I combine these two nations, not for the sake of intimating an affinity between them, but because both alike were unconnected, so far at least as we know, with the history of Italy until the later times of the Roman republic, and both dwelt to the south of the Alps only as parts of nations which out of Italy were widely diffused; in very early times too they seem to have been contiguous in the plain of the Po.

The Ligurians are among those nations which the short span of our history embraces only in their decline. Philistus, in representing the Sicelians as Ligurians, who had been expelled by Umbrians and Pelasgians, is not only blind to the identity of the Siculians and the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians; he is certainly no less mistaken as to the extraction of the Ligurians: but his mistake arises only from the very common errour, of confounding two irruptions which the same country has experienced at different times; as the nations that have successively inhabited Dacia, the Getes and Goths, the Huns and Hungarians, are taken one for the other; and in obscure traditions the same people appears, in some as invading, in others as driven out. During his banishment, which he passed in the countries on the Adriatic, Philistus may have learnt among the Umbrians themselves, out of their ancient books, that their forefathers and the Siculians had expelled Ligurians out of Tuscany; and it would be unwise to treat this information with contempt on account of his having understood it confusedly.