Here also we find Etruscan tradition continued on Roman soil, not only in the dancers of the festival processions, but in the tradition that Etruscan dancers, _ludii_ or _ludiones_, were imported to Rome to dance at the great festivals. The Greeks compared the Roman reel to the Dionysiac ‘cancan’, σίκιννις, while its Roman name is _tripudium_; it was danced at every period of Roman history by the Salii, the ancient priesthood of the Roman war-god, on the chief festival of the god, March 19. According to Livy (vii. 2. 4-7) the earliest Roman poetry, the coarse Fescennines, originated in the text which accompanied the dance of the _ludiones_, and the fact that the dancers during the Fescennines daubed their faces with minium supports the theory of Etruscan influence, which also makes itself felt in the custom observed by the Roman triumphators, who in the earliest times daubed their whole bodies with minium. For we know that the Etruscans coated the images of their gods with minium at their festivals, and that the Romans gave the ancient terracotta statue of the Capitoline Jupiter a similar coat of ‘war paint’ at the high festivals, a task which it fell to the censors to superintend.[25] The red minium was meant to heighten the natural red-brown hue of the men; it produced an artificial virile complexion, just as white lead and chalk served to emphasize the pale feminine hue.[26] The primitive nature of the verses connected with these dances is shown by the song of the Salii, the burden of which is the five times repeated ‘triumpe’ (jump!) and the text of which runs: ‘Help us, lares, let not the evil disease fall upon any more of us, Mars! Be satisfied, cruel Mars! Jump on to the threshold. Cease jumping. Help us, Mars!’ At the triumphs also, ‘carmina incondita’, as Livy tells us, were sung (iv. 20. 2), and we venture to think that Etruscan poetry was no better than this, and that the disappearance of the texts, which accompanied the dances, is no great loss. Varro mentions tragedies in the Etruscan language, but they were undoubtedly versions of the Greek ones, even worse than those made for the Romans by Livius Andronicus. Apart from some religious and a little historical literature, and a number of recipes for the gathering of simples, capable of rousing the admiration of the Greeks for ‘the descendants of the Tyrrhenians, the people skilled in medical lore’,[27] no tradition of any Etruscan intellectual life in writing or poetry has been handed down to posterity. [Illustration: FIG. 12. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI] [Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI] [Sidenote: LAUREL DECORATIONS]