CHAPTER I.
ETRURIA.
CONTENTS.
Historical notice—Temples—Rock-cut Tombs—Tombs at Castel d’Asso—Tumuli.
CHRONOLOGICAL MEMORANDA.
| Migration from Asia Minor | about 12th cent. B.C. |
| Tomb of Porsenna | about B.C. 500 |
| Etruria becomes subject to Rome | about B.C. 330 |
The ethnographical history of art in Italy is in all its essential features similar to that of Greece, though arriving at widely different results from causes the influence of which it is easy to trace. Both are examples of an Aryan development based on a Turanian civilisation which it has superseded. In Greece—as already remarked—the traces of the earlier people are indistinct and difficult to seize. In Italy their features are drawn with a coarser hand, and extend down into a more essentially historic age. It thus happens that we have no doubt as to the existence of the Etruscan people—we know very nearly who they were, and cannot be mistaken as to the amount and kind of influence they exercised on the institutions and arts of the Romans.
The more striking differences appear to have arisen from the fact, that Greece had some four or five centuries of comparative repose during which to form herself and her institutions after the Pelasgic civilisation was struck down at the time of the Dorian occupation of the Peloponnesus. During that period she was undisturbed by foreign invasion, and was not tempted by successful conquests to forsake the gentler social arts for the more vulgar objects of national ambition. Rome’s history, on the other hand, from the earliest aggregation of a robber horde on the banks of the Tiber till she became the arbiter of the destinies of the ancient world, is little beyond the record of continuous wars. From the possession of the seven hills, Rome gradually carried her sway at the edge of the sword to the dominion of the whole of Italy and of all the then known world, destroying everything that stood in the way of her ambition, and seeking only the acquisition of wealth and power.
Greece, in the midst of her successful cultivation of the arts of commerce and of peace, stimulated by the wholesome rivalry of the different States of which she was composed, was awakened by the Persian invasion to a struggle for existence. The result was one of the most brilliant passages in the world’s history, and no nation was ever more justified in the jubilant outburst of enthusiastic patriotism that followed the repulse of the invader, than was Greece in that with which she commenced her short but brilliant career. A triumph so gained by a people so constituted led to results at which we still wonder, though they cause us no surprise. If Greece attained her manhood on the battle-fields of Marathon and Salamis, Rome equally reached the maturity of her career when she cruelly and criminally destroyed Corinth and Carthage, and the sequel was such as might be expected from such a difference of education. Rome had no time for the cultivation of the arts of peace, and as little sympathy for their gentler influences. Conquest, wealth, and consequent power, were the objects of her ambition—for these she sacrificed everything, and by their means she attained a pinnacle of greatness that no nation had reached before or has since. Her arts have all the impress of this greatness, and are characterised by the same vulgar grandeur which marks everything she did. Very different they are from the intellectual beauty found in the works of the Greeks, but in some respects they are as interesting to those who can read the character of nations in their artistic productions.