burgesses to all public offices and to all public usufructs, which must have destroyed even the Roman state, had not its external successes enabled it in some measure to satisfy the demands of the oppressed proletariate at the expense of foreign nations and to open up other paths to ambition—­that struggle against the exclusive rule and (what was specially prominent in Etruria) the priestly monopoly of the clan-nobility—­must have ruined Etruria politically, economically, and morally.  Enormous wealth, particularly in landed property, became concentrated in the hands of a few nobles, while the masses were impoverished; the social revolutions which thence arose increased the distress which they sought to remedy; and, in consequence of the impotence of the central power, no course at last remained to the distressed aristocrats—­ e. g. in Arretium in 453, and in Volsinii in 488—­but to call in the aid of the Romans, who accordingly put an end to the disorder but at the same time extinguished the remnant of independence.  The energies of the nation were broken from the day of Veii and Melpum.  Earnest attempts were still once or twice made to escape from the Roman supremacy, but in such instances the stimulus was communicated to the Etruscans from without—­from another Italian stock, the Samnites.

Notes for Book II Chapter IV

1.  I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes

2. —­Fiaron o Deinomeneos kai toi Surakosioi toi Di Turan apo Kumas.—­

3.  I. X. Home of the Greek Immigrants

4.  Hecataeus (after 257 u. c.) and Herodotus also (270-after 345) only know Hatrias as the delta of the Po and the sea that washes its shores (O.  Muller, Etrusker, i. p. 140; Geogr.  Graeci min. ed.  C. Muller, i. p. 23).  The appellation of Adriatic sea, in its more extended sense, first occurs in the so-called Scylax about 418 U. C.

5.  II.  II.  Coriolanus

6. -Pleraque Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur:  rem militarem et argute loqui- (Cato, Orig, l. ii. fr. 2.  Jordan).

7.  It has recently been maintained by expert philologists that there is a closer affinity between the Celts and Italians than there is even between the latter and the Hellenes.  In other words they hold that the branch of the great tree, from which the peoples of Indo-Germanic extraction in the west and south of Europe have sprung, divided itself in the first instance into Greeks and Italo-Celts, and that the latter at a considerably later period became subdivided into Italians and Celts.  This hypothesis commends itself much to acceptance in a geographical point of view, and the facts which history presents may perhaps be likewise brought into harmony with it, because what has hitherto been regarded as Graeco-Italian civilization may very well have been Graeco-Celto-Italian—­in fact we know nothing of the earliest stage of Celtic culture.  Linguistic investigation, however, seems not to have made as yet such progress as to warrant the insertion of its results in the primitive history of the peoples.