Daily Life of The Etruscans - Jacques Heurgon (1961)

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
MEDICAL CENTER LIBRARY

SAN FRANCISCO
11
HISTORY COLLECTION
l
DAILY LIFE OF
THE ETRUSCANS
DAILY LIFE SERIES
Daily L~fe of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest by

Jacques Soustelle.
Daily Life in the Vienna of Mozart and Schubert by Marcel
Brion.
Daily Life in Rembrandt's Holland by Paul Zumthor.
Daily Life in Palestine at the Time of Christ by Daniel-Rops.
Daily Life of
THE ETRUSCANS
JacquesLHeurgon
Translated from the French by James Kirkup
G WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON

23 20 NEW BOND STREET LONDON WI
S9y
Sk
q~4 184149
1
© Librairie Hachette, 1961
English translation© 1964 by

George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Ltd
First published in France in 1961 under the title

LA VIE QUOTIDIENNE CHEZ LES ETRUSQUES
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

MORRISON AND GIBB LIMITED, LONDON AND EDINBURGH
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction I
I THE PHYSICAL TYPE

E'l·idence of medical biology - The evidence of monu-
ments with figures - Etruscans and Tuscans - Life-
expectancy of the Etruscans 20
II THE MORAL TEMPER

The gossip of Theopompus - The judgement of Posi-
donius - The Roman view 32
III ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
1 The Ruling Class - The Kings - The insignia of
sovereignty - The condottieri - The magistrates -
Official processions 40
2 The Servant Class - The host of servants - The
peasants - The slave revolts - The affranchised -
Composition of the slave personnel - The real con-
ditions of Etruscan slaves - The clients 54
IV THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE ROLE
OF WOMEN
Family life - The status of women - The freedom
they enjoyed- Their political authority-Mediterranean
survivals - Archaeological confirmation - The culture
of Etruscan women - Their privileges beyond the grave 74
V THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND
PATTERNS OF RURAL LIFE
Fertility of the land - The problem of malaria - The
successes of Etruscan hydraulics - The right of property
- The cereals - Vines and trees - Agricultural imple-
ments - Etruscan agronomists - The raising of stock -
Hunting - Fishing - The timber industry - The mines -
The roads - The vehicles 97
v
DAILY LIFE OF THE ETRUSCANS
VI THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF

URBAN ACTIVITIES
1 Foundation rites - Marzabotto - Spina - The
fortifications - Predominance of private dwellings -
The population of the cities 135
2 What the tombs of the dead tell us of the abodes of
the living - The exploration of a tumulus - The
atrium - Columns and peristyles - Traces of a
regular plan 148
3 Domestic interiors - Etruscan furniture - The Tomb
of the Reliefs 161
4 Etruscan costume - From the tebenna to the toga -

Footwear -Headgear - Jewellery 171
VII SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS
AND GAMES
The divisions of time 183
2 Table delicacies - A quick look at the kitchens -
Banquets - Silver plate 185
3 Games - Music - Dancing - Bacchic dance - Sport
- Racing - Athletics - The tribunes and the public -
Gladiatorial combats - The game of Phersu 193
VIII ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
1 Alphabets and spelling books - Tablets and scrolls -
The wrappings from the Mummy of Zagreb 216
2 The books offate - The Etruscan religion and its
prophets - The haruspices 22 3
3 Did the Etruscans have a profane literature? -
Fescennine hymns and songs - Dramatic spectacles -
Historical literature - The traditions of the great
families - Genealogical Trees - Maecenas - The
writings of Maecenas 237
Conclusion 270
Chronological Table 273
Notes 275
Index 298
Vl
ILLUSTRATIONS
betwun pages r48- r49
I An engraved mirror case (Photo: British Museum)

2 Bronze brazier from Chiusi (Photo: British Museum)
3 A bronze household colander (Photo: British Museum)
4 Strigil with the handle in the form of Aphrodite (Photo: British
Aluseum)
5 False teeth (Photo: The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum)
6 Fourth-century coins (Photo: British Museum)
7 A bronze tripod (Photo: British Museum)
8 Carved stone seat (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
9 Bronze mirror stand (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
10 Wall-painting from the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing (Photo:
The Mansell Collection)
11 Sculptured relief of Ulysses and the Sirens (Photo: British Museum)
12 The foot of a cista from Palestrina (Photo: British Museum)
13 Heracles subduing the horse of Diomede (Photo: British Museum)
14 A ceremonial chariot from Monteleone (Photo: The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1903)
15 Small bronze statue of Demeter (Photo: British Museum)
16 Panel from the Tomb of the Triclinium (Photo: The Mansell
Collection)
17 Terracotta figure of an actor (Photo: British Museum)
18 Painting from the Tomb of Seven Chimneys (Photo: The Mansell
Collection)
19 Copy of the wall-painting in the Tomb of Monkeys (Photo: The
Mansell Collection)
20 Bronze statue of Mars (Photo: British Museum)
21 A plate with an archer design (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
22 Bronze statue of a warrior (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
23 Detail from the lid of an urn (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
24, 25, 26 Paintings showing Etruscan costume (Photos: British
Museum)
27 Gold fibula and pendaglio (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
28 A pair of gold votive bracelets (Photo: British Museum)
29 Gold fibula from Vulci (Photo: British Museum)
vu
30 Carnelian scarab set in a gold ring (Photo: British Museum)

31 Large worked gold ring with a sard centre (Photo: British Museum)
32 A bronze sistula (Photo: British Museum)
33 The Tomb of the Reliefs (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
34 Funerary couch from Caere (Photo: The Mansell Collection)
35 Bronze stand for an incense bowl (Photo: British Museum)
36 An engraved frieze on a bronze cista (Photo: British Museum)
37 The banqueting scene from the Tomb of the Leopards (Photo: The
Mansell Collection)
38 A limestone sepulchral chest from Chiusi (Photo: The Mansell
Collection)
MAPS
Etruria x
Etruria and the Western Mediterranean Xl
Vlll
To
MONSIEUR JEROME CARCOPINO
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MILES
ETRURIA
and the
WESTERN MEDITERRANEAN
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INTRODUCTION
The word Etruscan might a priori seem to many people the very
last one to be associated with the idea of 'daily life'. The mere
sound of the word tends to induce in certain people a trance-like
state which almost discourages any attempt to approach the
subject in a realistic manner. Our contemporaries, fascinated by
an art whose marvels were little known until they were revealed
by the memorable 1955 exhibition at the Louvre and the sub-
sequent publication of numerous illustrated books on the subject
seem inclined to look upon the creators of that art as men who, if
ever they existed, did so outside the bounds of space and time.
They are the children of mystery and the sons of night, and the
dazzling fibulae which served to hook up their women's garments
perhaps shine all the brighter for being seen in a setting of im-
penetrable dark. In the eyes of many people the Etruscans
belong more to the domain of myths than to the pages of human
history. Our aim here is to show that, unlike the Arimaspians
and the other Hyperboreans, the Etruscans really existed.
It is no easy task: literary evidence about them is rare, their
language, to say the least, obscure, and the data presented by
their artefacts are uncertain. The Etruscans who still survived
at the time of Augustus were, in the words of Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, 'a very ancient people resembling no other either
in language or customs' .1 To this it may be added that, though
they did not hide themselves away behind an iron curtain they
were by nature proud and reserved, unwilling to reveal their
secrets to outsiders. Above all, it must be understood that the
Etruscans neither saw nor painted things as they are. Possessing
a deep store of popular wisdom and a marked gift for observation
and expression which in the end came into their own, they first
I
of all nobly surrendered themselves to a passionate admiration

for the most beautiful thing they knew - Greece. It was they
who introduced abroad and imitated all aspects of Greek civiliza-
tion, and in so doing lost their own way a little. Thus there arose
in Italy that strange and generous impulse, which was to be found
again at all periods of history, on the walls of Pompeian houses
and in the palaces of Renaissance princes, to re-create in everyday
life the constant and multiform presence of an ideal Hellas.
Venetians in the sixteenth century and Campanians in the first
re-lived the loves of Ariadne and the labours of Hercules as if
they were their own. The middle classes at Herculaneum opened
up the walls of their narrow dwellings with immense perspectives,
in trompe-l'oeil style, of Hellenistic colonnades. The Etruscans
in the days of the Tarquins were already living in a dream that
at every step brought them into contact with the gods.
But our attempts to see their real face and to observe them in
their ordinary lives have been in a large measure frustrated by
the narrow-minded and impatient attitude of their historians.
A welter of theories and interpretations has merely succeeded in
blurring the outlines of things. It is sometimes thought that
there are only two main problems and that if these were solved
everything else would be explained. For some scholars the main
problem is that of the origin of the Etruscans: when it is known
where they come from, they say, we shall know what sort of
people they were. The second problem is that of their language:
it is commonly believed that the Etruscan tongue is quite un-
intelligible and even indecipherable. But if a bilingual text of
some extent were to turn up, or if a cryptographer of genius were
to come along, those mysterious strangers would at once seem
closer to us, and less inscrutable.
Let us first of all, in order to centralize our aims, attack these
two problems. A brief historical exposition of the Etruscan
people and a linguistic outline of what is involved when we come
to the interpretation of their texts will allow us to determine more
precisely the extent of our aims in the present study. But let us
be clear on this point: the obscure beginnings, in the Orient or
elsewhere, of the distant ancestors of those who one day, settling
between the Tiber and the Arno, were to become the Etruscans,
will concern us much less than their civilization as it developed
2
INTRODUCTION
on Italian soil, and which is above all considered as the first great
civilization in Italy. On the other hand, a knowledge of the
Etruscan tongue, which might afford us solid but limited results,
can be acquired only after long and patient study; our knowledge
of this language moreover is much more advanced than is generally
supposed, and a great number of small inscriptions offer precious
insights which - and this will be perhaps one of the more original
contributions made by this little book - can be made use of
within reason.
WERE THE ETRUSCANS OF ORIENTAL ORIGIN?

The Etruscans have always inspired myth-makers. Ever since
the days of antiquity numerous myths have been related about
them, and in these truth was inextricably mixed up with false-
hood. One of these myths, which was supposed to demonstrate
the peculiar ways of the Etruscans, must be recalled here, in the
words of Herodotus: 2
' ... In the reign of Atys son of Manes there was a great scarcity
of food in all Lydia. For a while the Lydians bore this with
what patience they could; presently when there was no abatement
of the famine, they sought for remedies, and divers plans were
devised by divers men. Then it was that they invented the
games of dice and knuckle-bones and ball, and all other forms
of pastime, except only draughts, which the Lydians do not
claim to have discovered. Then, using their discovery to lighten
the famine, they would play for the whole of every other day,
that they might not have to seek for food, and the next day they
ceased from their play and ate. This was their manner of life
for eighteen years. But the famine did not cease to plague
them, and rather affiicted them yet more grievously. At last
their king divided the people into two portions, and made
them draw lots, so that the one part 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 departed. Then one part of them,
having drawn the lot, left the country and came down to Smyrna
and built ships, whereon they set all their goods that could be
carried on board ship, and sailed away to seek a livelihood and
3
a country; till at last, after coasting along many nations in turn,

they came to Ombrici, where they founded cities and have
dwelt ever since. They no longer called themselves Lydians,
but Tyrrhenians, after the name of the king's son who had led
them thither.'
Such, in the words of a Greek writing in the fifth century before

Christ and whose authority was scarcely ever disputed afterwards,
were the origins of those whom he called in his own language
Tyrrhenians (whence the name Tyrrhenian Sea given to that part
of the Mediterranean along the western coast of Italy). The
Romans named them Tusci (whence the name Tuscany) and
Etrusci (whence the term the Etruscans). And Herodotus'
account, leaving out of consideration the obviously legendary
details embellishing it, was accepted even by modern scholars,
for the hypothesis of the Etruscans' oriental origin allowed them
to understand better the more or less organically oriental
characteristics of that civilization. 3
By this we do not mean the objects, customs or beliefs that
may have been introduced by the regular routes of commerce and
intellectual exchanges. It has indeed been said that future
archaeologists, digging among the ruins of eighteenth-century
boudoirs, will probably find a suspicious amount of broken
porcelain from China: they would be wrong to infer from this
that a wave of yellow-skinned invaders had swept over western
Europe at that period. In the same way, the history of Etruscan
civilization opens with a so-called orientalizing period which
extended over the whole of the seventh century, and many of
whose traits can be explained by foreign importations: such as
that Egyptian faience vase, found at Tarquinii, and bearing the
cartouche of the Pharaoh Bocchoris (720-714), Phoenician scarabs
of smalt, iYory amulets, amber beads, bronze and gold pins, and,
later, in the first Etruscan temples, the principles of terra-cotta
frieze decoration similar to that used everywhere in the Creto-
Asiatic world - all these things really only go to prove the venture-
some spirit of merchants and the hold of culture on primitiYe
peoples. But there is a more profound correspondence whose
significance cannot be explained a\vay by superficial influences.
For example, one is impressed by the affinities of religion
4
INTRODUCTION
linking the Etruscans with the ancient empires of the Orient.

In particular, they earned the admiration of other races all
through their history for their skill in the interpretation of omens.
No other region in the ancient world knew such an obsession
with telling the future, nor had such experience of the observation
of celestial phenomena, the interpretation of thunder-claps and
divination from the intestines of their victims, such a passionate
desire to know the will of the gods. Only the ancient magi of
Assyria and Chaldea, themselves past masters in astrology and
hepatoscopy, were their equals. So that there is a great temptation
to consider the Etruscans as the remote but faithful heirs of the
latter. A sheep's liver in bronze in the museum at Piacenza has
its convex side divided into forty-four compartments, each one
marked with the name of a god; it resembles strikingly about
thirty terra-cotta livers, compartmented in the same way and
marked with inscriptions, which were discovered at Mari on the
central Euphrates and which date back to the first part of the
second millennium.
Then the Etruscan language itself also constitutes a mystery
which might show signs of solution if the hypothesis of the
oriental origin of those who spoke it were accepted. Etruscan does
not belong to the Inda-European family of languages; it is funda-
mentally different from Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, Celtic, Greek and
Sanskrit; but it seems to contain certain grammatical peculiarities
which are found in the dialects of western Asia Minor, Lycian,
Carian, Lydian. A funerary stele unearthed by French archae-
ologists in 1885 on the island of Lemnos in the northern Aegean
and dating from the sixth century BC, that is, from a period when
the Athenian conquests had still not resulted in the introduction
of Greek, presents an epigraphic text whose authenticity and
significance have been confirmed by recent discoveries and which,
if it is not written in Etruscan, is at least the text most closely
resembling Etruscan ever read outside Italy. This is not the place
to mention points of vocabulary and morphology which establish
a very close link between the two languages. But we must remem-
ber that, according to Herodotus, the Tyrrhenians had in the
course of their migration 'coasted along many nations': it is just
conceivable that they may have left behind a part of their contin-
gent on Lemnos.
D.L.E.-2 5
Is the case not proved, then, and what is it that prevents a

growing number of etruscologists from accepting the Herodotus
theory? First of all because it resembles too many of those
fables of antiquity which tended to link the birth of any western
Mediterranean civilization with a population-shift from the east.
Herodotus' version of the exodus of Tyrrhenus and his compan-
ions and of their settling in Etruria is not a priori more worthy of
credence than Virgil's accounts of the voyages of Aeneas and his
companions after the sack of Troy had forced them to flee the
shores of Phrygia and find a new home for themselves at the mouth
of the Tiber. But what increasingly prevents archaeologists
today from accepting the hypothesis of oriental origins is the
difficulty they have in finding any sufficiently precise break in
the succession of cultures in central Italy to allow of the inter-
vention of a foreign people.
For a long time this was believed to have taken place about
700 BC, at a moment when the orientalizing influence of which
we have spoken replaced the civilization that had reigned for two
centuries and which we call the Villanovan culture because it
was first studied closely in the region of Bologna, at Villanova.
This culture is characterized, in the early part of its development,
by cremation of the dead, whose remains were contained in
cinerary urns shaped like small houses or in ossuaries made of
two superimposed truncated cones and by the geometrical
decoration of objects; then, at a more advanced stage, by the
appearance, together with the rite of cremation, of grave burial -
without any new ethnic factor having supervened to cause the
change - and by the gradual enrichment of funerary furnishings.
Now it is becoming ever clearer, notably at Caere (Cerveteri), at
Tarquinii and at Bolsena where Raymond Bloch's diggings have
revealed the site of ancient Volsinii, that the orientalizing civiliza-
tion appears nearly always in those places which were centres of
Villanovan culture, following it without a break, the Etruscan
chamber tombs for example developing by natural evolution from
the former inhumation tombs. So that one arrives at the con-
clusion that if oriental elements did reach the Tyrrhenian coast
of Italy they were numerically of small importance and did not
sensibly modify the centres of population; in fact, one wonders if
the Villanovans were not already Etruscans. But at Bolsena
6
lNTHODUCTION
(ancient Volsinii) itself the foundations of huts from the preceding

civilization have just been laid bare - the civilization marking the
end of the Bonze Age, belonging to a type called Apenninic
because it extended over a large part of the peninsula's dorsal
range. In fact, one no longer knows exactly where one is nor
where to place these awkward intruders in the scale of Italian
pre-history and proto-history, unless along with Herodotus we
set their arrival in a legendary thirteenth century BC, which
means, in that part of Italy, that they are lost in the mists of time.
THE THEORY OF AUTOCHTHONOUS ETRUSCANS

It is at this point, when the traditional hypothesis begins to fade
away into a rather depressingly vague perspective, that another
solution presents itself, one whose sole supporter among the
ancients was Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and one which has long
been considered heretical by modern scholars. 'In fact,' says our
historian, 'those people who declare that the Etruscans did not
emigrate from anywhere and were always there have a chance of
coming closest to the truth.'
The partisans of the theory supporting the autochthony of the
Etruscans do not waste fire on sterile criticism of the opposing
side. They have positive views to put forth and an overall inter-
pretation of all aspects of the problem, among others of cultural
and linguistic relationship of the Etruscans with certain oriental
peoples, which is no less convincing than that of their opponents.
To the concept of a progress in techniques and beliefs through
communication by sea and land, they oppose the idea of a resur-
rection after a long entombment. The Etruscans, they say, were
not new arrivals in Italy, but the first occupants of a land which
had been wrested from them by lndo-European invasions; yet
these had not wiped them out completely nor had they broken
their spirit. The birth of Etruscan civilization in the sixth century
therefore is held to be simply the re-emergence - after a slow
re-conquering of the interior and under various influences
including those of the Orient and Greece - of the irrepressible
descendants of indigenous Bronze Age inhabitants.
'If the seed withereth not . . .' The hypothesis of Etruscan
autochthony obstinately pursues the subterranean course of a
Mediterranean community which the influx of great blond
7
barbarians, Italians or Greeks, might have temporarily subdued

but which went on struggling for freedom under the conqueror's
heel. Etruscan legends contain a ready-made symbol to explain
the origins of their religion, and one is astonished that so little
weight has been given to it: it is said that a Tarquinian plough-
man one day dug more deeply than usual in the earth and saw a
little man come out of the hole who looked like a child but had
the wisdom of an old man. He was called Tages and revealed to
those who had collected round him the secrets of what was termed
the Etrusca disciplina. 4
Thus a dualism which was no longer really horizontal - between
Orient and Occident - but vertical would seem to be the true
explanation of the ancient primitive world. One must imagine,
at the outset, in Italy, as also in Minoan Crete, a civilization
dominated by the importance of Chthonian cults and by the pre-
eminence of women; then, after vast upheavals, the marriage of
Heaven and Earth, Indo-European strength with Mediterranean
grace, the conquest of an agricultural society by war-lords. And
if survivals of the first community reappear only in certain
isolated parts, this is because its disappearance was like the sub-
merging and disintegration of an entire continent. The links
between Etruscan and Caucasian, between Lydian and the dialect
of Lemnos are understandable if one considers that an 'Etrusco-
Asianic' language was once used in Italy, in the Balkan peninsula,
on the islands of the Aegean and in Asia Minor and was then
driven back to the furthest bounds of its domain by the linguistic
pressure of the invaders.
But here again, as in the hypothesis of oriental migration, we
recognize the simplifying characteristics and grandiose outlines
of myth. As we said at the beginning, the very word Etruscan
evokes in the minds of our contemporaries the idea of mythological
beings. Either the sacred wisdom of the empires of the Orient
were transplanted in Tuscany after a mysterious voyage across
the seas, or a Mediterranean civilization, submerged for a time
by Indo-European invasions, reappeared after germinating for
centuries. These are broad and dizzying perspectives and we
may choose, according to our temperament, whichever one
appeals most to us, or else refuse to make a choice - and that is
what many scholars today feel impelled to do. But if the interest
8
INTRODUCTION
we have in the Etruscans were confined to that, we would be

ill-advised to write an account of their daily life which necessarily
requires a more precise and unassuming focusing of the lens.
ETRUSCAN CIVILIZATION: THE FIRST GREAT CIVILIZATION IN ITALY

Fortunately the Etruscan problem does not limit itself, as has so
long been thought, to the so far insoluble problem of origins.
Indeed, it has recently been remarked that even if this problem
were to be solved the real questions would only just be beginning. 5
After all, the history of France is something more than the
history of the origin of the Franks. The history of the Etruscans
is not the inevitable unfolding of corollaries at the end of a
theorem demonstrated once and for all, but the gradual formation
of an organism whose shape becomes defined in relation to its
milieu and circumstances. In any case, the Etruscan nation did
not appear at Caere or Tarquinii in the guise of a well-defined
and unalterable people.
It was only from the seventh century onwards, on Italian soil,
making contact with other people and at grips with peculiar natural
and climatic conditions that this nation achieved self-awareness.
Those elements, probably decisive, from which it derived its
singularities and its language gradually merged during the five
or six centuries of its existence into an ensemble which alone
may be termed Etruscan. We catch a shadowy glimpse of this
nation at the start; but we have a good view of it at the finish for
that culture which was formed from the seventh to the second
centuries in Etruria was nothing less than the first great Italian
civilization.
It is indeed a striking thought that the same region of central
Italy has twice, in the shape of ancient Etruria and modern
Tuscany, been the source of civilization in Italy. Since the
seventh century BC and from the fifteenth century onwards, in the
dawn of antiquity as well as at the beginning of modern times,
the same region of the peninsula has been distinguished by
exceptional qualities. The birth and the re-birth or Renaissance
of Italy had the same cradle. It is a remarkable coincidence,
and perhaps it is more than a coincidence. Are we to believe
that the landscape, the light and the climate of Tuscany, enjoy-
ing a more tonic atmosphere than the heavy air of the Roman
9
Campania, produced the same miracle twice? Michelangelo,

Vasari tells us, attributed 'whatever good he might have in his
nature to the lively and subtle air one breathes in Arezzo'. Are
we to assume that Dante, Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci
inherited, despite the effects of invasions and the mixture of
races, the centuries-old spirit of the ancient Etruscans? There
are astonishing correspondences and resemblances: for example,
the angels of death which keep watch at the foot of the cinerary
urn of Arruns Volumnius at Perugia seem to be guarding a tomb
of one of the Medici. Raymond Bloch, in one of his charming
little works, 6 has juxtaposed the head of a young man coming
from Cerveteri (Caere) and dating from the fifth century with
that of Donatello's St George. It is difficult to tell which is
Etruscan and which is Tuscan.
These remarks make us wonder whether the 'Etruscan mystery'
can be confined solely to the origins of the race or whether it is
repeated right through the nation's history in its most recent
manifestations. We shall do well to allow the sort of enchant-
ment inspired by the contemplation of the intangible to dissipate
itself, and to bring our faculties to bear upon things much closer
to us, upon a world where real men and women (who though
strange are not much different from the Italians of old and more
recent times) may be observed in the actual surroundings of their
everyday life.
HISTORICAL SUMMARY
It will be helpful to retrace the main outlines of the Etruscans'
history from the point in the seventh century when the country
between the Arno and the Tiber and between the Apennines and
the Tyrrhenian Sea seemed first to be touched with the rays of
a new dawn. From Populonia to the south of Livorno to Caere
to the north of Rome a series of princely tombs piled with golden
ornaments, silver plate, bronze chariots, figures and decorations
of ivory come to light in the cemeteries, sometimes in the very
mounds themselves of the inhumation tombs: signs of a sudden
prodigious increase of wealth 7 which soon extends to all the
cemeteries and which in any case, right from the start, overflows
the southern limits of Etruria. In fact, at Praeneste (Palestrina)
in Latium the Bernardini and Barberini tombs, identical to and
10
INTRODUCTION
contemporaneous with the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Caere, sud-

denly illuminate, with equal splendour, the strategic point com-
manding the road to Campania.
Today it can no longer be doubted that this rapid transfiguration
of the Villanovan world was connected with the discovery by the
Greeks of the metal deposits of Etruria. We shall discuss later
in greater detail the conditions under which the copper, iron,
aluminium and perhaps tin mines were exploited. The Greek
colonization of the west (in the eighth century when the Chal-
cidians in 770 established their first advance post on the island
of Ischia) was directed towards the discovery of basic materials
whose exploitation and exportation determined the economic
progress of those who were in control of the mines. 8 Populonia
has been called the Pittsburgh of the ancient world. Or, if we
prefer a comparison which today might appeal even more to our
imaginations, we might say the Etruscan gold was also, at the
outset, a black gold. Iron from the island of Elba played more
or less the same role for the Etruscan lucumones as oil does
today for the Emirs of the Persian Gulf.
Etruria, then, was at the start a country suddenly favoured by
great fortunes and in consequence was a civilization which came
to birth under Greek and oriental influences, developing in
heterogeneous surroundings. In this respect Praeneste is as
Etruscan as Caere, though its population and dialect are Latin:
a silver vase of the Bernardini tomb bears a Latin inscription.
But otherwise it is incontestable that to the north of the Tiber
the inhabitants of that country speak in general the same tongue
and are united, ethnically, by the closest links. But all the same
there is great diversity between one town and another: each city
has its own peculiar characteristics, its rites and traditions, its
industries and arts; and political disunity is to be one of the
constant features of Etruscan history. They did not shape them-
selves into a nation all at once.
Later, probably towards the middle of the sixth century BC,
they formed, after the example of Asia Minor's league of Ionian
cities, a confederation of twelve peoples united by political and
religious solidarity. 9 These twelve peoples or cities, duodecim
Etruriae populi, were, if one can venture to proffer an official list,
Veii, Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, Rusellae, Vetulonia, Volsinii,
II
Clusium, Perugia, Cortona, Arretium and Volterra and they held

periodically in a federal sanctuary situated in the territory of the
Volsinii at the temple of Voltumna or Vertumnus a solemn
assembly (concilium Etruriae); there the delegates discussed the
nation's interests and elected to protect these a 'magistrate of the
Etruscan nation' or zilath mechl rasnal, which means in Latin
praetor Etruriae. Despite the dissensions which continued to
agitate them, the Etruscans in the future at times pooled their
military resources for the prosecution of common enterprises and
for carrying out extremely ambitious plans. 10
So it was that having become aware of their political unity
and not content with clearing and fertilizing the territory which
nature - or Jupiter, as they claimed - had given them, they
crossed its frontiers and created an Empire which at one time
covered almost the whole of the peninsula: to the north in the
valley of the Po at the end of the sixth century they founded a
new Etruria of twelve cities including Marzabotto at the mouth
of the Reno, Bologna, which they called Felsina, Parma, Modena,
Ravenna, Spina, Adria, Melpum which is perhaps Milan, and
Mantua where Virgil was born. And these places, when the
Gauls invaded Italy at the beginning of the fourth century, were
the first to bear the brunt. To the south, they conquered Latium
and placed Rome under their domination: the tradition of the
annals has it that from 616 to 509 the Etruscan dynasty of the
Tarquins reigned there, and the most recent archaeological finds
confirm this, though they sometimes place the dates rather later
(550-475). 11 They advanced even further and the Etruscan
Campania, which came into being opposite Cumae, round Capua,
Nola, Nuceria and Pompeii (where just before the outbreak of
war Etruscan inscriptions were found), Sorrento, Salerno - as
well as twelve other towns, it is said - established immediate
contact with Magna Graecia.
But the maritime strength of the Etruscans was in no way
inferior to their land forces. Their most ancient cities, Vetulonia,
Vulci, Tarquinii and Caere are found only a few kilometres from
the coast where small ports, Graviscae for Tarquinii, Pyrgi for
Caere, sheltered their vessels, whether merchant or battle ships.
It is as sailors or rather as pirates that the Etruscans first appear
in the stories of the Greeks: but the word 'pirate' which really
12
INTRODUCTION
means 'adventurer' indicates the jealous disposition of rivals who

looked upon all competition as disloyal. The Etruscans had for
a long time waged war on Greek shipping in waters over which
they had control. Bound by very ancient ties with the islands
across the water, notably Sardinia, they checked Greek colonization
in the southern part of the peninsula. Soon, in order to resist the
progress being made by Phocaean thalassocracy which founded
Marseilles and became mistress of the far West, they united
with Carthage in an alliance so close that in the words of Aristotle
'the Etruscans and the Carthaginians had once formed a single
nation'. The Phocaeans, having successfully established them-
selves in Corsica, were driven from that island about 535 follow-
ing a memorable naval battle off Alalia (Aleria) in which they
were defeated by the combined Etruscan and Carthaginian fleets.
This date marks the apogee of Etruscan greatness. Shortly
after that the Etruscans were to begin their slow decline. At the
end of the century, in circa 509, the Tarquins were expelled
from Rome, Latium recovered its independence and Campanian
Etruria was cut off from Etruria proper. In 480 the Carthagin-
ians at Himera lost all hopes of conquering Sicily. In 474
the Etruscan fleet suffered defeat from the Syracusans at
Cumae which put an end to their domination of the Tyrrhenian
Sea.
It was not an irremediable catastrophe; it did not cut short the
vital force of a whole race nor did it extinguish their resourceful
spirit. Tarquinii and Caere lost a considerable part of thei1
prosperity as a result, but the closing of their outlets on that side
gave a great stimulus to Etruscan expansion eastwards to the
Adriatic: the organization of northern Etruria, the growth of
Marzabotto and Etruscan Bologna, the beginnings of prosperity
in Adria and Spina at the mouth of the Po all coincide with the
turn of the sixth century. The interior of northern Etruria in
contact with the fresh forces of that province took over hence-
forward the naval lead that had belonged to the south.
In Etruria, as in the whole of central Italy, this date marked the
beginning of a kind of complex and confused Middle Ages
during which there were obscurely worked out those political,
religious and technical elements whose most well-known centre
was republican Rome. It was a vast experiment conducted with
13
simultaneous solidarity at Tarquinii, Volsinii, Arezzo, Tusculum

and Rome and in which various peoples, at peace and at war,
sought by reciprocal exchanges to find a solution to the problems,
both spiritual and material, which presented themselves to all. 12
In the formation of this cultural koine the conquests which Rome
was to effect in the fourth and third centuries did not stop Etruscan
institutions from continuing in some places with paradoxical
vigour and from contributing, more than anything else, to the
civilizing of the conqueror. At the end of the fourth century the
great Roman families usually sent their sons to Caere as they were
later to send them to Athens to finish their education and it was
the Roman senate which in the middle of the second century took
measures to guarantee the continuation and preservation, should
the Etruscan nobility lose interest in it, of the Etrusca disciplina.
Veii was destroyed in 396, and Volsinii in 265, but other cities
more fortunate than these, reduced to the state of allies continued
to struggle on together and to carry on, at least nominally, the
administrative and priestly duties they had performed when they
were independent. Right to the end of the Republic there were
zilath mechl rasnal at Tarquinii, and there even emerged under
the Empire the old title of praetor Etruriae. At the beginning of
the first century, the Frarn;ois tomb at Vulci proclaimed with
greater piety than ever the exploits of heroes who had been the
glory of that city. Under Constantine the federal games in the
sacred wood of Volsinii were still being religiously celebrated.
This is why the chronological boundaries of our study cannot
be narrowly defined. Putting aside Tyrrhenian pre-history or
proto-history, we should like to observe the living Etruscans -
this Mediterranean world slowly vanishing, this Roman world
slowly growing - at their height, in the sixth century. But no
one will grudge us the assistance of more ancient evidence - the
treasures buried about 650 at Caere and Praeneste - nor indeed
that of the most recent finds. It is from the fourth century that
figured monuments become more explicit and their inscription
more numerous; and even after the Roman conquest which
infinitely increases our knowledge it is permissible to extract from
documents, taking full account of their date, evidence which
enlightens us about ancient Etruria. We shall often notice that
the Etruscans, though displaying a very receptive enthusiasm
INTRODUCTION
for superior modes of civilization, meaning Greek civilization,

show throughout their history an irreducible conservatism, a
jealous guarding of ancestral habit, a proud fidelity to their own
nature. It was not for nothing that Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
in the reign of Augustus, called them a 'very ancient people'.
They demonstrate a specific slowing-down of the historical
process which makes the princes of Norchia and Perugia, wearing
the purple-bordered toga of the Roman knights towards the end
of the Republic, authentic contemporaries of the Tarquins.
Let us stress here a fact which may not be at once evident to
all our readers: it would be wrong to imagine that Etruscan
history abruptly stopped with the entry on the scene of other
actors, the Romans, or that the Etruscan people disappeared
with the Roman conquest which destroyed a few of its towns and
deprived it of some of its political freedom. A people does not
die out so easily. There were of course massacres and displace-
ments of the population. But when Volsinii and Falerii were
destroyed there arose at their gates Volsinii no·vi and Falerii novi
where the survivors of the catastrophes settled and went on living,
perpetuating, in new forms, their ancient traditions. It has often
been believed, by those who put their faith in certain rhetorical
exaggerations, that the Samnites had been exterminated in the
social war. Ettore Pais has effectively demonstrated that under the
Empire the municipal magistrates of Samnium were the direct
descendants of the Samnites of the golden period whose families
had never died out completely. This is even more the case with
the Etruscans, whose civilization was highly regarded in Rome and
who, as Horace says, 'Vanquished, vanquished their vanquisher'.
Indeed in certain cases it was the Romans who took measures to
preserve Etruscan rites and customs. The roll-call of Etruscan
proper names has come down through the centuries with a
consistency which proves the persistence in the same ancient rites,
in the same palaces, of the same great families from "'hose
members Roman history has selected its poets and even its
emperors. And though a long decadence perhaps undermined
their diehard singularities, it did not affect their irreducible
vitality. And it is not without significance that even during the
Augustan era the Etruscan language was spoken and engraved on
the tombs at Perugia.
WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ETRUSCAN LANGUAGE

