e 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.