72 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



The most recent scientific criticism had refused the mystic nar- 

 rative of the Pelasgians. It is then clearly understood how some 

 scholars came to defend such traditions. However, it must be added 

 at once that to this day these attempts have not been very fortunate. 

 The excavations at Norba in the territory of the Volscians, with 

 the hope on the part of some to attribute to the Pelasgians the ancient 

 Italic walls, have only served to sustain the position of those critics 

 who assigned those same walls to a much more recent age. And the 

 same results have been obtained from the explorations in Etruscan 

 Volterra. The discoveries of material of the Mykensean type in Sicily 

 and also at Tarentum are in relation with the commercial diffusion 

 of products, which, in the third Mediterranean basin, reached the 

 first dawn of Greek colonization, that is the beginning of the eighth 

 century. Likewise all attempts to set back, by many centuries before 

 the eighth, the most ancient historical forms of Italy have completely 

 failed. 



No wise critic can seriously consider the attempt made by a learned 

 Swede to establish a chronology which goes back two thousand years 

 before Christ, by means of various types of bronzes and vases, which 

 lasted in an irregular manner according to the various countries, 

 more or less accessible to new commercial influences, more or less 

 slow on their way to civilization. A few years ago people took into 

 consideration such theories which, basing themselves on the study of 

 TEmilian palisades, caused the Italic founders of Rome to come 

 from the north of Italy. The recent discoveries in Greece, in the 

 jEgean islands on the coast of southern Italy, are instead tending to 

 prove that such archaeological discoveries can contribute to establish 

 the history of the commercial relations, but that they have nothing 

 to do with the ethnography of the most ancient Italic races. I do not 

 stop to examine theories already accepted as certain, of palisades 

 pitched even on dry land for mere reason of rite, and of Ligurians 

 recognized in various parts of Italy merely from the crouching posi- 

 tion of the corpses, etc. Common sense knows what value to put on 

 such aberrations. Archaeological excavations tend rather to prove 

 that the Italian civilization, born on the coast of southern Italy, 

 gradually spread as far as the plains of northern Italy and quite 

 to the base of the Alps, where the less frequent contact with the 

 East, the continuous emigration and impositions of barbarous 

 elements coming from the north, were maintaining stationary forms 

 of civilization, which had already disappeared from the south. 



Among all the excavations of Italy, those which have been so 

 zealously carried out in the Roman Forum by Giacomo Boni are to 

 be especially mentioned. These excavations have been, for some, the 

 revealing elements of a civilization anterior to Romulus himself. 

 But they proved, after all, nothing of the kind. We are lacking all 