It perhaps comes as some surprise that we should so often make
reference to the evidence of inscriptions in the Etruscan tongue
in order to obtain reliable information about institutions and
manners. It must not be thought that we belong to those who
periodically flatter themselves that they have 'pierced the mystery',
reputed to be 'insoluble', of that language. But our knowledge
of Etruscan is much less limited than is supposed and it would
seem that the public is not properly acquainted with the con-
ditions posed by this problem. Salomon Reinach once published
Eulalia, or Greek without Tears, and Cornelia, or Latin without
Weeping; there is perhaps room now for a Tanaquil, or Etruscan
without Trickery.
Etruscan is not hidden from our understanding by the veil of
a special writing which would have to be deciphered before we
could go any further, as Champollion deciphered the Egyptian
hieroglyphics or as Ventris and Chadwick more recently, in a
resounding discovery, deciphered the ideograms of the Mycenaean
syllabary called Linear B. To everyone's surprise, it was realized
that the unknown signs engraved, between 1450 and 1200 BC on
the tablets of Mycenae and Pylos concealed a known tongue,
which was no other than archaic Greek. But no such difficulty
attends the reading of Etruscan: it can easily be read by means of
an alphabet very similar to our own, because it was this, de1ived
from the Greek alphabet, which the Latins borrowed before
transmitting it to us. However the words which we can read so
easily cannot be understood: they belong to a tongue which,
apart from a few loan-words, resembles neither Greek nor Latin
nor any known language.
Does this mean that we must abandon for ever all hope of
understanding it? (Discounting the likelihood of the chance
discovery of a bilingual, Etruscan-Latin text similar to the
Rosetta Stone which, being trilingual, allowed a scrutiny of
three parallel versions in hieroglyphics, demotic and Greek of the
same text and thus gave early nineteenth-century Egyptology a
fine start.) We have long been in possession of brief bilingual
Etrusco-Latin inscriptions in which a romanized Etruscan gives
evidence of a double civil status. It is possible that one day,
while exploring the forum at Vulci or the pile dwellings of Spina
16
INTRODUCTION
archaeologists may unearth a long inscription detailing on both

sides of the stone, in two languages, the clauses of a treaty or of
some important public law. Such a discovery would considerably
enrich our lexicographical knowledge, but it would be wrong to
imagine that it would illuminate completely an area which until
then had been shrouded in the deepest dark. It would be a
great step forward; but meanwhile, a large part of the area has
already been mapped.
Indeed we cannot ignore the long, patient and fruitful work
performed by several generations of linguists who, conscious of
the limitations within which they worked but determined to exploit
them to the full, made etruscology an authentic science whose
methods are constantly becoming more precise. By scrutinizing
carefully some ten thousand epigraphic texts, of which only a
small number are of any length, they have succeeded in conquering
certain isolated reefs in an ocean of uncertainties and taking these
as their points of departure, are proceeding from the known to
the unknown and making constant progress. 13
In order to reassure the sceptics, let us consider here as ex-
amples three epitaphs from Tarquinii:
1 Larth Avles clan avils huth muvalchls lupu; 14
2 Velthur Larisal clan Cuclnial Thanchvilus lupu avils XXV; 15
3 Larth Arnthal Plecus clan Ramthasc Apatrual eslz zilachnthas
avils thunem muvalchls lupu. 16
An examination of hundreds of formulae of this kind in which
there reappear, always in the same place, identical words, has
allowed us to establish, down to the last details, the indisputable
meaning of the inscriptions. They begin with proper names
which are often known to us through their Latin equivalents
(Lars, Aulus, Tanaquil, etc.): they are the names of the dead
person, of his father and sometimes of his mother. They terminate
with the words avils lupu preceded or followed by a number
written in figures or in letters (thu and huth, for example, have
been proved to be names of numbers on two of the faces of a
die). The third inscription introduces, in the middle, two words
of which one, eslz, is the name of a number or numeral adverb,
while the other is derived from the magistrature, the term zilath,
as we have already seen, meaning praetor.
According to this analysis, the following translations are not

only possible, but irrefutable: the only words open to other
interpretations are the names of numbers:
1'Larth, son of Aulus, died at the age of fifty-four years';
2 'Velthur, son of Laris and of Tanaquil Cuclni, died at the
age of twenty-five years';
3 'Larth, son of Arnth ( =Arruns) Plecu and of Ramtha
Apatrui, having twice been praetor, died at the age of forty-
nine (undequinquaginta) years.'
Documents of this nature therefore show us without any doubt
names indicating parental relationships (clan: 'son'; elsewhere sec:
'daughter'; puia: 'wife'), the substantive meaning 'year' (avil),
the verb signifying 'to die' (Lupu). The third epitaph shows us
the existence of a copulative conjunction -c, post-positioned like
the Latin -que. They furnish us with yet other morphological
indications, notably concerning the -s and -al inflections of the
genitive case. Doubts still remain concerning the interpretation
of the names of numbers, which it must be agreed will one day
be resolved. But after all that, though we must admit that Etruscan
is certainly a difficult language, we can see that its gradual de-
cipherment is not dependent upon a miracle, but simply a matter
of time.
Etruscology is now in possession of a vocabulary which, not
counting proper names, consists of about two hundred word-
roots: a certain number of these come from ancient glosses; but
the majority are derived from textual exegesis, and their number
is growing steadily every year. One day Emil Vetter picked out
from certain Tarquinian epitaphs the formula of the date used by
eponymous magistrates corresponding to the Latin Cn. Fulvio P.
Sulpicio consulibus.17 On another occasion Santo Mazzarino,
proceeding from the Etruscan tular, meaning 'limit', elucidated
in the inscription, on a cippus or truncated column at Perugia,
relating the facts of a litigation between neighbouring proprietors,
a whole series of terms taken from legal language. 18
Knowledge of a language however is not measured by the number
of words whose meaning one knows or can guess at. Etruscan is
one of those whose grammar we are beginning to master. It is a
grammar which obeys complex and at times disconcerting rules:
18
INTHODUCTION
nevertheless we now have at our disposal a fairly well-established

system of phonetics, a morphology with its own paradigms of
declension and conjugation, and even the elements of a syntax
and stylistics. What is holding up scholars today is not the
question of whether Etruscan is related to Basque or to Caucasian,
but whether such and such a form is a genitive or a locative,
whether another is an active or a passive. Interpretation no
longer depends on tracing a word which in some obscure context
suddenly seems to be explained by its resemblance to Greek,
Latin or Lydian and thereafter drawing vertiginous conclusions;
the tendency now is to analyse the word morphologically and
phonetically before allowing the supposed relationship to have
any value. Thanks to this method considerable results have been
obtained which sometimes are highly relevant to the history of
Etruscan civilization; and we are allowed consequently to extract
from technical journals, Glotta or Studi Etruschi, certain data
which may help us in our attempt to reconstruct Etruscan life.
CHAPTER ONE
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
Evidence of medical biology - The evidence of monuments

with figures - Etruscans and Tuscans - Life-expectancy of the
Etruscans
What makes an Etruscan? Faced with the wonderment that these

strange people's customs inspired in the ancients and indeed in the
modems, we must first of all ask ourselves if, like Montesquieu's
Persian, there was not 'in his physiognomy something admirable'.
Was there an Etruscan type which allowed one to recognize at
first sight among the Mediterranean crowds the pirate from Caere,
the augur from Tarquinii, the courtesan from Pyrgi? It is not
unimportant that we should know with whom we are dealing in
the pages to come and so we must find out if those people whom
we wish to surprise about their daily tasks had their own unmistak-
able look.
THE EVIDENCE OF MEDICAL BIOLOGY

The problem is not a new one and numerous scholars, archaeo-
logists, anthropologists and biologists have shown interest in it.
Most of them were bent on proving the oriental origin of the
Etruscans. Recent articles by Sir Gavin de Beer, director of the
Victoria and Albert Museum, 1 have even made use of the evidence
of blood-groups. The percentage of the four groups into which
humanity is divided shows a remarkable stability in each race and
reunites, for example, over the centuries, the Jewish colonies of
Holland and Russia. The Romanies of Hungary present more or
less the same picture as the Hindus from whom they are descended.
Now it has been observed that maps of geographical distribution
reveal in central Italy a zone - corresponding roughly to the
20
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
boundaries of Tuscany - in which the proportion of groups A

and B is greater by about five per cent to that of the neighbouring
populations to the north and south, and this would seem to relate
the descendants of the Etruscans to the oriental peoples -
Armenians, Hindus, Romanies.
Inspired by these findings, the Ciba Foundation organized a
conference in London in 1958 at which the origins of the
Etruscans were discussed from a medical-biological point of
view. 2 Representatives of archaeology and the natural sciences
attempted to co-ordinate their methods and findings. In fact, the
scientists were extremely cautious and in general their reports
steered clear of any definite answer, particularly concerning the
oriental origin of the Etruscans. Before breaking up, the confer-
ence passed a resolution submitting that a detailed investigation
into blood-group proportions should be made in Etruria and the
surrounding areas.
But for the last century at least anthropologists have been
measuring skulls from Etruscan cemeteries, always aware that the
material at their disposal was very scanty and that the periods
dominated by the rites of cremation were excluded from their
observations. Giuseppe Sergi studied systematically forty-four
skulls taken from tombs in seven Etrurian towns and identified
thirty-four dolichocephalics and mesocephalics and ten brachy-
cephalics: the long and medium-sized skulls would have belonged
to invaders from the Orient, and the large skulls to the indigenous
population. To which it was objected that this verdict on the
skulls was more or less the same as that on the skulls of the
Mediterranean race which flourished over the whole of southern
Europe from neolithic times. 3 The facts present a picture of such
complexity that one is alarmed by the intrepid assurance of
certain anthropologists' generalizations:
'The Etruscan skulls are notably smooth in surface relief,
with little in the way of browridges; the side walls of the vaults,
seen from above, are not parallel, as with the longer Mediter-
ranean forms, but converging with the greatest breadth in the
parietals and a narrow forehead; the orbits are high and rounded,
and the nose narrow.'
From which Sir Gavin concludes: 'It is easy to recognize in the
D.L.E.-3 21
anthropologists' descriptions the type of the couple on the sarco-

phagus of Cerveteri: long face, thin nose, forehead high and
narrow without bulge, head rather long in shape.' 4
This terra-cotta sarcophagus from Cerveteri (Caere) and dating
from the second half of the sixth century is well known. There
are in fact three almost identical examples of it, one of which is
in the Louvre, the second in the Museo di Villa Giulia in Rome
and the third (forgery) in the British Museum. 5 It would be
pointless to give a lengthy description of this couple reclining
side by side on the funerary banquet-bed, with their delicate
features, their discreet smiles. We shall see that the presence of
the wife reclining beside her husband who lays his right arm
tenderly across her shoulder, would probably have seemed an
impermissible audacity in Greece, but among the Etruscans such
a pose was common. The dead wife wears on her head the
tutu/us shaped like a sutar-loaf which was the favourite head-
dress of Etruscan women in the archaic past, and on her feet she
has the calcei repandi or slippers with turned-up toes which was
also the national style of footwear. But despite the pose and
certain details of costume which we could show are of Ionian
origin, the faces resemble almost exactly those one sees on con-
temporary monuments in Greece and Asia Minor. The woman
seems to be related to the first Attic Korai, and as for the man,
to quote M. Charles Picard, 'with his jawline beard, his oval,
almost triangular face, his oblique eyes, his abundant hair spread
freely over his shoulders, this Tyrrhenian could easily have been
born on the shores of the Aegean'. 6
THE EVIDENCE OF MONUMENTS WITH FIGURES

Then must we conclude that the sarcophagus at Cerveteri gives
us a faithful portrait of bygone Etruscans, and must we imagine
the princes and princesses at the court of the Tarquins as this
couple is represented here in clay? That would be to forget the
imperious power of art, whose contemporary aesthetic has taught
us that it imposes the laws of its own vision on the facts of life.
Nature, it is said, imitates art much more than art reproduces
reality. That the Impressionist period, reacting against academic
beauty, should have preferred in the bathers of Renoir, the dancers
of Degas and the nymphs of Rodin, an animal grace in keeping
22
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
with their sensuality does not mean that French girls in 1880
all woke up one morning with slant eyes, flat noses and full
lips, nor that a colony of Tahitian women settled on the banks of
the Seine in the wake of Gauguin. How much more general
and tyrannical was the influence in Etruria of the Ionian style!
With the rich stuffs of Miletus and the black-figured amphorae
of Attica or Clazomenae, with the technical resources of their
artisans and the very form of their gods the Etruscans had
imported from Asia Minor or Greece the sloping brow, the
straight nose, the almond-shaped eye and the peculiar smile,
concepts of ideal beauty to which they tried to conform during
their lifetime and which in any case determined the image of
what they wished to appear like after their death. So that
those funerary sculptures from the archaic period are merely
masks.
It is certainly tempting to seek more authentic evidence in
later monuments, when a certain Etruscan realism, brought about
by the easy handling qualities of terra-cotta, though not before
attempting here and there other stylized forms, finally abandoned
those old-fashioned masks. This evidence tempted, on the eve
of the last war, certain German scholars who wanted to prove
their Rassentheone, or racial theories of Nazism. But by choosing
as they pleased whatever features seemed best to fit their aims,
they arrived at very different conclusions. One of them, looking
at cinerary urns surmounted by statues of the dead persons, had
been struck by the fact th?t some of these sometimes had hooked
noses. 7 So he proceeded to class the Etruscans among the aquiline
races, and Professor Fischer went around finding these noses
everywhere, drawing them in cafes and photographing Italians of
1938 whose noses, like eagles' beaks, seemed to him incontestably
Etruscan. He found them everywhere, but particularly at Chiusi,
the home land of Porsenna. And also at Volterra and at Tarquinii.
Very few at Perugia. And none at all at Viterbo. Could it be,
the professor asked himself in all seriousness, that the history of
Viterbo, a city so long the subject of quarrels between Pope and
Emperor and overrun by so many foreign invasions, explains this
physiognomic upset and the disappearance of all aquiline noses?
But the echoes of this communication to the Berlin Academy of
Science had scarcely died away before an article in the review
23
Klio claimed that the fundamental and distinctive character of

the Etruscan race, and the proof of its oriental origin, lay in its
obesity. 8
The responsibility for this should be laid to Catullus and Virgil
who, without apparently having tipped each other the wink,
denounce the obesus Etruscus and the pinguis Tyrrhe'flus. 9 Catullus,
invoking the various peoples of Italy, places between the Umbrian
and the Latin of Lanuvium, 'sun-tanned and full-toothed' the
'obese Etruscans'. Virgil, in more elevated tones, describes a
sacrifice celebrated to the music of a flute when 'a gross Tyr-
rhenian blew upon the ivory instrument near the altars'. More-
over the sarcophagi of the second and first centuries would
provide our poets with an appropriate plastic commentary. They
represent the dead man reclining on one elbow with a wine-cup
in his hand in the attitude of someone at a banquet and in these
figures the sculptor's eye for realistic detail has not overlooked,
indeed has rather exhibited with a kind of implacable complacency
as it sags over the robe's wide-open panels the plenitude of a
majestic corporation.
Similarly, certain scholars have claimed that primitive Etrus-
cans, judging by the emaciated proportions of the effigies on the
sarcophagi at Cerveteri, were extremely skinny, and that they
were succeeded later, following ethnic transformations and social
revolutions which allowed the autochthonous population to
reassert themselves, by the stout, stocky form of the Italians.
Other scholars were amazed to discover on steles and ancient
bronzes Etruscans with squat bodies: these, they claimed, were
the authentic Etruscans, shipped straight over like a host of pot-
bellied Sileni, from Caria in Asia Minor, while the elegant slim-
ness of the figures at Cerveteri were thought to reveal, in southern
Etruria, the existence of a distinct race, the Pelasgians which
were claimed to have come from Crete and the Grecian Islands.
As if the squat and the slim forms of the human body had not
existed simultaneously or alternately - as has long been proved -
in the vagaries of the Ionian style! But this did not prevent
Ernst Bux, in 1942, from attributing to the Etruscans a 'square
stature' which he was pleased to distinguish in the Emperor
Vespasian, born of an incontestably Sabine father but of a mother
who perhaps was Etruscan; a stature which moreover, as he saw
24
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
fit to remark, has been preserved to the present day in half the
population of Tuscany.
But let us leave these incongruous theories and return to the
obesity of the Etruscans: we cannot ignore the evidence of the
poets, above all when it is confirmed by obviously contemporary
funerary representations. But has the poets' testimony not been
overrated? In the excellent catalogue which Reinhard Herbig
collated on these later Etruscan sarcophagi, 10 we have found only
a small number, three or four, which show this peculiarity. Even
here, distinctions must be made. One of them, corning from San
Giuliano near Viterbo, is all the more impressive because the figure
is lying on its back and the monumental stomach, culminating in
the centre, rises from the body in proud independence. It was
thought to be a woman who had died in pregnancy. But it is
more reasonable to take into account a tendency towards stylistic
deformation which the Etruscan sculptors of that period were
fond of displaying, and which, achieving a geometric simplification
of masses, has actually been called cubist: more exactly, it was
called stereornetric, because it sought to combine spherical as
well as cubic volumes. It is certainly from this school, so foreign
to the Greek taste and so contrary to the usual forms of Etruscan
art, that the sarcophagus at San Giuliano derives, in which it is
impossible to see a faithful representation of any individual.
Yet another, in the tomb of the noble Partunu family at
Tarquinii, shows stretched along the lid the body of an old man
whose flesh, in contrast with the hollow cheeks and deeply-
wrinkled neck, is soft and plump; but as M. Herbig rightly
remarks, this happens to many intellectuals at the end of their
days.
The only truly obese Etruscan is the one in the museum at
Florence. A big bag of flesh, he has been called, displaying his
rotundity before us with a sort of cynical innocence. A wreath
of flowers round his shoulders, a bowl in his outstretched right
hand, the golden seal-ring of the knights on the third finger of his
left hand, this man, aged about fifty or so, has a small head with
no hint of plumpness; the top of his head is bald but the temples
are still well thatched; his big, vague eyes are wide open, and his
mouth seems fresh and young. He does not seem to be aware
of his colossal embonpoint, but if he were to rise from his couch
25
several servants would be needed to support him. The nudity of

his navel, the centre of his world, is almost indecent, but he does
not care. By exhibiting a belly of generous proportions this
descendant of the ancient lucumones proclaims, without shame
and even with a kind of family pride, his satisfaction at leaving
this life with a full stomach, in death which preserves to the last
the appearance of a banquet.
But it is this very feature which gives the sarcophagus at
Florence its value and justifies to some extent the words of the
Latin poets. It does not show us the Etruscan as such, nor the
eternal Etruscan, but one Etruscan from the period of decadence,
one of those great Tuscan landowners whose political independ-
ence had been suppressed but whose social privileges had been
confirmed by Rome and who, administering from afar their
latifundia for which there was abundant manual labour, were
hencefonvard devoting their lives, in their Perugian or Tarquinian
palaces, to proud memories of past glories and to the pleasures
of dolce far niente and a well-laden table.
At the same period, in Rome, sumptuary laws were passed in
an ineffective attempt to compel moderation at table. Cato the
Censor deprived of their public horse those equites who were too
corpulent to ride. Attacking an obese Roman, he said: 'How can
the State make any use of a man's body which from neck to waist
is all belly?' 11 The satirical poet Lucilius used the whole range
of his Rabelaisian vocabulary to describe big eaters: mandones,
comedones, lurcones - gormandizer, glutton, guzzle-guts - who
stuffed themselves with legs of pork, with choice asparagus and
cauliflowers, with shrimps and giant sturgeon. And he ended
with the sarcastic invocation: Vfr:ite ventres! 'Ye bellies, I salute
you! ' 12 Meanwhile Laelius the wise, Scipio Aemilianus' alter ego,
was singing the praises of vegetarian frugality and the philosophical
superiority of sorreJ13 and itinerant preachers went about repeating
that gluttony was like Circe the enchantress, could change old
men into beasts and that a big belly is incompatible with an
active mind: 'How can they attain wisdom if their hearts are
crammed with filth and wine?"14 Thus Roman humour and
Greco-Roman ethics let loose their barbs and their condemnations
against obesity as a manifest expression of vice and as the Etruscans
for reasons which we shall examine later, had the reputation for
26
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
luxury and debauch, it was natural, as soon as their degeneration

began to provide a target, that they should appear in the ill-natured
eyes of their masters and rivals as the very embodiment of mollitia.
But this was more of a moral judgement than a physical portrait.
The Etruscan became known as obesus just as he was known
elsewhere as segnis or ignavus. \Ve shall return to this point.
ETRUSCANS AND TUSCANS

It now hardly requires much effort to dissipate the fog behind
which the stylizations of the ancients and the categorical spirit
of the modems have hidden the Etruscan type from us. In fact,
the thing that comes to the fore in the majority of portraits, as
soon as the authority of Greek models begins to lose its hold, is
a refreshing realism; a liking, shared by both artists and clients, for
a scrupulously exact representation of individual features and of
the smallest and most private details. The man who had a
sculpture made of himself to decorate his sarcophagus no doubt
insisted first and foremost on a good likeness, down to the last
wart, because it was his fervent hope that he would live on in
this other self of stone or terra-cotta. The sculptors themselves,
leaving to the Greeks the marble which lends itself to idealization
and noble effects, had learnt their trade by modelling common
clay which they worked not with bated breath and with prudent
chisel as did the sculptor his marble, but with a freedom of move-
ment and improvization which enabled them to seize the individual
look, the typical gesture; and this freedom of treatment was
extended to their bronzes and even to their sculptures in alabaster
and travertine.
A striking example of this general tendency is given us by a
school of vase-painters which flourished at Volterra in the third
century; these painters took a mischievous pleasure in ornamenting
the flanks of their vases not with the idealized, dreamy profiles
suggested by Greek models but with sketches, almost caricatures,
done in a few brush-strokes with a proletarian vigour, of pros-
perous citizens seen at the market or taking their evening stroll
along the corso: the. fiery-eyed girl with the candid face, the shrew
with pinched nostrils, the self-satisfied sporting type, the frosty
intellectual, the round-cheeked boy and the old lady with her
head-scarf tied round her neck and under her chin; the latter was
chosen by historians of Etruscan ceramics as representative of

one of the painters of that particular school, who is termed the
Nun-painter. 15
So that if one looks at this gallery of portraits which are as
true to life as any, one finds a great diversity of human types and
faces, delicate or vulgar, energetic or sluggish, cunning or stupid,
and on which nature has inscribed all possible psychological
combinations. And this race has physically nothing which makes
them appear foreign to us, nothing which might inspire in us a
feeling of difference, attraction or repulsion such as we experience
at the sight of certain peoples; and they have nothing of the
accepted 'oriental' appearance. In fact, once the orientalizing
masks have been torn away, they appear as present-day Italians,
and give an almost hallucinating impression of consanguinity
with the inhabitants of the peninsula. There is not one Caliph
of Baghdad, not one Merchant of Venice among them: instead,
they are Tuscan peasants, condottieri, Roman priests and emperors,
young Bonapartes; and, on an urn from Volterra which shows
us two happy sixty-year-olds, we might be looking at Ovid's
Philemon and Baucis or Giuseppi Giusti's Taddeo and Vener-
anda. Therefore there is nothing to stop us, as we wander in
imagination through the streets of Tarquinii and Veii, from
lending our visions of their former inhabitants the same physical
types as we see today among the strollers along the Lungarno.
One last trait completes the illusion: the women were consider-
ably smaller than the men. 16 Their skeletons have been measured
and compared: the medium height for men was I m. 64., and for
women 1 m. 55. It is comforting to know that the signs of
gynaecocracy which we shall mention later did not mean that
the women had the stature of guardsmen, that a capable woman
like Tanaquil, though she might dominate her husband tempera-
mentally, did not crush him with her superior physique, and
that Tarquin, when he spoke to Tanaquil, had to bend his head
a little towards her.
LIFE-EXPECTANCY OF THE ETRUSCANS

After these remarks about the physical constitution of the Etrus-
cans, it may be of interest to make known a few unpublished
facts about their expectancy of life. Demographic studies are
28
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
now in full swing and these can attempt an explanation, by their

new methods, of population problems in the Greco-Roman world.
Attempts have been made to evaluate 'the expectancy of life at
birth' in Egypt, North Africa, Spain and at Bordeaux: document-
ary evidence is provided by funerary inscriptions which very
frequently indicate the dead person's age. 17 We have large num-
bers of Etruscan epitaphs. What can we learn from them on
this subject?
We have not used in this survey those texts which transcribe in
letters the names of numbers. The correct interpretation of these
is still in dispute, and though etruscologists have now reached
some measure of agreement in establishing the sequence of the
first ten numerals - thu, zal, ci, huth, mach, sa, cezp-, semph-,
nurph- and zar, - there is still some doubt concerning the respec-
tive values of huth and sa, four or six, and of cezp- and semph-,
seven or eight. 18 Now as the names of the tens, from thirty to
ninety, are formed from the units from three to nine, the use of
these inscriptions (about twenty in all) might risk an error some-
times multiplied by ten. Did Ramtha Matulnai die at the age of
forty-five or sixty-five? 19 Did Larth Tute die at the age of sixty-
two or eighty-two? 20 There is no way yet of being quite sure.
But we have at our disposal some one hundred and thirty
funerary inscriptions in which the age of the dead person is
indicated in numbers and here no doubt is possible. Nevertheless
we have disregarded those in which worn stone or cracks have
made interpretation uncertain. That leaves us with one hundred
and thirteen, sufficient to help us towards some conclusions.
These one hundred and thirteen inscriptions are of late date:
they belong to the last two centuries of the Etruscan world, from
about 200 to 50 BC. They nearly all come from Tarquinii and
Volterra, the only two towns where the habit of indicating age on
epitaphs was widespread. But within these limits, they bring to
life a numerous population, of varied and healthy types, and in
which all ages and all conditions of man are represented.
There is little Ravntza Un'nati, daughter of Arruns, aged two,
little Sethre Ceisinies Masu (in Latin, Caesennius Maso), who
lived to the age of three, and little Agatinia Annia, daughter of
Lucius, who died at the age of four. They are so touching, those
diminutives with their tender, caressing note (Agatinia, and
Ravntza from Ravntu), as is the dignity with which those babies

already bear all the onomastic attributes of grown-ups - gentilicial
name, sometimes a cognomen, and then the name of the father
who recognized them as his own. 21
Beside these 'premature dead' for whom Virgil's hell and pre-
sumably the Etruscan hell also contained a limbo, we see the
venerable Larth Vestarcnies moving slowly towards a tomb laden
with honours; he died at the age of eighty-four, not very different
probably from his compatriot - though there were three centuries
between them - of the same name and perhaps the same family,
the consul Vestricius Spurinna, whose green and smiling old age
has been described by Pliny the Younger. 22 Between these two
extremes come children, about thirty young men and women
snatched away between the ages of twenty and thirty, in the
prime of life; then there are the proud, fulfilled mothers; and a
grandfather whose double success as a family man and as a
politician is marked by three stages: three sons, mayor of his
little town at twenty-eight, six grandchildren, died at the age of
sixty-six.
And in case it is thought that these documents illumine only
a limited aristocracy, let us add that a good number of them
relate to slaves or freed men. One of the greatest families in
Volterra was that of the Caecina, in which Cicero, at the end of
the Republic, found intimate friends whose religious knowledge
he praises highly, and whose political errors he excuses: they kept
a large number of servants whose epitaphs have their place in
this statistical survey. 23 (Not counting that woman called Larthi
Lautnei) who died at the age of thirty-three, and whose name
(lautni) expressly denotes someone of servile origin.) 24
What conclusions can we draw? The total number of years
lived by these one hundred and thirteen persons was 4,620, and
the average length of life was 40·88 years. The average length of
a man's life was 41·09 years; of a woman's, a little less - a fact
which is met with all over the ancient world - 40·37 years. Our
figures are considerably higher than that which is usually given
(twenty-five years) but they agree with conclusions recently come
to for other countries or towns: 45·2 for North Africa, 36·2 for
Spain, 35·7 for Gallo-Roman Bordeaux. Naturally they have only
an approximate value. They do not take into consideration infant
THE PHYSICAL TYPE
mortality and therefore perhaps should be reduced by what has

been reckoned as one-sixth. But we can appreciate their full
significance when we realize what striking proof they give of the
vitality of the Etruscan people even in the days of their decline,
when we remember that life-expectancy at birth round about
1800 in Europe was thirty years: today it has risen to sixty-five.
In Italy in 1900 it reached 44·2 years for men and 44·8 years for
women; and in 1950, respectively, 53·7 years and 56 years. 25
31
CHAPTER TWO
THE MORAL TEMPER
------- -·----~------- - - - - - - - - -- - - - - -
The gossip of Theopompus - The judgement of Posidonius -
The Roman view
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who had devoted critical reflections

and thorough-going researches to the Etruscans, does not say that
this people differed physically from others, but states that it was
distinguished from the rest of humanity by its morals. Should
we therefore believe that nature or history had dowered this race
with a peculiar moral temper which set it apart from the rest of
humanity?
We must treat with caution what the Greeks have to say on
this subject. They had never forgotten the state of desperate
enmity which had existed between them and the Etruscans who
had allied themselves with the Carthaginians in order to dispute
the Greeks' access to and mastery of the western Mediterranean.
The fear they had of Etruscan pirates, coupled with the cruelty
of the indigenous inhabitants, had long prevented them from
advancing further, and had set an impenetrable frontier to their
colonial expansion which in Italy stopped at Cumae, Pozzuoli and
Naples.
Doubtless the Greeks of Phocaea in Asia Minor had succeeded
in forcing the blockade and opened a route to the distant shores
of Andalusia and Provence, where, towards 600, they founded
Marseilles. But in 535 their maritime empire foundered at the
battle of Alalia (Aleria) off the shores of Corsica: the joint Etruscan
and Carthaginian fleets chased them out of Corsica and Sardinia:
the survivors took refuge at Marseilles or went to settle at Velia
(Elea) in Lucania; those prisoners who had the misfortune to fall
into the hands of the Etruscans of Agylla or Caere suffered a
32
!I
THE MORAL TEMPER
punishment which roused the wrath of the gods and froze the
blood of the Greek historians. They were conducted out of the
city, according to Herodotus, and stoned to death. 1
Other texts, taking their information from the same author,
described tortures even more abominable, which they attributed
to the Etruscan pirates in general, although Virgil held the
impious Mezentius, king of Caere, responsible: 'Shall I tell you
of his unspeakable slaughters? His savage, tyrannical acts? May
the gods bring them down upon his head and upon his race! He
went as far as to bind living people to dead bodies, hands against
hands, mouth against mouth, and these victims of a new form of
torture, drenched in pus and poisoned blood, died slow deaths
coupled in this wretched way.' 2
The image the Greeks formed of the Etruscans was a reflection
of the horror of those merciless wars and those monstrous cruelties
which seemed to reveal, in its taste for other people's sufferings,
not so much primitive brutality as sadistic refinement. And this
image was all the more dismal because it was coloured by jealousy
as well as by hatred. The Etruscans shared with the Milesians of
Asia Minor and the Sybarites of Greece the dangerous honour of
offering less fortunate rivals who willingly looked upon poverty
as a virtue the precocious wonders of a brilliant culture: the same
'weakness' or mollitia preyed upon all three peoples, who were
all accused of indulging in 'luxury and gluttony' and of joining in
a sort of league founded on a common love of pleasure. According
to the Sicilian historian Timaeus, all ills sprang from the woollen
mantles of Miletus: 'The Sybarites wore mantles made of wool
from Miletus, and from this sprang the friendship between the
states. The Sybarites loved the Etruscans above all the other
peoples of Italy and among those of the Orient had a special
preference for the Ionians, because these, like themselves, were
fond of luxury.' 3 When Sybaris was destroyed in 510, all adult
Milesians shaved their heads as a sign of mourning.
Apart from these moralistic considerations, it has long been
established what the economic reasons were that led to the
Milesians, Sybarites and Etruscans getting to know and like
each other. Sybaris was one of the principal ports of transit
through which Ionian merchandise and culture made their way
to Tuscany. It certainly did not enjoy the exclusive monopoly
33
which has been attributed to it; the Chalcidian c1t1es of the

Sicilian straits, Rhegion and Zancle (Messina) were its strong
competitors. 4 It is no less certain that the Sybarites and the
Etruscans enjoyed a mode of life of which only the less honourable
aspects were remembered because of the malevolent exaggerations
of rivals.
THE GOSSIP OF THEOPOMPUS

It so happens that, by a great stroke of misfortune, the picture
of Etruscan manners has been painted, ne varietur, by a writer as
false-tongued as he is eloquent, Theopompus. He was writing
in the middle of the fourth century. Etruscan maritime power had
died out a century before, under the attacks led by Hiero of
Syracuse in the waters round Cumae. The danger this fleet had
represented to the Greeks was long past: it was now permissible
to laugh at this detested, envied and vanquished enemy. Now
Theopompus, whether he was writing about Athenian dema-
gogues, Persian tyrants or barbarian kings had usually, as Cor-
nelius Nepos has well said, 5 the wickedest tongue in all literature
(maledicentissimus): he was particularly fond of scabrous anecdotes
and bits of spicy gossip. But his malicious falsehoods have been
accepted as authoritative. They were piously collected by the
philosophers and historians, by grave Aristotle 6 and romantic
Heraclides Ponticus, 7 and by that Timaeus of Taormina8 whom
Nepos also ranks among the most wicked-tongued of authors.
Let us cast a glance, though not one of total credulity, at this
fragment of Theopompus which Athenaeus transcribed word for
word in his Learned Banquet. 9
'Theopompus, in Book XLIII of his History, says that the

Tyrrhenians possess their women in common; these take great
care of their bodies and exercise naked, often along with men,
sometimes among themselves; for it is not shameful for them to
show themselves naked. They sit down to table not beside their
own husbands but beside any of the guests, and they even drink
to the health of anyone they please. Moreover they are great
wine-bibbers and very beautiful to behold. The Tyrrhenians
bring up together all those children that are born to them,
heedless of who their father may be. These children live in the
34
THE MORAL TEMPER
same manner as their protectors, passing the most of their time

in drinking and having commerce with all the women indiffer-
ently. There is no shame for a Tyrrhenian to be seen committing
a sexual act in public or indeed submitting to it, for this too
is a custom of the country. And so removed are they from re-
garding the act as shameful that when the master of the house
is engaged in making love and he is called for, they say: "He
is doing so-and-so," referring to the act quite impudently by
its name. When there are gatherings of family or friends, this
is how they do: first of all, when they have finished drinking
and are ready for bed and while the torches are still lighted the
servants bring in sometimes courtesans, sometimes handsome
boys, sometimes their own wives. When they have taken their
pleasure of the women or the men, they make strapping young
fellows lie with the latter. They make love and pursue their
pleasures in full view of everyone, but usually surround their
couches with small frames of woven branches over which they
drape their cloaks. They certainly have much commerce with
women, but they always enjoy themselves much better with
boys and young men. The latter are in this country quite
beautiful to behold, for they live lives of ease and their bodies
are hairless. Moreover, all the barbarians who live towards the
west cover their bodies with wax and shave themselves; and
among the Tyrrhenians there are even many establishments
and practicians for this purpose, as common as barbers in our
own land. When they go there they lend themselves to the
work without any reserve, without having any shame of being
seen, even by passers-by.'
THE JUDGEMENT OF POSIDONIUS

We shall see later how much to credit of this libidinous chatter,
but for the moment it would be as well to counter it with the
evidence supplied by the philosopher Posidonius of Apamea who,
at the end of the second century, had brought back from his long
voyages in the west a much more equitable view of Etruscan
manners: at that time the old naval rivalry which had for so long
disturbed the judgement of the Greeks was no more than very
ancient history; and Posidonius' was a mind of a quite different
class from that of Theopompus. This Stoic had no special
35
liking for soft living and luxury, which he condemned very

severely in the towns of his native Syria. But he knew the right
way to look at things, could dispose under a subtle lighting the
facts of virtues and vices and here and there was able to dis-
tinguish causes from effects. This is what Diodorus Siculus,
writing under Caesar, gives us of that intelligent report: 10
'The Etruscans, who formerly were distinguished for their

energy, conquered a vast territory and there founded many
important towns. They also disposed of powerful naval forces
and for a long time enjoyed mastery of the seas, so much so
that the one which washed the western shores of Italy was
called by them the Tyrrhenian. They perfected the equipment
of their land forces by inventing what is called the trumpet,
which is of the greatest utility in war and was named by them
Tyrrhenian; they also devised marks of honour for the generals
who led them, assigning to them lictors, an ivory throne and
a toga bordered with purple. And in their houses they invented
the peristyle which is a great convenience in that it deadens the
uproar caused by their great crowds of servants. The majority
of these discoveries were imitated by the Romans, who per-
fected them and introduced them into their civilization. They
encouraged the progress of letters, science, nature and theology
and developed to a higher degree than any other people the
interpretation of thunder. This is why today they still inspire
those who are masters of nearly all the world (that is to say, the
Romans), with such deep admiration, and why they are
employed today as interpreters of the celestial signs. As they
inhabit a land fertile in fruits of all kinds and cultivate it
assiduously, they enjoy an abundance of agricultural produce
which not only is sufficient for themselves but by its excess
leads them to unbridled luxury and indolence. For twice a
day they have tables sumptuously dressed and laid with every-
thing that can contribute towards delicate living; they have
coverings embroidered with flowers and are served wine in
quantities of silver bowls, and they have at their call a consider-
able number of slaves. Some of the latter are of a rare beauty;
others dress themselves in clothes more magnificent than befits
their station of servitude, and the domestic staff have all kinds
THE MORAL TEMPER
of private dwellings: as have indeed most of the freed men. In

general they have abandoned the valiant steadfastness that they
prized so much in former days, and by their indulgence in
banquets and effeminate delights they have lost the reputation
which their ancestors won in war, which does not surprise us.
But what served more than anything to turn them to soft and
idle living was the quality of their land, for, living in a country
that produces everything and is of inexhaustible fecundity,
they are able to store up large quantities of fruit of every kind.
Etruria is indeed very fertile, extending for the most part over
plains separated by hills with arable slopes and it is moderately
well-watered, not only in the winter season, but also during
the summer.'
We notice that unlike Theopompus, Posidonius as a matter of

course attributed to the Etruscans the merit of manly courage
(andreia), as Virgil was to do later: Sic fortis Etruria crevit 'Thus
it was that valiant Etruria grew.' 11 He paid additional tribute to
their fertile genius and enumerated the many arts in which they
had deployed an incontestable vigour. Nevertheless he recognized
that they had degenerated, and under the influence of a too-
generous climate, had lost the energy for which they had once
been so highly praised. The image of the Etruscan passing
his time in drinking and loose living (anandroi) was therefore
nothing more than the image of irremediable decadence in a type
of humanity which was dragging out its days in the idleness to
which the Roman conquest had reduced it.
It is probable that it was in Rome itself that Posidonius had
formed this new opinion of Etruscan manners, one so different
from that which the philosophers and historians of Greece had
put about. For the Romans, after five centuries of intimate,
neighbourly interchanges, really knew much better a people from
whom they had borrowed so much. And though they might let
loose a satirical shaft or two - inspired by the Greek tradition or
by contemporary reality - on the loose conduct of Etruscan women
or the obesity of its musicians, it was not sensuality which seemed
to them the basis of the Etruscan character.
D.L.E.-4 37
THE ROMAN VIEW

