It will be enough for us to
remember that Veii, Clusium, Fiden?, Volsinii, and Tarquinii were of
the group of Etruscan cities at a later date.
The central portion of the country to which ?neas 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.
The king of the people among whom ?neas landed was one Latinus, who
became a friend of his noble visitor, giving him his daughter Lavinia
to wife, though he had previously promised her to Turnus.
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