ir
hold on that middle region precarious. They might come there
conquering; but would form, probably, no very permanent part of
the northern empire: they would mix with the conquered, and at
any weakening northward, the mixture would be likely to break
away. So Austria had influence and suzerainty and various crown
appanages in Tuscany; but not such settled sway as over the
Lombard Plain. Then, too, this is a region that, in a time of
West Asian manvantara and European pralaya, might easily tempt
adventurers from the Near East.

But the main road for true refugees is the high Apennines; and
this is the road most of them traveled. Their fate, taking it,
would be to be pressed southward along the backbone of Italy by
new waves and waves of peoples; and among the wild valleys to
lose their culture, and become highlandmen, bandit tribes and
raiding clans; until the first comers of them had been driven
down right into the hot coastlands of the heel and toe of Italy.
Great material civilizations rarely originate among mountains:
outwardly because of the difficulty of communications; inwardly,
I suspect, because mountain influences pull too much away from
material things. Nature made the mountains, you may say, for the
special purpose of regenerating effete remnants of civilizations.
Sabellians and Oscans, Samnites and Volscians and Aequians and
dear knows what all:--open your Roman Histories, and in each one
of the host of nation-names you find there, you may probably see
the relic of some kingdom once great and flourishing north or
south of the Alps;--just as you can in the Serbians, Roumanians,
Bulgars, Vlachs, and Albanians in the next peninsula now.

One more element is to be considered there in the far south. Our
Lucanian and Bruttian and Iapygian refugees,--themselves, or some
of them, naturally the oldest people in Italy, the most original
inhabitants,--would find themselves, when they arrived there,
very much de-civilized; but, because the coast is full of fine
harbors, probably sooner or later in touch with settlers from
abroad. It is a part that would tempt colonists of any cultured
or commercial peoples that might be spreading out from Greece or
the West Asian centers or elsewhere; and so it was Magna Graecia
of old, and a mixing-place of Greek and old Italian blood; and
so, since, has been held by Saracens, Normans, Byzantines, and
Spaniards.

The result of all this diversity of racial elements would