When the Romans of the last years of the Republic thought about
the Etruscans, they had in mind the concept of a great power
brought low, of fabulous, vanished riches but above all - would
you believe it? - the virtues of a rustic folk, bronzed by working
in the fields and animated by a deep sense of piety. Livy said
they were 'a nation attached more than any other to religious
practices, because they excelled in their knowledge and conduct
of them'. 12 And the etymologists racked their brains trying to
detect in the name Etruscan (Etrusci or Tusci) a symbol which
would indicate this vocation. They related Tuscus to the Greek
thusia, which means 'sacrifice' 13 and had no doubt that caerimoniae,
'ceremonies', came from the name of the city of Caere. 14
Indeed few peoples have been more deeply obsessed by the
will of the gods. Their daily existence, public or private, was a
forest of symbols through which their diviners had the task of
guiding their anxious steps. In their detailed observation of
lightning or examination of the liver of victims, in the careful
interpretation of natural catastrophes or abnormal births, in all
the phenomena which were reported to them at all seasons these
diviners or haruspices read what the future had in store and some-
times were even able to influence the future when it looked
black. They had confided their secular experience to very learned
books, the Books of Fate 15 of \vhich numerous fragments have
come down to us in Latin, and their prestige even in foreign lands
was such that Rome, very early on, had habitually turned to them
when her own pontiffs and the oracle of Apollo at Delphi were
not able to clarify the future sufficiently. We shall return further
on to whatwas called Etrusca disciplina, 16 the sacred science of the
Etruscans, but something would be lacking, probably something
essential, in our presentation of the homo Etruscus if we did not
stress strongly enough this anguished preoccupation with the
supernatural.
One of the most celebrated tombs in Etruria is that of Fran<;ois
de Vulci, whose frescoes are perhaps not anterior to the beginning
of the first century before our era. On one of the walls of the
atrium there rises in profile the figure of a young man with black
hair, draped in a dark blue cloak ornamented with embroideries.
His name, Ve/ Saties, 17 is inscribed above his head: perhaps he was
THE MORAL TEMPER
the owner of the tomb, but at any rate he was certainly an actual
person. 'We are in the presence,' it has been said, 'of the most
ancient full-length portrait in European painting.' 18 On his left
crouches a dwarf, Amza, 'little Arruns' who holds on his left
hand, attached to a string, a bird which has been identified as a
woodpecker. The scene represents an augural consultation, caught
at a moment of extreme dramatic tension, the moment when the
bird is about to take flight. And already Ve! Saties is getting
ready to follow its course across a sky heavy with omens. We
are struck by the anxious expression in those lifted eyes and in
those parted lips: it is a gripping pictorial translation of that phrase
of Livy's: gens ante alias dedita religionibus.
An ardent and sombre piety which senses in every object a
hidden significance and which the ritual books load with the
weight of grand cosmic laws, that is the fundamental insight the
Etruscans give us about themselves and which Roman evidence
confirms; this insight offers a total contrast to the double image
that the Greeks had of the Etruscans and which, even taking into
account the exaggerations and deformations of spiteful minds,
must have contained some truth. We must assume that in the
Etruscans there was an underlying cruelty which is revealed in
the horror of certain of their tortures and in the persistence,
right into historical times, of their human sacrifices. On the other
hand they were overflowing with sensuality and enjoyed a liberty
of morals which was hardly controlled by the Roman conquest.
But these three contradictory notions might just be reconciled if
we consider them as characteristic of a humanity still deeply
engaged in the pre-hellenic reign of the unconscious and which,
despite the passionate interest which Greek civilization exercised
upon it, nevertheless remained, with tenacious obstinacy, a
humanity that reached back beyond reason and beyond wisdom.
The Etruscan world was able to receive with enthusiasm the
missionaries of the dionysiac religion, but it seems difficult to
imagine that the lessons of Socrates found favour with it. It
remained, despite itself, the faithful heir of ancient powers,
oriental if one wishes, or Mediterranean, but whose survival con-
ferred on its culture the characteristics of a brilliant archaism.
39
CHAPTER THREE
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
1 The Ruling Class - The Kings - The insignia of sovereignty -

The condottieri - The magistrates - Official processions
II The Servant Class - The host of servants - The peasants -
The slave revolts - The affranchised - Composition of the slave
personnel - The real condition of Etruscan slaves - The clients
THE RULING CLASS

Etruscan society is an archaic society which, while neighbouring
societies gave way slowly and not without resistance to the
necessity for transforming their structures, strove to maintain,
with a rigid conservatism, an organization which despite the
anachronism one can call feudal.
In Rome since the sixth century according to traditional
chronology, but doubtless later in reality, the copyhold system
attributed to King Servius Tullius had broken primitive duality.
Shortly after the beginning of the Republic, in 493, the lower
classes created tribunes to be responsible for their defence against
the oppression of the patriciate and who gradually assured them
access to all magistracies. Certainly the new governing class, the
Roman nobility, was trying to monopolize the magistracy. None-
theless it opened its ranks to representatives of Italian families,
and new men were perpetually being voted to the Senate. The
upward movement of the lower classes, though restricted, went
on without a pause. A rich bourgeoisie or middle class, the
Roman knights, came into being and made itself into a third
estate between the senatorial nobility and the humiles or lower
classes. But Etruscan society never knew, right up to its final
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
extinction, anything but masters and slaves, and that too must be
defined more precisely as domini and servi.
THE KINGS
The ruling class is naturally better known to us than the others:
writers of epic poetry and history confine themselves to those of
the upper class. And first of all, at the summit of the hierarchy,
there appear very early at the head of the peoples of Etruria the
kings, who, however, cannot be proved to have presided over the
origins of the race.
We know the names of several of these kings. Rome, during
its Etruscan period, was governed by the dynasty of the Tarquins,
who originated in Tarquinii. But no less celebrated was Porsenna,
king of Clusium (Chiusi) whom the common peril had elevated
to the rank of federal king of all the nation. After the expulsion
of the Tarquins, he tried to set them on the throne again, laid
siege to Rome and doubtless took the city, though pious legends
tend to draw a veil over this defeat. Horatius Codes, one against
a hundred, braved the enemy attack while the Sublicius bridge
was being cut, the bridge across which, coming from the Jani-
culum, the enemy intended to swarm into the city. Mucius
Scaevola, having crept into the enemy camp to kill Porsenna,
burned his hand in a brazier rather than reveal the secret plot.
Clelia, with a group of young girls whom the king was keeping
as hostages, escaped by swimming the river and they arrived back
home safe and sound.
In fact it is probable that the first Roman consuls were merely
prefects of Porsenna; 1 but these fine tales which enchanted the
annalists and have furnished subjects for innumerable Latin
prose compositions, contributed indirectly, right to this very day,
to the glory of Porsenna, whose memory was still so vivid at the
end of the Roman Republic, when Varro described the gigantic
tomb which he had had constructed under the town of Clusium,
with its interior labyrinth and its superposed terraces, supporting
enormous pyramids. 2 Alas! archaeologists have found no trace
of it.
But Caere had also had its kings, one of whom was the famous
Mezentius, 'the mocker of the gods', to whom Virgil, as we have
seen, attributed the responsibility for the monstrous deaths and
41
tortures which the pirates of Agylla inflicted on their prisoners.

A Latin inscription recently discovered at Tarquinii mentions,
though the mutilation of the stone prevents us from reading his
name, a king of the Caerites, Caeritum regem: 3 the dimensions of
the break did not allow the insertion of his name. At Veii, we
know of a whole series of kings: a certain Morrius, if the name
is not a corruption, Thebris, who is said to have given its name
to the nearby Tiber, Propertius, the same name as that of the
elegiac poet 4 - and the number of these kings proves that the
local traditions at Veii were no less imposing than those at Rome
concerning its dynasties. But above all - and here we tread firmer
ground - Lars Tolumnius, who, in 432, perished by the hand of
the Roman consul Cossus: the inscription relating to these spolia
opima, seized from an enemy chief, and which Cossus had hung
up in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius on the Capitol, was still
legible in the days of Augustus. 5 Now the existence of the gens
Tolumnia has been confirmed four times in the last thirty years
by epigraphical discoveries in the diggings at the temple of
Portonaccio at Veii, where, during the first half of the sixth
century, a Velthur Tulumnes and a Karcuna Tulumnes offered two
vases to the divinity, 6 and where later, in the third century, at a
time when Veii was subdued by Rome and Etruscan had been
replaced by Latin, a certain L. Tolonios offered up two more to
Minerva and Ceres: 7 the family, dethroned for the past two
hundred years, nevertheless still survived in faded grandeur
among the local gentry. One might cite again the obscure
Arimnestos, 'king of the Etruscans' who is known to us through
the ex-voto, a throne, recalling his munificence, in the sanctuary
of Zeus at Olympia. 8 And we must not forget that, judging by
the testimony of the poets he protected, Maecenas, the minister
of Augustus, was directly descended from royal ancestors, the
Cilnii, who had reigned at Arezzo. 9
We know besides the title and insignia of these kings. They
were called in Etruscan lauchme or lauchume, a word which has
been transcribed into Latin as lucumo, for: lucumones reges sunt
lingua Tuscorum; 10 but sometimes the Romans took this generic
title for a name of an individual, just as others take the Piraeus
to be a man. One Etruscan lucumo, who according to legend had
been the ally of Romulus in his war against the Sabines, was
42
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
called Lucumo by Cicero and Lygmon by Propertius. 11 Lucumo

was also the name which Livy gave to Tarquinius the Elder before
he settled in Rome and had himself inscribed there under the
three names of Roman civilian status, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. 12
This kind of confusion, of which we shall find another example
later on in the case of Servius Tullius, was probably encouraged
by the fact that after the downfall of the kings the same name,
Lauchme or Lauchume, or in a derived form Lauchumni, Lauchum-
snei, had in fact become, notably in the regions of Perugia and
Chiusi, a family name as banal as our own King and Prince. 13
Under the Empire there was a lady at Volterra called Laucumnia
Felicitas. Let us point out besides that even under the republican
regime the religious functions of the ex-king were carried out (as
in Athens they were carried out by the arkhon basileus and in
Rome by the rex sacrorum) by a magistrate who retained that
title (lucairce = regnavit 14 ) and who perhaps lived in a Regia
(locative lauchumneti in the ritual of Zagreb 15).
THE INSIGNIA OF SOVEREIGNTY

As for the insignia of royalty, they are enumerated by Dionysius
of Halicarnassus in the account he gives us of the conquest of
Etruria by Rome under the rule of Tarquinius the Elder. The
ambassadors of the Etruscan league then awarded him 'the insignia
of sovereignty with which their own kings were invested. They
brought him a crown of gold, a throne of ivory, a sceptre bearing
an eagle on the top, a tunic of purple with gold figuring and a
mantle of purple adorned with embroideries, similar to that worn
by the kings of Lydia and Persia'. 16 We shall have to come back
when we are studying Etruscan costume and its Roman survivals
to these two pieces, upper and lower garments of the royal robes,
and which we recognize as the tunica palmata and the toga picta
(sometimes decorated with a sprinkling of golden stars) of the
Roman triumpher who, on ascending the Capitol, sported for one
day the purple, the crown and the sceptre of the kings. With
slight variations, this text of Dionysius of Halicarnassus is con-
firmed by painted plaques from Caere, which are in the Louvre: 17
on these an Etruscan king, contemporary with the Tarquins, is
seated before the statue of a goddess and is holding a sceptre in
his left hand: his seat, lacking arms and back, is not the 'throne'
43
of which Dionysius incorrectly spoke, but the foldmg stool,

decorated with plaques of ivory, which was known in Rome as
the curule chair (sella curulis), on which sat the magistrates when
dispensing justice. He is wearing characteristic shoes, with up-
curving toes, the same as those we have already noted on the
sarcophagi of the same period from the same city. Finally he is
wearing, over a white, short-sleeved tunic which falls no lower
than his upper thighs (therefore quite different from the long,
flowing tunic of the oriental monarchs) a mantle of purple adorned
with embroideries, also very short, the sort of little toga that was
called the trabea.
But an even more definite manifestation of sovereignty was
provided by the lictors who, carrying fasces over their shoulders,
walked before the king. We are assured that each of the twelve
Etruscan kings had one lictor at his disposal, but when in the
event of war the supreme power was delegated to only one of
them, this king was entitled to all the twelve lictors with their
fasces. There were indeed twelve fasces brought to Tarquinius
by the Etruscans, along with other royal insignia, as tokens of
the submission, not of one particular city, but of the entire nation.
And we know that in the Roman republic each of the two consuls,
heirs of kings, had the right to twelve lictors.
This bundle of rods with an axe in the middle which the
Etruscans handed down to certain Roman magistrates as a symbol
of their coercive power or imperium is well documented among
the oldest records in their history. According to a poet of the
Flavian era, Silius Italicus, whose Punica reveal here and there,
amid much Virgilian imitation and rhetorical inflation, precious
traditions probably going right back to Cato's Origines, 18 it was
the Etruscan city of Vetulonia that invented the curule chair, the
toga praetexta (that is, with a purple border), the military trumpet
and the fasces:
Vetulonia, formerly the pride of the Lydian race, was the
first city to place the twelve fasces at the head of processions
and to add to them the silent menace of the axes. 19
Now by a curious coincidence it was at Vetulonia that there was
discovered, in a seventh century tomb, the most ancient example
of such fasces, an ex-voto in iron, in miniature proportions and
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
displaying this peculiarity, that, unlike the Roman fasces, the axe
in the middle of the rods is a double-headed axe, a bipennatc one. 2o
The a.xe had always played a considerable part in primitive
religions, and the civilizations of the Orient and the M editerranean
have given it a prominent place in their religious symbolism. In
it is concentrated, it has been said, 'all that is divine in a storm,
in human blood, in immolated victims'. But it was above all in
Crete that the double-headed axe had been the object of a general
cult: it was placed in tombs, dedicated in sacred grottoes and
represented at the side of gods in rites and ceremonies. 21
The bipennate fasces from Vetulonia, found likewise in a tomb,
cannot be dissociated from Aegean practices. Yet the association
with double-headed axes, which is even more closely connected
with the attributes of a Roman magistrate, suggests a significance
more political than religious: some leader, perhaps a king, having
died, his followers had wanted to bring back to his last resting-
place the power with which he had been invested in his life-
time.
But as if fate wanted to confirm a second time the evidence of
Silius I talicus, it was once more at Vetulonia that a contemporary
stele (end of seventh century) was discovered showing a bipennate
axe, flourished like a commander's baton in the right hand of a
warrior wearing a big-crested helmet and carrying a circular
shield. 22 And the inscription, one of the most ancient, if not the
most ancient of all Etruscan inscriptions, tells us the name of
this person, Aveles Feluskes Tusnuties, or in Latin, Aulus Feluscus
the Victor or the Terrible or the Valorous (the exact meaning of
his surname is uncertain), in memory of whom on~ of his brothers-
in-arms, Hirumina Phersnachs, Herminius of Perugia, had set
up a stele. 23
THE CONDOTTIERI
Here apparently it is no longer a question of rightful kings, but
rather of those condottieri who are glimpsed at the beginnings of
Etruscan history, roaming across the countryside at the head of
their bands of mercenaries, giving their services now to Perugia
now to Vetulonia, just as in the fifteenth century Erasmo de
Narni, called the Gattamelata, whose equestrian statue by
Donatello stands in Padua, brought victory over the Visconti to
45
the Most Serene Republic, which awarded him the baton of a

general.
If history tells us nothing about this Aulus Feluscus, the
prowess of other Etruscan captains, celebrated in epic verse,
has left a few traces on later art and literature. As late as the
Roman era people still remembered the two legendary heroes of
Vulci, the brothers Caelius and Aulus Vibennae.
Their historical existence, or at any rate that of their gens,
even has epigraphical testimony, as in the case of the royal
family of the Tolumnii. 24 In the same sanctuary at Veii, one
Avile Vipiiennas or Aulus Vibenna, towards the middle of the
sixth century- at a moment when archaeology proves that Vulci
was at the height of her power - consecrated a bucchero bearing
an Etruscan votive inscription. A century later, the same names,
Avles V(i)pinas, appear on a cup with red figures which an
Etruscan artist, apparently from Vulci, had painted in imitation
of an Attic cup from the school of Duris: it can be seen in Paris
in the Musee Rodin.
Caelius and Aulus Vibennae were accredited with numerous
exploits: on a mirror and on various funerary urns of the third
century they can be seen entering, sword in hand, the sacred
wood in which prophesies a certain Cacus who adopts the lyre
and the attitude of Apollo and whom they are going to force to
reveal their destinies. 25 This destiny was to take them to Rome.
Scholars living at the end of the Republic even believed that one
of the seven hills, Mount Caelius, took its name from Caelius
Vibenna, who was said to have given assistance to one of the kings
of Rome, Romulus (others said Tarquinius) and as a reward
obtained the right to settle there with a colony of his own people. 26
A mutilated fragment of Verrius Flaccus, which stops just as it
is about to reveal an important secret to us, alluded to the arrival
of the two brothers in Rome and their appearing before Tar-
quinius. They were accompanied by a mysterious personage, of
whose name only the first three letters remain: Max ... This is
what the commentators have deciphered: Volci entes fratres
Caeles et A. Vibenna [e ... ad] Tarquinium Romam se cum Max
[. . . contulerunt]: 'The brothers from Vulci Caeles and Aules
Vibennae went to Rome to see Tarquin with Max .. .' 27
The Etruscan historians, if we are to believe the emperor
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
Claudius, 28 told a different story: it was Scrvius Tullius, whose

reign, by Roman tradition, comes between those of Tarquinius
the Elder and Tarquinius Superbus, who must have been in close
touch with Caelius Vibenna. He had been 'the most constant
friend of Caelius Vibenna and his inseparable companion in all
his adventures'. These, it appears, ended in disaster: Servius,
driven from Etruria 'with the remnants of Caelius' army', had to
go into exile in Rome and there had lived on Mount Caelius, which
he named in memory of his 'leader'. Thereafter he reigned, 'to
the very great good of the Roman State', under the name of
Servius Tullius, 'for in Etruscan he was called Macstama' or
Maxtama: he was the unknown person mentioned by Verrius
Flaccus.
Now one of the most dramatic episodes in the combats which
Caelius and Aulus Vibennae, aided by this faithful ally, had to
enter into and which is depicted in the wall-paintings in the
Frans:ois tomb at Vulci itself29 was the freeing of Caile Vipinas
or Caelius Vibennae, whose bonds were cut by faithful Macstrna
(Macstarna, Maxtarna). Beside them several warrior couples are
still fighting, and their names are inscribed above each figure:
Larth Ulthes or Lars Voltius, is slaying Laris Papathnas Velznach,
or Lars Papatius of Volsinii; Rasce or Rascius is slaughtering
Pesna Arcmsnas Sveamach, Pesius Arcumnius of Sovana; Avie
Vipinas, Aulus Vibennae himself, is massacring an adversary whose
name Venthical ... plsachs is mutilated but perhaps designates a
man from Falerii. Last, and not least, Maree Camitlnas, Marcus
Camitilius, is running his sword through Cneve Tarchunies
Rumach, Cnaeus Tarquinius of Rome, thus one of our Tarquins,
though the first name, Cnaeus, shows that he was not the Lucius
who is recorded in history. In any case, we notice that in all these
curious combats only the vanquished carry any indication of
their country. Caelius and Aulus Vibcnnae, Macstarna, Lars
Voltius, Rascius and M. Camitilius did not need, at Vulci, to
have their origins clearly stated. The others were the leaders of a
foreign coalition which was composed of contingents from
Volsinii, Sovana, Falerii and perhaps Rome. They had succeeded
for a while in holding Caelius Vibenna prisoner. But Macstarna
had arrived with Aulus at the head of a relief army and by reversing
the situation had saved his leader and his friend.
47
There is much more that could be said about this amazing man
Macstarna. According to Roman tradition, he had come to Rome
as an ally to place his strong sword at the service of Tarquinius;
but in the Etruscan version of events he was among the enemies
and indeed the murderers of Tarquinius. Then, at the end of
his adventures, he had seized one of the hills of Rome and by
means perhaps far from peaceful, the throne, whose vacancy goes
unexplained. It is clear that the Romans, in order to save face,
had tried (as they had so often done, for example in the case of
Porsenna) to disguise as benevolent concessions a blistering defeat.
But for the Etruscans Macstama was an embarrassing hero whom
they allowed only to play the part of a Pylades. This was because
at Vulci he was still a foreigner, as his name, of Latin origin,
proves.
In fact, this has long since been recognized: Macstrna, the
original spelling on the Franc;ois tomb, is no other, if one takes
away the final -na, the usual gentilicium suffix,* then the Latin
substantive magister: Etruscan does not stress, or stresses irregu-
larly, the interior vowels, and in its orthography confuses the
voiced guttural g with the unvoiced guttural c: Macstrna is
mag(i)st(e)r-na. 30
Here the Etruscans have made the same mistake as the Romans
did when they took the title 'lucumo' to be the name of a person.
They transformed into a proper name that was in fact the title of a
Roman or Latin magistrate. For in Latin the word magister,
'master' (and magistratus is directly derived from this), originally
meant various 'magistratures'. In classical times there was still
the magister equitum, 'master of the horse', who was the dictator's
adjutant; but it is not so widely known that the dictator was
originally called magister populi, 'master of the people'. It has
been supposed, 31 not without reason, that Macstarna, whom
historians identify with Servius Tullius, owed his legendary
prestige to the fact that he had come forward as the first dictator
in the Etrusco-Roman world - one of those plebeian, revolutionary
chiefs who, when the monarchial regime in Italy as in the whole
of the Mediterranean was tottering on its foundations, rose into
*The gentilicium nomen is in Latin the family name (gens) which, preceded
by the first name and followed by the surname or cognomen, forms with these
the tria nomina or three names under which a citizen is registered: the Etruscan
system of names is more or less the same.
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
prominence as the bearers of a new ideology, as the men who

unthroned kings, as the liberators of the people on the threshold of
the republican age. Is he really the one for whom the Roman annals
have made a place between the two Tarquins, at the end of their
gallery of kings? In defence of this identification it is pointed
out that Servius Tullius, whose very name evokes a servile (or
foreign) birth, was held to be the founder of all republican
Rome's democratic institutions and the man who, in the words of
the tragic poet Accius, libertatem civibus stabiliverat, 'had estab-
lished the liberty of the citizens'. And indeed from then on,
from the end of the sixth century, the whole of central Italy, in
Rome, but also in Tusculum in Latium, in Tarquinii in Etruria,
in Assisi among the Umbrians, was to undertake, in peace
and in war, a common laboration of the political forms of the
future.
THE MAGISTRATES
Henceforward texts and monuments allow us to perceive ever
more clearly the outlines of an aristocracy very jealous of its
privileges and intent on retaining the government of the city. 32
The authors mention several times those whom Livy designates
as principes, 'the great ones'; they constitute a class (ordo) called
upon to deliberate in the Senate which, to the exclusion of what
might have corresponded to the comitia centuriata or comitia
tributa of Rome, is the one political assembly of the Etruscan
state. They elect among their members a princeps civitatis who,
having replaced the king, fulfils the functions of president of the
republic and is elected annually; to assist him he has magistrates,
also elected annually, composing a collegium which recalls that
of the Nine Archons in Athens. Epigraphy illuminates a little
the gaps left by historians concerning these magistrates' titles,
careers and the special privileges which certain of them enjoyed.
It acquaints us with about forty cursus honorum, often very
complicated, with the enumeration of diverse charges whose
significance and connexion we are beginning to understand.
It must be realized that these inscriptions are generally fairly
late, that the oldest of them go back no further than the fourth
century, and that the majority date from a period when, having
entered willy-nilly into the Roman alliance, the Etruscan cities
49
had seen their political responsibilities considerably reduced and

the victor's institutions contaminating their traditions. The
Etruscan principes still proudly displayed their medals, but this
was a mere relic of the past and doubtless all that remained to
them of powers which Rome, even in strictly municipal limits,
was tending to mix with her own magistracies. For example, in
picturesque Tuscania, which, between Tarquinii and Viterbo,
lifts its crenellated walls, its medieval turrets round two admirable
Romanesque churches, a third century sarcophagus celebrated an
illustrious personage whose name unfortunately is mutilated; but
he had been pontiff, prutanis and generalissimo of his country,
perhaps duumvir also in some institution, and he had died, laden
with honours but not with years, at the age of thirty-six! Never-
theless this attachment to the vanity of titles tells us something
about a period in which they carried their full weight.
Leaving aside many sacerdotal or administrative dignities which
are still no more than names to us, let us turn our attention to
those magistracies which seem to have been accorded special
prestige, because they implied effective participation in the
government. There has indeed been discovered in Etruscan a
family of words derived from the root zil- which signifies 'to
govern': zilc or zilath is, like the Latin magistratus, the magistracy
or the magistrate; zilachnve, zilachnuce mean, in the perfect,
'has exercised the magistracy of zilath'. Several zilath devoted
themselves to the governing of the city; their numbers are un-
known to us, but they worked together in the sort of assembly
which we have compared to that formed by the nine Athenian
Archons. The jurisdiction of several of these was sometimes
clearly defined: just as in Athens distinctions were made between
the king-archon, the archon polemarch, the archon eponymus and
six undifferentiated thesmothetae, here we encounter a zilath
who was so to speak a minister of religious affairs, another con-
cerned with the protection of commoners, a third who was
perhaps entrusted with the interests of the nobility. Certain
zilath bore the particular title of maru, which we find, with various
meanings, in the institutions of other Italian peoples, notably
among the Umbrians of Assisi and Foligno, and which furnished
the Mantuan, Virgil, P. Vergilius Maro, with a cognomen inherited
from the Etruscan traditions of his native city. The maru were
50
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
both priests and magistrates and they have been equ;ted in

certain respects with the Roman aediles or town councillors.
Finally the president of the group of zilath was sometimes
designated by this one name, as a zilath properly speaking, and
sometimes by the term purth or purtlme, which perhaps comes
from the prutanis of the Greeks: this was the first zilath, or one
might say the first minister, and in the interpretatio Latina the
Romans translated it as praetor, that is, in the old sense of the
word, the chief of State.
Such were the principal magistracies within the city. But on
the national level, when the twelve peoples of Etruria met in the
federal assembly, they elected as head of their league a supreme
zilath, a fact given epigraphical authority in the denomination
zilath mechl rasnal, that is, zilath of the Etruscan people (we
know that Rasenna was the name which the Etruscans called
themselves in their own language): until the end of the Roman
Empire there were praetores Etruriae.
Proceeding from these elementary data, the epigraphists were
able to decipher some cursus honorum which bring to life a number
of brilliant careers. An inscription from Vulci tells us that Larth
Tute, son of Arruns and of Ravnthu Hathli, had been zilath
seven times, having been purth, that is, president, once, and that
he died at the age of seventy-two. 33 Another, probably his son
Sethre Tute, son of Larth and of Vela Pumpli, had been zilath
and had died at the age of twenty-five, during the year in which
he was president. 34 We can see from these two examples that
one could hold the same magistracy several times, and reach
very high positions at a very early age.
An inverted cursus, that is, enumerating the facts in descending
order, beginning with the most recent and most distinguished
offices, was lately identified as: . . . Larisa! Crespe Thanchvilus
Pumpnal clan zilath mechl rasnas marunuch cepen zilc thufi tenthas
marunuch pachanati ril LXIII. 35
This Crespe, whose first name we do not know, son of Laris and
of Tanaquil Pumpni, had been: I. marunuch pachanati, that is,
maru of the brotherhood of Bacchus; 2. zilc thufi, either zilath for
the first time, or first zilath; 3. marunuch cepen, titular head of
some public religious office; 4. zilath mechl rasnas, president of
the Etruscan league. He died at the age of sixty-three.
OFFICIAL PROCESSIONS
The number of examples could be greatly increased; those which
we have given will at least have given us a glimpse of the workings
of the complex machine. But we shall see it portrayed in even
more concrete fashion if we add to these epigraphic testimonies
the pictorial commentary offered by sepulchral bas-reliefs and
paintings. 36 Indeed a good number of sarcophagi, on whose lids
are stretched the effigies of the defunct ones, display, above the
epitaph which pays tribute to their grandeur, the funeral cortege
conducting them to the Great Beyond. But these zilath and
maru and purth have no desire to meet the infernal divinities
wearing the simple clothes of everyday life. Their last journey,
preserved in stone for the edification of posterity, must have the
solemn aspect of a triumphal procession, and they must proceed
beyond the grave bearing the insignia and surrounded by the
escort befitting their rank. So one sees them - on the nenfro
sarcophagi of Tarquinii, on the alabaster urns of Volterra and
on a few remnants of fresco - mounted on a chariot of ceremony
to which are harnessed two or four richly caparisoned horses:
they wear the tunic and a sort of toga, and, on their heads, a
crown still retaining touches of gilding. Behind them march
servants carrying baggage, not just the bag containing items
necessary for a journey but also the great register, the writing
tablets, the cylindrical boxes for holding rolls, symbols of their
administrative functions, and above all the curule chair on which
they are majestically enthroned, and, who knows, may still be,
among the judges of the infernal regions.
Even more impressive is the front of the procession. That is
usually where there parades a band of musicians blowing enor-
mous horns and long, straight or curved trumpets accompanied
on occasion by a player on the cithern or the flute. Then there
come those who are given the task of clearing the way for the
magistrate's chariot: first an apparitor, in Latin a viator, holding
in his right hand one of the symbols of power, a lance, or else
holding horizontally, pointed forward, a baton to keep the crowd
at bay; then come the lictors, in varying numbers, most often
two, sometimes three and even four. So far it has been impossible
to define the connexion which perhaps existed between this
number and the importance of the magistracies held by the dead
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
man. But this does not alter the fact that these lictors arc, in the
Etruscan republics as in Rome, the descendants of those who, as
we have seen, headed the king's procession. Only the fasccs
which they carry on the left shoulder, as the traditional insignia
of his imperium, appear here always lacking the axe which origin-
ally was inseparable from its bundle of rods.
Is this, as has been surmised, because the Roman conquest
had reduced the Etruscan magistrates' powers of coercion and
that the visible symbol of their dominion over the life and death
of citizens had been ended? In Rome, too, the consul P. Valerius
Publicola was credited with the passing of a law in 509 which
allowed any Roman condemned to death to make an appeal to
the people and with the symbolic act of taking the axes out of
the fasces: secures de fascibus demi iussit. 37 In reality the law de
provocatione is not anterior to 300: after that date the lictors of
Rome carried, within the walls, where the sovereign rights of
magistrates ended, only fasces without axes. It is interesting to
note that those in Tuscania did the same, probably as soon as the
third century.
Moreover certain reliefs at Volterra which are sculpted in an
alabaster that lends itself to a more precise rendering of details
show in addition to the fasces a thin wand carried by the lictors;
it might also be a lance, and they seem to be endeavouring to
keep it balanced upright in front of them, like a candle, either
in the free left hand or in the right hand already carrying the
fasces. Now this attribute, loaded with a significance which
escapes us now but whose slightness compensates for its practical
uselessness, is found in late Roman scenes where an appeal is
being made to the public: the magistrate's apparitor, leaning
two rods on his left shoulder, holds vertically, with his right
hand, a lance, emblem of sovereignty. All this apparatus demon-
strates that the Etruscans, even after their fall, remained faithful,
at least in their funereal iconography, to the antique symbols of
their power.
But we can learn even more from these processions, not only
about the zilath and their ceremonials, but about the rites with
which Rome surrounded her own magistrates. For the Etruscan
symbolism of the imperium, from which we know that the Romans
had borrowed, was of an infinite richness; it included, besides
D.L.E.-5 53
those they retained, many insignia which they did not know how
to use. In the paintings on the tomb of the Typhon at Tarquinii.
and on that of the Hescana at Orvieto, 38 mingling with the crowd
of musicians and lictors, are heralds carrying over the left shoulder
a sort of caduceus whose points are twisted together, and which
has no likeness in the pictures we have of public life in Rome.
II
THE SERVANT CLASS

Below the masters, there was hardly any other class in Etruria
but the slave class, though this slavery, as we shall see, had its
degrees. The palaces in the cities, the farms in the countryside,
the mines and workshops in the industrial zones were swarming
with an immense slave population that emerges from the shadows
here and there in sculptured monuments and in the pages of the
historians.
THE HOST OF SERVANTS

