The Ethnology of Europe

by R. G. Latham

Now, if we are right in supposing the Ligurians to have been Kelts, the earliest historical occupants of Lombardy, Etruscans, and the Liburnians and Venetians members of a distinct stock, we have to go far towards the south before we find the population with which the ideas suggested by the term Italian are connected; before we find a language allied to the Latin, or before we find a civilization and polity akin to that of the Romans. As far as we have gone hitherto, the nations of the Po and Arno are as little Italian as the Basques are Castilian. They have been the nation not out of which, but in spite of which Italy became the country of the Italian language. No immediate affinities have yet been found for Rome.

Language will be the chief test; and of the languages allied to the Latin the most northern were the Umbrian and the Latin itself; the former on the east, the latter on the west coast; the former spoken as far north as the mouth of the Po (in lat. 45°), the latter no further than that of the Tiber (in lat. 42°).

The particular division of those ancient Italian populations of which the language was Umbrian rather than Latin or Oscan, occupied, at the beginning of the historical period, the present districts of Urbino and Perugia, but as there is strong primâ facie evidence of their original area having been much wider, as well as traditions (if not historical records) of the Umbrians having suffered considerable displacement both on the north and west, in the direction of Lombardy, and in the direction of Tuscany, Ferrara, the Romagna, parts of Bologna and Tuscany may be added to the Umbrian area in its oldest form. Southwards, too, it may be carried to the March of Ancona, or the northern part of the Upper Picentine. The ancient Umbrians consisted of separate tribes, of which the one first known to the Romans was that of the Camertes. Yet they were, at the earliest times, the cultivators of the soil, and the builders of cities; and as the Umbrians, in general, passed for the oldest occupants, their capital Ameria, was one of the oldest cities of Italy. Pliny gives the date of its foundation as 381 years before the foundation of Rome.

The Umbrians here meant are the people who used the language of what are known as the Eugubine Inscriptions, so called from the place of their discovery, Gobbio, the ancient Iguvium; which the researches of Grotefend and others have shown to be undeniably akin to the Latin.

From the famous Sabines, in the strict sense of the word, and from the Sabine population in its purest form, the Italians who may best claim a descent are those occupants of that part of the states of the church which lies due north of the Campagna di Roma, and is bounded by the Tiber, the Teverone, the Nera, and the Apennines, the country people of the parts about Narri, Otricoli, and Rieti. The Campagna di Roma is pre-eminently Latin.

For the north-western Neapolitans in the Upper Abruzzo, the descent is from the southern Piceni, the Vestini, the Frentani, the Peligni, the Marsi, and other less important tribes, which it is difficult to distribute, i.e., to say, how far they approached the Umbrian type in the north, or the Samnite, in the centre of Italy. It is difficult, too, to say whether some of them were Latin or Oscan most.

All this is difficult, but, except to the minute ethnologist, unimportant. It is enough to remember that when we reach the ancient Samnium and Campania, the type has changed, at least, in respect to language; for the speech is neither Umbrian nor Latin, though the detail of the differences and agreements between the Samnite and Campanian dialects is difficult.

The language itself is the Oscan, or Opican, spoken at different times as far north as the neighbourhood of Rome, and as far south as Bruttium; where, however, it was not indigenous. It was common to Samnium and Campania, but not to Lucania and Apulia, originally. The general name for the nations that spoke it will be Ausonian.

The Oscan is known to us from inscriptions, and is, at the least, as closely allied as the Umbrian to—

The Latin.—I think the Latin was the language of the more southern of the earliest inhabitants of Etruria; so that at the time of the foundation of Rome, important as it was destined to become afterwards, it was in the position of the Cornish of Cornwall about three centuries ago. It may also be compared with the modern Frisian of Friesland, a tongue spoken at present over a small and unimportant area, but one which was once spread far and wide over northern Germany. If the Welsh were to reconquer England, or the Frisians Germany, the phenomenon which I imagine to have been presented by the history of Rome would be repeated. A people conquered up to a certain point react on their conquerors, vanquish them, and a fourth of the world besides. This opinion is, of course, the result of general ethnological reasoning, rather than the testimony of historians; yet I am not aware of any undoubted fact that it opposes. It stands or falls by the phenomena it explains. The chief of these is the peculiar character of the Latin language.