We seem to have somewhat clearer signs in Italy than we have in Greece of the men who dwelled in the land before the Aryans who appear as its historical inhabitants came into it. ♦Ligurians.♦ On the coast of _Liguria_, the land on each side of the city of Genoa, a land which was not reckoned Italian in early times, we find people who seem not to have been Aryan. And these Ligurians seem to have been part of a race which was spread through Italy and Sicily before the Aryan settlements, and to have been akin to the non-Aryan inhabitants of Spain and southern Gaul, of whom the Basques on each side of the Pyrenees remain as a remnant. ♦Etruscans.♦ And in historical times a large part of Italy was held, and in earlier times a still larger part seems to have been held, by the _Etruscans_. These are a people about whose origin and language there have been many theories, but nothing can as yet be said to be certainly known. These Etruscans, in historical times, formed a confederacy of twelve cities in the land west of the Apennines, between the Macra and the Tiber; and it is believed that in earlier times they had settlements both more to the north, on the Po, and more to the south, in Campania. If they were a non-Aryan race, the part of the non-Aryans in the geography and history of Italy becomes greater than it has been in any part of Western Europe except Spain. ♦The Italians.♦ But whatever we make of the Etruscans, the rest of Italy in the older sense was held by various branches of an Aryan race nearly allied to the Greeks, whom we may call the _Italians_. Of this race there were two great branches. One of them, under various names, seems to have held all the southern part of the western coast of Italy, and to have spread into Sicily. Some of the tribes of this branch seem to have been almost as nearly akin to the Greeks as the Epeirots and other kindred nations on the east side of the Hadriatic. ♦Latins.♦ Of this branch of the Italian race, the most famous people were the _Latins_; and it was the greatest Latin city, the border city of the Latins against the Etruscans, the city of _Rome_ on the Tiber, which became, step by step, the mistress of Latium, of Italy, and of the Mediterranean world. ♦Opicans.♦ The other branch, which held a much larger part of the peninsula, taking in the _Sabines_, _Æquians_, _Volscians_, _Samnites_, _Lucanians_, and other people who play a great part in the Roman history, may perhaps be classed together as _Opicans_ or _Oscans_, in distinction from the Latins, and the other tribes allied to them. These tribes seem to have pressed from the eastern, the Hadriatic, coast of Italy, down upon the nations to the south-west of them, and to have largely extended their borders at their expense.