name. When the Gauls had made a partial settlement upon their coasts, the Umbri seem to have equally lost those lovely regions and their own independence, while the power of the former was continually recruited by fresh migrations. Umbria, in its narrowed limits, seemingly belongs to the contiguous districts which were subdued by the Gauls 5, who made it their military road while they continued to visit Latium. The subjugation of the Umbrians to the Romans was effected in a single battle; and the smallness of their population is proved by the account of the general muster of the frontier districts in the great wars with the Gauls.

The Umbrian nation was composed of different races, partly of cities, partly of districts, (plaga',) and tribus. These, like the Etruscan states, seem scarcely to have formed an ideal unity; Polybius mentions even the Corsinates as a peculiar people, next to the Umbrians.

Their language is found on a part of the Iguvinian tables, but unintelligible to us. It contains, however, a number of Latin words, or words apparently cognate to the Latin, which gives weight to the opinion, that an Umbrian race was the progenitor of the Latins. But the Romans found it necessary in the fifth century, in order to negociate with them, to use an ambassador skilled in the Tuscan language The writing on the tables is Latin, on the coins Etruscan.

10

CHAPTER VII.

IAPYGIA.

IAPYGIA comprised south eastern Italy, from Metapontum, according to the ancients, or, including that city, from the Siris" to the Garganus, a mountain otherwise called by the Greeks the Drion; where probably Umbria in their geography immediately began. The islands of Diomede lie to the west of this promontory; and Scylax ascribes to the Ombrici the worship of the son of Tydeus, which other Greeks imagine they discover amongst the Daunians. He adopted this opinion, upon the recollection of some poet, although the true geography of his time should have allotted to the Samnites the coast between them and Iapygia.

This extensive country was inhabited by three different nations-the Messapii or Salentini, the Peucetii or Pœdiculi, and the Daunii or Apulii; the first, on the Isthmus east of Tarentum; the Peu

"Scylax, p. 5.

cetii north of these, on the sea coast from Brundusium to Barium, and from thence to the Garganus ; the Daunians, whom Strabo, with a very strange and in him most unaccountable error, separates from the Apulians, placing the latter in the country between the Garganus and the Frentani". He did not reflect, that these names, Daunii and Apulii, were not only used habitually and in similar form by the Greeks and Romans in their respective languages to designate the same people; but also, that it was only later geography which had extended Apulia beyond those western boundaries.

It was a received opinion, respecting these three nations, that they had come from beyond the sea. The oldest Greek genealogies mention Peucetius, brother of Enotrus, and his nation, a colony which he had brought out of Arcadia "; or, taking it as a genealogical history, they counted the Peucetians amongst the ancient Pelasgian stocks, which, in their belief, had migrated from Arcadia, being descendants of the first men, Pelasgus and Aizeus. There is also an old tradition, that the Messapii were Cretans, who, as Herodotus states, made an ineffectual voyage to Sicania, to avenge the death of Minos"; or, according to later accounts, they were companions of Idomeneus, joined by Locrians and Illyrians". Tradition says of Daunus, founder of the Apulians,

12 Strabo, VI. c. 3. § 8.

13 See note 35 and 38.

14 Herodot. VII. c. 170. Strabo, VI. c. 3. § 2. 15 Festus, in voce Danaus.

that he had left Illyria on account of internal feuds 16

If therefore, without admitting their Arcadian descent, we acknowledge the Peucetians, dwelling between the Enotrians and the Epirotes, to be a tribe related to both, then the tradition, with apparent probability, combines itself with the opinion, that the strange tribe which occupied the promontory of Iapygia, had settled at a later period on the coast, and driven them back. Varro gave a singular etymology for the name Sallentini, which the Messapians adopted from an Italian people, and whose derivation from the city Sallentum is so evident". However unworthy of notice, may be these imitations of Greek mistakes; however apparently dubious, though not positively to be denied, the fact of a Cretan settlement; yet the opinion respecting the Illyrian origin of the Messapii, and that of the Apulii, is remarkable. I would remind you of the Liburnian stock, which, at a remote period, inhabited the coast opposite Dalmatia, from the Padus down to the confines of Apulia; and it is probable, that Illyrians had already occupied the continuous coast, from the extreme eastern declivity of the Apennines to the borders of the Peucetii. If it were inevitably necessary (which by no means appears the case) to consider the inhabitants belonging

16 Fragment from the third book of Antiquit. Rer. Humanar. and Festus in voce Salentini, who has evidently copied from it. 17 See note 16.

to the common stock on both coasts of the Adriatic (which surround it like an inland sea) as a parent nation upon one of these coasts, and as a colony upon the other, still the claim of Illyria to the rank of the mother country would not be better founded than that of Italy; still less could we receive the utterly unfounded assertions of fable respecting the time of the emigration; but we may certainly consider the isolated Messapii as settlers.

The Alexandrian poet Nicander" undertook, with a bold hand, to set aside those accounts of the Illyrian migrations in the old Greek genealogies. He discovered two other sons of Lycaon,-Iapyx and Daunus,-who, with Peucetius, brought the Pelasgian emigrants from Arcadia; to whom the Illyrians united themselves, and from whom descended the Messapians. Those emigrants, according to his account, discovered the Ausonians, which, however, was in his day the common appellation for the early tribes of southern Italy.

The Messapians, a confederacy of independent cities, of which Hyria was the chief, were dispossessed of Tarentum" by Phalantus, a Spartan, and of an extensive district by the later Tarentines. Towards the middle of the third century of the Tarentines, (279,) the latter undertook to subjugate them". A dreadful battle, the most sanguinary in which a Greek army had ever until that day been en

18 In Antoninus Liberalis. Fab. 41. a passage to which I have been directed by Cluverius Italia.

20 Herodot. ut supra.