According to the numerous forms of the Italian national names, the Umbri must also have been called Umbrici: this the Greeks pronounced Ombrici, and saw therein an allusion to their great antiquity. The name was supposed to indicate that they existed even before the rain-floods, which, according to the creed of the Grecian sages also, had in many countries destroyed earlier races of men. This trifling was probably never meant seriously: but it is certain that the Umbrians were a great nation, before the Etruscans, in the time of the Oenotrians, and that they deserve to be called a most ancient genuine people of Italy. Their city Ameria was built according to Cato 964 years before the war with Perseus, or 381 years before Rome, It is certain too that in ancient times they inhabited a very extensive country; probably, as has been said already, beside what continued to be known as Umbria, the south of Etruria; and, according to definite Roman traditions, the district occupied by the Sabines between the Apennines and the Tiber. On the north-east of the Apennines toward the upper sea and the Po they are said to have spread as conquerors, to have expelled Liburnians and Siculians from the coast, and to have maintained an obstinate contest with the Etruscans for the territory on the lower Po.

History finds the Umbrians restricted to the left bank of the Tiber; with some scattered towns on the coast and near the Po, preserved to them partly, as Ravenna was, by the marshes around them, partly by paying tribute to the Gauls.

In Corsica we find Iberians and Ligurians: in Sicily, before the time of the Sicelians, Sicanians, who were afterward driven back by the Sicelians into the western and southern parts of the island. All historians agree in calling the Sicanians too Iberians: the only dispute was as to their home. They themselves asserted that they were a native primitive race: herein Timæus sided with them, and seemed to Diodorus to have proved it incontrovertibly. Thucydides however assures us it was a settled point, that they had been expelled by Ligurians from Iberia: and Philistus concurred with him. The positive language in which Thucydides expresses his judgement, “this is ascertained as truth,” in the mouth of a man like him, gives great weight to the traditions of western Europe: it can have been only Ligurian or Hispanian traditions, that he admitted as decisive. But even he might be misled by the genealogical prejudice; and where the supposed colony has no similar tradition, the declarations of the pretended original people can scarcely be admitted as evidence: in such cases vanity is very apt to bias.

On the other hand there is no doubt as to the Sicelians, that they themselves deduced their descent by emigration from the Oenotrians. Some Morgetes also inhabited the island; but history names only the more important kindred people.

That the Elymians were Trojans, passed for undoubted; only a tradition introduced Phocians also among the authors of their race. Hellanicus alone brought them from Italy.

The old Roman legend ran as follows: Procas king of Alba left behind him two sons: Numitor, the elder, weak and spiritless, suffered Amulius to wrest the government from him, and reduce him to his father's private property. In the possession of this he lived rich, and, as he desired nothing more, secure: but the usurper dreaded the claims that might be set up by heirs of a different character. He therefore caused Numitor's son to be murdered, and appointed Silvia, his daughter, one of the vestal virgins.

Amulius had no children, or at least only a single daughter; so that the race of Anchises and Aphrodite seemed on the point of expiring, when the love of a god, in opposition to the ordinances of man, gave it perpetuity and a lustre worthy of its origin. Silvia had gone into the sacred grove, to draw pure water from the spring for the service of the temple: the sun quenched its rays; at the sight of a wolf she fled into a cave; there Mars overpowered the timid virgin; and then consoled her with the promise of noble children, as Posidon did Tyro, the daughter of Salmoneus.

When Jupiter in the Æneid consoles the weeping goddess, the mother of the hero, by revealing the future to her; how the empire of her son and his posterity was to rise from step to step, increasing still in glory and greatness, up to Rome, to which no limit and no term was assigned; the three years promised for Æneas apply, not to the interval between his landing and his death, but to the duration of the little Troy on the Latian shore, until the building of Lavinium, the city of the united nation; though the former period was also reckoned to consist of the same number of years.

Thirty years afterward his successor led the Latins from the unhealthy low grounds on the coast to the declivity of Monte Cavo, from the summit of which the eye commands a view more ample than the dominion of Rome before the Samnite wars; in the light of the setting sun it can reach Corsica and Sardinia, and sees the hill which is still illustrated by the name of Circe, like an island, beneath the first rays of her divine sire. The site where Alba stretched in a long street between the mountain and the lake, is still distinctly marked: along this whole extent the rock is cut away under it right down to the lake. These traces of man's ordering hand are more ancient than Rome.