Niebuhr himself, who had attacked many of the positions of Micali in his first edition (1811), retracted his accusations in the last.

A second edition, with additions and corrections, was published in Florence in 1822; and four others have subsequently appeared in different parts of Italy. A French translation was published in Paris, but shamefully disfigured by the ignorance and the prepossessions of the translator.

These studies seem naturally to have led our author to the examination of another part of his national history hardly less obscure, and assuredly no less interesting, than that which he had treated with such marked success. This was the history of the "Commerce of the Maritime Republics of Italy.' He had long been engaged in collecting materials for this work, when his attention was called back to his original theme, by the discoveries which were making in nearly all those parts of Italy, which had been distinguished as the seats of her earliest civilization. A new and strong light was thus thrown upon many questions, which at the beginning of his investigation had been purely conjectural; and he had the rare satisfaction to find, that the views, which he had adopted upon the authority of his first observations, were fully confirmed by all his subsequent discoveries. It is to this that we are indebted for the work, which forms more immediately the subject of the present paper, and of which we shall now proceed to give a full and minute analysis, taking, at the same time, the liberty to interweave such illustrations and observations of our own, as seem naturally to arise from, or be required by, the facts that we are called upon to relate.

1. The question concerning the name and origin of the first inhabitants of Italy has long been agitated in vain. The progress of geographical discovery has shown, that man may exist in almost any part of the globe. But he has always been found in a state of union. Origin everywhere escapes our researches. It is obvious, however, that the human race must have been most readily propagated in those regions, where the means of subsistence are most abundant and most easily obtained. The only course, that can afford a reasonable gratification to our curiosity, is, to ascertain, as nearly as we can, the condition of the people whom we find in possession of a country, without troubling ourselves about the fruitless inquiry, as to whence they came.

The physical revolutions of Italy, of which so many and such positive proofs still remain, must, for at least a considerable space after its first settlement, have confined its inhabitants to the higher regions. But the frequently renewed experience of modern times shows how insufficient the terrors of nature are, to drive man from the spot which he has once made his home. Even here we witness a new triumph of human power; for man daily accomplishes what nature cannot, and strikes those with dread, to whom earthquakes and volcanoes had spoken in vain.

The natural fertility of Italy has been the subject of poetical rapture and rhetorical declamation from all antiquity. The fables which represent man as springing from the soil, and from the trunks of trees, can but allude to the impenetrable antiquity of the human race in these happy regions. The tradition of an original and distinct race of native Italians was preserved in the historic ages; and the Aborigines mentioned by the Romans are the same, whom the Greeks found assembled in tribes, and whom they qualified, according to the invariable custom of that ingenious but vain people, by the contemptuous denomination of barbarians. From these, as from one common stock, sprang the people, who, under various names, occupied the chief portion of the Italian peninsula.

Their mode of life, like that of all men in this first epoch, we would say of aggregation rather than of society, was regulated by their physical wants and by the roughness of their manners. Acorns and roots, the spontaneous products of the soil, together with the game of their forests, supplied their daily food. Society has few charms for those who have never tasted its artificial pleasures; and it was only by the slow and natural progression from their first wild life to the more regular occupation of pasturage, that they were led to agriculture, the first decisive step in civilization. even this step has seldom, if ever, been taken without some unusual external impulse. The fables of Janus and of Saturn, that golden age, so often and so sweetly sung, and which, from its unlikeness to any thing that we have ever seen, seems rather as a fiction than a reality, allude to this change, and probably indicate, at the same time, the sacerdo

But

The magnificent description of Virgil in the second Georgic, and that of Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first book of his Roman Antiquities, are the finest, but unfortunately too long to be introduced here.

tal influence by which it was accomplished. The traces of a distinct class of priests, whose origin, although probably Egyptian, is rendered obscure by the same necessity which compelled them to clothe all their doctrines in the mystic veil of symbols and fables, are too evident to admit of any doubt. We shall have occasion to show in the sequel, how long this class preserved its separate station, and how far its power, though modified and restricted, continued to extend.

2. The first inhabitants of Italy dwelt among the mountains and highlands, while the low grounds were as yet unfit to receive or to nourish a permanent population. Descending from thence, as a scarcity of food or the increase of their numbers required, they began to divide themselves into separate tribes, whose members were bound together by those fragile ties, which can alone be formed in these early periods of society. The natural divisions of a country intersected in every direction by rivers and by mountains soon drew those artificial boundary lines between tribes of the same race, of which the influence has been so striking in every age of Italian history. The old writers have, fortunately for us, preserved the memory of a singular custom, by which the foundation of a large proportion of these new colonies was regulated.

