elucidate this dark subject a little, we must cast a wider glance over the inhabitants of Italy.
Two nations are mentioned as dwelling in the earliest times to the north and south of Latium, one or both of whom seem to answer to the notion of Aborigines:—the Umbrians and the Oscans. The Umbrians were regarded by the Romans as a truly primæval Italian race; who at one time held possession of all Lombardy and Tuscany, reaching perhaps into Latium. The Oscans, (in Greek, Opikes,) under various names,—Volscians, Ausones[1], Auruncans,—appear as a principal people of Southern Italy, who in historical times press from Campania northward into Latium. Their position on the peninsula, unless they cam by sea, would suggest that they must have entered it still earlier than the Umbrians. What are the relations of the Umbrian and the Oscan languages, has not been very satisfactorily settled, although documents of both remain to us[2]. In the
- ↑ Ausones is understood to be another form oof Aurunes, preferred by Greek writers; Aurunei the Latinized form of Aurunes. But whether Ausonians and Oscans are coestensive terms, or one is genus and the other species, is undcertain. The language of all seems to have been called Oscan.
- ↑ The celebrated Eugubine inscriptions are supposed to be in the Umbrian language: those of Bantia and Abellà are in the Oscan. Various single words have been explained, and many of the forms of verbs and nouns detected. The Umbrian is characterized by a love of terminating words with the letter r, which appears also in the Oscan to have been commoner than in Latin.
On the ancient Italian languages the reader will do well consult Prichard's Physical History of Mankind, vol. iii.