First of all, a whole world of servants - that is what the familia
urbana was later to be called in Rome - peopled at Tarquinii and
Volsinii the dwellings of the rich. Among the Etruscans, this
familia was so numerous that the reason sometimes given for the
existence of the atrium or courtyard at the centre of the house
was that the master's apartments might be separated from the
commons and protected from 'the uproar caused by the host of
servants'. 39 From the sixth century one sees on the tomb frescoes
pictures of servants busy round the couches of banqueters: cup-
bearers jumping to re-fill cups, a young servant-girl fanning her
mistress, kitchen-hands kneading dough or putting dishes in the
oven; not forgetting the little boy bringing a chair, another
teasing a cat under the table, another fallen asleep curled up in
a corner. Fundamentally all these domestics resemble very closely
those who attended on the feasts of imperial Rome and these
paintings might be given an appropriate commentary, albeit
satirical and exaggeratedly low in tone, in a famous letter by
Seneca on how to treat slaves: 40 'An insolent fashion decrees that
at supper the master shall have a whole troupe of slaves standing
54
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
round him ... We are reclining on our festive couches. One slave
wipes up gobbets of spit from the floor. Another slices up rare
fowls: his expert hand, passing in a flow of precise movements
from the breast to the rump, carves off delicate slivers. The
young cup-bearer, attired like a girl, endeavours to belie his
age . . . Nevertheless the wretched slaves do not have the right
to move their lips, even to speak. The rod silences all murmurings.
No exception is made, even for involuntary sounds, fits of cough-
ing, sneezings, hiccups. They spend the whole night standing
there, silent and without a bite of food.' Here Seneca is showing
us the reverse side of the picture; the Etruscan world however is
sometimes presented in a more humane light. Certain slaves are
referred to by name, they have a personality. It would seem that
the living had believed they were giving pleasure to the dead man
by surrounding him beyond the grave with the attentions of his
own servants, and, as Seneca says, of his 'humble friends'.
They are also slaves who, in the same frescoes in the Tomb of
the Augurs or of the Triclinium, devote their talents to the
amusement of guests or participate in the funeral games held in
memory of the dead man: athletes and pugilists, acrobats and
jugglers, but above all flute-players, dancers and ballerinas,
perhaps actors. These, according to Posidonius, were more
sumptuously clad than befitted their station as slaves. 41 We shall
later describe these magnificent robes and cloaks whose brilliant
colours are known everywhere now through the vogue for Etruscan
painting; but those who wore them were still slaves.
Livy has a significant passage on this subject. The scene takes
place at the beginning of the fourth century, shortly before the
siege and destruction of Veii. The federal assembly of the twelve
peoples had met at Volsinii in the temple of Voltumna, to elect
the supreme head of the league and to celebrate its great annual
feast. One of the candidates was a nobleman from Veii, and it
was he who this time contributed more than any other to the
brilliance of the games. Nevertheless he was beaten, and his
defeat in the elections upset him so that right in the middle of
the spectacle he suddenly called in the artists 'who were almost
all his slaves': artifices, quorum magna pars ipsius senti erant, ex
medio ludicro repente abduxit. 42 Such an interruption of the sacred
ceremonies was a grave scandal: Etruscan piety never forgave
55
him. One can imagine, like an episode from some very ancient
Comic Romance, the return, all along the via Cassia, of the
melancholy procession of chariots and carts carrying the dis-
appointed troupe, with their glittering costumes locked away in
boxes.
THE PEASANTS
The country slaves were quite different, and doubtless very
numerous too; they were known as the f amilia rustica. Here we
must not let our judgement be led astray by what Plutarch tells
us of Tiberius Gracchus' impressions when, in 137, he crossed
Etruria to rejoin the Numantia front in Spain; 'he was struck by
the desolation of the countryside, where there lived, in the fields
and on the pastures, only foreign and barbarian slaves' .43 This
testimony concerning maritime Etruria - for Tiberius Gracchus
of necessity followed the coastal route, the via Aurelia - might
possibly be applicable in the case of the Tuscan Maremma and
the least fertile part of Etruria; but above all its reference is
temporally very restricted: it defines exactly the demographic
state, not only of Etruria, but of the whole of central Italy in the
second century BC, when, as a consequence of various political
and economic factors which the historians have brought to light,
the disappearance of the small rural holding and the development
of the system of latifundia had produced from one end of the
peninsula to the other a depopulation of the countryside and the
use of slave labour to guard the flocks. 'Foreign and barbarian
slaves': the expression is extremely apt, and in these two adjectives
we can identify, not only Greeks, but mainly Carthaginians,
Sardinians, Gauls and Spaniards whom the wars had cast up in
their thousands in the slave-markets. But in primitive Etruria
the population of the Etruscan countryside must have had a
different look.
Once again it is to Livy we are indebted for some very valuable
indications. At the end of the fourth century a Roman legion,
led by the consul Q. Fabius Rullianus, made its way through the
dense Ciminian Forest, in the region of Viterbo, and came out in
the opulent cornlands of central Etruria. The family traditions
of the Fabii paint their great man's prowess in glowing colours,
but behind these glorious pictures there are a number of authentic
ETHUSCAN SOC IETY
little details. It matters very little whether it was the consul's

brother or half-brother who, on a reconnaissance mission with a
single slave, triumphed over all the traps set by man and nature.
It is a story, but the details are astonishingly correct. This
Roman knew Etruscan, for he had been brought up at Caerc in a
gens with whom the Fabii exchanged hospitality.
In order to avoid being captured by the enemy, the two emis-
saries had borrowed native clothes. 'They set off disguised as
shepherds and equipped with rustic weapons, carrying each a
sickle and two hunting-spears.' And in fact when the rest of the
legion followed in their tracks they encountered only small
detachments of Etruscan peasants hastily mobilized by the local
lords: tumultuariae agrestium Etruscorum cohortes repente a prin-
cipibus regionis eius concitatae. 44
So when the Romans entered the Etrurian regions of Chiusi,
Arezzo and Perugia, they found a landscape of cultivated fields
lying between dense forests (cereals and timber have always been
the principal products of Chiusi); and, in this setting, a sedentary
population, very primitive and practising an economy as yet
undifferentiated as it was based on sheep-raising ('disguised as
shepherds'), on agriculture (the sickle for cutting corn) and on
hunting (the two boar-spears). But these peasants, if the alert
was given, owed military service to the local princes, and, carrying
their tools in the guise of arms, formed improvised troops whose
combat value seems to have been mediocre.
Dionysius of Halicarnassus gave these Etruscan peasants a
name which is merely metaphorical but nevertheless very accurate.
He was writing about the course of one of the legendary wars
between Rome and Veii, which the annals traditionally assigned
to the year 480 or thereabouts. Veii was in danger, and appealed
for help to the league of twelve. 'Reinforcements arrived from
all over Etruria,' says Livy.45 But the Greek historian, using the
same source material but writing more expansively, says precisely:
'The most powerful princes came from all over Etruria, bringing
with them their penestes.' 46
This name traditionally meant, in Thessalia, indigenous popu-
lations reduced to slavery by the conquerors after the Dorian
invasions: attached to the soil as the helots in Sparta, they were
compelled, in exchange for guarantees against violence and
57
eviction, to do agricultural labour and military service. Demos-

thenes tells us of a Thessalian noble, Menon of Pharsalos, who,
on the occasion of an expedition launched by Cimon against the
city of Amphipolis, had placed at the disposal of the Athenians,
besides twelve talents of silver, 'three hundred horsemen recruited
from among his penestes'. It was the same situation as that in
which the lucumones called together their vassals to the defence of
Veii. In comparing the latter with the penestes of Thessalia,
Dionysius made quite clear that they were free men whose
dependence on their lords was based on clientela; 47 but he sug-
gested that, contrary to what went on in Rome, the Etruscan
masters treated their people with contempt, giving them degrading
tasks to perform, beating them and treating them as badly as if they
had been real slaves sold by public auction in the great markets
of Greece or Asia. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, though he up-
holds the thesis of the Etruscan people's autochthonous existence,
provides, in his account of the penestes, an argument in favour of
those who see in the serfs of the Etruscan countryside the des-
cendants of Villanovans exploiting lands (which they had to pay
rent for) that the invaders had seized from them.
When he reproaches the Etruscan princes with inflicting on
their penestes tasks unworthy of free men, we think of those
particularly arduous tasks, the digging of quarries and mines,
which were always, in antiquity, given to slaves. The marble
quarries of Luna (Carrara) were not opened before the end of the
Roman republic. But it is evident that the mining industry which,
in Populonia and in the Campigliese, was the foundation of
Etruscan power, had to fall back on a large amount of slave labour
and that the arms and tool factories could only work at full
stretch if they had at their disposal numerous f amiliae of metal
workers. (In Arezzo alone, these factories were able, in 205, to
equip the fleet of Scipio Africanus with three thousand bucklers
and as many helmets, fifty thousand javelins, gaesa* and long
lances, not counting the axes, spades and scythes.)
Juvenal describes the punishments meted out to those pampered
and indolent city slaves when they misbehaved. They were sent
into darkest Lucania to labour in the fields, or in Tusca ergastula,
(into the Tuscan slave prisons). 48 Here some scholars might be
•The gaesum was a sort of javelin, of Gaulish origin.
58
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
tempted to take ergastulum in its primary sense, that of the Greek

ergasterion, 'workshop', of which it is merely a modified transcrip-
tion. And certainly there must have been in Populonia, at the
mouth of the Po, and in the Etruscan campagna, ergastub of
this nature - hutments or vaults in which miners were locked for
the night, or labourers engaged in draining the marshes. llut the
life led in these places was so atrocious that 'ergastulum' became
a synonym for 'slave prison', in which there were prisoners or
vincti whose manacles were never loosed. Thus l\1artial, at the
end of the first century AD could write, not without rhetorical
exaggeration, that the latifundia of Etruria rang with the clanking
of innumerable chains. 49
THE SLAVE REVOLTS

As we have seen, literary texts furnish us with only rare and
uncertain evidence about the lower levels of the Etruscan popula-
tion. Nevertheless they insist upon the frequency and violence
of social disorders which, from the end of the fourth century,
agitated the most populous cities of Etruria: in Arezzo, 50 the
ostentation of the Cilnii, distant ancestors of Gaius Maecenas,
provoked an armed insurrection, and a little later revolts broke
out in Volsinii, whose mighty ramparts above Bolsena have been
identified by M. Raymond Bloch. 51 A similar revolution took
place in the mysterious Oinarea or Oina, which we do not know
whether to identify with Volterra, Orvieto or Volsinii itself: but
in the Mirabiles Auscultationes attributed to Aristotle, we have the
testimony, almost contemporaneous, of a third century Greek. 52
The fall of Volsinii was related by Livy in a book now unfor-
tunately lost; but several of his followers or abbreviators, among
them Valerius Maximus, Florus, Cassius Dio, 53 have preserved
for us the substance of his account, whose historical value, despite
moralizing intentions and peripeteia, is considerable.
Volsinii in 280 had had to submit to Rome. For obscure
reasons which Livy declared were the effects of lengthy indulgence
in soft living and pleasure but which also probably contained
elements of despair and disgust, the local nobility had lost interest
in the management of its affairs and had left the responsibility to
the slaves.
More aware politically, the Pseudo-Aristotle discerned in the
59
events which occurred in exact parallel at Oinarea, the threat of

tyranny which nobles of liberal tendency had hoped to avert by
relying on the slave class.
At any rate, the Volsinians had, in a hasty democratic evolution,
emancipated their slaves on a massive scale, and, in the absence
of those assemblies which in Rome served to express and canalize
popular opinion, had at once opened access to their senate for
the affranchised slaves. These had not hesitated to seize, by
trickery, the whole of the government. The Pseudo-Aristotle
declares that they exercised power in alternation every year.
The traditional account of Livy did not cover up the excesses
in which the mob had indulged: the new masters proceeded to
carry out land reforms and redistribution of property, forbade
the former free men to attend meetings and banquets (that is,
withdrew the right of free association), married the daughters of
their masters (that is, abolished those restrictions on the inter-
marriage of upper and lower classes which stayed in force in
Rome until the reign of Augustus). It is even added, though this
may be calumnious exaggeration, that they passed a special law
licensing their attacks on the modesty of widows and married
women and forbidding any young girl to marry a free man before
her virginity had been taken by one of the new rulers.
It was in these desperate circumstances that the nobles had
appealed to the Romans for help. And here the annalists' imagina-
tions were given free course. They related complacently the
arrival of secret ambassadors who insisted on being received by
the Senate in a private dwelling-house, so that none of the pro-
ceedings might become public. As bad luck would have it, a
Samnite, guest of the master of the house, concealed himself on
the premises, overheard the entire discussion and denounced the
plot. On their return the ambassadors were arrested, tortured
and executed.
That was in 265. Then the consul Q. Fabius Gurges was sent
to Volsinii, and, having skirmished with the army which was sent
out against him, laid siege to the city. He had been mortally
wounded and was replaced by a consul suffectus, * P. Decius Mus
who had to repel a vigorous attack from the besieged city. Its
*Consules suffecti was the title given to consuls who took the place of those
who died in office or were unable to carry out their commitments.
60
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
defenders did not give in until famine forced them to the followin g
year. The consul M. Fulvius Flaccus triumphed over the Vol-
sinians, de Vulsiniensibus, 5·1 on November 1, 264. The affranchised
men had been massacred in their prison, the surviving nobles had
their rights restored to them but were transferred to the site at
Bolsena. Volsinii itself was destroyed, and its two thousand
bronze statues gave Rome a new adornment.
THE AFFRANCHISED
In the preceding passages we have not concealed our sense of
being at a loss to explain precisely the bonds of dependence which
subjected the lower classes of Etruria to the aristocracy of the
principes. In fact, one hardly knows what name to call them by:
slaves, serfs, clients, affranchised men? 55 The ancients themselves
were reduced to approximations whose inexactitude they must
have been well aware of. The Greeks, avoiding the term douloi,
only used the expressions oiketai and therapeuontes, which in
their tongue actually signified 'domestics' and 'servants'. As if
the revolt at Volsinii could have been carried out only by kitchen-
hands and musicians! Only once, as we have seen, Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, dealing with country serfs, has recourse to a
metaphor which shows fairly clearly the inadequacy of the current
terminology: he had to go as far as Thessalia to find a word which
corresponded to the condition of those rural masses. So ancient
were the Etruscans, who resembled no one else! If it is per-
missible to apply to their penestes the definition which Dionysius
had given beforehand, they were free men but were treated like
slaves. Writing in Rome at the beginning of the Roman Empire,
Dionysius was unable to find in that disconcerting society the
juridical forms, well-known and clearly codified, of the mancipium,
or master's right of ownership of a slave as it was defined in
Roman law. If the legal status of rural labourers seemed to him
more like that of a client with regard to his patron, he could not
blink the fact that their real status was scarcely better than that
of the slaves. Such were the problems which the study of a strange
and archaic civilization set a historian accustomed to viewing
things in relation to the categories of his time and of his adopted
country.
Livy has fewer scruples, and does not hesitate to affix the
61
forthright name of servi to all and sundry - the peasant bands

who rose up in 196 against the landowners as well as the dancing
troupe of a lucumo. 56 And Valerius Maximus writes that it is the
servi who, imprudently admitted to the Volsinian senate, drove
their former masters from the government: this is a deceptive
abbreviation, missing out the intermediate stages of affranchise-
ment. Others, Orosius and Aurelius Victor, do not do this and
speak judiciously of libertini. 57 But here again a difficulty awaits
us: it is not certain that the affranchisement in Etruria was the
same thing or had the same effects as the Roman manumissio.
A small number of bilingual Etrusco-Latin texts have estab-
lished the equivalence of the Latin word libertus and the Etruscan
word lautuni, which is usually syncopated into lautni. A cinerary
urn from Perugia, for example, has inscribed on its lid:
L. SCARPVS SCARPIAE L. POPA, 58
which means Lucius Scarpus Scarpiae libertus popa, 'Lucius

Scarpus, freed man of Scarpia, victimary', the popa being an
inferior priest, the executioner who led the victim to the altar
and killed him by hitting him over the head with a mallet. This
man had been affranchised by a woman named Scarpia whose
gentilitial name he had taken.
On the body of the urn itself there appears:
Larth Scarpe Lautuni,
where the same person appears with his Etruscan first name
(Larth), his name derived from the name of his mistress, and
the qualification lautni of which libertus is the translation. So
one is tempted, in the very numerous Etruscan inscriptions
where the term lautni figures (or its feminine form lautnitha) to
translate automatically: Avle Alfnis lautni by 'Aulus, freed man of
Alfius', and Velia Tutnal lautnitha by 'Velia, freed woman of
Tutia'. 59
The origin of lautni is known: it is derived from the word
laut(u)n which corresponds exactly to the Latin familia. Now
f amilia, in good Latin, does not mean at all what is meant by our
'family': it meant first of all 'the community of slaves and servants
living under the same roof', then, by extension, 'the entire house,
62
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
master, wife, children and servants living under the master's

dominion'. 60
The sense of the words evolves by a perpetual and complex
movement of meaning; the familia, which at first comprised only
the slaves to the exclusion of the free members of the family,
ended by including only the latter, to the exclusion of the slaves,
while at the same time f amiliaris became coloured with moral
nuances and finally expressed the charm of intimacy. When
Seneca, in the letter we quote, congratulated his correspondent
on living familiariter, that is, living 'en famille' with his slaves,
because he invited them to dine with him, he was playing on the
two meanings, ancient and modern, of the adverb. A little further
on he writes: 'Will you at least remember how far our fathers
went in doing away with everything that could arouse hatred for
the master or cause the degradation of the slave: they called the
master the "father of the family" (paterfamilias); the slaves were
"the people of the family" (familiares).'
Etymologically, the translation of lautni would be f amiliaris,
that is, 'slave'. It is remarkable, and characteristic of the natural
incompatibilities dividing the two societies, that it should be
interpreted by our bilingual experts, at the moment when the
Etruscan world, drawing to its close, was abdicating more and
more its own personality, remodelling it on that of the conqueror,
in the sense of 'affranchised man', that is 'ex-slave'.
But the contradiction is perhaps not as profound as it at first
appears. For in Rome itself the affranchised man remained in a
state of dependence on his former master, whose first name and
surname he took as if he were his son. And though henceforward
he escaped the confines of his former f amilia, there are plenty
of tombs in which the master has reserved a place sibi libertis
libertabusque posterisque eorum, 'for him, for his affranchised
men and women, and for their posterity'. Among the Etruscans,
it seems, at least during the late period of the inscriptions we
refer to, the lautni occupied within the f amiliae, whose coherence
remained unaltered, a relatively privileged situation. This was
not the obscure host of slaves of the lowest rank, those who
barely had a name or a burial-place; they are at a fairly high level
in the hierarchy of the humble, having acquired through personal
merit or the favour of their master, the enjoyment of a measure
of liberty which, transposed into terms of Roman law, made

them Liberti. It is possible, indeed it is probable that this liberty
was confirmed by a juridical act of emancipation analogous to
the manumissio. The essential thing is that they did not leave the
f amilia, that they even constituted its essential element, and the
only one that mattered, the rest not being worthy of mention.
We have a fine example of this persistent solidarity in Etruscan
slave families in the following account which dates to 91 BC.
That year, threatening omens heralded the wrath of the gods,
offended, in the estimation of rich landed proprietors, by the
policy of agrarian reform in which the Gracchi, some forty years
before, had taken the initiative and which, so long excluded from
Etrurian soil, seemed about to strike it directly.
'In the land of Modena, two mountains clashed together
with a great noise, advancing and then retreating, whilst flames
and smoke rose up between them into the heavens, in broad
daylight, and from the via Aemilia a great crowd of Roman
knights with their familiae, and travellers too witnessed the
spectacle. The shock destroyed all the houses in the place and
killed a multitude of animals that were there.' 61
This account of an earthquake, as the Etruscan haruspices had
written it in their books, from which it had passed on to Pliny
the Elder, is admirable in its picturesque precision, and every
detail deserves a brief comment. Who does not know the via
Aemilia, the great Roman highway which, from Rimini to
Placentia, takes in the immense and fertile plain to which it has
given its name, Emilia? Anyone who has travelled along it, from
Bologna to Modena and from Reggio to Parma, through the fields
of maize and past opulent farms with their mulberry walks, with
the first ramparts of the Apennines to the south, where inviting
roads lead towards Tuscany, will have no difficulty, even though
modern culture has modified the landscape a little, in imagining
the scene ... The disaster he will situate in the valley of Frignano.
Here there were numerous villae which crumbled into ruins;
sheep-farming was practised on a large scale, and the Campi
Macri, near Modena, were famous woollen markets: those sheep
would be the animalia that were crushed and perished. And the
road is black with people. Here let us quote from Pliny's text:
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
spectante e via Aemilia magna equitum Romano rum f amiliarumque

et viatorum 11111ltit11di11e. Doubtless, as was natural, travellers
('viatores) passing by on foot, on horseback or in those carriages
which the Cisalpine Gauls had made widely popular in their
many forms, stopped to stare. But above all the local population
was there, comprising, significantly, only two elements, Roman
knights (equites Romani) and their people (familiae). Now these
Roman knights, in 91 BC, were no other than the descendants of
noble Etruscans who had become Roman citizens and whose
fortunes placed them in the rank of knight. They were still the
same rich landed proprietors, here raisers of sheep, whose pro-
perties were touched neither by Roman colonization nor by
Gracchian policy. And all round them stood compact groups of
people (no category of freed men having been mentioned at all)
which the Naturalist does not bother to divide into their various
elements: the familiae.
COMPOSITION OF THE SLAVE PERSONNEL

Fortunately Etruscan epigraphy helps us to make a deeper
analysis, and illuminates from within the darkest corners of
individual existences and the composition of these groups.
There was one of these, somewhere in the country between
Chiusi, Montepulciano and Lake Trasimene, whose funerary
inscriptions acquaint us with about fifteen of its members. It
was the alfni family, 62 whose name, despite its suffix, has nothing
specifically Etruscan about it: it was formed on the radical a/b-
in Latin, alf- in Osco-Umbrian, which signifies 'white'. One
encounters Albii and Alfii or 'Whites' throughout the peninsula,
and it is possible that the ancestor of the alfni arrived one day
from Umbria or Campania to seek his fortune at Chiusi.
In the last century before the Christian era, the paterfamilias
was cremated in a fine urn of travertine on which, for the first
time, his civil status was inscribed in Etruscan and in Latin:
Vl. Aljni. Nuvi. Cainal
C. ALFIVS. A. F. CAINNIA. NATVS. 63
In his native tongue he was called Vel Alfni Nuvi, with an
Etruscan first name and two names of which the second belonged
no more than the first to Etruscan onomatology. It was simply,
transcribed into Etruscan, a name derived from the adjective

novus, 'new', which was met extensively in southern Italy and
elsewhere: which confirms the connexions of the Alfni with a
region outside Etruria.
But the thing that reveals this person's fidelity to national
traditions is the mention of his mother Cainei, Cainal in the
genitive.
In order to have himself inscribed in the registers of the Roman
census, Vel Alfni Nuvi had exchanged his first name, decidedly
inassimilable, of Vel for the common one of Caius; he kept only
the first of his names and gave his father's first name in the
customary abbreviated form A(uli) J(ilius), 'son of Aulus'. But
he insisted, even in Latin, on retaining the name of his mother,
Cainnia.
Now the Alfni possessed a large and picturesque band of
servants; the epitaphs of certain of these, painted in red on urns
or pots, give us confused glimpses of their persons.
There were servants like Aule Alfnis lautni, or Aulus, the lautni
of Alfius. Venzile Alfnis lautni had been given a name which was
a fond diminutive of the first name Venel: this seems to betray
the affection of the master for the little slave born in his house
(verna). A tile, indicating a neighbouring ossuary, introduces
us to an Arruns Alfius who was a dyer, fulu, in Latin Julio.
There were female servants, like Vibia, lautnitha of Alfius, and,
in Latin, Alfia Q(uinti) l(iberta) Prima, or again that Larthi
Alfnis lautnitha Percumsnas, otherwise 'Larthi, lautnitha of Alfius,
wife of Percumsna', which is a name like 'Perconius' or 'Pergonius'.
The little terracotta urn which held her remains was found about
ten kilometres to the west of Chiusi, at Sarteano, where Larthi
had married and was buried beside her husband Vel Percumsna,
son of Arruns. Another, Sleparis Alfnis l(autnita) Achlesa, bore
a name, Sleparis, which was believed to be a transcription of the
Greek Cleopatra: but it is more likely to express one of the special
duties she had to discharge in the house; others were put in
charge of the crockery (urnasis), of the beds (hupnis) or of the
table (ahlchis). 64 But this lautnitha of Alfius was also married,
and had as her husband Achle, or Achilles.
This was not the only slave or freed man of Greek origin in
the family. A terracotta urn contained the remains of yet
66
ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
another laut11i of Alfius and whose name, Pilunice, is quite trans-

parently Philoneicos. A eippus preserved, in Latin, the memory
of Amethystus T. Alfi Hilari servus, 'Amethystus, sbve of Titus
Alfius Hilarus', servus being, as indeed was libertus, an approximate
translation of laut11i.
The entire slave onomasticology of inner Etruria, from Chiusi
to Perugia, is studded like this with Greek names easy to decipher
from their phonetic deformations and orthographic peculiarities:
a widespread name was Antipater (Antipater), Apluni (Apollonius),
Archa:::a (Arcadius), Atale (Attalus), Evantra (Evander), Herclite
(Heraclides), Licantre (Lycander), Nicipur (Nicephorus), Pherse
(Perseus), Philutis (Philotis), Tama (Damas), Tinusi (Dionysos),
Tiphile (Diphylos ), not forgetting several Zerapiu (Serapion) whose
Egyptian origin is at once evident. 65
But naturally maritime Etruria, if the epigraphical harvest was
as abundant or as communicative, would not speak another
language. At Caere, where a more precocious romanization had
brought about a general use of Latin but not the disappearance
of the ruling genies, what a lot of cognomina of Greek and oriental
origin we find in the large family of the Magilii, doubtless
descendants of the Macia or Macula who flourished already in
the days of independence! Philemon and Lais, Philip and Chelido
(the swallow), Hebene, black and precious as the wood she was
named after; and there is even a Jew, L. Magili L. !. Aciba,
whose surname was merely the transcription of the proper name
Jacob, in Hebrew Aqiba. 66
The sources of recruitment of this slave population, whose
numbers since the end of the third century had shown a massive
rise, were not so much provided by the raids of Etruscan pirates
as by the carrying-off of war prisoners by Roman generals. Of
150,000 Greeks whom Aemilius Paulus brought back in 167 from
his campaign in Epirus, most were sent to Tuscan ergastula; of
the 50,000 Carthaginians whom Scipio Aemilianus sold in 146
after the destruction of their city, a large number were doubtless
sent to Etruria where they may have helped to spread certain
agricultural techniques which the great Punic agronomist Mago
had described and which the Etruscan agronomist Saserna and
his son must have studied. We should have liked to discover
among the inscriptions in Etruria traces of Carthaginian slaves
and deformations of names like Hanno or Muthumbal with which

Plautus' Carthaginian has made everyone familiar. So far we
have had no luck. They are concealed perhaps under Greek names,
slave merchants having the tendency to make frequent use of
those appellations which were at a premium. Or they might even
have gone under specific Etruscan denominations, harmless first
names like Cae (Caius) or Aule (Aulus), and finally under the
curious Lethe, feminine Lethi or Lethia, which, it has been recently
proved was frequently used to designate persons of servile con-
dition, rather as in Latin the word puer was used to denote young
boy slaves - a sort of common name that remained attached to
the slave who used it as a first name, or even as a family name
which he passed on to his children. 67
If we cannot identify the Carthaginians and the Sardinians
whom Tiberius Gracchus doubtless encountered in large num-
bers along the via Aurelia, there are other 'strangers' and other
'barbarians' whose presence in Etruscan families is gradually being
revealed, and in an unmistakable way, by the analyses carried
out by researchers.
At the gates of Perugia there is a tomb in which an apparently
prosperous family had deposed the urns of at least nine of its
members: it is the Tomb of the Veneti, in Etruscan Venete. One
of these, for example, was called:
Se. Venete La. Lethial clan6B
which can easily be interpreted as:
Sethre (first name) Venete, clan (son) of Larth (Venete) and

of Lethi.
The eponymous ancestor of the Venete had certainly come from

the north, from the region of Este and Padua, where flourished
the people who have given their name to Venetia and Venice.
Horse breeders, merchants and sailors, the Veneti, whose religion,
art and language related to Latin are beginning to emerge in the
light of history, had succeeded, alone of all Cisalpine peoples, in
preserving their independence in the face of Etruscan colonization.
Livy, who was one of them, never misses an opportunity to recall
this with pride. But they had not surrounded themselves with an
68
ETRUSCAN SOCIFTY
unbreachable wall: exchanges, either through war or through

peaceful relations were inevitable. At Este there was a certain
Voltiomnios (Voltumnius ), a Carponia and other Etruscans. 6!i
Similarly there were Venete at Perugia, and also at Chiusi and
Bomarzo (Polimartium), for whom in former days the ethnic
name was used as a personal name.
Had the first Venete at Perugia come of his own free will to
settle? It is possible that he had been a prisoner of war and a
slave, and later affranchised, either he or his descendants. In
any event, nothing of the Venete in this tomb recalled their
humble origins. But the father of Setlzre Venete, Lartlz Venete,
had married Letlzi, whose name betrays a more or less indirect
descent from slaves. We shall meet her a little later under another
aspect of the f amilia.
Epigraphy gives us another glimpse, at Perugia or Chiusi, of
other Veneti whom the linguist recognizes by their characteristic
names: Ustiu, Autu, Tita; and along with them, originating at
the other extremity of the Cisalpine region, some Ligurians: a
lautni bearing the name of Lecusta (Ligustius ), 70 a freed woman
called in Latin Salassa Grania after the Salassians of the Vale of
Aosta. 71 We shall not mention the Mantuans, since l\!Iantua was
an Etruscan colony, from which, not surprisingly, one Mantlzuate
and one Mantlzuatnei, a woman, had returned to die in the land
of their fathers. 72 What we must look for in particular among the
peoples of the north are the Gauls.
It is well known that for centuries they had mingled with the
Etruscans in a war for the possession of that Cisalpine region
which, Etruscan at first, was finally called Gaul; and the cities
of Etruria proper never ceased to tremble at the threat of invasion
by the Gauls, who, before reaching Rome in 390, sacked those
very cities. For a long time, when Rome was still only a small
state hemmed in by its own hills, they had to fight on two fronts,
against the Greeks (that is, the Syracusans whose fleet was
ravaging their coasts), and against the Gauls whose irresistible
pressure was with difficulty held back at the Apennines. There
\Vas a striking expression of this double nightmare in the barbaric
rite which, at certain critical junctures, required the wrath of the
gods to be appeased by burying alive, in the forum of the city, a
Greek man and woman and a Gaulish man and woman; these
D.L.E.-6
poor wretches were selected from the anonymous crowds of Greek

and Gaulish slaves at the nearest ergastulum.
The vast human reservoir of the Gauls must have contributed
in great measure to swell the ranks of Etruscan slave classes.
Perhaps the majority, like our hypothetical Carthaginians, dis-
guised themselves under banal names, Cae, Aule, and so on, or
under the qualification Lethe. But sometimes a corner of the veil
is lifted.
A cippus at Volterra warns us of the nearby presence of the
tomb of Mogetius, lautni of Cneuna, Mucetis Cneunas lautunis.
The master has a family name, Cneuna or Cnevna, formed on the
first name Cneve, in Latin Cnaeus. But in Muceti, Mogetius, the
linguists are unanimous in recognizing a Celtic name often found
in the three Gauls and even as far afield as Mainz or Mayence,
which name, Mogontiacum, is formed from the same root,
'great'. 73
THE REAL CONDITION OF ETRUSCAN SLAVES

Besides the origins of slave personnel, our inscriptions reflect in
miniature but sometimes with a fascinating precision, the con-
ditions they lived under. And here again, naturally, we know
nothing about the very lowest classes. It was not until the slave
became a lautni that he got a voice, a name, an ossuary. We said
previously that he was often called Lethe, but this knowledge
comes down to us through others; he himself remains mute. The
lautni are more communicative, and tell us, among other things,
about their marriages.
Thana Laucinei (or, if we so wish, Thana Lucinia in Latin) was
the lautnitha belonging to two brothers, Ve! and Tite: we
assume that she had been their undivided property before being
emancipated by them both, and that they had both remained her
masters. Hence the inscription, on a cheap terracotta jug:
Laucinei Thana Ve/us Tites lautnitha. 74
But on the tile drawing the passer-by's attention to the tomb,

she was described as:
Thana Laucinei Lethesa = Thana Laucinei, wife of Lethe. 75

ETHUSCAN SOCIETY
Let us not inquire if they were united by legal bonds. Never-

theless we notice here that the wife has a right to the same title
as women of free birth, with the qualification of puia, conj1111."C:
Caia puia Laclws, Caia, wife of Laclm, which is perhaps a trans-
cription of the Greek Laclu3n. 76 Moreover freed men on occasion
married outside their respective families and then the women
followed the man to his abode: we have seen Larthi Alfni leaving
Chiusi for Sarteano after her marriage. But there were mis-
alliances; not only between free-born men marrying freed women,
but sometimes - we have two very clear examples of this -
free-born women who lived in concubinage with a lautni.
A single urn from Chiusi, which is now in the Louvre, con-
tained the mingled ashes of H asti Ecnatei, whose first and
family names indicate a very honourable birth (there had been
Egnatii in the Roman Senate since the second century), and of
a lautni whose name is no less rich in significance: H. Ecnatei
Atiuce lautnic. 77 Although the copulative particle -c (in Latin
que) is placed after the second of the two co-ordinated terms,
this can clearly be deciphered as: Hastia Egnatia Antiochusque
libertus, 'Hastia Egnatia and the freed man Antiochus'. A
degrading union, such as the revolutionaries of Volsinii dreamed
of at the time of their brief seizure of power, but which, in a
more recent Etruria, no longer caused any scandal and was
advertised in the cemeteries, although this Atiuce, Antiochus,
must have come fresh from heaven knows what slave-market on
the Syrian Orontes.
It really does seem that henceforward the familiae of Chiusi
and Perugia were the settings for rather rapid social rises. We
have already cited one Diphylos who, with another Greek named
Damas, had been part of the Velcii household. He was laid to
rest at Chiusi, next to his wife Pollia, herself doubtless a lautnitha:
Tiphile, lautni Velches Puliac, or: Diphylos, Velcii libertus et Pollia.
They had one son, who is designated thus on a cinerary urn:
Ath. Tiphile. Palpe. Pulias, or Arruns Diphilus Balbus, Pollia natus.
Thus, in the space of one generation, Tiplzile had become a
name preceded by the most classical of all Etruscan first names,
Arnth, Arruns, and which is followed by a surname borrowed
from Latin (Balbus, the Stammerer). In conformity with the
usages of good society, the matronymic is mentioned, but there
71
is no allusion to the father, since legally that Arruns is nullo patre.

