The statement that "formerly the Roman boys were trained in Etruscan culture, as they were in later times in Greek" (Liv.

ix.
36), is quite irreconcilable with the original character of the Roman training of youth, and it is not easy to see what the Roman boys could have learned in Etruria.

Even the most zealous modern partizans of Tages-worship will not maintain that the study of the Etruscan language played such a part in Rome then as the learning of French does now with us; that a non-Etruscan should understand anything of the art of the Etruscan -haruspices- was considered, even by those who availed themselves of that art, to be a disgrace or rather an impossibility (Muller, Etr.ii.

4).

Perhaps the statement was concocted by the Etruscizing antiquaries of the last age of the republic out of stories of the older annals, aiming at a causal explanation of facts, such as that which makes Mucius Scaevola learn Etruscan when a child for the sake of his conversation with Porsena (Dionysius, v.