Note 12 — BOOK III.
Reading edition
—Page 249, stanza xciii.
and all the honours of the race Lend their last bloom to smile in Ægle's face.
The Etrurians paid more respect to women than most of the classical nations, and admitted females to the throne. The Augur (a purely Etruscan name and office) was the highest power in the state. In the earlier Etruscan history, the Augur and the king were unquestionably united in one person. Latterly, this does not appear to have been necessarily (nor perhaps generally) the case. The king (whether we call him lars or lucumo), as well as the augur, was elected out of a certain tribe, or clan; but in the strange colony described in the poem, it is supposed that the rank has become hereditary in the family of the chief who headed it, as would probably have been the case even in more common-place settlements in another soil. Thus, the first Etrurian colonist, Tarchun, no doubt had his successors in his own lineage.
I cannot assert that Ægle is a purely Etruscan name; it is one common both with the Greeks and Latins. In Apollodorus (ii. 5) it is given to one of the Hesperides, and in Virgil (Eclog. vi. l. 20) to the fairest of the Naiads, the daughter of the sun; but it is not contrary to the conformation of the Etruscan language, as, by the way, many of the most popular Latinized Etruscan words are, such as Lucumo, for Lauchme; and even Porsena, or, as Virgil (contrary to other authorities) spells and pronounces it, Pors[~e]nna (a name which has revived to fresh fame in Mr. Macaulay's noble "Lays") is a sad corruption; for, as both Niebuhr and Sir William G. remark, the Etruscans had no o in their language. Pliny informs us that they supplied its place by the v. I apprehend that an Etrurian would have spelt Porsena Pvrsna.[B]