain of death to speak Latin, so that a hundred years afterwards no more trace of that language is to be found. As late as in the eighteenth century, the whole Christian population of Cæsarea spoke Greek: a bashaw forbid them to do so, and after a lapse of thirty or forty years, when my father came to the place, not a soul was any more able to converse in that language. In Sicily, at the time of the Norman conquest, the language was exclusively Greek and Arabic; even under the Emperor Frederic the Second, the laws were still promulgated in Greek; afterwards this language all at once utterly disappears. In the Terra di Lecce, and the Terra di Otranto also, the names were afterwards Italian, but conversation was in Greek; and at the end of two hundred years, in the fifteenth century, it became extinct also here. In Pomerania and Mecklenburg, without any immigration of Germans, merely owing to the predilection of the princes, the Vandal language has vanished in the course of one or two generations. The conquerors of the march of Brandenburg forbade the use of the Vandal tongue on pain of death, and nothing soon was spoken but the Low German, (plattdeutsch). The Etruscans had quite an aristocratical constitution, and they lived in their towns in the midst of a large subjected country; under such circumstances, it could not but be of great importance to them, that the people should adopt their language.
The Rasena came down from the Alps as conquerors, since, according to Livy and Strabo, not only the Rhætians, but also the other Alpine tribes, the Camunians, the Lepontians on the Lake of Como, were of Etruscan race. That they were forced by the Gallic conquest to retire from the plain into the Alps, has never been said by any of the ancients; and it is absurd to think that a people which fled before the Gauls from the Patavinian plain, should have been able to subdue the mountaineers of the Alps, or have been allowed to have any footing there, unless those regions had already before been occupied by others of the same tribe. We have the tradition, probably from Cato, that the Etruscans had taken three hundred Umbrian towns;—these must be considered as belonging to the interior of Tuscany;—and a long time afterwards, a district in Tuscany is called Umbria, and a river, Umbro. The Etruscans are therefore one of those northern nations which were driven to the south by the pressure of some of those national migrations which are quite as historically certain as the later ones, although we do not find any record of them,—national migrations like that which had driven the Illyrians forward, so that the Illyrian Enchelians, about the fortieth Olympiad, burst into Greece, and sacked Delphi, as Herodotus tells us. Such a national migration drove the Etruscans from the north. They once inhabited Switzerland and the Tyrol; nay, it surely happened to the Etruscans in those countries, as it did also to the Celts in Spain, that some tribes kept their ground longer than the other. The heathen wall on the Ottilienberg in Alsace, which Schweighäuser has described as one of the most remarkable and unaccountable of monuments, is evidently an Etruscan work: it has exactly the character of Etruscan fortification, as we see it at Volterra, Cortona, and Fiesole. Some would have this called the Gallic style of building; yet quite groundlessly, as we may see both from Cæsar’s description, and also from other remains and structures in Gaul. There are two essentially distinct kinds of fortifications in central Italy. The one are the so-called Cyclopian Walls, built in polygons, which alternate with intentional irregularity along the slope of a hill, in such a manner that it has become quite scarped, but at the summit it is without walls. The ascent is by a ledge on the slope of the hill, Clivus, which one may ride up on horseback; at the bottom of it, and at the top there are gates. In this manner the Roman and Latin hills were fortified. The other are the Etruscan fortifications, which are erected on the crown of a hill of difficult access, the wall being not of polygons, but of parallelopipeds of colossal dimensions, very rarely of hewn stone, which follow the ridge of the hill in all its bendings. Thus it is near Volterra, and such is the one in Alsace just spoken of. Now, I do not assign the origin of this wall to such very ancient times, but to a kindred tribe with the Etruscans, which had long maintained its ground there against the Celts; and yet I would not quote its existence as an irrefragable proof that there had been such a tribe. The Etruscans settled first in twelve towns in Lombardy; about as far as to the present Austrian frontier, on the side of Piedmont (Pavia was not Etruscan); in the south, from Parma to Bologna; in the north, from the Po to Verona; then they spread farther, and founded or enlarged in the country south of the Apennines twelve towns besides, from which they commanded the country. Now it is the common belief that the Etruscans were quite an ancient people in Italy; I was myself for a long time of that opinion. But very old in Tuscany they are not; and in that part of southern Tuscany which now belongs to the States of the Church, they have spread only very late. Herodotus relates that about the year of the city 220, the unfortunate Phocæans had been beaten in a sea-fight by the Agyllæans who dwelt in Corsica, and the Carthaginians, and that those who had been taken prisoners were stoned to death; that the vengeance of heaven for this crime had been made manifest; that the Agyllæans had applied to Delphi, and that Apollo had imposed upon them Greek sacrifices and the worship of Greek heroes. Now Agylla, according to the unanimous account of all writers, bore this name as long as it was Pelasgian: thenceforth it was called Cære by the Etruscans. Mezentius, the tyrant of Cære in the legend which Virgil with his great learning embodies in his poem, may with much probability be taken to be the Etruscan conqueror of Cære. He also appears afterwards as the conqueror of Latium, who claims for himself the tithe of the wine, and even the whole produce of the vintage. The extensions of the Etruscan sway belong to the age of the last kings of Rome: they are connected with the expedition of the Etruscans against Cuma, and in the country of the Volscians. About the time from Olympiad 60 to 70, they spread in those parts; in the year of the city 283, they found Capua, according to Cato’s account, which has certainly great authenticity. The shortness of the period allowed for the growth and decay of the people, the objection started by Velleius, cannot make this improbable: Capua, for instance, had already been built two hundred and fifty years before it became a large town: New York is a case yet more in point. The time, therefore, when Hiero of Syracuse defeated the Etruscans near Cuma, was that in which these people flourished. In the beginning of the fourth century of the city, they declined, while the Romans rose; and in the middle of the century, the Gauls wrested from them the northern part of their territory,—their possessions in the neighbourhood of the Po.
After men had come to the conviction that the Alban origin of Rome was untenable, Rome was believed to be an Etruscan colony. I myself put forth this supposition, and made it the groundwork of the first edition of my History, because I held the Alban Latin descent to be false. This Etruscan origin seemed to me to be confirmed by several circumstances, especially by the statement of a certain Volnius in Varro, that the names of the oldest Roman tribes were Tuscan; and, moreover, by the remark that the secret theology of the Romans was derived from Etruria, and that the sons of the ten first in the Roman senate learned the ordinances of religion there, insomuch that the worship of Jupiter, of Juno, and of Minerva on the Capitol, was in all likelihood after the Etruscan ritual. Yet by unprejudiced researches I have convinced myself that this is not the case; that the two original elements of the Roman state are the Latins and Sabines, though I would not altogether dispute the existence of an Etruscan one afterwards added to it; that as Rome is much older than the spread of the Etruscans in those parts, the statement of Volnius is either groundless, or the names of the tribes were later than the tribes themselves; yet that the strong influence of the Etruscans at the time which is designated as the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, and of Servius Tullius, is sufficient to account for all the Etruscan institutions in Rome. Moreover no ancient author ever speaks of an Etruscan colony at Rome. The question then is only this, Whether the Etruscans spread so early, that in the times of Tarquinius Priscus they were already in possession of Tarquinii and the neighbouring places? or whether they began only about the sixtieth Olympiad, and later, to appear on the Tiber and beyond it?