NATURE 



THURSDAY, JUNE 6, 1907. 



\ PREHISTORIC ITALY. 

 IntroduAion liVHistoire romaine. By Basile Modestov. 

 Transl;ited from the Russian by Michel Delines. 

 Pp. yiii + 473. (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1907.) Price 

 15 fn.ncs. 



PROF. MODESTO^"•S work, which appeared 

 originally in Russian, with an analysis in 

 French, in the years 1902 and 1904, is a learned if 

 somewhat conjectural attempt to reconstruct by the 

 aid of archaeological evidence the history of' pre- 

 historic Italy, with the view of elucidating the ante- 

 cedents of Rome. In his own words (p. 341) : — 

 " abordant I'histoire de Rome, il se donne la tache 

 de discerner toutes les influences qui ont entoure la 

 ville de Romulus dans la premiere phase de son 

 existence." Basing himself on the work of Italian 

 archaeologists, which for the most part lies buried 

 in the pages of periodicals, he begins with the 

 Palaeolithic age, and ends with the arrival of the 

 Etruscans, which he dates somewhere about 1000 B.C. 

 His learning is incontestable. It ranges from Rome 

 to Berlin, and from St. Petersburg to London; it 

 includes at once the work of Prof. Conway on Italic 

 dialects and the researches of Mr. Arthur Evans and 

 Mr. J. L. Myres on prehistoric Greece. Every scholar 

 must be grateful for this laborious and exhaustive 

 synthesis of the knowledge accumulated, during the 

 last forty or fifty years, with regard to the history 

 of primitive Italy. 



Yet the critic may be pardoned if, in some respects, 

 he ventures to criticise Prof. Modestov 's work. For 

 one thing, the author seems to exaggerate unduly 

 the value of archjeological research and archaeological 

 results. Etruscan pot-sherds and the debris of 

 tcrramari are valuable in their way, but our sense 

 of their value must not allow us to pooh-pooh, as 

 Prof. Modestov too readily does, the work of a great 

 constructive historian like Mommsen. The spade of 

 the archjeologist is, after all, a meaner tool than 

 the pen of the historian, and the failing of the 

 Pharisee is one to which the archaeologist is so readily 

 liable that it behoves him to be on his guard. It 

 must be admitted, however, that the polemics of 

 Prof. Modestov are directed against brother archae- 

 ologists still more vehemently than against Mommsen. 

 He wastes not a few pages, and exhausts not a little 

 the patience of the reader, by continual diatribes and 

 disproofs, which may cause a flutter in the dovecots 

 of Italian archaeology, but end by annoying the un- 

 initiated scholar. There is something of a barbarous 

 zest in such a sentence as : — 



" Only the reasoning of M. Helbig. which M. 

 Marthe has elected to follow, can vie, in its incon- 

 sistency and lack of scientific profundity, with that 

 of its imitator." 



.^nd this suggests, what the reviewer has again 



and again noticed, that the author lets us too much 



into the workshop, and shows us too much rude 



workmanship and too little finished work. These 



NO. 1962, VOL. 76] 



argumentations represent the scaffolding of a book, 

 which ought to be taken down when the building is 

 finished, instead of remaining to spoil the view. Prof. 

 Modestov has been so much interested in his matter 

 that he has forgotten its form. He repeats himself, 

 for instance, again and again, and one comes to 

 notice, as a running refrain, the information (some 

 four times repeated) that Pliny narrates the capture 

 of 300 towns from the Umbrians by the Etrurians 

 (though, by the way, at the fourth time of mention- 

 ing, p. 448, the captors are the Proto-Pelasgians). 



The author is somewhat too prone to risque con- 

 clusions, which he is not averse to supporting by 

 dubious arguments. Though he is readv, upon 

 occasion, to controvert Sergi, he accepts without re- 

 luctance the most hazardous of his conclusions, and 

 believes in a " Mediterranean race " originating from 

 Northern Africa. This is, he thinks, the earliest 

 Italian race, and its representatives are the so-called 

 Ligurians and Sicels, who came into Italy by way 

 of the Straits of Gibraltar, and formed the basis of 

 Italian population during the Stone age. To attain 

 this conclusion, Prof. Modestov follows Sergi in 

 e.xalting the evidence of skulls far above the testi- 

 mony of language; to support it he is willing to 

 accept the most dubious of linguistic evidence, and 

 to connect the language of the Basques with that 

 of the Berbers, or, indeed, with that of the hiero- 

 glyphics of Egypt. Is it for this, one asks, that 

 Mommsen and Ihne are rejected in scorn? But 

 the conclusions of Prof. Modestov on which he would 

 himself wish most stress to be laid are not those 

 which relate to the Stone age or to the Meditei-ranean 

 race, but those which are concerned with the age of 

 Bronze and the age of Iron (the civiltd ViUauovaiia): 

 and with the races by which these ages were intro- 

 duced ; while still more important, perhaps, in the 

 eyes of the author is the part of his book in which 

 he attempts to solve the problem of the origin of the 

 Etruscans (pp. 341-468). 



We may conclude by a brief indication of the con- 

 clusions which the author reaches on these important 

 points. The age of Bronze came in two ways. 

 Partly it came by way of commerce, from C\prus — 

 more especially in southern Italy; partiv it came 

 through immigration of an Aryan stock from the 

 valley of the Danube. The first entry of this .^ryan 

 stock is represented by the tcrramari of the lower 

 valley of the Po, as is proved more particularlv by 

 the Aryan custom of incineration (instead of burial), 

 which can be shown to have been practised in the 

 tcrramari. The first Aryan stock left the lower valley 

 of the Po owing to the pressure of a second Aryan 

 immigration, and, forced gradually .southward, it 

 settled in Latium, and became the parent of the 

 popitlus Romanus. The second Aryan immigration 

 is that of the Umbro-Sabcllians, who came about 

 1000 B.C., and introduced the age of Iron, the so- 

 called civilisation of Villanova, which thev had 

 derived from the Greeks by way of the Adriatic. 

 The first Aryan stock, which had settled in Latium, 

 borrowed from these new-comers something of their 

 civilisation (their use of iron, their methods of decor- 



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