c tribes which made their
way over the Alps; they took up their abode along the coast of the
Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona. But isolated bands of Celtic settlers
must have advanced even far in the direction of Umbria, and up to
the border of Etruria proper; for stone-inscriptions in the Celtic
language have been found even at Todi on the upper Tiber. The limits
of Etruria on the north and east became more and more contracted,
and about the middle of the fourth century the Tuscan nation found
themselves substantially restricted to the territory which thenceforth
bore and still bears their name.

Attack on Etruria by the Romans

Subjected to these simultaneous and, as it were, concerted assaults on
the part of very different peoples--the Syracusans, Latins, Samnites,
and above all the Celts--the Etruscan nation, that had just acquired
so vast and sudden an ascendency in Latium and Campania and on both
the Italian seas, underwent a still more rapid and violent collapse.
The loss of their maritime supremacy and the subjugation of the
Campanian Etruscans belong to the same epoch as the settlement of
the Insubres and Cenomani on the Po; and about this same period the
Roman burgesses, who had not very many years before been humbled to
the utmost and almost reduced to bondage by Porsena, first assumed an
attitude of aggression towards Etruria. By the armistice with Veii in
280 Rome had recovered its ground, and the two nations were restored
in the main to the state in which they had stood in the time of the
kings. When it expired in the year 309, the warfare began afresh; but
it took the form of border frays and pillaging excursions which led to
no material result on either side. Etruria was still too powerful for
Rome to be able seriously to attack it. At length the revolt of the
Fidenates, who expelled the Roman garrison, murdered the Roman envoys,
and submitted to Lars Tolumnius, king of the Veientes, gave rise to
a more considerable war, which ended favourably for the Romans; the
king Tolumnius fell in combat by the hand of the Roman consul Aulus
Cornelius Cossus (326?), Fidenae was taken, and a new armistice for
200 months was concluded in 329. During this truce the troubles of
Etruria became more and more aggravated, and the Celtic arms were
already approaching the settlements that hitherto had been spared on
the right bank of the Po. When the armistice expired in the end of
346, the Romans on their part resolv