The Etruscans still remain a people of mystery, and not
all the learning and imagination of Miss M. A. Johnstone can tell us who they were, whether they were aliens or of the soil, Lydians (as Herodotus would have it, to the scandal of Dionysius) or Terramare folk (as our latest scholars suggest). Nevertheless, in Etruria Past and Present (Methuen, Is. 6d.) she has reconstructed for us a most fascinating account of Etruscan society and culture, for which the general reader and the traveller to Etruria are very much in her debt. We may read of the dancing girl beautiful as a bubble of foam, like a bit of thistledown on the breeze," or of the exquisite Larthia, wife of a prince, but very woman : and we can see here a society in which women were so honoured and so enlightened as to be a stumbling-block to their neighbours, and even to the Greeks, who could only interpret emancipation as profit- gacy. But is it necessary to use the horrible word Etruscology ?
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