Entering the territory of the Umbrians, they drove them before them into the rugged and mountainous districts, and themselves occupied the rich and fertile plains. The head-quarters of the invaders was Etruria; the conquered Umbrians lived amongst them as a subject people, like the Peloponnesians under their Dorian conquerors, or the Saxons under the Norman nobility. This portion of the Pelasgians called themselves Rasena, the Greeks spoke of them as Tyrseni, a name evidently connected with the Greek τυρρις or τυρσις (Latin, Turris,) and which remarkably confirms the assertion of Herodotus, since the only Pelasgians who were famed for architecture or tower-building, were those who claimed a Lydian extraction, namely, the Argives and Etruscans.[15] This theory of the Pelasgian origin of the Etruscans is due to Lepsius,[16] and has been adopted by Donaldson;[17] and if it be correct, the language of Etruria was probably Pelasgian amalgamated with, and to a certain extent corrupted by, the native Umbrian.
Pelasgian supremacy on the left bank of the Tiber found no one to dispute it. Let us now turn our attention to the influence of these invaders in lower Italy. As they marched southwards, they vanquished the Oscans and occupied the plains of Latium. They did not, however, remain long at peace in the districts which they had conquered. The old inhabitants returned from the neighbouring highlands to which they had been driven, and subjugated the northern part of Latium.
The history of the occupation of Etruria, which has been already related, was here acted over again, with only the following alteration, that here the Oscan was the dominant tribe, and the subject people amongst whom they took up their abode were Pelasgians and Sikeli, by whom the rest of the low country of Latium were still occupied. The towns of the north formed a federal union, of which Alba was the capital, whilst of the southern or Pelasgian confederacy the chief city was Lavinium, or Latinium. The conquering Oscans were a nation of warriors and hunters, and consequently, as Niebuhr remarked, in the language of this district the terms belonging to war and hunting are Oscan, whilst those which relate to peace and the occupations of rural life are Pelasgian. As, therefore, the language of Etruria was Pelasgian, corrupted by Umbrian, so Pelasgian + Oscan is the formula which presents the language of Latium.
