=Italy Peopled.=—While watching the rise, meridian splendors, and glowing sunset of Grecian letters, we have left unnoticed the dawn of literary taste in Italy, the sister of Hellas, peopled, as we have seen, by kindred Phrygian tribes who spoke dialects of the Phrygo-Hellenic tongue (p. 133). Whether they were the first of human kind to wake the echoes of the Italian solitudes, must ever remain a matter of doubt. Some believe that the Alps had proved an insuperable barrier to previous emigrants from the East; others, that the adventurous Pelasgians, on descending their slopes, found a Turanian population already in possession of the peninsula. If the latter theory be correct, the Turanian aborigines were speedily overpowered by the new-comers and became incorporated with their conquerors. When Rome was founded, 753 B.C., the predominant Italian races were distinguished as Latin and Umbrian (embracing the Oscans); their languages were closely related, and have been called _Italic_. The Etruscans, who lived west of the Tiber, though probably of Aryan origin, differed in many respects from the Umbrians and Latins. [Illustration: ANCIENT ITALY and the PLACES NOTED in the HISTORY of its LITERATURE [See the above map for the various localities mentioned in connection with Roman Literature.]] =The Latin Language=, in its most ancient form, was probably spoken by the people of Latium at least twelve hundred years before the Christian Era. For many centuries it remained harsh and unpolished, nor did its roughness materially wear away until it came in contact with the Greek, about 250 B.C. Then its vocabulary was enriched, and it gradually acquired elegance and beauty. A knowledge of Greek came to be regarded as indispensable to a polite education, and Roman children were taught this language before their own. A reaction, however, ultimately set in, and the foisting of foreign words and idioms on the native tongue was condemned as strongly as it had once been favored; a strange expression was now compelled to run the gantlet of merciless criticism before it was admitted as part of the language. Cæsar advised to shun a new term as one would a reef; Augustus frankly acknowledged that, though he was emperor of the world, he could not make a Latin word; and Tiberius was thus pointedly rebuked by a Roman grammarian for a verbal error: “Thou, O Cæsar! canst confer Roman citizenship on men, but not on words.” When the rest of Italy submitted to the arms of Rome, it accepted the language of the conqueror. Latin also supplanted the Carthaginian tongue in Africa and Spain, Celtic in Gaul and Britain, and finally was spoken in greater or less purity throughout the empire.