·w ait a few years more and we shall find, in Latin characters,
the epitaph of one A r. Tibile, P.L. Arruns Diphilus Publii libertus -
the gens created so recently already has its own freed men. 78
THE CLIENTS
It was a rise in the social scale which did not stop with the attain-
ment of the status of lautni and the conquest of liberty. Even
higher than the lautni can be distinguished the category of the
etera, who, in the family tomb, had a place of honour. For
example, in the Tomb of the Vencti, the urn of Se. Venete La.
Lethial clan was flanked by another which belonged to La. Venete
La. Lethial etera, 79 and whose inscription was no different from
the first excepting in the name Larth instead of Sethre and the
substitution of the word etera for the word clan (son). Elsewhere,
in the tomb of the Titii Petronii, there were ranged against the
rear wall, side by side, the urns of the eldest son and of the etera
of the paterfamilias. The etera formed a privileged class, but
not an independent one, for one is always the etera of somebody.
At Tarquinii, a special magistrate, zilatheterau, was put in charge
of their interests.so
We are more and more inclined to agree that these etera were
clients, and high-class ones. Many attempts have been made
to explain their name. We have proposed81 among several
etymologies which have been suggested, that it is a loan word
from the Greek hetairos, hetaros, a companion in arms. The
Etruscan legend, formed in the image of Homeric epic, is very
keen on these bonds of military companionship which, as we have
seen, united Macstarna and Caelius Vibenna. And moreover the
institution of the clientela is part of all ancient societies in their
primitive state. The Roman nobility had its clients, whom
Dionysius of Halicarnassus sometimes calls ht!tairoi, and the
Gaulish aristocracy had its own, called in the Celtic tongue
ambacti; it is curious that the historian Polybius, writing of the
Cisalpine Gauls against whom the Etruscans had fought so long,
translates ambacti by hetairoi. 82 Of the Etruscans, too, he might
have said that they knew no other outward sign of personal credit
and power than a large train of servants and hetairoi gathered
round a man. There is a good chance that if they gave their
72
ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
clients the name of etera they had borrowed it, along with so
many other terms of civilization, from the Greeks.
But we also see in Etruscan inscriptions at Chiusi and Perugia
the qualification of lautneteri, which is, quite undoubtedly, com-
posed of lautn and etera. Thus Salvi Precus lautn eteri would
mean Salvius, lautneteri from Preco. 83 It is natural to suppose
that in this case it was a question of a lautni in an Etruscan family
who had been promoted to the enviable condition of etera. Livy
by chance furnishes us with the Latin equivalent when he
mentions a cliens libertinus of the tribune of the plebs called
P. Rutilius. 84 •
73
CHAPTER FOUR
THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE

ROLE OF WOMEN
Family life - The status of women - The freedom they enjoyed -

Their political authority - Mediterranean survivals - Archae-
ological confirmation - The culture of Etruscan women - Their
privileges beyond the grave
FAMILY LIFE
The Etruscan family - and we now use the word in its usual
restricted sense - the human group formed by father and mother
surrounded by their children and grandchildren, is not distin-
guishable in any way from the Roman family or the Grecian
family. It knew neither the communal sharing of wives which
Strabo 1 describes in the Arab world and Caesar2 attributes to the
Celts in the British Isles; nor marriage between brother and sister
which was recommended in the very ancient Orient and was still
practised in the Egypt of the Ptolemaic dynasty; nor, apparently,
the polygamy recognized by Assyrian laws, nor the uterine
filiation that flourished in the matriarchal societies, among the
Lycians for example, who, according to Herodotus, called them-
selves by their mother's and not by their father's name. 3
As far back as we can go, the Etruscans seem to have had solid
and well-united families. They did not contest the authority of
the paterfamilias which the Romans accorded to the family head;
the filiation in their inscriptions is definitely paternal.
One religious personality in Tarquinii, at the beginning of the
second century, called himself Laris Pulenas, son of Laree, nephew
of Larth, grandson of Velthur, great-grandson of Laris Pule Creice. 4
In the same period, one Scipio in Rome called himself L(ucius)
Cornelius, P(ublii) f(ilius), L(ucii) n(epos), P(ublii) pron (epos).
74
THE C-rRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE HOLE OF WO:\IEN
Thanks to these inscriptions, we know the principal parental

terms in Etruscan. \Ve know that clan meant 'son', sec 'daughter',
puia 'wife', and that tusurthi(r) signified 'the married pair'. \V c
discover that 'grandfather' was papa ( cp. the Greek pappos), and
'grandmother' ati 11acna, literally 'dear mother', 'brother' was
tlzuva and 'nephew' papacs. The great-grandson was the prwnatlzs,
and the grandson the nefts, which greatly resembles the Latin
nepos. Nefts and nepos, papa and pappos: these concordances or
borrov.,;ngs go to prove that there were deep affinities between
the Etruscan family and the Graeco-Roman family.
What could be more respectable than this example of regularity
in family life, the epitaph of the Petronii at Perugia, banal as
one of our own funeral announcements, inscribed on an urn whose
lid bears the reclining statues of the husband and wife: Ve! Titius
Petronius, son of Vel and of Anneia Spurinna, rests here with his
wife Veilia Clantia, daughter of Arruns? Beside this, another urn
contained the remains of their son Lars Titius Petronius, son of
Vel and Clantia, and of his wife, Fasti Capenia, daughter of Vel
and of Coesidia, wife of Tarchi. 5 Doubtless here it is a question
of relatively recent inscriptions (second century), but it is the
same language which would have been used on the great mass-
produced sarcophagi of the sixth century if epitaphs had been
written on them for the anonymous couples of Caere stretched
beside one another on the funerary couch, and whose attitude, at
once dignified and informal, the affectionate protectiveness of
the husband, the tender confidence of the wife, express in the most
universal sense what we call married bliss.
These texts and figured representations are a far remove from
the scurrilous gossip of Theopompus.
THE STATUS OF WOMEN

Perhaps one detail will have been noticed in the inscriptions we
have just quoted, a detail which distinguishes Etruscan civil
status: the women are provided with a first name. The most
illustrious Roman matron was never referred to in Latin inscrip-
tions as more than Claudia or Cornelia; even an empress was still
plain Livia. But Etruscan women were given individual first
names, Ramtlza, Tanaquil, Fasti, Velia, which gave a more rounded
expression to their personality in the bosom of the family. Again,
75
while the Latin onomastic formula only mentions, after the first
and the family names, the first name of the father: M(arcus)
Tullius M(arci) f(ilius), Etruscan epigraphy regularly adds the
mother's name, sometimes even accompanied by her first name.
A praetor of Tarquinii called himself Larth Arnthal Plecus clan
Ramthasc Apatrual, or 'Lars, son of Arruns Pleco and of Ramtha
Apatronia'. 7 And this tradition was so strongly rooted in national
habits that it survived the romanization of the Latin inscriptions
in Etruria, where the mention of the mother's name completes -
which to an authentic Roman would have seemed a pointless
luxury - the indication of the father's name. Some inscriptions
from Montepulciano, still under the Empire, acquaint us with a
certain A. Papirius L.f. Alfia natus, or 'Aulus Papirius son of
Lucius, born of Alfia'. And a certain L. Gellius C. f. Longus Senia
natus, 'Lucius Gcllius, son of Caius, born of Senia'. 8 And this
particularly would be sufficient, even outside Etruscan territory,
to reveal the origins of a sister-in-law of the emperor Claudius,
Vibia Marsi filia Laelia nata, 'Vibia, daughter of (Vibius) Marsus,
born of Laelia'. 9
These were uses which, in their tenacious singularity, point
to a feature of Etruscan life we cannot ignore, though we must not
exaggerate its importance. For it is obvious that it was the
patronymic which had the first place in inscriptions, and that in
Tarquinii or Perugia as in Rome it was the father's name that his
sons and daughters received when they were born. The matron-
ymic only takes second place. But the care that is taken not to
omit it, and at the same time the attribution of a special first
name of their very own to the women, arc signs, among many
others, of the particular consideration they enjoyed. Let us not
try to seek a quick explanation: let us take the facts.
THE FREEDOM THEY ENJOYED

Yet in the opinion of the Greeks and Romans, Etruscan women
had a rather bad reputation. Serious authors, like Aristotle,
repeated the tales of Theopompus and accused them of banqueting
°
with men, lying with them under the same cloak. 1 Comic authors
like Plautus claimed that they collected their dowries by making a
commercial exploitation of their charms. 11 Need we remark that
this has been seen as an argument in favour of the race's oriental
TllE ETRUSCAN FAl\llLY AND TllE Hc">l.E OF \\'0!\IEN
origin? But why should the case of Etruscan debauchery be

sought in the sacred prostitution of Babylon? Lydian women, it
appears, gave themselves to all and sundry. But so did the women
of Cyprus and even of Locri in Greece itself. \Ve must remember
in all this that the Etruscan way of life offered in this respect many
opportunities for ill-natured criticism and from the point of view
of morals in antiquity it sometimes created a scandal. For, taking
into account the relaxations which time had brought about in tht
severe living-conditions of Greek women under Dorian law and
in their primitive seclusion in the gynecaeum, 12 the Etruscan
woman enjoyed no less liberty and rights, which, for a narrow-
minded Greek - and there were some, after all - seemed to
authorize the very worst misbehaviour.
The Greek woman and the Roman woman lived in the shadow
of their homes; but the Etruscan woman 'went out' a great deal.
\Ve see her everywhere, in the forefront of the scene, taking a
considerable place in it and never blushing for shame, as Livy
says of one of them, when exposing themselves to masculine
company. In Etruria it was a recognized privilege for ladies of
the most respectable kind, and not just for courtesans as in Greece,
to take part with men in banquets where they reclined, as the men
did, beside their male hosts on the couches of the Triclinium,
whereas even in private parties represented on Attic steles the
wife remains modestly seated, the better to serve her lord and
master. But Etruscan women were not afraid to have themselves
painted in such company in the numerous frescoes at Tarquinii,
in the Tomb of Leopards and in the Tomb of the Triclinium (fifth
century), conventionally adorned with blond hair (the men have
black hair) and wearing a heavy embroidered mantle over their
tunic. In this costume they attended dances, concerts, sports
events; they even presided, as a painting in Orvieto shows,
perched on a platform, over boxing matches, chariot races and
acrobatic displays13 - whereas at Olympia only the priestess of
Demeter had the right to attend the games. 14 Such participation
in public and private life on the part of the Etruscan women could
appear indiscreet; it roused the suspicions of neighbouring peoples
and gave fuel to the hostile propaganda of their enemies.
Livy gives us some admirable examples of this enviable or at any
rate different women's situation which provoked such astonished
77
disapproval in Greece and Rome. Livy, despite the summary

judgements on his work which appear sometimes in learned
manuals, is one of the most intelligent historians of antiquity.
The feeling he has for psychological realism certainly equals that
which is more willingly attributed to Tacitus. Writing under
Augustus, he had collected in the tradition of his predecessors a
quantity of very ancient facts which he always endeavoured to
understand, to motivate and explain according to the character
of the men concerned in them. Now it so happens that in the
second part of his Book I, he had to recount the history of the
three Etruscan kings, Tarquinius Priscus, Servius Tullius and
Tarquinius Superbus, who had reigned in Rome in the sixth
century. All this part of his work stands out from the whole
because of certain new characteristics: the style is much less
dense, the story is richer in human truth and more given to
dramatic effects. After all the vague fables and long accounts of
wars, there suddenly appears a living dynasty of condottieri,
painted in the liveliest colours; it bounds on the scene and for
more than a century engages in a complex game of intrigues and
violence. This was because, at the origins of this tradition, the
obscure data of Etruscan historiography offered themselves to
the narrator in a second-hand state; they had already been used,
exploited and remodelled by the first Roman annalists, but
nevertheless still contained, in a fossilized condition as it were,
irreducible and unassimilated facts. Livy does not always seem
to get the meaning: in his view these are monstrosities or oddities
whose more profound significance he does not realize, but which
we are able now to interpret more precisely.
For example, in chapter LVII he tells a marvellous anecdote.
We are in the reign of Tarquinius Superbus: the young princes,
his sons, are at the siege of Gabii in Latium, and the fall of the
city is expected:
'Here in their permanent camp, as is usual with a war not

sharp but long drawn out, furlough was rather freely granted,
more freely however to the leaders than to the soldiers; the
young princes for their part passed their idle hours together
at dinners and drinking bouts. It chanced, as they were
drinking in the quarters of Sextus Tarquinius, where
THE ETHUSCAN FAl\HLY AND THE HOLE OF WOMEN
Tarquinius Collatinus, son of Egerius, was also a guest, that the

subject of wives came up.'16
The subject is a common one and has been taken up many times
by the novelist and the dramatist: a conversation in the mess or
in a stalag: a number of men thrown on their own company seek
to supplement the idleness of captivity by talking about women:
each one praises the merits of his own, and from this spring
drama, desire, jealousy. \\-'hat Livy does not mention, seeming
not to be interested in it (though it interests us profoundly) is
that the young princes' wives are of Etruscan blood like themselves,
except the wife of Tarquinius Collatinus, who is Roman. It is
the virtuous Lucretia's very purity which is to inspire in Sextus
Tarquinius, a blase Don Juan, a passion and a violence that are
to incite rebellion and the expulsion of the kings.
So 'the subject of wives came up, and every man fell to prais-
ing his own wife with enthusiasm, and, as their rivalry grew
hot, Collatinus said there was no need to talk about it, for it
was in their power to know, in a few hours' time, how far the
rest were excelled by his own Lucretia. "Come! If the vigour
of youth is in us let us mount our horses and see for ourselves
the disposition of our wives. Let every man regard as the surest
test what meets his eyes when the woman's husband enters
unexpected." They were heated with wine. "Agreed!" they
all cried, and clapping spurs to their horses were off for Rome.
Arriving there at early dusk, they thence proceeded to Collatia,
where Lucretia was discovered very differently employed from
the daughters-in-law of the king. These had been seen at a
luxurious banquet, whiling away the time with their young
friends. [Cum aequalibus, in the text, does not indicate their
sex.] But Lucretia, though it was late at night, was busily
engaged upon her wool, while her maidens toiled about her in
the lamplight as she sat in the hall of her house. The prize for
the contest in womanly virtues fell to Lucretia.'
This confrontation is not, for us, as it was for Livy, just one
between dissipation and virtue, but between two ways of civiliza-
tion. The rather timorous discretion of the historian will have
been noted - how he glides rapidly over the princesses' occupations:
79
the tombs of the Leopards and of the Triclinium leaves us in no

doubt that they would have handsome youths with them, and as
for the way they passed the time, we know that they were 'heavy
drinkers'. 16 But this brief evocation of the life of Etruscan women
has been kept to the last, the better to bring out by immediate
contrast the image of Roman Lucretia sagely by the hearth at
evening, by candlelight winding and spinning amid her toiling
women and above all, for this attitude is the essential thing, not
reclining on a festive couch, but seated, sedentem.
Pudica, lanifica, domiseda: such are the epithets customary on
funerary inscriptions which Roman husbands composed in praise
of their wives. They could imagine no finer role for them than to
spin wool and keep house. 'Domum serauit, lanam fecit', soberly
concludes the most celebrated of these epigrams.17 The Etruscan
ideal and Etruscan manners were different. One can imagine,
when the two societies mingled, what domestic conflicts must
have taken place. When a young Roman brought a fiancee from
Chiusi or Arezzo and introduced her to the pater f amilias, her
replies to questions on manners were not always satisfactory. The
foreign girl was not home-keeping enough, did not sit up straight
on her chair and so on. And when a Fabia or a Claudia married
into a family in Volterra or Vulci, her sisters-in-law must have
laughed at her prudery. But it was the Romans who finally
triumphed, and from the fourth century onwards, in the paintings
at Tarquinii, we see that the Etruscan women had learned to sit
properly on chairs, like civilized creatures.
THEIR POLITICAL AUTHORITY

But they not only enjoyed more liberty than Roman women in
their pleasures. In civil society also they played a preponderant
role which Roman matrons could not pretend to, despite the
moral authority their virtues gave them. This is what comes out
again admirably in the portrait of Tanaquil which Livy has
painted for us, not without astonishment at the part this extra-
ordinary woman took in promoting the rise of her husband,
Tarquinius Priscus.
He was the son of a Corinthian Greek, Demaratus, whom a
revolution had driven from his country and who had come and
settled in Tarquinii. The extent of Corinthian commerce along
80
THE ETRUSCAN FAl\llLY AND THE ROLE OF \VO!\!EN
the shores of Etruria in the middle of the seventh century, largely

confirms the truth of such a legend. 18 In Tarquinii, Demaratus
married an Etruscan woman who gave him two sons: one of these,
whom Livy calls Lucumo, married Tanaquil.
'The self-confidence implanted in his bosom by his wealth

was heightened by his marriage with Tanaquil, who was a
woman of the most exalted birth, and not of a character lightly
to endure a humbler rank in her new environment than she
had enjoyed in the condition to which she had been born. The
Etruscans looked with disdain on Lucumo, the son of a banished
man and a stranger. She could not endure this indignity, and
forgetting the love she owed her native land, if she could only
see her husband honoured, she formed the project of emigrating
from Tarquinii. Rome appeared to be the most suitable place
for her purpose; amongst a new people, where all rank was of
sudden growth and founded on worth, there would be room
for a brave and strenuous man.' 19
There could be nothing more solemn nor yet more informal than
the arrival of the emigrant family, the future Tarquinius and his
wife Tanaquil, when, having piled all their household goods on a
chariot, they came one day in sight of Rome; one can almost feel
one is following them along what was later to be the via Aurelia,
and, at the last turning on top of the J aniculum, looking down
with them, on a Rome spread out over the mouth of the Tiber,
which doubtless was not the Rome of a thousand domes which
one goes to view today from that celebrated balcony, nor even the
Rome which Augustus, in the days of Livy, began to construct
of marble but simply, lying there in the golden light, a primitive
Rome with peasant villages perched on the seven hills. It was
indeed to be the work of the Tarquins to turn it into a true city
and into the Eternal City.
And it was there, as they halted for a moment, wondering what
destiny would have in store for them, that the wondrous event
occurred: a bird, an eagle, came circling down round Tarquinius'
head, snatched off his pointed cap, circled round again for two or
three times, then returned and replaced it firmly, apte, on the
head of the man whom Jupiter thus designated as called upon to
reign. He was somewhat frightened, but 'Tanaquil, versed, as

Etruscans usually are, in the interpretation of celestial signs', re-
assured him. 'She embraces her husband, and exhorts him to
cherish great and high hopes.' Heartened by this incident, and
confirmed in their ambitions, Tarquinius and Tanaquil went on
their way, and, having found a lodging, went to the police station
where Tarquinius had himself registered under the curious name
of Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, which means, by the delicious
anachronism of tradition, Lucius Tarquinius the Elder, to dis-
tinguish him from those who were to follow. 20 A Roman tradition,
based on Etruscan data, which is determined to honour the future
king with the tria nomina of a real Roman citizen, and relegates
to anonymity the woman who nevertheless had been the inter-
preter and maker of his fate.
Some thirty-seven years later, at the death of Tarquinius,
Tanaquil again played a determining role in the strange accession
of Servius Tullius whose hidden future she had divined while
he was still a little boy, and who had become her son-in-law.
Using her irresistible authority, she passed over her own sons
and presented him as their new king to a populace that was at
first unwilling to accept him. 21 This fresh intervention, which
only reaches us now wrapped in obscure magical practices and
mixed up with specious erudition, nevertheless reveals in the
Etruscan queen a strange political primacy which would have
eclipsed the brilliance of the men whose power she had made
possible if she had not been, from the Roman point of view, a
mere woman. Generations of historians ever since Fabius Pictor,
who was the first, at the beginning of the second century, to delve
into Etruscan sources for the material of his books, had done all
they could to bring this virago down to the common level of
Roman matrons, subjecting her retrospectively to the all-powerful
paterfamilias. Tanaquil who, we may be sure, attended in her
native city of Tarquinii banquets and games in the company of
men, had finally, in Rome or at least in the complaisant imagina-
tions of those who had adopted her, been brought to bear the
traditional distaff. Young married couples at their wedding
ceremony used to invoke her name, for she had been a model of
conjugal honesty: the proof of this was that she had been an
'excellent spinner', summa lanifica. And Varro had seen, mir-
THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE ROLE OF W0:\1EN
aculously preserved in the temple of Semo Sancus on the Quirinal

hill her spindle and distaff, still wound with wooi.22
There could be no question of using etruscology to explain every

authoritarian woman in history. But there was one, at the court
of Augustus, who, though the days of Tanaquil had long since
passed, seemed to bring her tradition alive again. She was called
Urgulania, and her name, recently discovered on an inscription
at Tarquinii, clearly indicates her origin. Tacitus, in various
passages of his Annals, has traced a portrait in the grand style
of that haughty and dominating personality. 23 She had acquired,
thanks to the friendship of Livia, wife of Augustus, a considerable
position 'which placed her above the law'. 'Called as a witness in
a case which was being heard in the Senate, she declined to
appear: a praetor was sent to question her at her home.' She
succeeded in escaping a previous accusation by addressing herself
directly to the imperial palace. Later she makes an appearance
as an old lady who would suffer no stain on her family honour.
One of her grandsons had thrown his wife out of the window: in
order that he should be spared the ignominy of certain conviction,
Urgulania sent him a dagger.
This Etruscan woman of imperious character and inflexible
pride had a husband of whom one knows nothing but that he was
called Plautius. In order to establish the fortune of her descend-
ants, she made full use of the exceptional credit and excessive
power which were hers through her links with the empress.
She first used her nimia potentia to get her son, M. Plautius
Silvanus, appointed to a consulship in the year 2 BC, which he
had the honour to share with Augustus himself. Silvanus had a
brilliant career which is outlined for us in an inscription on the
mausoleum he had made for himself and his family at Ponte
Lucano near Tivoli: 24 the epitaphs of other members of his family
tell us something about its history.
He himself had married Lartia, whose name, based on the first
name Lars, Lartis, has an obvious Etruscan character. For
Urgulania kept up an unfailing fidelity to her own race both in
herself and in those around her.
The eldest of her four grandchildren, M. Plautius Silvanus
(the same name as his father), a praetor, had conjugal difficulties
as we know. But the woman he defenestrated was called Apronia,

and this is also an Etruscan name. The second son, Aulus Plautius
Urgulanius, died at the age of nine before his grandmother had
had time to marry him off. But the third, P. Plautius Pulcher, did
not escape. We are able to follow him all through a slow and
painful career which, despite the protections he enjoyed, rose no
higher than a praetorship. But he also had married an Etruscan
princess, Vibia Marsi filia Laelia nata.
U rgulania, who practised, as we can see, a policy of rigorous
endogamy within the Etruscan aristocracy, tolerated only one
misalliance: this was in order to marry her granddaughter Urgu-
lanilla to one of Livia's grandsons, the future emperor Claudius.
This boy was the 'idiot' of the imperial family: despised by
all, ridiculed in public, he set his grandparents a difficult problem.
We have the fragment of a letter from Augustus to Livia in which
the ageing emperor expresses his embarrassment. What was to
be done with this poor creature, misellus, now that he had attained
the age to accede to the magistracies? The best thing they could
think of, to teach him good manners, was to entrust him to
M. Plautius Silvanus - he who had thrown his wife out of the
window - and to marry him off to Urgulanilla. And Claudius,
introduced into the Etruscan discipline, became a great scholar:
he composed a history of the Etruscans in twenty volumes. It is
clear that the son-in-law and brother-in-law of the authentic
representatives of the principal Etruscan geutes of the time, having
access to family archives jealously guarded within the severe walls
of Tuscan palaces at Tarquinii, Volterra, Chiusi and Perugia
had found there his vocation as etruscologist; and at the same
time we can see that the fragments of his Tyrrhenica which have
come down to us, take on, if they are placed in this perspective,
an unexpected value.
MEDITERRANEAN SURVIVALS
But returning from the nimia potentia of Urgulania to the over-
weening ambition of Tanaquil, we cannot fail to notice, more or
less effaced or muddled by prejudiced historians, traces of a social
status for women that was very different from that existing in
Rome. It was on this that ninety years ago a German scholar,
contemporary and friend of Nietzsche, J. J. Bachofen, had based
THE ETHUSCAN FAl\llLY AND THE HOLE OF WOMEN
his ingenious - and inadmissible - Sage von Tmzaquil, in which

he defined Etruscan society as an example of Jl.1utterrecht or
matriarchy, surviving into historical times.
A fairly pure form of Mutterreclzt is described by I Ierodotus
in his account of the Lycians of Asia Minor:
'They call each other by their mother's name, not by their
father's. If one of them inquires of a neighbour what his
name is, the person questioned will give his genealogy on the
maternal side and enumerate the maternal ancestors of his
mother. If a woman citizen marries a slave, the children of the
marriage are considered to be of good stock; but if a male
citizen, even were he the greatest of all, marry a foreign woman
or a concubine, the children would enjoy no consideration
whatsoever.' 25
But sociologists distinguish between the matriarchy of a regime
(of which Egyptian and perhaps Cretan society showed fairly
clear signs, and which, closely allied to systems where relation-
ship was passed down on the maternal side, cannot be quite
compared with them), and that of female domination or gynae-
cocracy. And we can well imagine that in both cases the eminent
dignity of the mater f amilias had been one of the distinctive
traits of the Mediterranean societies before the Greek and Italian
invasions had put in their place the reign of the male.
It cannot be denied that Etruscan society in many respects has
elements of both matriarchy and gynaecocracy. What we have
related above about the attention given to the matronymic in civil
life recalls certain features of matriarchy. The case of Maecenas,
the minister of Augustus, whose ancestors had reigned at Arezzo,
is very curious in this respect. He was called C. Maecenas C.f.,
but all his noble connexions seem to have come to him from his
mother's side, by which he was related to the illustrious gens of
the Cilnii, and it was for this reason that Augustus, ignoring the
name of his paternal ancestors, called him affectionately Cilniorum
smaragde, 'emerald of the Cilnii'.
But if there was a form of Mutterrecht among the Etruscans, it
existed in a very adulterated form. It was the father's name which
was given to children. If Tarquinius Priscus had lived in a
rigorously matriarchal city, there would have been no reason for
D.L.E.- J 85
him to emigrate. 26 Among the Lycians 'if a woman c1t1zen

marries a slave, the children of the marriage are considered to
be of good stock'. In Tarquinii, the son of an Etruscan woman
and of a Corinthian would have no difficulty in realizing
his ambitions, and Tanaquil's pride would not have had to
suffer from a misalliance which did not encroach upon her
privileges.
What is the final word? There is a phrase of Cicero's that goes
very far: reproaching Cato with the abstract intransigence of
his dogmatism, he objected to him that he did not live 'in the
ideal Republic of Plato, but in the filthy city of Romulus'. 27
We do not find in Etruscan society either a theoretical Mutter-
recht or an ideal gynaecocracy, but simply one stage in a long
development, an unstable equilibrium of antagonistic forces in
full evolution and which is given its full significance only if we
compare it with what we observe in Greece and Rome. We have
already noted several times that Etruscan civilization was an
archaic civilization. Its feminism, strange as it may seem to us,
is not so much a recent conquest as a distant survival threatened
by Graeco-Roman pressures; it recalls in many respects the Crete
of Ariadne and the paintings of Cnossos more than the Athens of
Solon and Pericles. But the social state, of which it seems to
retain many of the characteristics, if it was ever realized in its
pure form, had a for a long ~ime, in the Etruria of the seventh or
sixth centuries, felt contrary influences which denatured it.
Human societies can never be defined with absolute precision.
In Etruscan society, the paterfamilias laid down the law, but
the mater f amilias had her say also, and her word was often the
last one.
Let us open our Livy again: in the accession to power of Tar-

quinius Superbus, his wife Tullia played a role analogous to that
which Tanaquil had played in the accession of his predecessors,
Tarquin the Elder and Servius Tullius. 28
Servius Tullius had had two daughters, Tullia the elder and
Tullia the younger, of whom history - Roman - has not preserved
the first names. The one was violent and the other timid. In
order to consolidate his throne, Servius Tullius had married
them to the two sons of Tarquinius the Elder: two very ill-
86
THE ETRUSCAN FA!\llLY AND THE ROLE OF WOMEN
assorted households. The violent daughter had married a gentle

man, the timid daughter had married a violent one. Then Tullia
the violent one fell in love with her violent brother-in-law.
Gentle Tarquinius and gentle Tullia were assassinated. The
remaining pair, by marriage, united their double violence, assuring
Tarquinius Lucius, the future Superbus, the royal crown.
Now in this story which Livy tells as if it were some tragedy
in the tradition of Aeschylus' Oresteia, there are some details
that give us pause. Servius Tullius, in the Curia, had just been
furiously assaulted by his son-in-law Lucius Tarquinius and had
been cast down from the throne. Tullia was awaiting in her palace
the outcome of this dramatic scene: but she could not wait for
news, and went out. 'It is believed, inasmuch as it is not incon-
sistent with the rest of her wickedness, that this deed was sug-
gested by Tullia. It is agreed, at all events, that she was driven
in her carriage into the Forum, and nothing abashed at the
crowd of men, summoned her husband from the Curia and was
the first to call him king.' [Regemque prima appellavit.]29
These words: 'she was the first to call him king' are perhaps
one of those fossils, embedded in a very ancient tradition, of
which we have already spoken; the whole context is psychological
interpretation, and, in a certain sense, literature. One thing
is certain, as Livy says: the proclamation of the king by the
queen. Livy, to whom this kind of accession seemed very suspect,
expends great ingenuity in explaining it through the personality
of Tullia. His Lucius Tarquinius himself is profoundly shocked
by it, like the good Roman he is according to his Roman bio-
graphers. He orders Tullia, in very sharp words, to 'leave such a
tumultuous crowd' and to go back home. But it seems that the
generating kernel of the story was an immemorial usage in which
the Etruscan woman, as in Cretan and Egyptian society, had the
status, incomprehensible to Livy, of 'king-maker' - as if the
legitimate monarchy depended on the queen's designation and
consecration of the monarch. Regemque prima appellavit.
In a preceding chapter, one small phrase embarrasses the
editors very much. 30 Tullia, as we have seen, despised her
younger sister because she was of a gentle and timid disposition,
and she never stopped telling her brother-in-law how unworthy
of him such a wife was. The one who had been given the energetic
and violent husband 'lacked feminine audacity', muliebri cessaret

audacia. This 'feminine audacity' seems to have shocked most of
the editors of Livy. When the historian, in the picture which
inspired David, shows the Sabines dashing into the midst of
battle to separate their confronted fathers and husbands, and
says that they triumphed through their muliebris pavor, the timidity
of their sex, no one can find any objection. When Sallust, in his
account of Catiline's conspiracy (De Catilinae Conjuratione),
evokes the image of lovely Sempronia, full of wit and talents and
effrontery, and declares that this young lady had committed more
than one ill deed with a manly audacity, this virilis audacia is
found quite satisfactory by everybody. But Tullia despises her
sister because she lacks 'feminine audacity', and most editors
assume that the text here is corrupt. An English editor suggests
that audacia should be corrected to ignavia: muliebris ignavia
would make everything quite all right. 'Tullia despises her sister
because her feminine cowardice makes her irresolute.' M. Jean
Bayet 5uggests we should read muliebriter cessaret audacia:
'because woman as she was, she lacked courage'. But it is wise
to keep to the original manuscript, as Conway and Walters have
so rightly done in the Oxford edition, and profit from its lesson.
Perhaps Livy did not exactly realize the importance of what he
was saying. Perhaps he did not find the sources transmitted to
him altogether clear. But we must take the reality as it stands. It
is a woman speaking: Tullia is not in revolt against her own sex;
she does not disown her sisters; she does not consider herself to
be an exceptional being free from all feminine weakness. Only
she has particular ideas regarding the feminine temperament
which are not incompatible with a sort of specific audacity,
energy and ambition, the audacia muliebris which animates
Etruscan women like Tanaquil and Tullia the Elder in the dynasty
of the Tarquins.
ARCHAEOLOGICAL CONFIRMATION
Now that these traditions which Livy echoes should not have
been empty fables but should correspond - though imaginary in
so far as details of events and persons were concerned - to u
state of civilization in which the woman exercised prerogatives
which were withdrawn from her later on is something which
88
THE ETRUSCAN FAl\IILY AND THE HOLE OF WO:\IEN
archaeology confirms in a decisive manner, not only in paintings

where we see Etruscan women participating with men in numerous
aspects of social life, not only in the epitaphs where the matronymic
often is given a prominent place, but in certain evidences, not
sufficiently noted before, which are provided by the contents
and the disposition of the tombs.
At least some of these among the most ancient and most
luxurious, which had revealed to a dazzled nineteenth century the
extent of the Etruscan princes' riches, had in fact been constructed
for princesses. In the case of the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Caere, 31
which dates from about 650, there is no doubt at all: the hypogeum
comprised a funerary chamber at the end of a long corridor, in
the walls of which two alcoves had been fashioned: in the one on
the right, along with arms and a ceremonial chariot there lay, in
an urn surmounted by a horse, the ashes of a warrior; in front,
in the antechamber, another man was buried surrounded by very
rich furnishings, with much silver and bronze plate, part of which
flowed over into the left-hand alcove; but in the funerary chamber
proper there was stretched, on the ground covered with gold,
silver and ivory, alongside her throne, the bejewelled skeleton of
a woman: it was above all for her that the tomb had been destined,
and quite by chance we even know her name from the inscriptions
that were engraved on the silver cups and goblets: she was called
Larthia.
\Ve cannot help wondering what was the relationship between
the three dead people, though we are unable to reach any solid
conclusion. In any case it was Larthia who had first right to the
tomb. A queen, accompanied or rejoined in death by a prince of
her own family inhumed in the antechamber and by a warrior
whose cremated remains were placed in the right-hand alcove,
Larthia would make a good heroine for a novel. The two different
kinds of funerary rites - inhumation and cremation - the different
styles of life which the arms of one, the precious objects of the
other reveal between a soldier and a courtier would fire the
slowest imaginations. Has not a great scholar been tempted to
suppose that the warrior was the enemy of the prince inhumed
in the antechamber, or else a slave sacrificed to appease his shade?
That Larthia herself, the supposed widow of the prince, had been
constrained, like Hindu women, to follow her husband beyond
the grave? And why not? In a more sober fashion, Luigi Pareti,
the most recent exegetist of the Regolini-Galassi tomb, concludes:
'The traces of matriarchy which have been claimed in Etruria
have doubtless been exaggerated; nevertheless in the archaic era
a princess at Caere had been able to occupy the same state of
sovereignty as Roman tradition still accords Tanaquil the wife of
Tarquinius the Elder, who is said to have brought about the
accession to the throne of Rome first of all of her husband, then
of her protege Servius Tullius.'32
But perhaps Larthia was no exception. It so happens that the
Bernardini tomb at Praeneste, more or less contemporary with the
Regolini-Galassi tomb at Caere, and which has delivered up no
less a number of marvels, has just arisen from the anonymity in
which it had lain so deeply buried. While cleaning one of the
great silver cups from that tomb, there was discovered a graffito
which reveals a proper name, Vetusia. 33 A Latin name, which, by
virtue of the phonetic transformation known as rhotacism, is
perpetuated after the fourth century under the form Veturia.
There were still Vetusii at the consulate in Rome at the beginning
of the fifth century. And the Latin style of this name causes no
surprise at Praeneste, a Latin city. What we must remember in
all this is that the one proprietary name which until now has been
discovered in the Bernardini tomb is that of a woman, Vetusia.
Incidentally, the curious will not fail to wonder why, at Caere
as at Praeneste, it was only on their silver plate that Larthia and
Vetusia had their proof of ownership engraved. The evidence
from the Bernardini tomb consists, as yet, of only one piece.
But in the Regolini-Galassi tomb the name of Larthia was repeated
on five goblets, six cups and a small silver amphora, whereas
her companion in the antechamber had his name engraved on
none of the silver cups belonging to him and not one of the
fibulae, bracelets and pieces of gold leaf which adorned the
princess bore the slightest trace of graffiti. The period - mid
seventh century- is that in which in Greece, Athens, Aegina and
Corinth began to mint coins in that metal. Was there a risk of
silver acquiring a venal quality in the process of smelting which
might attract robbers? Was an Etruscan princess's dowry counted
in so many pieces of silver plate? In the present state of our
knowledge, we cannot tell.
90
THE FTRUSCAN FA:\!ILY AND TllE HOLE OF WO:\U.N
But we shall notice that, even later, at the end of the sixth
and at the beginning of the fifth centuries, at a time when Caere
would be at the height of her power, the women among the
aristocracy had still not given up, if not their pretensions to
royalty, at least their rights to luxury articles of plate. This
has been revealed by the study, among others, of a tomb in the
necropolis of the Banditaccia explored at the beginning of this
century by Raniero Mengarelli; this tomb is called the Tomb of
the Grecian Vases. 34 vVe shall have to return to this tomb when we
discuss the Etruscan house, faithfully reflected in funerary
architecture; this tomb which, in its plan and decoration, testifies
to the already classical taste of those for whom it had been con-
structed, though they surmounted it by a vast tumulus which
covered the three neighbouring tombs of their ancestors. Some
one hundred and fifty Attic vases with black or red figures of a
severe style and of an often signal quality which accumulated there
during two or three generations prove the enthusiasm with which,
from 550 onwards, when the Tarquins reigned in Rome, a great
family at Caere collected ceramic products and in general the
most refined objects of Hellenic civilization.
THE CULTURE OF ETRUSCAN WOMEN

Among the materials in the Tomb of the Grecian Vases there are
three pieces signed by the potter Nicosthenes - two amphorae
with black figures and one pyxis with red figures. Now the two
amphorae which represent different subjects, one a procession of
animals, the other dances of Silenoi and Bacchantes, but which
have, as if deliberately, the same height exactly - 31 centimetres -
both carry, engraved on the base, the name of their owner, and
this name is mi culnaial: 'I belong to Culni'. And this Culni was
a woman. Besides this, Culni saw fit to inscribe her name on two
decanter vases of the type known as olpe; these, too, have black
figures and can be dated, as can the amphorae of Nicosthenes,
round about 530. Other graffiti were looked for but only one more
was found in the whole collection, on the base of a third olpe,
and this graffito reads mi atiial: 'I belong to Ati'. So two women,
Culni and Ati, lend the tomb a little of the personality associated
with living people. But they do it, and especially Culni, in a
singularly expressive way. Culni loved Attic vases; she preferred
91
DAILY LIFE OF TIIE ETRUSCANS
signed examples; she had a fondness for the graceful curve of

