The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

“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 vexatœ quœstiones 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.