by the old burgesses to all public offices
and to all public usufructs, which must have destroyed even the Roman
state, had not its external successes enabled it in some measure to
satisfy the demands of the oppressed proletariate at the expense of
foreign nations and to open up other paths to ambition--that struggle
against the exclusive rule and (what was specially prominent in
Etruria) the priestly monopoly of the clan-nobility--must have ruined
Etruria politically, economically, and morally. Enormous wealth,
particularly in landed property, became concentrated in the hands of a
few nobles, while the masses were impoverished; the social revolutions
which thence arose increased the distress which they sought to remedy;
and, in consequence of the impotence of the central power, no course
at last remained to the distressed aristocrats-- e. g. in Arretium
in 453, and in Volsinii in 488--but to call in the aid of the Romans,
who accordingly put an end to the disorder but at the same time
extinguished the remnant of independence. The energies of the nation
were broken from the day of Veii and Melpum. Earnest attempts were
still once or twice made to escape from the Roman supremacy, but in
such instances the stimulus was communicated to the Etruscans from
without--from another Italian stock, the Samnites.

Notes for Book II Chapter IV

1. I. X. Phoenicians and Italians in Opposition to the Hellenes

2. --Fiaron o Deinomeneos kai toi Surakosioi toi Di Turan
apo Kumas.--

3. I. X. Home of the Greek Immigrants

4. Hecataeus (after 257 u. c.) and Herodotus also (270-after 345)
only know Hatrias as the delta of the Po and the sea that washes
its shores (O. Muller, Etrusker, i. p. 140; Geogr. Graeci min. ed.
C. Muller, i. p. 23). The appellation of Adriatic sea, in its more
extended sense, first occurs in the so-called Scylax about 418 U. C.

5. II. II. Coriolanus

6. -Pleraque Gallia duas res industriosissime persequitur: rem
militarem et argute loqui- (Cato, Orig, l. ii. fr. 2. Jordan).

7. It has recently been maintained by expert philologists that there
is a closer affinity between the Celts and Italians than there is even
between the latter and the Hellenes. In other words they hold that
the branch of the great tree, from which the peoples of Indo-Germanic
extraction in the west and south of Europe have sprung, divided itself
in the first instance into Greeks and Italo-Celts, and that the latter