Nicosthenes' amphorae. One amphora by Nicosthenes is all
very well; but two, each measuring thirty-one centimetres, sug-
gests some aesthetic purpose. These twin amphorae were destined
to echo one another, placed on either side of some doorway.
Culni had a feeling for symmetry which accords well with the
architectural features of the tomb where she was interred. Etrus-
can women of the second half of the sixth century, while their
husbands, strangely absent, scoured the high seas, fought at
Aleria and lapidated Phocean prisoners, seem to have played an
active part in the progressive hellenization of their country.
Naturally there exist proprietary marks which bear the names
of men, though these are very rare in Caere. On the other hand,
in Greece we do not find, as far as we can infer from the ceramic
inscriptions of the agora of Athens or that of Olbia, similar marks
emanating from a woman. In Xenophon's Oeconomicus no doubt
Ischomachus entrusts his wife with the task of looking after their
domestic goods. 'What a fine sight it is, to see shoes of all kinds
neatly aligned; how beautiful are bronze vases, table ware, even
the cooking pots, all nicely arranged! All these kinds of things
form a chorus, and the space all round them is so lovely to see
when it is cleared in this way!' 35 There would have been a row,
all the same, if that perfectly-organized housewife, whose name
moreover Xenophon neglects to give, had put her mark on the
household crockery. Without wanting to draw too ambitious
conclusions from this, let us remember that Etruscan women in
the golden era had the right to possess their own amphorae
made by Nicosthenes, and that they were sometimes highly
cultivated. Did the same thing not occur at other periods? For
example, at the end of the Empire, was it not the great ladies of
the Roman aristocracy, whose semi-barbarian husbands were
occupied on the frontiers, who were the most brilliant recruits
to Christianity, and whom Saint Jerome found his most sensitive
audience?
But there is even more to be deduced from our observations of
the cemeteries of Caere. At some date a little posterior to the
days of Culni and Ati, we found set up everywhere at the entrance
to tombs innumerable little columns fitted into the flagstones
next to little stone coffers in the form of sarcophagi or houses
92
THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE H(>J.E OF WO!\IEN
with a double slope to the roof. Provided with a painted or

engraved inscription, first in Etruscan, then in Latin, these cippi
inform the passer-by of the presence of a nearby tomb, and of
the identity of the dead person. Now these columns, whose
phallic significance is unquestionable, were put up for men, while
the houses were for the women, perhaps because it was in the
house that their activity was felt and because they spent the
greater part of their lives there. 36 'In Rome,' one historian
remarks, 'it was the paterfamilias who was the centre of the home;
in Etruria, it was the wife.' 3 7
In Caere the distinction was clear; all the columnar cippi
are marked with men's names: A(·vles) Campanes L(arthal) clan
or L(ucius) Magilius L(ucii) l(ibertus) Pilemo (Philemon). All the
house-shaped cippi bear the names of women: Thanchvil Pustinia
L(artlzal) s(ec) or Magilia L(ucii) l(iberta) Celido (Chclido, a
swallow). Nevertheless the rule does not seem to have been
rigorously applied outside Caere, for at Tarquinii, where in any
case the use of funerary cippi is much more limited, M. Pallottino
has taken a mischievous delight in discovering one in the form of
a house, dedicated to a man. 38 This was because in their funerary
rites as in everything else, each Etruscan town had its own
particular habits.
In Caere itself, the use of the cippus is not known until the
beginning of the fourth century, when the development of funerary
epigraphy lends them a very definite significance. But the
tradition they seem to refer to had certainly more ancient origins,
as is proved by another fact, less commented on, more mysterious,
more important also, which one can notice in those tombs built
from the end of the seventh century to the middle of the fifth
century.
THEIR PRIVILEGES BEYOND THE GRAVE

Mengarelli, in 1927, 3 9 had distinguished in these tombs two sorts
of funerary couches hewn from the rock and on which the dead
were laid. Some of them reproduced faithfully the image of an
Etruscan bed, or a Greek one (kline), with its four round feet
freely sculpted: where the head came, a semi-circular hollow
was made to contain the pillow. The others, wider and longer,
had the appearance of big sarcophagi of the Greek type, without
93
a lid but with a triangular fronton at each extremity; inside, the

semi-circular mark for the pillow can often be seen.
Let us consider the plan of a fine tomb from the second half
of the sixth century, the tomb of the Capitals. 40 The anterior
chambers contained only seats for the servants. In the central
hall, eight klinai were aligned along the walls. But in the three
chambers which open out from the back wall, and which, corres-
ponding to the main rooms of the house, sheltered the remains
of its masters, we find, each time, a bed on the left and a sarco-
phagus on the right. It becomes clear that we are here in the
presence of conjugal tombs, those of the paterfamilias and of the
mater familias in the centre, those of their children and step-
children here and there; and we see that just as a cippus in the
form of a house indicated a female sepulchre, so in these funerary
chambers the sarcophagus was also destined for the mother
of the family. Mengarelli thus was led to formulate a new
law: in Etruscan tombs the body of the man, on the left, was
disposed on a kline, that of the woman, always on the right, in a
sarcophagus.
And naturally, as always happens when a rule is formulated in
an absolute way, objections came to light, and there were large
numbers of exceptions. For example, there are funerary chambers
in which we find side by side two beds with carved feet. Were
these the last resting-places of two brothers united in death?
One tomb, called the Tomb of the Tablinum, contains two beds
and eight sarcophagi, which would seem to indicate a family in
which the girls predominated in an abnormal fashion over the
boys. 41 But all things considered, we would consider that Men-
garelli was right and so do the majority of etruscologists. His
observation is too often borne out, even as late as 1951 during
diggings carried out at Caere by the University of Rome, 42
for it to be called a coincidence or for us to interpret other-
wise the disposition which he had the distinction of noticing first.
There are even touching cases where the sarcophagus on the
right carries a semi-circular design to fit two pillows instead of
one, and one pillow is smaller than the other: a dead child had
been entombed with his mother. Sometimes again a smaller
kline, for a little boy, was placed in the chamber, on the right,
just beside the maternal sarcophagus. 43
94
THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE ROLE OF W0:\1EN
The exceptions to the rule can easily be explained if we con-

sider that the distinction it enunciates is an historical fact that
had its beginning, its apogee and its decline. Its beginning? It
has been observed, for example, that in the very ancient Tomb
of the Painted Lions, from about 650, right in the oricntalizing
period, a funeral bed had been transformed into a sarcophagus
by the clumsy insertion of two small tri;ingular frontons. 44 Its
decline? About 450 - which is about the date of the Tablinum
tomb - the specific significance of beds and sarcophagi seems to
have lost its primal clarity. Between these two dates, the custom
was observed in the majority of tombs though in the case of female
inhumations the bed was not everywhere replaced by the sarco-
phagus. Some obscure purpose nevertheless is borne out in this
persistent tendency.
We may perhaps see more clearly the profound significance of
it if we turn our attention to a detail which escaped Mengarelli. 45
It is not quite exact to say that there are two sorts of funeral
couches: a bed with carved feet and a sarcophagus. The sarco-
phagi, we have noted, were wider and had deeper sides. It is to
be observed that masculine beds were generally eighty centimetres
and the sarcophagi one metre ten centimetres wide: the difference
in width corresponds to the thickness of the walls of the sarco-
phagus. Inside this, there was, in fact, for the woman also, a
kline, of which one may see the rounded extremity and whose
carved feet were covered. In other words, the alternative is not
one bed or one sarcophagus, but one funeral couch or bed, alone
and unadorned, or one bed inside a sarcophagus, a bed covered by
a sarcophagus. It does seem that the purpose of such additions
and transformations was to make sure that a certain category of
the dead, particularly women, would have a more sacred character;
to preserve the remains better and to increase the inviolability of
the funeral couch. The sarcophagus, if we may use here an
anachronistic expression, functioned as a kind of reliquary,
protecting particularly precious remains. It is as if, between 650
and 450, the Etruscans, or at least those of Caere, had considered
women to be of a superior essence and more susceptible of
divinization than men.
Here we are touching very superficially on impenetrable
problems, whose solution, if we could reach it in the present
95
state of our knowledge, would require a long examination. Let

us simply indicate here that there was a special use of sarcophagi
and funerary cippi in the form of houses in a certain Etruscan
funerary ritual which is connected with a complex web of tradi-
tions stretching over all the ancient world from Asia Minor to
occidental Europe and which could only be studied in relation to
the use of hut-urns in the pre-Etruscan necropolises of Etruria
and Latium and to those of the region of the Elbe as well as to
the house-shaped steles in the Celtic cemeteries of Roman Gaul.
The Etruscans seem to have taken over a widely diffused practice
in order to load it with a significance whi~h apparently was close
to their hearts. Let us also note that scholars still cannot decide
whether these sarcophagi represent houses or temples, for the
temple, like the tomb, is conceived after the image of a human
dwelling; and perhaps there is no way of making a definite dis-
tinction between what belongs to the domain of complaisant
imprecision and deliberate ambiguity. Finally, in the universe
of Etruscan religion, dominated by the all-powerful female
divinity, the Earth Mother whom Veii and Caere worshipped
under the name of Hera or Juno, Mater Matuta or Leucothea, it
is possible that a dead woman the more readily inspired a religious
cult in survivors if she appeared to merge, beyond the grave, with
the great goddess; and that woman in general was considered by
her very nature as participating in that of the divinity who reigned
in the temples and necropolises.
The latter, in any case, furnish us with fresh reasons for
attributing to the Etruscan woman, in a society where we see her
mingling with such brilliance in the business and the pleasures of
men, her character torn to pieces by envious outsiders but in-
vested in her country with an authority that was almost sovereign;
artistic, cultivated, interested in hellenic refinements and the
bringer of civilization to her home; finally venerated in the tomb
as an emanation of divine power, a privileged position which
perhaps recalled that of Phaedra or Ariadne in Minoan Crete,
and which Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, would never have
dared aspire to in Rome.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND

Fertility of the land - The problem of malaria - The successes

of Etruscan hydraulics - The right of property - The cereals -
Vines and trees - Agricultural implements - Etruscan agro-
nomists - The raising of stoch - Hunting - Fishing - The timber
industry - The ndnes - The roads - The vehicles
FERTILITY OF THE LAND

It has been remarked above with what lyrical enthusiasm the
ancients celebrated the fecundity of Etruscan soil. If we believe
what they write, all Nature's gifts were assembled there, all the
fruits of the earth there responded perfectly to the cultivators'
care, and it was finally the very abundance of harvests of corn and
wine that had sapped the energies of the race and contributed to
its decadence. But if we take literally this evocation of an Etruria
Felix, that is, fertile, in the sense in which one talked of the
Campania Felix and Arabia Felix, and imagine a sort of idyllic
landscape of vineyards and elm-groves and murmuring waters, we
cannot help thinking that things have changed there considerably
during the last two and a half thousand years.
Tourists who have followed the via Aurelia from Pisa to Rome
hardly recognize 'these plains covered with cornfields that are
separated by hills with cultivated slopes' 1 in the low, stony,
marshy lands of an unhealthy Maremma whose centuries-old
desolation has in recent years only partially been changed by the
agrarian developments in the region. Nor do those idyllic des-
criptions correspond to what veterans of the Italian Campaign of
June 1944 remember as they trudged along the via Clodia - a
meridional Etruria of arid steppes and thorny thickets, of escarp-
ments eroded into labyrinthine canyons in the middle of which
97
rose the remains of ramparts, or carved by the sandy watercourses

of the Fiora, the Orcia, the Ombrone. Today at any rate the
classical descriptions are true only - and then they are marvellously
exact - of the Etrurian interior, beyond the lake of Bolsena and
the slopes of the Amiata, where one enters, in the shade of chest-
nut-trees, a new world where firmer horizons, rolling hills and
deep-running waterways herald the real Tuscany. One receives
then as one enters the valleys of the Paglia, the Chiana and the
upper Tiber, towards Chiusi, Cortona and Perugia, the same
impression that the Romans must have received about the end
of the fourth century when, leaving behind the Ciminian forest
they discovered, displayed before them, 'the opulent fields of
Etruria', opulenta arva Etruriae. 2
It was indeed of Tuscany, in the modern sense of the name,
that our authors were thinking when they lauded the fertility of
Etruria; and especially of a country known under the name of
Etrusci campi, 'the Etruscan plains', 3 which extended from Fiesole
to Arezzo, 'rich in corn, in cattle and everything'.
Would you care for a fine word-picture of it? We are indebted
to Pliny the Younger for one: he had had built for himself, in the
vicinity of Tifernum Tiberinum (Citta di Castello), one of his
country villas: 4
'The aspect of the country is the most beautiful possible;

picture to yourself an immense amphitheatre, such as the hand
of nature alone could form. Before you lies a vast extended
plain bounded by a range of mountains, whose summits are
crowned with lofty and venerable woods, which supply abund-
ance and variety of game; from thence as the mountains decline,
they are adorned with underwoods. Intermixed with these are
little hills of so loamy and fat a soil, that it would be difficult
to find a single stone upon them; their fertility is nothing
inferior to the lowest grounds; and though their harvest indeed
is something later, their heavy crops are as well matured. At
the foot of these hills the eye is presented, wherever it turns,
with one unbroken view of numberless vineyards, which are
terminated below by a border, as it were, of shrubs. From
thence extend meadows and fields. The soil of the latter is so
extremely stiff, upon the first ploughing it rises in such vast
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF HURAL LIFE
clods, that it is necessary to go over it nine times with the

largest oxen and the strongest ploughs, before they can be
thoroughly broken.
The flower-enamelled meadows produce trefoil and other
kinds of herbage as fine and tender as if it were but just sprung
up, being everywhere refreshed by never-failing rills. But
though the country abounds wi!h great plenty of water, there
are no marshes; for as the ground is sloping, whatever water it
receives without absorbing, runs off into the Tiber. This
river, which winds through the middle of the meadows, is
navigable only in the winter and spring, when it transports
the produce of the lands to Rome; but its contracted channel
is so extremely low in summer, that it resigns the name of a
great river which, however, it resumes in autumn.
You would be most agreeably entertained by taking a view of
the face of this country from the mountains: you would imagine
that not a real, but some painted landscape lay before you,
drawn with the most exquisite beauty and exactness; such a
harmonious and regular variety charms the eye whichsoever
way it throws itself.'
Very different, at all times, must have been mant1me Etruria.

Since the Roman era, it seems to have presented the aspect of a
wild and pestilential scrubland infested with savage boars and
serpents, which Dante paints in his Inferno, 5 and whose pictur-
esque romanticism was sung by so many nineteenth-century
travellers: Thus it had appeared, as we have said, to Tiberius
Gracchus when he noted 'the desolation of the country, where
there lived, in the fields and pastures, only foreign and barbarian
slaves'. 6 At the beginning of the Empire, Veii was a site aban-
doned to a luxuriant vegetation amid cascades, and on what had
once been its forum the shepherds pastured their flocks. 7 Caere
was only the shadow of her former self, and Strabo assures
us that a little nearby watering-place, the Aquae Caeretanae, was
much more populous because of the crowds of people coming to
take the baths. 8 There was no mention of Vulci, Vetulonia or
Rusellae. At the beginning of the fifth century, the Gaulish poet
Rutilius Namatianus, returning to his province by sea, described
the Etruscan coast he was sailing along; everywhere the towns
99
and villages of yore had given way to large farms; at Cosa, near
Orbetello, he could make out 'ancient ruins and horrid walls
that no one guarded'. 9
THE PROBLEM OF MALARIA

Several causes could be attributed to the devastation and
depopulation of this coast where the Tyrrhenians had once
perhaps disembarked, and where their principal metropoles had
been built: the silting-up, for example, of a port like Vetulonia,
in ruins since the end of the sixth century; war, which had utterly
destroyed Veii and Volsinii; the political regime, as Tiberius
Gracchus referred to the extension of the latzfundia: but also the
ravages of malaria, a problem we must briefly discuss.
The impaludism which raged in the Maremma and sometimes in
certain inland valleys brought upon the whole of Etruria, by
unjust generalization, a disagreeable reputation for insalubrity.
From his native Auvergne, Sidonius Apollinaris was to condemn
it utterly in this respect: pestilens regio Tuscorum. 10 But one is
astonished to see a cultured Roman of the end of the first century
AD, Domitius Apollinaris, an admirer of Martial and a corres-
pondent of Pliny the Younger, 11 expressing disquiet on learning
that the latter is going, in summer, to his villa in Tuscany. And
Pliny was to reassure him by pointing out that it is far from the
sea, 'and at the foot of the Apennine range, so much esteemed for
salubrity'. But he recognized that 'the air of that part of Tuscany,
which lies towards the sea coast, is thick and unwholesome': Est
sane gravis et pestilens ora Tuscorum, quae per litus extenditur. 12
The most ancient testimony we have on this subject is from
Cato, and, in its laconicism, this fragment summarizes an im-
portant historical event. In 181, Rome had founded, at the foot
of the plateau on which Tarquinii was built, right at the edge of
the sea, at the place called formerly Graviscae and now Porto
Clementino, a colony destined probably to intimidate that proud
city, which remained obstinately faithful to its traditions. But
the enterprise was disastrous: the site proved unsuitable to the
prosperity of a great urban centre, and the fevers which decimated
the new colonists left the Romans with the bitterest memories. 13
Virgil and Rutilius Namatianus recalled this. 14 But Cato, who had
lived through this disappointment, had already declared that
100
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AM> PATTERNS OF !WHAL LIFE
Graviscae drew its name from grm1is, 'heavy', 'unwholesome',

because the ground exhaled gravem aercm, 'an unwholesome air'
malaria. 15
Let us try to go back a little further in time. A celebrated
document, to which we shall have to return, places us in 205,
towards the end of the Second Punic War. 16 That year, Scipio,
who was preparing for his landing in Africa, called on the allies
to arm a fleet for whose outfitting the State had refused to pay.
Etruria, Livy tells us, distinguished herself by the speed with
which she replied to the appeal, and the detailed enumeration of
goods promised by each people tells us much about the special
cultures and industries to which each was devoted. Caere was to
deliver wheat and supplies of all kinds, Populonia iron, Tarquinii
linen-cloth for the sails, Volterra timber for the keel and frame-
work of the ships, as well as wheat, Arezzo three thousand
bucklers, as many helmets, and javelins, gaesa, long lances (a
total of fifty thousand items of each article); axes, spades, scythes,
earth baskets and millstones to equip forty warships, and part of
the provisions for the voyage to be used by the rowers and their
officers, without counting one hundred and twenty thousand
bushels of wheat; Perugia, Chiusi, Rusellae gave pine trees for
the construction of the ships, and a great quantity of corn.
What strikes us at once in this list is that the centres of Etruscan
prosperity had moved inland, and that to judge by the importance
of both its metallurgical and agricultural contributions Arezzo
really appears to have become the economic capital of Etruria.
But if one considers the contribution from the towns in the
coastal area, we notice, chiefly in between Tarquinii and Rusellae,
which, upstream from modern Grosseto, had formerly taken the
place of Vetulonia, a wide gap of about a hundred kilometres.
In this cradle of Etruscan grandeur, where so many sites had
brought themselves honour by signal gifts to civilization, Telamon,
Ansedonia-Cosa, Sovana, Saturnia, Vulci, not one quintal of
wheat could be collected. Vulci particularly, Vulci on the Fiora,
is conspicuous here by its absence, not that life had altogether left
it: it still had, at that period, its zilath who were preceded by
lictors in solemn processions. Later, it would recapture its old
enchantment in the glorious memory of Aulus and Caclius
Vibennae in the Frani;ois tomb. But the fact that it could not he
D.L.E.-8 IOI
taxed proved that it was ruined. And even Tarquinii, that boasted
having seen the divine dwarf Tages 17 spring out of one of its
field-furrows, had been able to produce only a bundle of cloth
from its depleted stores. It is clear that some sort of calamity
had overtaken all the region, and how could it be anything else
but malaria?
Yet it is an obscure point, and it has caused much ink to flow.
Scholars have wondered, and wonder still, exactly when maritime
Etruria became insalubrious. No one denies that it had always
been bordered by lagoons. But not all lagoons are malarial:
Ravenna, though built entirely on piles in the middle of marshes,
enjoyed such a tonic climate that a school for gladiators had been
set up there. 18 The anopheles are dangerous only when they
transmit a virus which they do not secrete themselves. If they
propagate impaludism by stinging healthy men, they must first
have stung infected men. So there must have been a moment
when the malaria microbe was introduced - as it had been already
in the plain of Sybaris in Magna Graecia - into Etruria. And as
impaludism has its best breeding-places in tropical or sub-
tropical regions, the foreigners who imported it are looked for
in Africa or Asia. Nello Toscanelli gave those partisans of
Herodotus' theory of the oriental origin of the Etruscans a nasty
knock by telling us that it was the companions of Tyrrhenus who,
after landing at Vetulonia, had contaminated the anopheles of
Lake Prilius (Lago di Castiglione), and, as the sickness spread,
had finally caused the loss of a people who until then had led
wholesome and innocent lives. 19 Rejecting these audacious views,
we tend today to believe that the scourge did not break out till
fairly late, and those who believe that colonization had come
from Asia point out that if the Maremma had already been in the
grip of fever when the immigrants landed there, they would soon
have left those inhospitable shores; or, if they had persisted in
remaining, they would never have succeeded in creating the
powerful civilization which flourished there for several centuries. 20
It seems to us that this underestimates the resources of human
energy, and the Etruscans were by no means lacking in it. We
see today in Tuscany itself that there are means of purifying a
malarial zone; there, after a long struggle, the improvement
of the land and agrarian reform have eliminated the last tracts
IOZ
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF RURAL LIFE
of marshland. The French are perhaps better informed on

the history of the great Algerian plain known as the Mitidja,
which, despite its natural fertility, indolence and the insecurity
brought about by Turkish domination had turned into 'an im-
mense sewer', and which, reclaimed after a hundred and thirty
years of labour from fever-breeding swamps, now displays, as
far as the eye can see, all round Boufarik, its fields, its vineyards,
its splendid orchards. 21 And yet, at first, the ravages of malaria,
in the army and among the colonists, had been terrible. We can
translate into Etruscan terms what Toussenel, civil commissioner
at Boufarik, wrote:
'In I 842, Boufarik was the most deadly place in Algeria.
The faces of those rare inhabitants who had escaped from the
pernicious fever were green and puffy. Although the parish
had changed priests three times in one year, the church was
closed; the justice of the peace had died; the entire civilian
administrative and military personnel had had to be renewed,
and the district officer, the one man left alive, had been invested
with all kinds of functions through the decease or sickness of
all other office-holders.'
Certainly the Etruscans did not know about quinine. They had
had no Laveran to discover the microbe of impaludism for them.
But it is not impossible that they may have put into practice the
essential principles of anti-anophelean action which is aimed at
depriving the larvae of the stagnant waters where they breed: this
can be done by so shaping the ground that water cannot stand
still, and draining away water when it gets bogged down - in
other words, the warping and drainage of the marches.
It was no small surprise to us to discover in that fine work
by Drs Edmond and Etienne Sergent, Story of an Algerian
Marsh, from which we have borrowed the citations above, that
there exists among the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, pre-
served at the lnstitut de France, a note accompanied by a drawing,
which shows 'how one should conduct, with running waters, the
soil of mountains into marshy valleys, and make them fertile, and
purify the surrounding air'. 22
The learned doctors conclude: 'The practice of warping land
was born in Tuscany, the native country of Leonardo da Vinci.'
103
Was born there? Possibly. Unless it is a question of a skill

surviving and being transmitted across the ages to the unexpected
heir of the Etruscan engineers.
THE SUCCESSES OF ETRUSCAN HYDRAULICS

It is a fact that, very early in its history, this people showed an
exceptional talent for solving problems in hydraulics, and dis-
played a relentless determination to harness the waters of the
earth. The recent re-emergence of Spina and Adria, of which
we shall speak further on, has made intelligible the testimony of
Pliny the Elder, who, describing the mouth of the Po and the
great works that had made its course more regular, declares:
'All these diversions and canals, from Sagis (Porto di Magnavacca)
onwards, had as their first authors the Etruscans: with the help
of trenches they conducted the greater part of the river into the
marshes of Adria.' 23 But without going so far, we recall that it
was to the Tarquins that the annalists attributed, as one of the
greatest services they had performed for Rome, the construction
of draining-trenches and sewers that had purified a forum until
then covered with stagnant waters.
Of Tarquinius the Elder (616-579) Livy writes: 'There were
low quarters round the forum and in the valleys between the hills
in which the lack of slope made it difficult for waters to run
away; he drained them by using a system of draining-trenches
running from high places down into the Tiber.' 24 Of Tarquinius
Superbus (534-510) he writes: 'He caused to be constructed,
despite the protestations of the people who found this labour
very trying, a great subterranean sewer intended to receive all
the filth of the city, a work which our modern magnificence found
hard to equal.' 25 One can still see today, where it enters the
Tiber, the arches of that famous Cloaca Maxima, since restored
several times. Under the forum have been discovered several
other subterranean galleries which were used as sewers, or
aqueducts, or main-sewers collecting the waters under the Capitol;
and all recent diggings confirm the capital role the Etruscans
played in making Rome the city in regione pestilenti salubrem,
'salubrious in the midst of a pestilential region', which Romulus
founded, 26 and in allowing the forum, once drained, to assume its
historic role as the political centre of the city.
104
THE ETHUSCAN COUNTHYSIDE AND PATTEHNS OF !WHAL LIFE
Yet there were still - when the Etruscans had left - frequent
pestilentiae or outbreaks of malaria which made the region round
the Tiber a dangerous place: many sanctuaries were consecrated
to the goddess Fever, and Apollo, whose temple rose in the Campus
Martius about the middle of the fifth century, was first of all
invoked as a healing god, llfedicus.2 1
How could this zeal fail to improve the sanitary conditions of
their colonies by draining away stagnant or polluted waters -
which recalls one of the most constant preoccupations of nine-
teenth-century Europeans in their Asian or African possessions -
how could it fail to inspire the Etruscans to do the same for their
own territory? Even today one can still admire traces of their
work. Though at Cosa the Tagliata which they were thought to
have excavated in the rock to serve as an outlet to the Burano
lagoon has been shown to be a canal from the Roman port whose
silting-up it helped to prevent, 28 no one denies that they con-
structed, near Veii, the tremendous covered trench, eighty
metres long, four metres wide and ten metres deep, which they
had laid out at the Ponte Sodo for the passage of the Cremera. 29
It has long been known that the soil of meridional Etruria,
notably in the ager Tarquiniensis at Bieda, was mined with an
internal network of cuniculi whose purpose was to 'withdraw the
water underneath the absorbent layer of earth and make it run
underground', thus 'removing the humidity without eroding the
surface of the soil'. 30 Although one is probably wrong in attribut-
ing all the merit for this vast system of cunicular drainage to the
Etruscans - (it continues into Latium, and it is obvious that
Rome did not entirely abandon it) - it is certain that they started
it. Moreover, the science of the haruspices, indirectly reflecting
the technical problems that the engineers had to solve, prescribed
special rites for making water flow. When, at the time of the
siege of Veii, it was reported to Camillus that the Alban Lake,
by some unprecedented miracle, had overflowed, an Etruscan
diviner was not caught napping and fluently described quae
sollemnis derivatio esset or 'the ritual method of draining it'. 31
Etruscan hydraulics had a place in the most ancient foundations
of religion.
Another small incident confirms their competence in this
domain. Having carried out a study in depth of everything
105
concerning the drainage of water, they were no less skilful in

discovering and harnessing waters to irrigate arid ter~ain. Not
for nothing did Varro call the aquilex, Tuscus: 32 Etruria was where
the best water-diviners were found, and these were not common
water-diviners; they knew for example how to find lakes of sub-
terranean water by examining peculiarities of vegetation, and
how to bore what are known today as artesian wells. 33
So we are entitled to believe that impaludism, far from having
made a late appearance among the Etruscans, then bringing about
their downfall existed always in an endemic state on certain
parts of the coast. A vigilant policy of action against the unhealthy
conditions of the marshes, practised in their provinces when they
were at the peak of their power, and whose prescriptions were
registered in deep-rooted religious traditions shows them from
the first conscious of a menace which they were very soon able
to circumscribe and keep in check and which perhaps was partly
responsible for making them what they were. But a drainage
canal, if it is not looked after, becomes just as dangerous a place
as a marsh. 34 From the third century at least, political and
economic circumstances, the insecurity of wars and the destruction
of certain cities, the shrinking of arable land and the encroachment
of useless pasture resulted in a return and a spread of the evil;
and, undermining Etruscan vitality, precipitated the decadence
which had allowed the evil to declare itself. All the same, it was
not a total and definitive decline. If the malaria at Graviscae
decimated the first Roman colonists, Lake Prilius on the verge of
the Maremma of Grosseto was not, at the end of the Republic, so
insalubrious that it did not stimulate the greed of the tribune
Clodius: 35 according to Cicero, he wanted to build himself a villa
there on ground stolen from a local land-owner. Even at the
worst times, the fever did not spread its virulence everywhere.
Even around Graviscae, 'the verdure of dense forests'3 6 and 'the
shade of pine-groves undulating along the edge of the sea' were
mentioned by Rutilius Namatianus.
THE RIGHT OF PROPERTY

Those naturally fertile plains, those low lands reclaimed from the
sea, those methodically irrigated steppes were - and this is a
second trait that ought to be noted in our description of the
106
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF IWHAL LIFE
Etruscan countryside - composed of measured and marked-off

fields. The Etruscans never seem to have indulged in nostalgia
for an age of gold in which the fruits of the earth flourished
spontaneously in an undivided earth, in which Saturn governed
peace-loving men who knew nothing of the desire to possess
things: amor lzabe11di. 37 Their earliest memories were of the com-
ing of Jupiter, the law of work, the reign of property. Theirs was
the hard and active world which Virgil, though he softens it with
a note of universal tenderness, sings in the Georgics: 'Before
Jove's day no tillers subdued the land. Even to mark the field or
divide it with bounds was unlawful. Men made gain for the
common store.' 38 This is what had also been proclaimed by an
Etruscan prophetess, the nymph Vegoia, in a prophecy that has
been preserved, in Latin, in a collection of texts about land-
measuring, the Corpus of the Agrimensores. After an abbreviated
fragment of cosmogony, in which she evokes the separation of sea
and sky, she introduced all at once, as if Etruria had never existed
before his advent, Jupiter, creator of property and protector of
its laws: 39
'Know that the sea was separated from the sky. Now, when
Jupiter had claimed back his rights over the land of Etruria,
he established and ordained that the plains should be measured
and the fields marked. Knowing human greed and the desire
to possess lands, he wished that everything should be marked
by boundaries.' Scias mare ex aethera remotum. Cum autem
Juppiter terram Aetruriae sibi vindicavit, constituit iussitque
metiri campos signarique agros. Sciens hominum avaritiam vel
terrenum cupidinem, terminz"s omnia scita esse voluit.
The Etruscan Jupiter, Tinia, is especially a Jupiter Terminus, to
whom boundaries were consecrated - in Latin termini and in
Etruscan tular. Tular, 'limits', 'confines', is in fact one of those
words (the inflexion indicates a plural) the interpretation of
which, definitely established in the course of recent years, has
given us the best insights into the sociology of the Etruscan
world. 40
The nine inscriptions in which it figures, generally on stone
cippi, have been cleverly replaced where they were found, and it
has been demonstrated that they were meant to demarcate either
107
the pomerium* of a town like Perugia, 41 or the territorial confines

of a city like Fiesole, 42 with the name of the magistrates who had
mapped them; they could also be either the bounds of a private
property, 43 or those of a concession in a cemetery, 44 or finally the
frontiers of the Etruscan league at Cortona. 45
But this desire of the Etruscans to indicate clearly with in-
contestable marks that certain places belonged to the State, to
a commune or to a private person was felt in their provinces and
even among neighbouring peoples before it was taken up by Rome
and conquered the world. Thus the place called Tullare, today
Tollara, in the toponymy of the Apennine near Placentia as it is
revealed to us in the Alimentary Tale of Veleia, tells us that even
under Trajan there were still traces of an ancient Etruscan
limitatio. And the Umbrians adopted the idea and the vocable,
from which is derived their tuder, attested in the Tables of
Gubbio, and better still in the name of the frontier town between
Umbria and Etruria, Tuder, modern Todi. 4 G
We should like very much to understand thoroughly these
epigraphic documents about boundaries which encourage us to
think of Etruria as a land governed by a rudimentary form of
cadastral survey. Our knowledge of Etruscan law and of the laws
of the ancients in general will be greatly enriched when the
inscription on the cippus from Perugia47 is elucidated; this sets
out, on two sides, in some forty-six lines, the contract entered
into by the Velthina and the Afula in settlement of a joint-property
case which had brought them into opposition.
Another term, on a sepuchral boundary-stone from Monte-
pulciano, excites our impatience: it is claruchies, which could
only be the genitive of an adjective formed on the Greek klerouchos
and which the Etruscan tongue seems to have borrowed very
late from the vocabulary of Ptolemaic Egypt, applying it to those
colonists who were beneficiaries in the apportionment of lands. 48
This one, called curiously enough Au. Latini, that is, Aulus
Latinius, was he not one of the followers of Sylla whom the
dictator set up on the territory of Chiusi?
The great movement of colonization which the Gracchi had
started in 133 BC and which was aimed at distributing lands
*The pomerium was a consecrated space outside the town, where it was not
permissible to build or plough. (Cf. Chapter VI, i.)
108
THE ETHUSCAN COUNTRYSll>E AND PATTERNS OF HUHAI . l.IFE
among the poor citizens of Rome caused the most violent storms
in the Etruscan world and even provoked in 91 a march on Rome.
This wave of colonization struck both at the interests of landed
proprietors and at the age-old feeling the Etruscans ha<l for the
inviolability of boundaries. The same maledictions fell upon law-
breakers who shifted them clandestinely and upon the promoters
of agrarian reforms. It was Jupiter who had planted the boundary
marks and who gave them their sacred character. At Chiusi
people claimed that Jupiter, assisted by the goddess Justitia, had
revealed to the lucumo Arruns, using the nymph Vegoia as inter-
preter, the principles of Property. 49 At Tarquinii this revelation
was attributed to Tages who, rising from the soil to the great
surprise of the ploughmen, had made known to Tarchon the
precepts of limitatio: 50 he was credited with a book whose title,
in Latin, sounds strangely: liber qui inscribitur terrae iuris Etruriae -
on 'the law relating to the land of Etruria', or 'the law of Etruria
relating to the land'. 51 Terrae ius Etruriae was the literal transla-
tion (hence the gaucherie) of an expression which S. Mazzarino
succeeded in deciphering in the inscription on the cippus at
Perugia: 52 an agreement had finally been reached between the
parties helu tesne rasne (in which hil-helu signifies 'land', tesan-
tesne 'law' and rasna-rasne 'Etruscan'), consequently e terrae iure
Etruriae, 'according to the law of Etruscan land'.
Such was the law that Jupiter had imposed upon Etruria when
he took over its government: he made of it the ideal country for
private property - large-scale property and also farms of small
and moderate importance. This is what has notably emerged from
researches undertaken in meridional Etruria during the last years
by J. B. Ward Perkins and the British School at Rome: 53 before
the bulldozers took over in an improvement plan and completely
wiped out all vestiges of the past, it became urgent, and proved
very instructive, to attempt to retrace, step by step, the ancient
road-network: it was noticed that the whole of the Veii region and
the western part of the ager Faliscus had, in the second and first
centuries BC, been the scenes of intense repopulation which can
still be seen in the density of the ruins of rural undertakings
which denote a certain ease of life. As we go further back into the
past we are reduced to conjecture. But the numerous indications
offered by local epigraphy lead us to believe that if the territory
109
of independent Etruria was generally in the hands of an aristocracy

of landlords exploiting extensive domains, there also existed, or
had been created, round the fertile valleys of the Paglia and the
Chiana, from Chiusi to Arezzo and Cortona, small properties
cultivated directly by peasant families. In this respect history
has still not been able to modify radically the appearance of the
Etruscan countryside.
THE CEREALS
A fertile country, well cultivated, abundant in resources and
products of all kinds ... Livy, discussing the contributions made
by the various Etruscan peoples to Scipio's expedition, has given
us, as we saw above, the elements of a regional economy already
marked by signs of decadence. At the time of former prosperity
we can imagine that all round the towns there was a chequerboard
of fields and orchards in which a polyculture was practised that
met all local needs. 'In a fat soil, as in Etruria,' writes Varro,
who points out the difference between these and certain poor lands
in the region of Tusculum and Tivoli, 'one sees fertile fields that
are never fallow, fine straight trees and no moss anywhere.' 54
Etruria grew sufficient cereals to be able on occasion to export
them to her neighbours. In the fifth century, during periods of
famine, Rome several times had recourse to stocks available in
the granaries of maritime Etruria and Tiberine Etruria, 55 and
texts bring before our mind's eye great convoys descending the
river. 56 The 205 list also mentions supplies of wheat from Caere,
Rusellae, Volterra and especially from Chiusi, Perugia and Arezzo.
And in the classical period it was again in the interior, at Chiusi
and Arezzo, that Etruria's richest granaries were situated. People
praised to the skies the miraculous harvests of these Tusci campi,
giving fifteen bags for one; 57 they praised the weight of Chiusi
spelt (far Clusinum) that reached twenty-six pounds to the bushel, 58
and the whiteness of its flour (candoris nitidi59 ) with which Ovid
was to advise his readers to powder their cheeks, 60 but which
meanwhile was used by the common people to make that mash
(Clusinae pultes 61 ) which long constituted the basis of Etruscan
and Italian food. But Clusium and Arezzo were also famous for
their wheat, a fine variety known as siligo, which was used in
confectionery. 62 This first-class wheat also made Pisa's reputa-
110
tion; 63 this city was no less famous for what we could call its
pasta, 64 which was made with a sort of semolina (alica), mixed
with honeyed wine. As for Cisalpine Gaul, it was particularly
suited to the cultivation of millet. 6 5
VINES AND TREES