Before the practice of tillage had become sufficiently general to place them beyond the reach of those casualties, by which a people, half nomad and half agricultural, is so often exposed to extreme want, the Italians were taught to propitiate the deity, whose wrath had been manifested in the failure of their harvests, by sacrificing to him all the productions of the following spring. The young of their flocks and of their herds, and even their own offspring, were mingled together in this bloody atonement. But, as an advancing civilization began to gain upon their manners and their feelings, this dreadful rite was softened, and the products of the sacred spring, instead of being offered in sacrifice to the deity, were set apart for a particular service, which was supposed to have the same effect in appeasing or in averting his wrath. When the children born during the consecrated year had attained to the age of manhood, they set forth under the guidance of chosen members of the priesthood in quest of new habitations. The favor of the deity attended them; and wherever, erecting their altars, they took possession of the soil, the

original inhabitants gladly united with those, on whom the seal of the Divinity had been so strikingly set. There also the same observances were held sacred; and these children of the primitive family became the fathers of new and constantly multiplying colonies. It was thus, according to Pliny,* that the Piceni descended from the Sabines; and the Samnites, originating in the same way, gave rise themselves to the Lucani.t

The course pursued by the Italians, in the resistance which they opposed to the first invaders of their territory, indicates a certain degree of advancement in civil discipline. They had made some important steps towards social life. They lived in villages and in cots, as is still practised in Switzerland, and in many parts of Europe. These, according as they were more or less favored by their natural situation, grew and became large towns. This was especially the case in the vicinity of the larger water-courses. According to Ælian, there were eleven hundred and ninety-seven of these places, which, by a use of the word which our language will hardly admit of, he calls cities. This progress was nowhere more sensible than in those tracts which border on the Mediterranean.

3. Unfortunately for early Italian history, nearly all the information, that we possess concerning it, has been derived from Greek historians and antiquaries, whose authority has been called in question by the more judicious portion even of their own countrymen. They were followed by the Latins, who, in so many parts of their literature, were little else than close imitators of the Greeks. It was by means of their settlements in southern Italy, that the attention of the Greeks was first directed to this subject; and various were the opinions which they hazarded concerning the origin of the people, whom they found in possession of the soil. Nearly all of them, however, concurred in claiming for themselves the glory of having been the first to occupy it; and the heroes of the Trojan war were hardly more celebrated for their military exploits, than for their supposed colonization of the chief places of the Italian peninsula. Some few of the Romans ventured to throw doubts upon this tradition; nor were there

* III. 5.

Var. Hist. IX. 16.

Strab. V. p. 158. Ed. Casaub. 1587.

historians wanting among the Greeks themselves, who were willing to confess its improbability. But antiquity had hallowed it. The people had seized upon it with that avidity, with which national and personal vanity grasps at whatever can serve to ennoble the obscure period of origin; and the fables of Æneas, of Hercules, and of an innumerable host of other chieftains, whose real history is no less uncertain than theirs, became inextricably mingled with the first epochs of Roman and of Italian history.

Yet a surer source was open to the Romans. When their great historians wrote, the original languages of the country were still spoken; and contained, as one of the most valuable portions of their literature, the annals and records of all their principal cities. In the times of Varro, the Etruscan annals, written in the eighth century of the nation, a period which, according to the most approved computation, corresponds to the close of the fourth century of Rome, were still in existence. The principal public acts and events, together with the names of the magistrates of each year, were carefully recorded in the pontifical annals. The memory of treaties, and of all other occurrences of more than usual importance, was preserved by inscriptions in bronze or on stone. Here then was the true fount of Italian history. But the Romans, content with the glory of their conquest, and pleased with the ingenious flattery of the Greeks, asked for nothing beyond those gorgeous fictions, which seemed to add new splendor to their triumph. The loss of these documents sets an impassable barrier to modern research upon several curious questions. But the monuments which still remain, and a critical examination of the most judicious among the ancients, have in a measure supplied this deficiency, and enabled our author to place these obscure epochs of his national history upon a more durable foundation, and one more accordant with the principles of enlightened criticism.

4. The territories, comprised under the name of ancient Italy, varied at different periods, with the progress of discovery, and with the changes incidental upon conquest. Its primitive name was Saturnia, so called from Saturn, whom the natives revered as the founder of their civil institutions.

"Salve magna parens frugum, Saturnia tellus!"

The Greeks, referring to its geographical position, called