Bk. IV. Ch. I. TEMPLES. 281 perhaps, as to entitle them to be considered among the aboriginal inhabitants. It would have been only natural that the expatriated Trojans should have sought refuge among such a kindred people, though we have nothing but the vaguest tradition to warrant a belief that this was the case. They may, too, from time to time have received other acces- sions to their strength ; but they were a foreign people in a strange land, and scarcely seem ever to have become naturalized in the country of their adoption. But what stood still more in their way was the fact that they were an old Turanian people in presence of a young and am- bitious community of Aryan origin, and, as has always been the case when this has happened, they were destined to disappear. Before doing so, however, they left their impress on the institutions and the arts of their conquerors to such an extent as to be still traceable in every form. It may have been that there was as much Pelasgic blood in the veins of the Greeks as there was Etruscan in those of the Romans ; but the civilization of the former had passed away before Greece had developed herself. Etruria, on the other hand, was long contemporary with Rome — in early times her equal, and sometimes her mistress, and consequently in a position to force her arts upon her to an extent that was never effected on the opposite shore of the Adriatic. Temples. Nothing can prove more clearly the Turanian origin of the Etrus- cans than the fact that all we know of them is derived from their tombs. These exist in hundreds — it may almost be said in thousands — at the gates of every city ; but no vestige of a temple has come .down to our days. Had any Semitic blood flowed in their veins, as has been sometimes suspected, they could not have been so essentially sepulchral as they were, or so fond of contemplating death, as is proved by the fact that a purely Semitic tomb is still a desideratum among antiquaries, not one having as yet been discovered. What Ave should -like to find in Etruria would be a square ])yramidal mound with external steps leading to a cella on its summit ; but no trace of any such has yet been detected. Their other temples — using the woi'd in the sense in which we usually understand it — were, as might be expected, insignificant and ephemeral. So much so, indeed, that except from one passage in Vitruvius,i and our being able to detect the influ- ence of the Etruscan style in the buildings of Imperial Rome, we should hardly be aware of their existence. The truth seems to be that the religion of the Etruscans, like that of most of their congeners, was essentially ancestral, and their Avorship took the form of respect for the ' Vitruvius, iv. 7.