\Ve are also very well informed under the chapter on wines.
Since the days of Alexander, the wines of Etruria had been known
in Greece, 66 and Dionysius of Halicarnassus recommends them
along with Falernian and the wines of the Colli Romani. 67 The
Spaniard Martial acknowledges that they equal those of Tarra-
gona. 68 Other writers state that the best wine was that of Luni
on the borders of Liguria. 69 The wines of Graviscae, despite the
malaria exhaled by the surrounding marshes, and those of Statonia
on the slopes of the upper Fiora produced excellent vintages. 70
But the territory round Veii only produced (alas for the stomachs
of Horace, Persius Flaccus and Martial!) a thin, sour wine with
thick sediment which could please the stingy purses of only the
most miserly hosts. 71 In Cisalpine Gaul there were the wines of
Adria, of Cesena, and a Maecenatianum which probably came from
a vineyard of Maecenas. 72 These wines were universally esteemed.
Of even more interest to us is the fact that the Etruscans
preferred types of muscatels whose sugary taste, it is said, pleased
the bees and so earned them the appellation of Apianae: 73 a
fanciful etymology, for the name was probably derived from that
of a wine-grower (Appius, with Etruscan simplification of the
occlusive: we know of a Florentine, one Aviles Apianas=Aulus
Appianus). 74 In any case, this sweet wine, very heavy, is the
one the banqueters in Etruscan wall-paintings got drunk on.
Other local vines hint at future Chianti and Orvietos: at Todi,
on the frontier of Umbria, there was the Tudernis; at Arezzo the
Talpona (which recalls the name Talpius, Talponius). 75 All
these varieties indicate a long experience of viticultural tech-
niques; grafting had long been practised in the creation of hybrids
and there was a methodical arrangement of the vineyards so
that different plants could be juxtaposed. Pliny tells us of a
vine called Murgentina, introduced from Sicily into the Campania
where it took the name of Pompeiana and which prospered
particularly in the rich soil of the Chiusi hills. 76 But since this
I I I
plant was imported at a relatively recent date, we dare hardly

assume that it was the taste of its wine which inspired the Gauls
to invade Italy. 7 7
We have seen that the speciality of Tarquinii, at the end of the

third century, was the cultivation of flax and the weaving of sails
for ships: there is no longer any mention of this in Pliny. The
textile industry also seems to have been a tradition of the Faliscan
territory: the poets clothe their legendary heroes in flowing robes
of fine linen which the Romans denounced as a symptom of
degeneracy, 78 and even under Augustus the Faliscans were first
in the manufacture of Etruscan hunting-nets, which were 'so
strong that they could not be cut, so fine that they could pass
through a ring, and so light that one man could easily carry slung
over his shoulder enough net to cover a whole wood'. 79
A curious fact is that the olive, whose silvery-green foliage
seems to give modern Tuscany its typical colouring, must have
been less common in ancient Etruria. The cultivated olive was
still unknown in Italy in the days of Tarquinius the Elder, 80 and
though in the second century Cato lovingly describes an olive-
plantation in the region of Venafro, on the north-western edge of
the Campania, 81 as far as we know there is no allusion in the ancient
authors to any comparable cultivation in Etruria. It is not that
the Etruscans did not make abundant use of oil. They borrowed
the name for it at a very early date from the Greeks, as the Latins
did, and one of the most ancient Etruscan inscriptions, engraved
on a clay phial, refers to it under the name of aska eleivana,
which means vase (askos) for oil (elaion). 82 But this oil had long
since been imported by them from Attica in the innumerable
amphorae that are scattered over the cemeteries of Caer~ and
Spina.
At the time when, in an enthusiastic eulogy of Italy, Varro
declared that it was 'everywhere planted with trees so that it
looked like one enormous orchard', 83 we must indeed assume that
Etruscan territory was no exception to the rule. But we must not
forget that the majority of our fruits - and vegetables - were
unknown in primitive Italy and were only brought there through
the ages along with other refinements from the Orient. Not for
nothing does Virgil entrust the garden of his dreams, in the fourth
I 12
THE ETHUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND l'ATTEHNS OF !WHAL LIFE
book of the Georgics, to a horticulturist just landed from Cilicia.s4

It was a time when cherries were considered an exotic fruit; they
\Vere brought from the Pontus by Lucullus 85 after his victory over
Mithridates, and when the lemon, in the country 'wo die Zitronen
bli.ihn' (where the citrons grow) was still only a medicament
used as an antidote or a breath-sweetener. 86 The connexions the
Etruscans had with the Carthaginians, who brought the art of
tree-culture to perfection, 87 as well as the great number of eastern
slaves who entered their familiae had perhaps allowed them to
steal a march on the Romans. It is sufficient to browse through
M. Jacques Andre's Lexicon of Latin Botanical Terms to see that
the citron or cedrat derives its name through Etruscan88 from a
non-Inda-European language, and that among the varieties of
cherries there was one, the ruddiest kind, the cerasum Apronianum,
whose inventor, one Apronius, must have been born in the region
of Perugia. 89 Nevertheless, when the ancient agronomists enum-
erated the peninsula's most succulent fruits they cited the apples
of Ameria, the pears of Tarentum, the figs of Herculanum and
the almonds of Praeneste: 90 Etruria is absent from the catalogue,
and Ovid simply says that the Faliscan region was rich m
orchards. 91
It is the same for vegetables; everyone praised the leeks of
Aricia, the turnips of Nursia and Amiternum, the onions of
Tusculum and the asparagus of Ravenna: a strange silence reigns
over Etruscan vegetable-plots. Even the humble cabbage, which
inspired Cato to an extraordinary dithyramb, 92 the cabbage,
delight of gastronomes and universal panacea; the cabbage, the
medicine for ulcers and melancholy that was cultivated by all the
towns of Italy - Aricia, Ardea, Tivoli, Signia, Capua, Caudium
and so on 9 3 - apparently even the cabbage left the Etruscans
indifferent. A sign that the coastal latifundia had not encouraged
the development of fruit and vegetable cultivation and that the
interior plains were devoted to cereals and vines.
For information about earlier times we are compelled to study
very closely the floral decorations on funerary paintings and
works of art, which show - but these may be motifs borrowed
from the ornamental repertoire of the Orient - the artichoke,
bindweed, ivy, the dwarf palm and the oak, which belong to the
indigenous flora; and the crocus, acanthus, laurel, cypress, lily,
113
poppy, pomegranate and so on, which were importations.94

The pomegranate appears on painted plaques at Caere of the
sixth century: 'Punic apple', malum punicum in Latin, the dis-
covery of which was claimed by the Carthaginians. 95 We can
imagine what the lovely gardens of Tarquinii looked like from the
frescoes in the Tomb of the Baron and the Tomb of the Triclinium:96
palms, laurels, pomegranates, various shrubs whose branches
bend under the weight of big blue bell-flowers compose for the
dancers a setting which perhaps is related to the age-old tradition
of the 'paradises' of ancient Persia. 97 Among the Etruscan texts
which have come down to us in translation, one refers to trees of
ill-omen: 'buckthorn, dogwood, fern, black fig, holly, wild pear,
butcher's broom, eglantine, bramble' 98 - an infernal and fatal
flora whose growth warned the haruspices to expect the direst
calamities; but these trees and bushes also composed the rough
scrubland which the farmer's tools had to be ceaselessly weeding
and clearing.
AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS
The Etruscans' agricultural implements are abundantly repre-
sented in the display-cases in the museum at Florence in the
shape of iron instruments coming from Luni and Telamon, to
which has been added a votive deposit unearthed on this last site
and which was consecrated in 225 on the occasion of the victory
won that year by the Romans and Etruscans over the Gauls. 99
The latter objects are in bronze, because of their religious char-
acter: Tages had ordained that the furrow which originally marked
the boundaries of cities should be ploughed with a bronze plough-
share.100 Here we have a complete collection of hoes and spades
and picks, of bill-hooks for pruning and weeding, of sickles for
cutting hay and corn; above all, there are two swing-ploughs
which clearly illustrate our knowledge of ploughing among the
Etruscans. Need we recall that our plough, with its fore-part
borne on two wheels, saw the light in the northern plains, and that
it is mentioned by the ancients in the first century of our era only
as a recent invention of the Rhaetian Gauls? 101 Further on we shall
see that the Celtic peoples were very much in advance of everyone
else in the matter of carriages and chariots. The Mediterraneans
for a long time contented themselves with light swing-ploughs,
I 14
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF HURAL LIFE
better adapted to the nature of their soil and the shape of their
land. 102 One of the swing-ploughs from Telamon is the typical
form; it is of the most primitive type: a long handle terminated
by a hook. It figures thus in contemporary bas-reliefs, brandished
like a weapon by a legendary warrior who, it is said, had fought at
Marathon with nothing but a plough to defend himself with.103
We also have, in the same collection, a flat ploughshare in the
shape of a spoon, which fitted on to the framework. The other
swing-plough, of a composite type, was formed mainly of a
pointed ploughshare, a long tail with a handle, a long beam at the
end of which the yoke was fixed, with in the middle three pro-
tuberances to guide the team's harness. A similar swing-plough
is found, after the end of the sixth century, on the friezes in the
situla of the Certosa at Bologna, where a ploughman on his way
to the fields carries it over his shoulder while driving his oxen
before him, 104 and, in a rather more perfected state, on a bronze
from Arezzo dating from the beginning of the fourth century and
which shows the ploughman at work behind his swing-plough
and his placid oxen. 105 It is still not the plough of Virgil and
Pliny with its coulter which, in front of the ploughshare, plots
the furrow, and the mould-board that turns over the furrow-slice.
ETRUSCAN AGRONOMISTS
The great interest the Etruscans had in exploiting their land had
inspired some agricultural treatises. It was perhaps not by
accident that the Vegoia fragment was coupled, in the collection
of ancient land-surveyors, with a text by the celebrated Car-
thaginian agronomist Mago: ex libris ll1agonis et Vegoiae auctorum -
by Mago whose twenty-eight books were translated after the
Punic War and summarized several times in Greek and in Latin,
and to which, apparently, the centuries-old bonds between the
Carthaginians and the Etruscans had already attracted the
attention of the latter.
In any case, judging by his name among other things, Saserna
must have been Etruscan: his work, written at the end of the
second century, and continued by his son, is often mentioned by
Varro, Columella and Pliny in tones of mingled praise and
mockery. In it he took as his model a domain he possessed in
Gaul - that is, in Cisalpine Gaul where the Etruscan colonist
had preceded the Roman ones, and probably in the region of

Placentia or Veleia whose Varro contrasted the easy plains and
moderate hills with the steep slopes of neighbouring Liguria.106
And the Romans of the end of the Republic did not fail to jeer at
the choice absurdity of his precepts. For Saserna brought all
kinds of things into agriculture - medicine, hygiene and beauty-
treatments. He evolved an infallible recipe for killing bugs:107
'Take a root of serpentaria and let it soak in water, then pour the
water over the place you wish to disinfect: no bug will come near
it. Or else mix ox's gall with vinegar, and rub the bed with this.'
In order to depilate one's skin, one simply had to throw into
boiling water a yellow tree-frog, and when its bulk had been
reduced by two-thirds, to anoint one's body with it. Again, if one
gave a cooked frog to a dog, this was the best way to teach him to
follow one. But above all he had discovered a magical formula to
cure gout: Varro got the recipe from a third person, a certain
Tarquenna, who was also obviously Etruscan: when one began to
feel pains in the feet, one had to repeat twenty-seven times, before
breakfast, after having spat, and touching the ground, 'I think of
thee, cure my feet, let the earth keep my pain, let health remain
in my feet'.
These wise women's remedies, it must be said, have their
echoes in the folk-lore of all countries: Cato also knew a charm
against dislocations, and even the resorting to contact with
Mother Earth has nothing specifically Etruscan about it. It is
more interesting to observe that the very wide interpretation
which Saserna gave to the word 'agriculture' shows that the rural
property-owner usually made on the spot everything he needed
for the storage and sale of his harvests. Saserna's world was a
small, self-contained world. Though he greatly scandalized the
Romans of the end of the Republic by devoting a chapter to the
question of clay quarries (figilinae), 108 it was natural that he
should do so, as he was exploiting those on his own land to
supply the potters' kilns which were producing his corn-bins,
his amphorae for wine and oil. The big estates had their own
doctors, their fullers and their specialized craftsmen, which
deprived rural labourers of any pretext for 'walking out in their
best clothes on working days'.
Saserna, heir to long experience of agricultural labouring
II6
problems, insisted with even greater force than Cato on the fact
that the familia rustica must be strictly disciplined. 'No one is
allowed to go outside, with the exception of the steward or of
the man he sends on an errand. If anyone else absents himself, he
must be punished; otherwise the steward is responsible.' 109 There
were also, regarding the number of hands required to do certain
tasks, precise directions: one man, working for forty-five days,
was sufficient for eightjugera or about one hectare (2·47r acres);
in fact, he could dig one jugerum (25 acres) in four days, but one
had to reckon with thirteen days lost through ill health, bad
weather and slacking. 110 Two teams of oxen were necessary for
a ploughed area of two hundred jugera or about fifty hectares, 111
which gives us the dimensions of a typical farm, mid-way between
the Roman colonists' small-holdings (one to two hectares at
Modena and Parma) and the later big estates such as that of Pliny
the Younger, reckoned at seven hundred and fifty hectares.11 2
Even in the days of Martial, the richest land-owner in Caere,
one Hilarus, the heir of an old local family, had his farmers
cultivate small plots of land, one of which, as the poet describes
it, measured scarcely three and a half hectares. 113 \Ve must
correct a few rather too facile generalizations about the latifundia.
THE RAISING OF STOCK

The pastures of the latifundia on the coast and the wooded
valleys of the interior were the raising-grounds of fine cattle;
the oxen of Etruria were heavy-shouldered and strong workers,
and the heifers of the Faliscan region were white as snow and
much in demand for sacrifices to the gods. 114 This does not add
much new detail to our picture. But there was also the great
reputation of the pecorino, the cheese made from the milk of
ewes at Luni on the borders of Liguria: it was of an enormous
size and could weigh up to a thousand pounds, 327 kilos. The
trade-mark, in Roman times, was naturally a crescent moon.
Martial, among the small presents he made to his friends, des-
cribes a caseus Lunensis big enough to provide a thousand dinners
for the slaves in one f amilia. 115
Another detail is interesting when we consider pig-breeding,
which the Etruscans, like the Cisalpine Gauls, practised on a
large scale: tripe in the Faliscan mode - venter Faliscus - was
117
D.LE.-9
greatly renowned. As the Etruscans did everything to music

they had trained their flocks and herds to follow the sound of
the trumpet, unlike the practice noted in Greece by Polybius,
where the swineherds drove them along in front of them. And
the Greek historian describes immense herds proceeding along
the beaches of the Tyrrhenian Sea, with the swineherds walking
some distance in front of their charges and from time to time
sounding a trumpet whose note and peculiar timbre the beasts
knew well enough to keep following; thus they ran no risk of
losing themselves and mixing with a neighbour's flocks. Varro
also says that young pigs ought to be brought up by the farm~r
in such a way that from a very early age they are accustomed
omnia ut f aciant ad bucinam.11 6
HUNTING
The forests and marshes were stocked with abundant and varied
game. When Rutilius Namatianus was returning to his native
Gaul, he was held up by a storm in the port of Pisa, which has
been replaced by Livorno or Leghorn, and profited from this
enforced halt by organizing a hunting expedition:
'The farmer, our host, found us hunting-pieces and dogs

trained to discover animal lairs by smell. Into our traps, into
the large and perfidious mesh of our nets a wild boar fell and
fought; it was a beast redoubtable indeed in its vigour and
pugnacity, one which the arms of Meleager, nay, even the grip
of Hercules could not have restrained. Then the horn sounded
across the hills that re-echoed its notes; and our songs made
the prey less heavy as we bore it home.' 117
This description comes from the year AD 417, but though recorded
ten centuries later, all the details agree with what we see repre-
sented on the figured monuments of the Etruscans living in the
days of the mythical Lausus, son of Mezentius and debellator
ferarum: 118 the weapons, spears, javelins and axes, the bloodhounds
on the trail, the nets of Falerii in which the wild beast (the Tuscus
aper of Statius) 119 is trapped, the call of the horn deep in the woods
and the return from the hunt with the boar suspended from a
pole borne by two farm-lads; even the evocations of the boar
118
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF HUHAI. LIFF
hunts of Calydon and Erymanthus that enchanted the imagination

of the lucumones - there is nothing which is not illustrated in the
friezes of the bronze situla of the Certosa and in the paintings at
Tarquinii in the Tomb of the Querciola or the Scrofa Nera.120
Boar hunts, deer hunts, the hunting of the hare ...
At the end of the Republic - but that is merely when we begin
to have texts, and there is nothing to prove that it was a recent
innovation - there existed in the region of Tarquinii a game
reserve of ten hectares, where the proprietor, Q. Fulvius Lippinus,
not only raised hares (which earned these reserves the name of
leporarium), deer and hind but also wild sheep. And Varro
knew of even bigger reserves in the region of Statonia. 121 The
feudal structure of their society, their country's great game re-
sources are enough to explain the cynegetic vocation of the
Etruscans. But perhaps other things were mixed up in it: obscure
and incomprehensible ethnic traditions, familiarity of a religious
nature with the world of beasts which perhaps had very remote
origins. Later on we shall quote on this subject an extraordinary
text by Aelianus about the role played by music in their legendary
huntsmen's capturing of wild animals. 122
Etruscan art retained, from the foreign influences under which
it came to birth, a taste for certain animal representations which
were used as decorative subjects. Those panthers on either side
of a column, those lions jumping on gazelles compose a conven-
tional bestiary and, together with the griffins and sphinxes of
fable, hold up a screen of illusion in front of reality, in which real
wolves roamed. 12 3 Sometimes the influence is a puzzle, for
example in the case of the monkeys.
In fact, a whole simian menagerie has been discovered on
Villanovan fibulae, on the amber amulets and necklaces of Vetu-
lonia and Marsiliana d' Albegna, on the amphora of Tragliatella,
from the end of the seventh century, where a horseman rides with
a little monkey behind him; but there is not much difficulty in
discovering, at Samos among other places, the oriental sources of
the motif. 12 4 Later, a well-known tomb at Chiusi, from the first
half of the fifth century, shows, taking part in funeral games
which include all the attractions of a popular circus, a wistiti or
little striated monkey tied by a chain next to the troupe's dwarf
and equilibrist.1 25 The monkey figures again in the paintings of
119
the Tomb of the Sette Camini near Orvieto, which belongs to the
following century.
We can hardly suppose that these animals were captured in the
neighbouring mountains. They were little luxury pets such as
the Greek world had made popular everywhere. A domesticated
monkey plays a part at the beginning of the Miles Gloriosus or
'The Braggart Warrior' which takes place at Ephesus. But it was
North Africa above all which was the principal market for them. 126
The Numidian Masinissa was one day to tell some pet-lovers who
wanted to buy a large number: 'But gentlemen, in your country
don't the women give you children?' 127 We see in the Poenulus
of Plautus that in the best homes in Carthage there were tame
monkeys capable of biting, in play, a little boy, leaving on his
hand a mark whose timely recognition brings the comedy to a
happy end. 128 The ones we see in Etruria are probably memories
of some mercenary of Chiusi who had fought in an African
campaign, or presents from a Punic businessman to his clients in
Orvieto. They go to prove the lively relationship that existed
between the two countries.
Yes ... but perhaps things are not quite so simple. There are
two disturbing features. The island of Ischia, where the first
Chalcidian colonists disembarked in the eighth century, was
named by them Pithecussae, from pithekos meaning 'monkey', and
this expressive toponymic reappears in the Greek authors to
designate various places in Africa where monkeys abounded. But
it so happens that the old lexicographers have handed down to us
quite unmistakably the Etruscan word for monkey, arim-, and if
this gloss is exact the river Ariminus, at the mouth of which the
Etruscans founded the town of Ariminum, modern Rimini, was
a sort of 'Stream of the Monkeys' such as exists in the gorges of
the Chiffa, near Blida.
It was perhaps the same word which lay at the root of the
indigenous name for Ischia, Inarime, which the Greeks translated
into their own tongue and which reappears, deformed, in its
classical name Aenaria. This was a problem which exercised
Strabo and has still not lost its fascination for modern scholars. 129
It has been suggested that arim- is a borrowing from the Etruscan
or Punic harim-, 'flat-nosed', an epithet which the Carthaginians
applied to their monkeys. It is supposed that it was the
120
Carthaginians who gave lnarime its name, but neither they nor the
Phoenicians ventured into the region of Ariminum. What then?
There were monkeys in Italy from the dawn of time; they seem
to have left fossilized remains in Tuscany and they had also left
traces in a very ancient toponymy. Moreover it is curious that
Homer, Hesiod and Pindar knew the country of the Arimnoi,
which they located in the region of Syria. The word arim-
perhaps belongs to the Mediterranean substratum of language.
But with regard to the period that interests us here, this does not
alter what we have been saying: the amber necklaces of the
seventh century were junk from some bazaar, the Tomb della
Scimmia merely illustrates the friendship between Carthage and
the Etruscans.
The skies of Etruria were flocked by birds which the haruspices
had carefully studied. Their 'omen books' or Ostentaria were
illustrated with pictures representing, against the accompanying
text, those species whose augural significance they defined. 130
These included birds, Pliny stated, that no one had ever seen.
But it is to these treatises that we owe our knowledge of the
Etruscan word for eagle, antar, for hawk, arac and for falcon,
capu. 131 We see a woodpecker about to fly away in a scene denoting
observation of the flight of birds (auspicium) in the Frarn;:ois tomb.
There are indeed many enchanting birds in Etruscan paintings,
caught in full flight or pecking about in the trees. The Tomb of
the Triclinium is a veritable aviary in which, not counting the
cock and hen watched by a cat under the banqueting couches,
the dancers move surrounded by blackbirds and thrushes perched
in the branches. The fights and bloody games depicted in the
Tomb of the Augurs are dominated by the passage, on wide-spread
wings, of great red palmipeds which have been identified as
cormorants. 132 Moreover Strabo remarks that water-fowl were
one of the attractions of Etruscan lakes and marshes. In the
celebrated tomb della Caccia e Pesca, hunters standing on the cliff
are trying to reach with their slings a multicoloured flight of
wild duck. 133
FISHING
Here the scene takes place at the seaside, and the fowling is
accompanied by a fishing expedition. Boats guided from the rear
121
by a tiller-oar sail on green and violet waves in which dolphins

disport themselves. In the prow decorated with a huge, luck-
bringing eye, a fisherman throws his harpoon or retrieves his net.
There are even swimmers climbing up a rock in order to dive in
among the boats. M. Pallottino has admirably characterized the
originality of the artist who conceived this painting, 'unique in
the productions of archaic and classical eras', which shows an
extreme liberty in the interpretation of the most varied human
attitudes and disposes them in an exuberant nature.
Texts, by comparison, are scanty. They hardly speak of any-
thing but tunny-fishing; there existed on the promontories of
Populonia and Monte Argentario, above Orbetello, two of those
thynnoscopoi or look-outs from which the arrival of fresh shoals
was observed. Pyrgi, the port of Caere, was famous also for its
fisheries which, under the Empire, supplied the fishmongers of
Rome. And we also know that the Etruscans had stocked the lakes
of Bracciano, Bolsena and Vico with carp and sea-dace and with
all kinds of salt-water fish that acclimatized themselves to fresh
water. 134
THE TIMBER INDUSTRY

An examination of the natural resources of Etruria now brings
us to her forests. Of course, deforestation had its effects. Even
in the days of Livy the impenetrable Ciminian Forest which right
to the end of the fourth century had inspired in travelling mer-
chants and Roman soldiers a sort of awe, had lost all its mystery;
today it is no more than sparse clumps of weedy trees rising above
bushes. 135 The slopes up which one climbs to Volterra are also
denuded, so that one wonders where the oaks and beech-trees
grew that were used in 205 to build the interamenta navium, that
is, the interior parts, the hold and the keel of boats, whilst the
fir trees of Rusellae, Perugia and Chiusi were used for the masts
and bulwarks. 136 Well before Scipio, the Etruscan navy had long
exploited, around Caere, the fir and pine woods described by
Virgil, for whom the pine is an Etruscan tree (Etrusca pinus).
Theophrastus, in the fourth century, spoke of beech-trees whose
trunks, thirty or so metres long, formed the keels of 'Tyrrhenian
ships'; but Pisa in particular, with its forests whose timber was
especially suited to naval construction, had become the principal
122
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTHYSIDE ANO l'ATTEHNS OF !WHAL LllE
arsenal in Etruria; it was Pisa that had thought of providing the

vessels of war with rostra for boarding-parties. But the day was
to come when t he decadence of the Etruscan navy and the incre:tse
of luxury in houses resulted in the timber of Etruria being used
for beams and planks and for the ornamenting of palaces.137
Let us pass over the exploitation of quarries as the Etruscans
did not know of the marble of L u ni, today called Carrara, the
discovery of which dates from the very end of the Roman Republic.
Concerning the stone they did q uarry, we have some indications
in Pliny, for example about the white limestone of the agcr
Tarquiniensis, near the Lake of Bolsena, from which stone they
carved the fine sarcophagi in the T omb of the Partunu.138 But
we must hasten to consider one of the most ancient sources of
Etruscan wealth - mines and metallurgy.
THE MINES
We have in fact seen that Etruria's mineral resources were the
basis of her strength. When about 770 the Chalcidians founded
on the island of Pithecussae (Ischia) a first advance post which
would soon serve as a base fo r t heir establishment in Campania,
they came perhaps counting on the tin and certainly on the copper
and ingots of bronze offered them by central Italy. 139 The con-
trast between the abundance of bronze in the Villanovan tombs
and the poverty of metal in the Greek tombs of the geometric
period (ninth to eighth centuries BC), the beginnings of Greek
colonization in the west coinciding with the upsurge of Etruscan
civilization in the eighth century are the fundamental data which
explain the prodigious enrichment displayed by the orientalizing
tombs of Praeneste, Caere, Vetulonia and Populonia. But Popu-
lonia in particular, close to the present-day Piombino facing the
Isle of Elba, 'generous in mines of iron' as Virgil says, was the
centre of a mining and metallurgical industry which has earned
it the name of the Pittsburgh of antiquity. 140
The whole southern part of the province of Livorno, all the
region comprised between Volterra to the north and Massa
Marittima to the south are still full of traces of that centuries-old
activity, largely extinct at the beginning of our era when Strabo
saw, in the country round Populonia, many abandoned mines, 111
but which sometimes was preserved elsewhere, as at Massa
123
Marittima on the road to Siena: Massa whose marvellous Roman-

esque cathedral, soaring up suddenly with its thirteenth-century
palaces in the fold of a hill scarred with the red earth of excava-
tions, speaks volumes for its continuing prosperity. Since
1830 the working of the mines has gone on where the ancients
left off.
In particular the region of Campiglia Marittima, about ten
kilometres as the crow flies to the north-east of Populonia, still
shows visible traces of shafts dug as early as the Etruscan period in
the search not only for copper and iron but also for argentiferous
lead and for tin. It is well known - and the splendid researches
of M. Roger Dion and M. Jerome Carcopino 14 2 have been most
illuminating in this respect - that the tin necessary to the ancient
bronzesmiths came mostly from the far-off Cassiterides, islands
off the Atlantic shores of Armorica and Cornwall, where the
Phoenician galleys went to obtain a monopoly whose secret they
jealously guarded but which the Celts, for their part, imported
right into their own territory along a continental route probably
opened up at the request of Marseilles and which made the
fortune of those living along it: witness, in a princely tomb on
the borders of Burgundy, the celebrated krater or wine-bowl, a
masterpiece of Greek toreutics, and the other priceless objects
discovered in 1953 at Vix, near Chatillon-sur-Seine. 143 Yet this
tin, together with the copper it was alloyed with in the normal
proportion of eight to fifteen per cent, 144 existed in Etruria itself,
in mines which for a long time were able to supply its industry,
as is proved by the slag found near Campiglia, in places with
evocative names like Campo delle Buche, the Cento Camerelle, the
Cavina, and also on the island of Elba.
Here and there the extraction of copper preceded that of
iron: this had already happened in the eastern Mediterranean,
where iron, before the discovery of tempering, was at first used
only as a meteoric substance miraculously fallen from the sky.
Then, when its use had been extended, it was bronze that took
on the sacred character which we find in numerous ritual pre-
scriptions: almost all instruments used in rituals were of bronze,
as Macrobius tells us; the Sabine priests, like the flamen or priest
of the god in Rome had their hair cut with bronze scissors.
Among the Etruscans, as we said above, the cult of the legendary
124
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AN!.> l'ATTEHNS OF !WHAL l.IFE
dwarf Tagcs observed the same taboos, and they traced the
boundary furrow of their towns with a ploughshare made of
bronze. Antonio l\1into, moreover, has noted that chariots dis-
covered at Populonia in the necropolis of San Cerbone were
covered with ornaments of bronze and iron, in which iron /amellae
cut in open-work designs were incrusted in the bronze in the
manner of marquetry: 145 the precious metal in those days was
iron. There was a time at the end of the orientalizing period,
that is, the end of the seventh century, when siderurgy was still a
rare luxury.
In the case of Elba, the authors testify to copper coming
before iron, and in the Campigliese this fact is confirmed by
archaeology; there have been brought to light, notably in a valley
which significantly bears the name of Val di Fucinaia, or Valley
of the Forge, numerous mines with deep cavities open to the sky,
with shafts, communicating galleries, supply trenches and lines
of furnaces: the whole, judging from fragments of ceramics and
bronze objects found in the vicinity, going back to the eighth
century.
Some of the furnaces are fairly well preserved 146: they have
the form of a truncated cone, about one metre eighty ems. in
diameter, the interiors lined with refractory bricks and divided
int9 two chambers one above the other by a partition pierced
with holes. This partition was supported by a column of local
porphyry. A square door opened in the base to ventilate the
furnace and regulate combustion. The upper chamber was filled
with copper pyrites and charcoal. A fire was lighted in the
lower chamber: the oxide of iron collected above while the copper
was released through the holes: these have been found to be
incrusted with carbonate of copper.
As can be imagined, it is a problem to determine the origin of
this type of furnace; it presents affinities with certain examples
discovered among the Philistines, metallurgists of renown, in
Palestine (twelfth to eleventh centuries), or in the more recent
Celtic civilization of La Tene; here again we must be hesitant of
choosing between the influences, oriental or occidental, which
may have had their effect. Let us content ourselves with remarking
that the output was very low, as an examination of residues has
shown: these have been used again by modern industry. We should
125
DAILY LIFE OF TllE ETRUSCANS
like to know more about the activity of the workers in this district:
but there has been one find which illustrates it in a concrete way -
the miners' lamps, made of clay, sturdy in shape, with two holes
at the back for a cord. 147
But as we have seen iron finally triumphed over bronze. The
extraction of copper and tin ceased in the Campigliese and on the
island of Elba, perhaps because of the competition from the mines
of Spain and Brittany which became more and more accessible to
Mediterranean trade; perhaps also because the workings ran out.
This was the case on the island of Elba, where, so the Pseudo-
Aristotle tells us, no further copper could be found in his day
(third century); however, in its place, and, he makes clear, in the
same workings, iron was found in abundance. 148 This time the
resources were boundless: people even believed that the iron
mines on the island of Elba kept filling up again like the quarries
of Paros from which the famous marble was extracted. 149
The mineral rock was originally treated on the spot, in a multi-
tude of furnaces which covered the Mediterranean heavens with
a sombre smoke; hence, the etymologists assured us, the name of
Aithaleia given it by the Greeks and which signified 'black with
soot' .150 But at some date which could not be anterior to the
fifth century, it was seen that the mineral-bearing substance could
not be smelted adequately in the island's furnaces, and it became
the custom to transport it immediately to Populonia, where it
was treated in more highly perfected installations. We can
picture the convoys of great barges crossing the ten kilometres
of the channel. The port, on whose quaysides ingots of bronze
from the Campigliese had been stacked long before the cast iron
of the island of Elba, became from then on the great siderurgical
centre of Italy. 1 51 The Pseudo-Aristotle, Varro and Strabo were
all agreed that the work was divided up thus, a consequence of
technical progress which had separated the mine from the forge.
Today Populonia lies beneath an enormous mass of iron slag
which, having engulfed its necropolis and its archaic monuments,
eloquently proclaims the intensity of its industrial production.
For the last forty years metallurgical concerns have been working
these pyrites, which still contain thirty per cent of iron, and
archaeological diggings profit from this industrial intervention.
But it was all known beforehand, in any case. Populonia, judging
126
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF !WHAL LIFE
by its name, was the city of Fufluns, an Etrnscan god who was
assimilated with Bacchus, but who, in the Etruscan religion, was
very close to the solar deity, Catha. Vulcan, with his tongs and
hammer figures on the coins of the third century. And when in
205 Scipio levied specific goods from Etruscan cities, he asked
Populonia for only one thing, iron.152
Some insights into the technique of smelting, at least in the
period of decadence, have been left us by Posidonius of Apamea,
who had long been familiar with the mines of Spain and had not
neglected those of Etruria.
\Ve read this in Diodorus Siculus:
'The island of Elba possesses a great amount of iron-rock,
which they quarry in order to melt and cast and thus secure
the iron, and they possess a great abundance of this ore. For
those who are engaged in the working of the ore crush the rock
and burn the lumps which have thus been broken in certain
ingenious furnaces; and in these they smelt the lumps by
means of a great fire and form them into pieces of moderate
size which are in their appearance like large sponges. These
are purchased by merchants in exchange either for money or
for goods and are then taken to Dicaearcheia (Puteoli, modern
Pozzuoli) or the other trading stations, where there are men who
purchase such cargoes and who, with the aid of a multitude of
artisans in metal whom they have collected, work it further and
manufacture iron objects of every description. Some of these
are ingeniously fabricated into shapes well suited for various
arms, two-pronged forks and sickles and other such tools;
and these are then carried by merchants to every region and
thus many parts of the inhabited world have a share in the
usefulness which accrues from them.' 153
This is a very interesting text, not merely as regards its final
passage in which, as the historian quotes it, a Stoic philosopher
celebrates with wondering praise that trade by virtue of which the
benefits of civilization are spread throughout human society.
This dates the passage: far from describing, as has been thought,
the most ancient phase of Elba's iron industry, he is showing us
the final stages, when Pozzuoli had become in the second century
BC - though it was still no more, according to Lucilius, than a
127
'little Delos' - the great emporium of Italy, enjoying close relation-

ships with all the markets of Greece and the Orient. 1 54 An inter-
esting text, but one in which, perhaps through some fault of the
abridger, one suspects an omission or an error: that Pozzuoli
should have forged agricultural implements is quite in keeping
with what we know of its workshops in the days of Cato; 15 5 and
that it should manufacture arms for the use of mercenaries or
Samnite gladiators is something less well known but which should
not surprise us. 156 But Diodorus must have jumped one of
Posidonius' phrases in which he mentioned the role played by
Populonia between the extraction of the ore on Elba and its
manufacture, in Pozzuoli, into commercial goods. Unless Elba
and Populonia were comprehended in the same vague expression.
In any case, some hundred years later, at the beginning of
our era, Strabo was still able to say: 'From the height of the city,
where I had climbed for that express purpose, I saw in the distance
Sardinia, Corsica, and, nearer, the island of Elba. I also saw the
forges where they work the iron brought from that island.'
Therefore the tall furnaces of Populonia were still not extinguished
and were continuing to receive, as soon as it had been extracted,
the raw iron ore. So let us put in the name which was omitted -
Populonienses - in the place where, according to the Pseudo-
Aristotle, Varro and Strabo, it had to come, in close connexion
with those words it defined, or ought to have defined: 'those who
are engaged in the working.' Moreover it was at Populonia that
the 'ingenious furnaces' of which Diodorus speaks must have
been found, and not on Elba, where all other authors agree that
they must have been inadequate.
Nevertheless from this uncertain account we can extract a
few precious indications concerning the imperfections in Popu-
lonia's foundry-work: this amounted to no more than a simple
initial torrefaction. The fact that the ingots produced had the
appearance of great sponges reminds us of a remark by Pliny the
Elder, who notes with astonishment that 'when a vein of ore is
fused the iron becomes liquid like water and afterwards acquires
a spongy and brittle texture: in spongeasfrangi'. 151 Was Populonia
at this period able to carry out the operation itself? It seems to
have given up also the manufacture of trade articles. It had
certainly declined from its former prosperity. Its furnaces were
128
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTHYSIOE AND l'ATTEHNS OF !WHAL l.IFE
still working, but, as Strabo said in a few evocative phrases, 'today

this township, with the exception of her temples and a few houses,
is absolutely deserted. The quarter where the arsenal lies, with
its little port at the foot of the hill and its two wet-docks, offers a
less desolate prospect'. Another four centuries pass: when
Rutilius Namatianus lands there on November 4, 417, on his way
home to his native Gaul, he finds only 'a line of ramparts broken
down here and there, and the roofs buried under vast piles of
rubbish' .158 The tides of history had turned away from the place
that in its heyday had been the industrial capital. of the Etruscan
world, another Vulcan's Forge, a Pittsburgh of antiquity, whose
tall furnaces blackened its walls with smoke: it had no need, then,
of help from Pozzuoli in putting the finishing touches to its metal
products, in forging the plough of Tages or the two-headed axe
of Macstarna.
THE ROADS
It was indeed a great, busy land, with its lands reclaimed from
the marshes, its forests and scrublands, its naval dockyards and
its mining areas, and its chequerboards of wheatfields and vine-
yards round its towns. We must now, before entering these,
which give the land its meaning, attempt to retrace the network
of roads that were the nervous system of that vast body and kept
up the circulation between the various regions.
It is a difficult problem, this question of the roads in Etruria:
upon this point at least the victory of Rome marked a considerable
and brutal break with the past. The great routes of antiquity
that crossed Etruria and whose traces are still followed by modern
traffic all date from after the conquest and all lead to Rome, as
is only natural: the via Aurelia, constructed in 241 BC, along the
coast from Rome to Pisa; inland the via Clodia (225) crossing the
plateau by way of Bieda, Tuscania, Maternum (Farnese) and
Saturnia; the via Cassia (154 or 125), further to the east, running
from Rome to Florence by way of Volsinii, Chiusi and Arezzo;
the via Amerina (241) which followed the right bank of the Tiber
as far as Amerinia. These four routes leave Rome, the centre of the
world, exclusively preoccupied with Roman interests which were
not necessarily those of the Etruscans and even at times ran
counter to them: for example there was an old road running from
129
Caere to Veii and thence to Praeneste, in order to reach the

