Not too long ago, I smiled when I chanced upon an article in the New York Times that made mention of Thucydides. To-day, I had the thrilling experience of encountering Herodotus in the Guardian.
The latest findings confirm what was said about the matter [i.e., the origin of the Etruscans] almost 2,500 years ago, by the Greek historian Herodotus. The first traces of Etruscan civilisation in Italy date from about 1200 BC.
About seven and a half centuries later, Herodotus wrote that after the Lydians had undergone a period of severe deprivation in western Anatolia, “their king divided the people into two groups, and made them draw lots, so that the one group should remain and the other leave the country; he himself was to be the head of those who drew the lot to remain there, and his son, whose name was Tyrrhenus, of those who departed1”.
Then, thus this mean that Virgil’s tale has some historical merit, aside from being a self-aggrandizing panegyric to feed Roman vanity?
1 The enigma of Italy’s ancient Etruscans is finally unravelled.