Migration from Asia Minor about 12th cent. B.C. Tomb of Porsenna about B.C. 500 Etruria becomes subject to Rome about B.C. 330 The ethnographical history of art in Italy is in all its essential features similar to that of Greece, though arriving at widely different results from causes the influence of which it is easy to trace. Both are examples of an Aryan development based on a Turanian civilisation which it has superseded. In Greece—as already remarked—the traces of the earlier people are indistinct and difficult to seize. In Italy their features are drawn with a coarser hand, and extend down into a more essentially historic age. It thus happens that we have no doubt as to the existence of the Etruscan people—we know very nearly who they were, and cannot be mistaken as to the amount and kind of influence they exercised on the institutions and arts of the Romans. The more striking differences appear to have arisen from the fact, that Greece had some four or five centuries of comparative repose during which to form herself and her institutions after the Pelasgic civilisation was struck down at the time of the Dorian occupation of the Peloponnesus. During that period she was undisturbed by foreign invasion, and was not tempted by successful conquests to forsake the gentler social arts for the more vulgar objects of national ambition. Rome’s history, on the other hand, from the earliest aggregation of a robber horde on the banks of the Tiber till she became the arbiter of the destinies of the ancient world, is little beyond the record of continuous wars. From the possession of the seven hills, Rome gradually carried her sway at the edge of the sword to the dominion of the whole of Italy and of all the then known world, destroying everything that stood in the way of her ambition, and seeking only the acquisition of wealth and power.