Dionysius had this information, that the Etruscans considered themselves as an indigenous people, which descended from no other, and, knowing nothing of the name of Tyrrhenians and Etruscans, called themselves Rasena.[63] Of the traditions of the Greeks they knew nothing. Yet the latter had two distinct traditions concerning the Tyrrhenians, which they referred to the Etruscans; the one, that of Hellanicus, that the Pelasgians from Thessaly had settled at the mouth of the Po, at Spina, from whence they had crossed over the mountains to Etruria; the second, that of Herodotus, according to which the Lydians at the time of Atys, were visited by a famine, so that part of the people under Tyrrhenus were obliged to emigrate to Italy. Dionysius controverts the latter statement in that good style of criticism which we sometimes find in him, on the ground that neither the language nor the religion of the Etruscans bore any resemblance to those of the Lydians; and that neither the Etruscans, nor the Lydian writer Xanthus,--whose work, as O. Müller shows, was unjustly suspected among the Greeks of not being genuine,--know any thing about it. Dionysius in this judged rightly, because he did not work from books, but from immediate observation. With the other tradition he deals differently: he does not altogether drop it; but he refers it, not to the Etruscans, but to the aborigines. The Italian antiquaries, on the contrary, stuck to the Lydian tradition; or they also referred the emigration of the Pelasgians from Thessaly to the Etruscans, and said, in spite of all the assertions of Herodotus, that the inhabitants of Cortona (Croton) were not at all different from the people of the neighbourhood. And here I will now set forth the simple results of my researches concerning the Etruscans. I have (in the new edition of the first volume of my Roman history) shown that the name of Tyrrhenians was transferred by the Greeks to the Etruscans, as we use that of Britons when speaking of the English, or that of Mexicans and Peruvians, of the Spaniards in America; because those nations dwelt originally in these countries, whilst a newly immigrating people founded quite a new order of things, and that so completely that we no more recognise any traces of an earlier condition, than if the former had never existed. The Tyrrhenians were quite a different people; yet they inhabited the shores of Etruria, as well as the whole coast to the south, as far as Œnotria proper, i. e. Calabria and Basilicata. These Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians, as well as those of the Peloponnesus and Thessaly: and when Sophocles speaks of Τυῤῥηνοὶ πελασγοί in Argos; when in Æschylus king Pelasgus, son of Palæchthon, rules in Argos; when Tyrrhenians, according to Thucydides, reside near Athos, and in Lemnos, and, according to Herodotus, in Attica near the Hymettus, these are all branches of one and the same stock. In Asia Minor we must fill up the