ABSTRACT
H ITHERTO we have been occupied with the prehistory of the several fractions of a land that was and is a geo-graphical unity. It remains to enquire how they came to be united politically also, so that when a united Italy had been set up on those ancient foundations it might become in its turn one of the most important foundation-stones of western civilization. The disunion of pre-Roman Italy, except in the geographical sense, is too obvious to need emphasis. For though the land itself makes an entity, and a self-contained entity at that, it was occupied by the representatives of more than one primitive society,! each of which had its own type of civilization, and each of which (with a single exception) had, once it was established in Italy, lost touch with other branches of the same society without establishing, except after a delay of several centuries, effective contact with the other societies that were its neighbours within the peninsula. The one exception is the Hellenic society, which in ancient Italy never really lost touch with its own centre, with the source from which it had sprung. The extremely ancient neolithic civilization (we can hardly speak of it as a society) belonged to a very sparse and scattered population in Italy, the elements of which can have had no sort of unity either within themselves or with other neolithic peoples. The later bronze age and early iron age peoples likewise not only were detached almost as completely from their central European and Danubian homelands
as if the ocean flowed between, but also formed in their new home quasi-national groups that were divorced from one another in everything except trading relations that were always liable to interruption, were always conducted on a small scale, judged by the international trade even of Roman times, and in no case tended to produce a union of two or more groups. The gulf that separated the Etruscans of Italy from their native land was so wide and so deep that the very locality of their original home had become a subject of debate even in ancient times and has remained so ever since; and though they extended their power widely in the land of their adoption they showed little or no inclination to unite themselves with its other inhabitants, or those inhabitants with one another, except by a policy of conquest that the event proved unsuccessful. The La Tene culture of Italy was never more than an overflow from the regions north of the Alps, and the Kelts never thought either to unify the land over which they roamed or to unite it (or any part of it) to a larger Keltic domain. And no recognizable trace remained of any linguistic or other unity which may have joined the ancestors of the Keltic and Italic tribes of Europe to one another or to other Indo-European speaking peoples. But the representatives of the Hellenic society in Italy, though they joined hands only temporarily at moments of special emergency, were able to remain true to a cultural allegiance, if not a political subservience, to their homeland and mother-cities. This, as will appear in the sequel, is a fact of great significance.
