word.’  Certainly the Gauls drove them out of Lombardy, and some of them, as refugees, up into the Rhaetian Alps,—­sometime after the European manvantara began in 870.  We cannot read their language, and do not know enough about it to connect it even with the Turanian Group; but we know enough to exclude it, perhaps, from every other known group in the Old World,—­certainly from the Aryan.  There is something absolutely un-Aryan (one would say) about their art, the figures on their tombs.  Great finish; no primitivism; but something queer and grotesque about the faces....  However, you can get no racial indications from things like that.  There is a state of decadence, that may come to any race,—­that has perhaps in every race cycles of its own for appearing,—­when artists go for their ideals and inspiration, not to the divine world of the Soul, but to vast elemental goblinish limboes in the sub-human:  realms the insane are at home in, and vice-victims sometimes, and drug-victims I suppose always.  Denizens of these regions, I take it, are the models for some of our cubists and futurists. . . .  I seem to see the same kind of influence in these Etruscan faces.  I think we should sense something sinister in a people with art-conventions like theirs;—­and this accords with the popular view of antiquity, for the Etruscans had not a nice reputation.

The probability appears to be that they became a nation in their Italian home in the tenth or eleventh century B.C.; were at first war-like, and spread their power considerably, holding Tuscany, Umbria, Latium, with Lombardy until the Gauls dispossessed them, and presently Corsica under a treaty with Carthage that gave the Carthaginians Sardinia as a quid pro quo. Tuscany, perhaps, would have been the original colony; when Lombardy was lost, it was the central seat of their power; there the native population became either quite merged in them, or remained as plebeians; Umbria and Latium they possessed and ruled as suzerains.  The Tuscan lands are rich, and the Rasenna, as they called themselves, made money by exporting the produce of their fields and forests; also crude metals brought in from the north-west,—­for Etruria was the clearing-house for the trade between Gaul and the lands beyond, and the eastern Mediterranean.  From Egypt, Carthage, and Asia, they imported in exchange luxuries and objects of art; until in time the old terror of their name,—­as pirates, not unconnected with something of fame for black magic; one finds it as early as in Hesiod, and again in the Medea of Euripides,—­gave place to an equally ill repute for luxurious living and sensuality.  We know that in war it was a poor thing to put your trust in Etruscan alliances.