DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.847#0171
160
TAHQUINIA.
shall afterwards describe as having probably been
the Westminster Abbey of Central Etruria. Truly,
the voice from the dead, which these princes and
Lucumones of the early world send forth, tells us
great things of their potent sway over a numerous
people, and leads us to contrast the desolation and
barbarism of imperial, and still more of papal Italy,
with the flourishing state of things which must
have existed there when the world was young.
We now often see a few squalid emaciated indivi-
duals, half scared away by pestilential air, and half
starved with insufficient food, straggling over the
barren waste, whose only trace of real habitation is
to be found in the records of its former inhabitants,
dead three thousand years ago. This was dreadfully
thecaseat Psestum, but ina measure,it is true,of every
place where the malaria prevails. The ancient inha-
bitants must have been a populous, wealthy, and, to
j udge from their paintings, a merry and somewhat Epi-
curean race, who knew how to make the most of the
good things which the homeof theirfathers produced,
before the Roman sword brought with it the malaria,
and sent conscriptions and pestilence to depopulate
the land. These were bright and sunny days in old
Etruria, when every man sat under his own vine,
and under his own fig-tree, when Tages taught how
to read fortunes from the swoop of an eagle's wing,
and when Tarchon presided on the magisterial
bench.
Of the great number of tombs which have of late
years been excavated in this immense and rabbit
TAHQUINIA.
shall afterwards describe as having probably been
the Westminster Abbey of Central Etruria. Truly,
the voice from the dead, which these princes and
Lucumones of the early world send forth, tells us
great things of their potent sway over a numerous
people, and leads us to contrast the desolation and
barbarism of imperial, and still more of papal Italy,
with the flourishing state of things which must
have existed there when the world was young.
We now often see a few squalid emaciated indivi-
duals, half scared away by pestilential air, and half
starved with insufficient food, straggling over the
barren waste, whose only trace of real habitation is
to be found in the records of its former inhabitants,
dead three thousand years ago. This was dreadfully
thecaseat Psestum, but ina measure,it is true,of every
place where the malaria prevails. The ancient inha-
bitants must have been a populous, wealthy, and, to
j udge from their paintings, a merry and somewhat Epi-
curean race, who knew how to make the most of the
good things which the homeof theirfathers produced,
before the Roman sword brought with it the malaria,
and sent conscriptions and pestilence to depopulate
the land. These were bright and sunny days in old
Etruria, when every man sat under his own vine,
and under his own fig-tree, when Tages taught how
to read fortunes from the swoop of an eagle's wing,
and when Tarchon presided on the magisterial
bench.
Of the great number of tombs which have of late
years been excavated in this immense and rabbit