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I remember with gratitude many Umbrians who were kind to me; I would not, however, indirectly cause any trouble to them in their old age, or to their descendants. The Imperial estate was large and I learned its history. It was made up of three adjacent properties confiscated at different periods by different Emperors.
A long time elapsed ere the Celts crossed the Po; hence the Etruscans and Umbrians left deeper traces of their existence on the right bank of the river than they had done on the left, which they had to abandon at an early period.
The Samnites found allies in the Umbrians of Northern, and the Marsi and Pieligni of Central Italy, But these people were easily subdued, and a peace was made with Samnium, after twenty-two years’ war, when Bovianum, its strongest city, was taken by storm, B.C. 298.
Here also the people looked well-to-do and civilised, on the whole like Umbrians; whereas on the Olevano side, even on Sunday, they were in rags and miserably stolid. The little caffè where we eat was lined with political caricatures.
The Umbrians retained the valleys of the Apennines, and the Veneti, speaking a different language, kept possession of the north-eastern portion of the valley of the Po. Ligurian tribes maintained their footing in the western mountains, dwelling as far south as Pisa and Arezzo, and separating the Celt-land proper from Etruria.
With the Sabines who occupied the middle mountain range from the borders of the Umbrians down to the region between the Tiber and the Anio, and who, at the epoch when the history of Rome begins, penetrated fighting and conquering as far as Latium itself, the Romans notwithstanding their immediate neighbourhood subsequently came comparatively little into contact.
The natural road for the Gauls would have been along the Adriatic, then through the country of Umbrians who were tributary to them and already quite broken down, and thence through the Romagna across the Apennines.
It is certainly true that each of these great artists had his own individual and distinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbrians and Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy of Shakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the human soul in King Lear has only once been equalled, and that is in the dreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and the Morning of Michelangelo.
The Umbrians or Ambrons were driven out or subjugated. Nevertheless some of their peoplets, preserving their name and manners, remained in the mountains of upper Italy, where they were to be subsequently discovered by fresh and more celebrated Gallic invasions.
The cognomen Maro is in origin a magistrate's title used by Etruscans and Umbrians, but cognomina were a recent fashion in the first century B.C. and were selected by parents of the middle classes largely by accident. In this he is doubtless following a fairly reliable tradition, accepted all the more willingly because of his intimacy with Maecenas, who was of course Etruscan:
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