Of these, the number of warriors was 110,000, the rest being old men, women, and children.
But as the historian of these movements is the conqueror of Gaul, we must expect, ere long, the reduction of Helvetia to a Roman province. It takes place as a matter of course. It is Cæsar who effects it; and the process of Romanizing begins. The Roman language, however, I think, extends itself into Switzerland from three points; from Gaul, from Italy, and from the Tyrol. Such, at least, is the inference from the present dialects; since in Tessino and the Valteline we have the Italian; in Geneva and the Valais, the French; and in the Grisons, the Romance.
This last requires notice. If we follow the Rhine from the Lake of Constance, we are carried up into the narrow valley in which it rises, and here the dialect is neither French nor Italian, but a separate substantive tongue which, like them, is derived from the Latin, and accordingly, it is known as the Romance or Rumonsch of the Grisons or Graubünten. The Inn must then be traced upwards in like manner, when in the valley of its head-waters, and the water-shed between it and the Rhine, the Romance will be found again. It is reduced to writing and spoken in several dialects and subdialects; so as to have all the appearance of a language of long standing.
Now this, I imagine, represents the Latin of Rhætia—i.e., of the Tyrol and Vorarlberg—rather than that of Gaul, and it was from the Tyrol and Vorarlberg, conquered in the reign of Augustus by Tiberius and Drusus, that it was introduced.
In few countries reduced by Rome must the blood on the mother’s side have been more aboriginal than in Helvetia, and in few countries is the extent to which the speech is Latin less a measure of the Latinity of the descent.
Until the fifth century Switzerland was Keltic and Latin, even as France was; and then mixture set in, partially. The Germans of Suabia and Franconia, Germans of the High-German division, Germans by whom Alsatia, Bavaria, Baden, Wurtemburg, Burgundy, and Franche-Comté, were Germanized—some perfectly, some partially—extended their conquests to the present cantons of Schwytz, Uri, Unterwalden, and the other cantons of the German language; the populations of which are Keltic, Roman, and German, those of the rest of Switzerland being simply Keltic and Roman.
Switzerland, then, is the third country in which the basis is Keltic, and the superadded elements Roman and German.
CHAPTER IV.
ITALY.—LIGURIANS.—ETRUSCANS.—VENETIANS AND LIBURNIANS.—UMBRIANS.—AUSONIANS.—LATINS.—EARLIEST POPULATIONS OF NORTH-EASTERN ITALY.—SOUTH ITALIANS.—ITALIAN ORIGIN OF THE GREEKS.—SICILIANS.—ELEMENTS OF ADMIXTURE.—HERULIAN.—GOTHIC.—LOMBARD.—ARAB.—NORMAN.—ANALYTICAL SKETCH OF THE POPULATION OF MODERN ITALY.
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:—