from which travellers now take the steamships for the East at Brindisi,
he would have found some of the emigrants from the North. If he had
gone to the north of the river Tiber, he would have seen a mixed
population enjoying a greater civilization than the others, the
aristocracy of which had come also from the northern mountains, though
the common people were from Greece or its colonies. These people of
Greek descent were called Etruscans, and it has been discovered that
they had advanced so far in civilization, that they afterwards gave
many of their customs to the city of Rome when it came to power. A
confederacy known as the "Twelve Cities of Etruria" became famous
afterwards, though no one knows exactly which the twelve were. Probably
they changed from time to time; some that belonged to the union at one
period, being out of it at another. It will be enough for us to
remember that Veii, Clusium, Fidenæ, Volsinii, and Tarquinii were of
the group of Etruscan cities at a later date.

The central portion of the country to which Æneas came is that known as
Italia, the inhabitants of which were of the same origin as the Greeks.
It is said that about sixty years before the Trojan war, King Evander
(whose name meant good man and true) brought a company from the land of
Arcadia, where the people were supposed to live in a state of ideal
innocence and virtue, to Italia, and began a city on the banks of the
Tiber, at the foot of the Palatine Hill. Evander was a son of Mercury,
and he found that the king of the country he had come to was Turnus,
who was also a relative of the immortal gods. Turnus and Evander became
fast friends, and it is said that Turnus taught his neighbors the art
of writing, which he had himself learned from Hercules, but this is one
of the transparent fictions of the story. It may be that he taught them
music and the arts of social life, and gave them good laws. What ever
became of good Evander we do not know.