The vicinity of the Etruscans to Rome, from which their territories were separated only by the Tiber,—the alliance of their leader, Cœlius, with Romulus, and the habitation assigned them on the Cœlian Mount,—the accession to the Roman sovereignty of the elder Tarquin, who was descended from a Greek family which had fixed its residence in Etruria,—the settlement of a number of Etruscan prisoners, four years after the expulsion of the kings, in a street called the _Vicus Tuscus_, in the very heart of the city;—and, finally, the intercourse produced by the long period of warfare and political intrigue which subsisted between the rising republic and their more polished neighbours before they were incorporated into one state, would be sufficient to account for the Roman reception of the customs and superstitions of Etruria, as also for the interchange of literary materials. It does not seem that the hostility of rival nations prevents the reciprocal adoption of manners and literature. The romantic gallantry and learning of the Arabs in the south of Spain soon passed the limits of their splendid empire; and long before the conquest of Wales the Cambrian fables and traditions concerning Arthur and his host of heroes were domesticated in the court of England. Accordingly, we find that the Romans were indebted to the Etruscans for the form of the robes which invested their magistrates, the pomp that attended their triumphs, and even the music that animated their legions. The purple vest, the sceptre surmounted by an eagle, the curule chair, the fasces and lictors, were the ensigns and accompaniments of supreme authority among the Etruscans; while the triumphs and ovations, the combats of gladiators and Circensian games, were common to them and the Romans. The simple and rustic divinities of Etruria and Latium were likewise the objects of Roman idolatry, long before the introduction of that more imposing and elegant mythology which had been embellished by the conceptions of Homer and the hand of Phidias. Saturn, the reformer of civil life, though afterwards confounded with the Kronos of the Greeks, was not of Greek origin. Janus, the _Deorum Deus_ of the Salian verses, to whom the Romans offered their first sacrifices, and addressed their first prayers, and whom system-framers have identified with Noah(39), the Indian Ganesa(40), the Egyptian Oannes(41), and the Ion of the Scandinavians(42), or have represented as a symbolic type of all things in nature, was truly an Italian God:— “Nam tibi par nullum Græcia numen habet(43).”