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Updated: June 23, 2025
Commissioners were sent to the Delphic oracle to inquire what the gods portended by this prodigy; but an interpreter of the fates was presented to them nearer home in a certain aged Veientian, who, amid the scoffs thrown out by the Roman and Etrurian soldiers from the out-posts and guards, declared, after the manner of one delivering a prophecy, that until the water should be discharged from the Alban lake, the Romans should never become masters of Veii.
Soon a vast number of warriors was marshalled under King Turnus to drive the Trojans out of Italy. Vergil gives a long list of the famous chiefs who assembled on this occasion. First came Me-zen'ti-us, an Etrurian king, fierce in war, but a despiser of the gods. His own people had expelled him from their country, for his cruelty, and he had taken refuge with King Turnus.
Messengers therefore were sent to the oracle of Delphi to enquire of the god what this might portend. But the Romans found, for so fate would have it, an interpreter of the marvel that was nearer at hand than the oracle of Apollo. As the Roman soldiers and the soldiers of Veii talked together at the outposts, a certain old man, an Etrurian, chanted in the fashion that prophets use this verse
Wherefore the senate resolved to treat with Camillus, that he would relinquish Antium and undertake the Etrurian war. The city troops, which Quinctius had commanded, are decreed to him. Though he would have preferred the army which was in the Volscian territory, as being tried and accustomed to him, he made no objection: he only demanded Valerius as his associate in command.
The war with the Samnites being now nearly put an end to, before the Roman senate was freed from all concern on that side, a report arose of an Etrurian war; and there was not, in those times, any nation, excepting the Gauls, whose arms were more dreaded, by reason both of the vicinity of their country, and of the multitude of their men.
Gregory VII., the second of the great re-creative forces of that time, was of the Tuscan peasantry, Etrurian in type, therefore Italian in speech, by name Hildebrand. Whether an historian understands his career or no is a very test of whether that historian understands the nature of Europe. For St. Gregory VII. imposed nothing upon Europe. He made nothing new.
A beech received me, like a second Gualbertus, in its hollow trunk. The dry leaves chased each other down the steeps on the edge of the torrents with hollow rustlings, whilst the solemn wave of the forests above exactly answered the idea I had formed of Valombrosa, " . . . where th' Etrurian shades High overarch't imbowr."
Milton's description of the rebel legions adrift on the flaming sea is a fine instance of the difficulty felt and conquered: Angel forms, who lay entranced Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades High over-arched embower; or scattered sedge Afloat, when with fierce winds Orion armed Hath vexed the Red-Sea coast, whose waves o'erthrew Busiris and his Memphian chivalry, While with perfidious hatred they pursued The sojourners of Goshen, who beheld From the safe shore their floating carcases And broken chariot-wheels.
All around lay the neglected land, thinly besprinkled with forlorn olives, but without signs of man, save where a crumbling village might be seen crowning the summit of the little conical hills that form so striking a feature in the Etrurian landscape. When we had reached the spurs of the Apennines the storm fell. The air was thickened with alternate showers of sleet and snow.
With peculiar pleasure, every cultivated mind must repose on the fair, the happy, the glorious Florence, the halls which rang with the mirth of Pulci, the cell where twinkled the midnight lamp of Politian, the statues on which the young eye of Michael Angelo glared with the frenzy of a kindred inspiration, the gardens in which Lorenzo meditated some sparkling song for the May-day dance of the Etrurian virgins.
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