Prehistoric Etruscan Pottery
or purple stripes, the toga with purple border, the sceptre of ivory, the curule chair, the twelve lictors with their axes in bundles of rods—were borrowed from the Etruscans. Thus it seems that the ancient garb of the Roman citizen, a tunic covered by a long mantle or toga, a costume which is essentially the same as the chiton and himation of the Greeks, started as a fashion introduced by their more civilised northern neighbours. It seems clear also that the earliest Roman art, the decoration of temples with painted terra-cotta ornaments, was Etruscan in origin. Some of the earliest statues of the gods seem to have been painted, for we hear of a very ancient red Jupiter. Thus there is some probability that Rome passed through a period, perhaps in the sixth century, of alien rule and alien civilisation. Remembering the cousinship between Greece and Etruria we shall find that Rome had been prepared for the reception of Greek culture in very early times.
Plate VI. ETRUSCAN VASE
The Roman Toga
The fifth century seems to have been a period of decline for the Etruscan power. The Greek republics, with, as I hope we agreed, their northern stiffening, had advanced far beyond their Etruscan kinsmen in intelligence, and the tyrant Hiero of Syracuse defeated them in a great sea-fight in 474 B.C. It is agreeable to the historian to have a fact so certain and a date so well attested in all the wilderness of legend that surrounds the early history of Italy. Then the warlike hill tribes of the Southern Apennines began to press upon their southern colonies, and finally the Gauls from the north swept down upon Etruria at the beginning of the fourth century and broke up their declining empire for ever. It was probably during this period that the Romans expelled their Etruscan princes, and replaced royalty by a pair of equal colleagues sharing most of the royal power and regal emblems except crown and sceptre. So we get to the Rome of the earliest credible tradition—a Rome governed by two consuls and a senate of nobles. It is a city composed of farm-houses and in each house the head of the family rules in patriarchal majesty.