Eustace, John Cretwode: A classical tour through Italy An. MDCCCII (Vol. 3): 3. ed., rev. and enl (London: J. Mawman, 1815)

322 CLASSICAL TOUR Ch. VIII.
celled in the arts, and rioted in the luxuries of
life, while the Greeks were still barbarians, and
Rome had yet no name; and whose antiquity
is such that their origin is lost in the obscurity
of ages, and was even in the time of Herodotus,
as it now still remains, a subject of dispute and
conjecture. Some suppose them to have been
Aborigines, an appellation given to the inhabi-
tants found in a country by its first recorded
invaders*; others from a distant conformity in
certain customs, fancy that they w7ere of Egyp-
tian origin. Many represent them as a colony
of Lydiansf, or perhaps of Maeonians, com-
pelled by the pressure of famine to leave their
native soil and to seek for maintenance in a
more fertile region; a still greater number
imagine that they were PelasgiJ, a w7ell known
tribe of Greeks, who, when driven by the
Hellenes from Thessalia, first took shelter in
Lydia, and afterwards in Italy. In fine, a few
later writers have thought that they had dis-
covered in the manners, language, and monu-
ments of the Etrurians and Cananeans such an
affinity, as authorized them to conclude that the

* Dionysius Halic.
t See Cluv. Ital. Ant. lib. ii.
3

t Herodotus.