All the statements of the ancients about the Etruscans are full of contradiction. The difficulties have been increased by the opinion which has been established for a long time, that the Romans derived the greater part of their institutions and character from the Etruscans, an opinion which formerly I also entertained. But I have given it up, and in the second edition of my Roman History I have honestly stated my reasons. The cause of the great confusion among the ancients about them is the supposition that the Etruscans and Tyrrhenians were the same people. I have shown in my history that the Greeks, who are here our only authorities, as we have no other statements, called the Tyrrhenians Pelasgians, and Tyrrhenians existed not only on the coasts of Etruria, but occupied the whole coast of Italy down to the Oenotrian frontier, before the Ausonians subdued those districts. Being Pelasgians, the Tyrrhenians, according to the views of the Greeks, were of the same race as the ancient Meonians in Lydia, as the inhabitants of Lemnos and the islands near the Hellespont, and as the occupants of the neighbouring coasts. Hence also the tradition about the connection between the two. These original inhabitants of Etruria, from Luna as far as the Tiber, were then overpowered by a nation invading Italy from northern Europe, just as we have seen in the case of the Illyrians; Greek historians afterwards called the conquerors Tyrrhenians, partly because a large proportion of the population of Etruria actually was Tyrrhenian, and partly because the whole country bore the name Tyrrhenia. In like manner the English are called Britons, and the Spaniards in Mexico and Peru Mexicans and Peruvians; and in the same way the Greeks applied the name Oscans to the Sabellians inhabiting Lucania and Samnium, although the Oscans were the subjects and the Sabellians the ruling people. As the conquerors have often entirely changed the language of the conquered people (the coins of Posidonia, when in the end it had become Roman, have Latin inscriptions in Latin characters), so the language of the Tyrrhenians, under the dominion of the Etruscans, gave way to the language of the rulers; and hence we cannot be surprised at finding on Etruscan monuments none but the mysterious Etruscan language. I mentioned before the Mexicans as an illustration: the Spaniards who conquered Mexico amounted only to a few thousands, while the country they subdued contained many millions of inhabitants. The latter, it is true, were extirpated by inhuman cruelty, epidemics, and the like; but still the fact of the Spanish language having become quite universal there remains a remarkable phenomenon. The Spanish colonists had scarcely any women with them, and accordingly took native Mexican women for their wives, whence we might expect to find the Spanish language would have disappeared all the more naturally and easily. It is a foolish opinion