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Updated: June 6, 2025
They avoided war even with their rivals; they allowed themselves to be supplanted in Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the east of Sicily almost without resistance; and in the great naval battles, which were fought in early times for the supremacy of the western Mediterranean, at Alalia and at Cumae , it was the Etruscans, and not the Phoenicians, that bore the brunt of the struggle with the Greeks.
The Etruscans and Umbrians on the other hand held by Rome, as they had already taken part with the equites against Drusus.
The wise politicians in the capital were already recalling the time when Italy found itself threatened by Philip from the east and by Hannibal from the west; they conceived that the new Hannibal, just like his predecessor, after having by himself subdued Spain, could easily arrive with the forces of Spain in Italy sooner than Pompeius, in order that, like the Phoenician formerly, he might summon the Etruscans and Samnites to arms against Rome.
Æneas, in his flight from Troy, after many adventures, reaches Italy, marries the daughter of Latinus, king of the people, who then lived in Latium, and builds a city, which he names Lavinium, and unites his Trojan followers with the aboriginal inhabitants. It was immediately surrounded by the Etruscans, Sabines, Equi, and Marsi.
This rapid collapse of the Etruscan maritime power would be inexplicable but for the circumstance that, at the very time when the Sicilian Greeks were attacking them by sea, the Etruscans found themselves assailed with the severest blows oil every side by land. The Romans suffered in its course severe defeats.
But, while the Etruscans differed thus widely from the Graeco-Italian family of languages, no one has yet succeeded in connecting them with any other known race. All sorts of dialects have been examined with a view to discover affinity with the Etruscan, sometimes by simple interrogation, sometimes by torture, but all without exception in vain.
He bought recklessly of them and gave them to Effie, whom he assured, without the applause of the ladies, and with the grave question of the young clergyman, that the vendors were little Etruscan girls, all at least twenty-five hundred years old. "It's very hard to find any Etruscans under that age; most of the grown-up people are three thousand."
The Etruscans and Umbrians on the other hand held by Rome, as they had already taken part with the equites against Drusus.
It is true that in the proper Sabellian territory, in Sabina, in the Abruzzi, in Samnium, there are hardly found any works of art at all, and even coins are wanting. But those Sabellian stocks, which reached the coasts of the Tyrrhene or Ionic seas, not only appropriated Hellenic art externally, like the Etruscans, but more or less completely acclimatized it.
The Latins, who were deficient in all the chief articles of export, could carry on only a passive traffic, and were obliged even in the earliest times to procure the copper of which they had need from the Etruscans in exchange for cattle or slaves we have already mentioned the very ancient practice of selling the latter on the right bank of the Tiber.
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