Campania without passing through Rome; it crossed the Tiber at
Fidenae (Castel Giubileo ), eight kilometres upstream, and it
really does seem that the legendary expedition of the three
hundred Fabii against Veii had as its aim the capture of this line
of communication. 159 The Romans never bothered to keep up
that road, but they sent out into Etruria the four we have men-
tioned, like so many probing knives into conquered territory,
using them to transport their legions as quickly as possible to the
north of Italy where they were called by the Gaulish menace and
prospects of further expansion. So that though the Romans some-
times took over already existing roads, for example from the ager
Tarquiniensis where the via Clodia still serves Bieda, Norchia and
Tuscania, their roads often passed in an undeviating straight line
some distance from the ancient centres: the same via Clodia,
after leaving Tuscania, goes on to Saturnia, a Roman colony,
but Vulci and Sovana are not accessible excepting by side-roads,
which contributed not a little to their decadence. 160
We must beware of representing Etruscan roads as if they were
like the Roman highways, with the fine slabs grooved with cart
and chariot wheels of the via Appia. In any case, the via Appia
itself did not begin to be paved until 293. 161 In Etruria the only
paving we see on the roads is in the immediate vicinity of towns,
for example at the north-west gate of Tarquinii. 162 Generally they
appear as tracks cut into the rock and deeply pitted by the weight
of carts and the action of water. And certain of these, at Veii,
Bieda and Sovana with their high, precipitous sides with tombs
opening off them half-way up, with the luxuriant vegetation
carpeting the bottom, have a wild picturesqueness that recommend
them to tourists. But an Etruscan origin must not be attributed
to all the Cave nor to all the Cavoni mentioned by the guides.
'It is impossible to tell a road abandoned only a century ago from
a road belonging to the Etruscan era.' 163
The sole criteria are the tombs which sometimes border the
latter and rock inscriptions. J. B. Ward Perkins' recent researches
in the Faliscan territory164 successfully brought to light numerous
segments of pre-Roman road along the via Amerina and else-
where. We must admire the boldness with which, in order to
avoid over-steep slopes, the road was dug to a depth of fifteen
130
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF HUHAL LIFE
metres; running parallel to one of the sides, a cuuiculus, sometimes

coYered, provided for the running-away of water. Certain of
these road-works arc signed by the engineer: thus Larth Vel
Arnies, near Corchiano. 165 All these facts allow us to build up a
picture of fairly intense traffic between towns like Veii for example
and Nepete (Nepi) and Falerii (Civitacastellana). They allow us
glimpses, unlike the imperious simplicity of the Roman road
system, of tangled side-paths and of a regional particularism
which confirm what we knew already, the absence of centralization
in the Etruscan world. At the fanum Voltu11111ae, near Volsinii,
there was a site for an annual concourse. If we knew the Etrurian
road-map better, would we look upon this as a fine star with
twelve radiating branches? We doubt it. At the end of the Roman
Empire the Umbrians of Spello ventured to ask Constantine to
excuse them from having to undertake that journey across moun-
tain escarpments and along difficult roads, ardua moutium et
difficultates itinerum. 166 Some ten centuries earlier, Tarchon
must have received many similar requests.
THE VEHICLES
But there was a good deal of short-distance travel, from town to
town. A history of Etruscan vehicles begins with the war chariots
which were unearthed at Populonia, Vetulonia, Marsiliana and
Caere in tombs dating from the seventh century: 1 67 chariots with
two wheels reinforced with metal tyres and felloes and carrying
a wooden body open at the back and rounded at the front; a long
pole was fixed to it over which the driver leaned to guide his
team. They are similar to those we see on Grecian vases ever since
the days of the Di pylon, and bring to mind the battles in Homeric
poems. But it is hardly likely that they ever were used, in Etruria,
by some new Achilles, or in actual battles. Their panels adorned
with more and more richly decorated bronze laminae prove that
they were ceremonial chariots which perhaps were used only in
solemn processions in honour of the leader who rode in them
after a victory: in Rome they survive in the form of the quadriga
with the four white horses of the triumphcrs.
This ceremonial character is even more marked in the chariots
of Monteleone and of Castel San Mariano, 168 from the middle of
the sixth century, with their bronze casing ornamented with
131
repousse masks of Gorgons and mythological figures - incom-

parable masterpieces of Etruscan toreutics but which have nothing
in common with the arts of war. Moreover at that period war
had changed its methods and its arms: the chariot, an archaic
instrument for displaying individual prowess, gave way to cavalry
manoeuvring in serried formations. It served only for parade or
in the races at the games, like those for which the Tomb of the
Bigae at Tarquinii shows preparations being made. 169 But the
chariot is found again, in the third century, on steles from Bologna
and urns from Volterra representing the infernal voyage of the
dead who are being dragged after demon psychopomps. 170 As
once happened on the roads of Etruria, the dead man goes on
foot or rides a horse with Charon holding the bridle, or is borne
in a chariot; and the latter, as is natural in an heroic scene, is
often no other than the biga or quadriga of the archaic age whose
galloping horses dash off into immortality. 171 But sometimes, too,
Etruscan realism gives it the prosaic aspect of a contemporary
cart or trap: a vehicle with two wheels, covered by a cradle-like
hood which seems to be made of a tilt ornamented with fringes
and embroideries and stretched over hoops; it is open at the front
to show, comfortably seated and driving two peaceful mules, the
traveller and his wife who look as if they are off to the local
market. 172
It was in this sort of vehicle that Tarquinius and Tanaquil,
having left their native Tarquinii, had once arrived in Rome; in
such a cart, which Livy properly calls a carpentum, they had piled
their luggage (sublatis rebus) and journeyed to the summit of the
Janiculum. And there, as Tarquinius was 'seated in his cart
with his wife', carpento sedente cum uxore, an eagle had descended
from the sky to prove to him that the gods were in agreement with
his ambition. 173
These carpenta often appear in the history of primitive Rome;
in particular in the history of Roman feminism where they appear
in the long fights the matrons had to wage in order to obtain, like
their Etruscan sisters, permission to leave their houses. For at
first, according to Ovid, the Italian ladies circulated freely in
carpenta:
Nam prius Ausonias matres carpenta vehebant. 174
(For of old Ausonian matrons drove in carts.)
132
THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF !WHAi. l.IFE
But the Catos of Rome had ceaselessly contested, accorded,

withdrawn, given back and bargained over this right, on the
pretext that it caused traffic-jams in the narrow streets of the city,
and, above all, offended against morals. A woman had to be
brazen indeed - and an Etruscan! - like Tullia, daughter of Servius
Tullius, to venture to expose herself to the gaze of men at the
forum, where she had herself driven in her carpe11t11m (rarpento
in forum inuecta): 175 on her return, moreover, she had done e\·en
worse and gone so far as to crush beneath the wheels of her
carpentum her old and dying father (per patris corpus carpe11t11111
egisse fertur). One had to be a shameless hussy like Propertius'
Cynthia in order to ride to Lanuvium in the silk-upholstered
carpentum of a boy-friend, especially when we are told that she
sat 'near the pole, with her legs dangling' . 176
In 395, after the capture of Veii, the dictator Camillus, in order
to recompense the Roman matrons for having placed all their
jewels at his disposal for the war-effort authorized them to ride
in the pilentum - this was a ceremonial vehicle with four wheels -
on the occasion of sacrifices and games, and in the carpentum
every day, whether holidays or not. 177 In 213, during the darkest
days of the Punic War, a Lex Oppia had been passed again, for-
bidding women the use of horse-drawn vehicles, in Rome and
in the other cities and in an area measuring one thousand paces
all round them, excepting for religious purposes. ·when peace
returned in 195, Cato had launched a diatribe against those who
wanted to abrogate this law and succeeded in doing so. 178 With
the passing years, however, in stables where they were joined by
all kinds of other vehicles, tumbrils, charabancs, cabriolets, the
carpenta had taken on the patina of ancient objects and the prestige
of the ceremonies for which their use had been reserved. That is
why, under the Empire, Messalina and Agrippina could think of
nothing more gratifying to their pride than to have themselves
borne to the Capitol in a carpentum (carpento Capitolium in,Etredi),
'formerly the privilege of priests and sacred objects'. 179 At the
death of his mother, Agrippina the Elder, Caligula had already
started the circus and its games, in the course of which his statue
would solemnly be borne in procession on a carpentum. 18 0 \Ve
can see the venerable equipage, promoted to the rank of carriage,
on the medal struck on that occasion memoriae Agrippinae: the
D.L.E.-IO 1 33
arched roof seems to be held up by four small statues. 'This type

of covering is very probably of Etruscan origin.'181
In fact there is nothing to disprove that Rome had borrowed
the carpentum from the Etruscans, among whom we first see it
portrayed. Yet it is well known that Rome owed to the Gauls,
in the final analysis, the majority of the types of vehicle she used
at the same time as the vocabulary by which they were designated.
'The Romans,' it has been well said, 182 'a sedentary people,
proprietors cultivating their own land, did not possess the large
chariots with four wheels in which bands of conquerors from Gaul
transported their belongings and which served to encircle their
camps at night.' The Romans borrowed the name from the Gauls
whose activity in Italy contributed to their deliverance from
Etruscan domination. This is also true of the carrus, a four-
wheeled chariot, a word which was substituted in Romance lan-
guages for the Latin currus; as well as of the petorritum, the benna,
the covinnus, the rheda, the cisium, the essedum, as well as of the
carpentum, whose origin is attested by Livy (carpentis Gallicis)
and Florus (carpenta Gallorum). 183 But it is evident that the
Etruscans themselves had been the first to submit to this in-
fluence when we think of their proximity, fruitful not only in
battles but also in commercial and cultural exchanges of every
kind, with the Cisalpine Gauls, whose heavy chariots and light
carriages rutted the vast plain of the Po. 'All Roman vehicles,
models and names, were imitated from the Gauls.' 184 Quite
probably, though, this was done through the Etruscans, who were
better placed than anyone for discovering their secrets, among
others those of these carpenta, however they called it in their own
tongue, which we see depicted on their third-century urns in
Northern Etruria, at Volterra and Fiesole.
1 34
CHAPTER SIX
THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF

URBAN ACTIVITIES
I Foundation rites - l\Iarzabotto - Spina - Tlze fortifications -

Predominance of private dwellings - The population of the cities
II What the tombs of the dead tell us about the abodes of the
li'l:ing - The exploration of a tumulus - The atrium - Columns
and peristyles - Traces of a regular plan
III Domestic interiors - Etruscan furniture - Tlze Tomb of the
Reliefs
IV Etruscan costume - From the tebe1111a to the toga - Footwear
- Headgear - Jewellery
Though the Etruscans showed themselves to be good agronomists

and vigorously imposed their will on Nature, it was above all
as builders of towns that they revealed their true genius. At the
very beginning of Italian history they were the promoters of the
idea and the first to realize it. 1 It has often been demonstrated
that the Italians or rather the Italics did not spontaneously con-
ceive the notion of city in the sense that the Latins gave to the
word urbs, that is to say in the sense not of a more or less fortui-
tous agglomeration of buildings but of an entity at once material
and spiritual, governed according to its own laws, its boundaries
limited by strict rules and consecrated by foundation rites. 2 It
is well known that it was the Etruscans who, from scattered
villages on the hills around Rome made a true city, dominated
by its Capitol above a forum that had already been drained. In
all the places governed by them, where the natural tendency of
the indigenous tribes was to spread out in rural districts scattered
here and there with farms and hamlets, they concentrated in the
1 35
cities the reserves of their strength, the organs of their governments

and the ceremonies of their religion.
FOUNDATION RITES
No one in antiquity denies them this merit, and the finest praise
one could give to a city was that it had been founded Etrusco ritu,
according to the Etruscan rite. It was known that they possessed
'ritual books' in which was prescribed 'by what rite towns are
founded, altars and temples consecrated; what made walls in-
violable and gates permissible'. 3
These foundation rites were carried on by the Romans who
introduced them into all their colonies in the peninsula and in
their provinces. After having consulted the omens, the augurer
would orient the future city by taking the direction of the sun
with the help of an instrument called a groma, thus establishing
the position, from east to west, of the decumanus, and, from north
to south, of the cardo. Then would begin the ceremonies of
limitatio, whose picturesque details caught the attention of the
ancients more than anything. The founder, his head covered
with a part of his toga, would cut the primal furrow with a bronze
ploughshare harnessed to a bull and a heifer; he was careful to
cast the soil of this boundary furrow (sulcus primigenius) inwards,
and when he arrived at where the gates (porta) would stand, he
would lift and carry (portare) his plough. While doing this he
was not only surrounding the city with a symbolic moat and walls,
but also consecrating a space called the pomerium in which it was
forbidden to build within and plough without. 4
Inside this perimeter, a system of streets, parallel to the decu-
man and cardinal ways and laid out like them by means of a
cord, separated the city into insulae, all of regular shape and size,
whose appearance was that of a large chequerboard. The width
of the principal streets, of the secondary streets and of the insulae
was always in the same proportions.
Finally the Roman etruscologists affirmed that the founders of
Etruscan towns did not consider as regular or justae those towns
which had not three gates, three streets and three temples conse-
crated to Jupiter, Juno and Minerva. 5
Such was the theory of the ritus Etruscus: taken literally, it
invites us to imagine the most ancient Etruscan cities as being
THE TOWNS AND TIIE SETTIN<: OF UHllAN ACTIVITH.S
like those camps and colonies of the Empire at the height of its
power, and which, in North Africa among other places, display
an almost perfect quartering of the ground; the Tarquinii of
Tarchon and the Agylla of Mczcntius arc said to have been, eight
centuries beforehand, like Lambaesis and Timgad extending their
chequered carpet down a gentle slope. No one will believe this:
first of all because the shape of the ground in Etruria - as in
N umidia - for the most part was not suited to the strict application
of foundation principles, and because Nature often rebelled against
this intransigent wish to dominate it in this rational way. 'If
the ground allows of it,' wrote a Roman geometrist, 'we should
follow out the calculations; if not, we should depart from them
as little as possible.' 6 Very great departures had to be made in
order to perch Orvieto on its pedestal surrounded by abysses, to
plant Volterra on the rolling hills which are surmounted by its
vertiginous pyramid. It needs the sharp eyes of the archaeologist
to detect in the irregular contour of Arezzo, fan-shaped, or of
Perugia, star-shaped, the design of an urbs justa.
We must add here that recent studies have rightly contested
the claim that the Etruscans were the first to invent and the
original conceivers of the marvels of antique town-planning. The
little we know of the most ancient cities makes it difficult for us
to see a symmetrical plan related to the two axes. Vetulonia,
which disappeared at the beginning of the sixth century, is on
the contrary characterized by the irregularity and the sinuosity
of her streets which cross in various ways but never at right
angles. 7 It is possible that Veii or Sovana presented an attempt
at axial arrangement which went back to their foundation. 8 But
the true orthogonal system and the chequerboard plan which is
its logical development did not appear until fairly late, in the
sixth to fifth centuries, and simultaneously throughout the whole
of the Mediterranean basin, under the influence of the needs and
the progress of Greek colonization, from Miletus to Agrigentum
and Metapontum. The discovery is traditionally attributed to
the architect Hippodamus of Miletus, who lived in the first half
of the fifth century, and who must simply have codified and
brought to their full expression the tendencies of the preceding
generations. 9 All the same in this perspective the originality
of the Etruscans seems less brilliant, though it was no small
137
distinction to be the ones who introduced into Italy, g1vmg it

their own personal accent, Greek civilization.
The history of the language presents a confirmation and a
symbol of this derivation in urban matters: the word for the
apparatus used by the Roman surveyor, groma, is a borrowing
from the Greek gnomon or gnoma, but reveals a dissimilation of
the nasal (gn/gr) which conforms to the rules of Etruscan phonetics
and indicates the necessary intermediary. 10 Moreover the bonds
which linked the Etruscans to Ionia are so numerous and so obvious
that one seizes with satisfaction the opportunity to increase their
debt towards the country of Hippodamus of Miletus.
But then new Etruscan foundations immediately adopted the
type of plan given by Greek colonies. The Etruscans, too, from
the beginning of the fifth century, 11 had colonies which they
implanted like bridge-heads at the entrance to their Cisalpine
and Campanian provinces, Marzabotto and Capua. Here it so
happened that the configuration of the ground lent itself more
easily to the demands of the rite known henceforward as Etruscan:
in the former, on a terrace above the Reno near where it flows
into Aemilia; in the latter, on the plain which, according to a
mistaken etymology (but a classic one) had given its name to
Capua, a campo dicta. 12 The fact is that Capua would always
inspire in the Romans an admiration mixed with envy because
of its privileged situation which allowed it to expand freely, on
wide, flat ground, the intelligible harmony of its town-planning.
Whereas their own city, 'placed', as Cicero says, 'in a setting of
mountains and valleys, as though suspended in the air with its
many-storeyed houses, divided by mediocre roads and very narrow
little streets', 13 irremediably evoked the ancient cities of Etruria
proper before the Hippodamian reform.
MARZABOTTO
The continuity of life at Capua for twenty-five hundred years
has tended a little to efface or confuse its features. Those of
Marzabotto, which an invasion by the Gauls destroyed in the
fourth century, have been brought to light, during diggings
made in the course of the last century and resumed after the
war, with a clarity that has caused people to speak of an
Etruscan Pompeii. 14
THE TOWNS ANO THE SETrING OF UHUAN ACTIVITll..S
Let us ignore, to the north-west, the acropolis of l\lisandlo,

which was the town's sacred centre: there the basements of five
religious edifices, temples and altars have been found. At the
foot of the Capitol, on the plateau of Misano, the town proper
extended: a regular gridiron of streets separating rectangular
blocks of houses formed a site of about one hundred hectares,
half of which has long since crumbled away into the riYer. The
two great axes have survived, very exactly orientated: they were
two wide roads measuring fifteen metres across (a figure never
equalled elsewhere) and divided into three parts, a roadway between
two pavements of three metres each; they even had channels for
carrying away rain-water such as were never seen in later Roman
towns, like Ostia or Pompeii. The decumanus maximus was
doubled, in the south, by other decumani which were not so wide
(twelve metres) and which were linked by streets five metres
wide running parallel to the cardo. This gridiron pattern restricted
the spread of the blocks of houses of which only remain rough
foundations of dry stones and whose walls must have been made
of crude bricks.
The length of these insulae was unvarying, 165 metres, and
their width, thirty-five, forty and sixty-eight metres. On them
there were grouped without order round often very vast court-
yards, more like farmyards or the yards of works than the atrium
of the Roman house, small living-rooms, shops, workshops: heaps
of iron slag examined in 1952 have shown the existence of a
metallurgical laboratory. All this was decidedly much more
modest than the setting - those big, well-designed arteries, those
broad pavements, those hydraulic installations - had led us to
expect. It may be that the founders of Marzabotto, in the creative
intoxication of colonization, were too ambitious, and that the
mediocrity of the place's resources and of its destiny betrayed
the hopes that were placed in it: it left no trace on history, and
we do not know even what it was called in ancient times - perhaps
Misa. Doubtless it was never scarcely more than a small town.
Nevertheless its tombs contained rich funerary furniture, which
the 1944 bombardments partially destroyed, golden ornaments
and Attic vases. The last diggings brought to light a very fine
little head of an ephebe in Parian marble. At Marzabotto one
was not very far - some eighty kilometres at the most - from the
I 31)
DAILY LI.FE OF THE ETRUSCANS
great Graeco-Etruscan city of Spina through which flowed Greek

ceramics and all the refinements of Hellenism.
SPINA
In the archaeological research going on today, Spina10 is very
much at the forefront. It still lies submerged by water but its
fascinating enigma begins to be unfolded. In the fifth century it
had been the greatest port of the Adriatic, a sort of Venice built
three kilometres from the open sea among the lagoons formed by
one of the mouths of the Po, where Cornacchio now stands. It
was a cosmopolitan town where the indigenous Veneti, the new
masters the Etruscans and the Greek merchants rubbed shoulders;
the latter claimed they had settled there after Diomedes, the
Homeric son of Tydeus, and their wealth and piety were pro-
claimed in a monument erected in their name at Delphi. It was
a centre of international trade, where the Athenian fleet perhaps
came to seek the amber of the Baltic and the tin of the Cas-
siterides, but above all the wheat that the plain of the Po, ener-
getically irrigated and canalized by Etruscan engineers, produced
in abundance. In exchange, Spina imported along with the
products of the Orient the most beautiful Attic vases: these,
unearthed in the course of thirty years of excavation in the mud
of its necropolises, are today the pride of the museum of Ferrara.
Many more have been found at Bologna and Marzabotto. Still
others a little farther north, on the site of Atria, twin sister of
Spina, that gave her name to the Adriatic and the exploration of
which is also promised for the future. 16
Special economic circumstances, which have just been made
apparent with singular force, had built up the fortunes of Spina
and Atria: in 474 the defeat inflicted at Cumae by the Syracusan
navy marked the decadence of the Etruscan fleet and its expulsion
from the Tyrrhenian Sea. This is what gave immediate importance
to the Adriatic route, which enabled the Athenians to renew and
intensify their relations with the Etruscans. It has been proved,
from the dates on Attic vases discovered at Spina and also at
Atria, Bologna and Marzabotto that the import figure rose swiftly
after 470: sixty-three for the last quarter of the sixth century, 110
for the first quarter of the fifth century, but 309 for the second
quarter. 17
THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHUAN ACTIV!Tll .S
Twelve hundred tombs had been excavated before the war:

today more than three thousand arc known. Agrarian reform,
drainage and improvement projects have offered archaeologists
fresh opportunities; on the sand-banks which rose from the water
further necropolises have been recognized; sunk in the slime, metal
caissons have brought up a vast harvest of volutcd bowls and
panathenaic amphorae. This provoked some clandestine activity
among the eel-fishers of Cornacchio, but appropriate steps were
promptly taken to halt the flow abroad of their miraculous
draughts. After finding the city of the dead it remained to find
the city of the living.
This has been accomplished since October 1956. A study of
aerial photographs revealed what the eye could not distinguish -
the outline of a city buried in the sands. A city of lagoons, where,
as at Venice, traffic was confined to waterways: a Grand Canal
thirty metres wide crossed it from one end to another in a straight
line: this was the River Po whose course had been canalized and
here was the port of Spina: it was cut at equal intervals by minor
canals which, being today covered with taller grass, appear darker
from the air, and which bounded the geometrical insulae. Helped
by photography, the digger's pick at once began to look for re-
mains of the edifices swallowed up by the marshes and unearthed
lines of piles on which, as was to be expected, lay the buildings'
foundations. A lacustrine city, Spina, in its own way obeyed the
laws of the Etruscan rite, unless, as has recently been suggested,
it was through Spina that the Hippodamian plans were imposed
on Marzabotto and spread throughout the Etruscan world. 18
The plan of Capua, the ruins of Marzabotto, the aerial
photographs of Spina afford us only an illusory image of what
the ancient metropolises of Etruria proper must have been.
Quite different was the appearance of Tarquinii when Tanaquil
left the palace of her fathers, or of precipitous Volsinii when
the princes of all the nation climbed its steep flanks on the
occasion of the concourse of the twelve peoples. The urbs Justa
was originally only a forbidden ideal about which one dreamed
as one did about the perfections of the Greek world and which
in any case was only partially realizable if a tyrant, Porsenna at
Chiusi and perhaps already Tarquinius Superbus at Rome,
invested as they were with vast edilitarian powers, decided one
fine day to thrust dead-straight avenues through the archaic

labyrinth of streets. We shall find later on in the cemeteries
themselves, at Caere, from the beginning of the fifth century,
at a time when the Greek vases are entering the country in
large numbers, unexpected alignments of fai;ades on small
squares symmetrical in shape which certainly reflected what was
happening at the same time in the city of the living.
Of the latter, we know still very little in general, despite the

determined efforts of archaeologists to bring more to light.
Since before the war P. Romanelli had explored, not just the
tombs, but also the city of Tarquinii; 19 since the war the diggings
carried out by the Ecole Frani;aise at Bolsena, led by Raymond
Bloch, have laid bare for us the city of Volsinii. 20 The surrounding
walls have been excavated, the acropolises located, and fruitful
soundings have been made in the interior; at Tarquinii there
has been brought to light the temple known as the Ara della
Regina, with a magnificent group of horses in terracotta; at
Volsinii, the temple of the goddess N ortia has emerged. Yet
despite all these fine results, the greater part of the two cities -
their streets, their squares and their houses are still hidden
from us, buried under vineyards and olive groves whose ex-
propriation could not be countenanced; perhaps they will always
be hidden from us in the higher parts where the action of running
water over the centuries has carried away all surface works.
So it was with joy that we greeted in 1955 the news that the
urban site of Vulci, whose tombs, ever since the days of Lucien
Bonaparte, had enriched all the museums of Europe, was to be
the object of a complete excavation under the direction of R.
Bartoccini, superintendent of antiquities in meridional Etruria. 21
This first of all required a meticulous preliminary investigation
in which the most modern technical resources were employed:
topographic studies, aerial photographs, geochemical prospecting
and electrical and phonic investigations carried out in accordance
with the methods perfected by the engineer Lerici, so that the
desolate plateau on the banks of the Fiora on which the Etruscan
habitat stood and where no trace of former edifices is visible
today was able to be converted into a sort of instructional diagram
permitting the archaeologists to work with great precision. The
142
THE TOWNS AND THE SETTIN(; OF UIHIAN At'TlVlTll.;:;
desire to avoid costly and futile exploratory work and to get in

before the bulldozers of modern improvement schemes and the
raids of clandestine diggers is here combined with a determination
not to allow any indication contributing to the resuscitation of
Vulci's past to escape.
THE FORTIFICATIONS
Meanwhile we have to content ourselves with what we can learn,
for example, from the surrounding walls - those powerful forti-
fications made of enormous blocks, more or less roughly squared
and uncemented which formerly were attributed to the fabulous
days of the Pelasgians and the Cyclops. 22 In reality the Etruscan
cities, naturally protected by their escarpmented position, had
long done without fortifications. It was the threat of invasions
by the Gauls, in the sixth and fifth centuries, which made them
put up defensive walls. What particularly interests us here is
the great extent of the fortifications: about ten kilometres of them
at Tarquinii, nine at Volterra, six or seven at Volsinii . At Volsinii,
the perimeter of the city embraces four hills. At Volterra, the
ramparts, roughly rectilinear on the south front, send out to the
north, right into the country, far-reaching extensions intended to
enclose, with thoughts of a siege in mind, all the resources of the
area. It becomes more and more apparent that these immense
urban areas - 150 hectares for Caere, 135 for Tarquinii - were
not built over altogether, but comprised gardens, pasture land
for beasts and undefined territories. At Capua itself, all the
eastern half of the city, though enclosed within the walls, is empty
of all trace of building.
PREDOMINANCE OF PRIVATE DWELLINGS

A sentence from the Posidonius-Diodorus account provides us
with a detail about the character of the Etruscan home. 'Among
them, not only the slaves but also the majority of the freed men
have all kinds of private dwellings.' At first this seems rather
surprising: one might think it was some kind of disgrace which,
instead of striking at the slaves only, affected even freed men.
Now it is a question of what seems to us a very precious privilege:
the enjoyment of individual homes.
In fact, the sequence of ideas is more complicated. In what
1 43
went before, the author had given examples of the luxury of

Etruscan life, mentioned sumptuous repasts, embroidered
carpets, silver plate, the number, beauty and splendid robes of
the slaves: costumes, he said, which were far above the wearers'
station. Here he brings in 'they have separate dwellings'. This
is not a punishment, far from it: it is a fresh sign of magnificence
or, if one wishes, of the indolence and softness of their masters.
In making this remark, Posidonius is thinking of the usual
condition of slaves, not only of those who, undergoing punishment,
with their feet shackled, were packed into the ergastula, but also
in general of the slaves of town and country who, one conjectures,
despite the lack of information in the texts, occupied common
apartments in the villa urbana or rustica. This is what has been
noticed in rural areas round Pompeii, where they were accom-
modated near the stables in lines of cells. 23 Only it was not a
question of the same slaves here. We have seen above that under
this generic term the Etruscans understood a lower class whose
more advanced or more favoured elements, freed men or clients,
enjoyed a fairly liberal way of life.
Diodorus, having noted this privilege granted to the Etruscan
'slaves', abridging Posidonius, awkwardly perhaps, adds that this
privilege is extended also to freed men. He would be more
readily understood if he had said, 'Besides the private dwellings
are also intended for freed men'. Only the first part of his sentence
fits in with his description of the Etruscan tryphe. But even as he
considers this kind of habitation it inspires him at once with
another idea, to wit, that it is common among the non-servile
population. As he thought this was worth mentioning, it is
evident that Etruria in this respect was distinguished from the
Roman world: it remained faithful to the idea of domus; it remained
rebellious to the principle, already triumphant in the capital, of
the insula.
M. Carcopino, in some fine pages in his Daily Life in Ancient
Rome, 24 has described the creation of those tenement houses
which, at the end of the Republic, became more and more com-
mon, accommodating a ceaselessly growing population and
imposing on the city development 'in a vertical direction'. He
recalls that 'already in the third century BC insulae of three storeys
had become so numerous that no one thought them unusual at
TllE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHllAN ACTIVI rn:s
all'. There are many instructive texts which recount, in 218, the
extraordinary talc of a bull which climbed to the third storey of
one of the skyscrapers in the Fon11n Boarium, which was the
cattle-market, and, confused by the spectators' cries, jumped into
space; in I 53, we read of the home found in Rome by an Egyptian
king in exile, Ptolmy Philometor, at the house of the painter
Demetrios who gave him the use of his garret on the top floor
because the rents were so high; in 99, the case which cost T.
Claudius Centumalus a house he possessed on Mt. Caelius and
which he had to pull down because it was preventing the augurs
from making their prognostications from the top of the Capitol.
'The Rome of Cicero,' according to the orator, 'would appear to
be suspended in the air on the tiers of tenements.' One knows
that the troubles of M. Caelius, Cicero's young friend, came from
his having rented a lodging in the house of the tribune P. Clodius
which from the landing or the garden made him a neighbour of
Clodia, the beautiful Lesbia of Catullus. But at the gates of
Rome the port of Ostia was soon, in its industrial centres, to have
large blocks of towering tenements. Rome at that time was an
example of overcrowding. In the light of this concentration of
living quarters, Posidonius' remark reveals that in Etruria people
were clinging to more dispersed modes of life: one domus to each
person or to each family. But perhaps this was just a fleeting
impression hastily noted by the traveller. It might in a certain
measure be contradicted by what we learn from the chamber
tombs which, from the end of the fifth century, no longer shelter
the remains of one couple but are opened to accommodate more
and more populous f amiliae, as well as from what is suggested by
the columbaria of Sovana, Bieda and Veii with their two hundred
or so loculi:25 these seem to indicate human hives rather ill-
adapted for individual privacy. But let us retain for the moment
as an indication of a special feature - the one becoming archaic -
the image of the physiognomy of an Etruscan city with its private
houses, its individual dwellings, which naturally took up a good
deal of space within the fortifications.
THE POPULATION OF THE CITIES

The extent of the urban perimeter is no less important and poses
the problem of the numbers of the population. Here the
historians, we must admit, have very little to go on. They do

not possess those precious details which Beloch used as the basis
of his Bevolkerungsgeschichte Italiens in the Middle Ages and in
modern times: 26 recruitment lists in which Pisa and Siena after
the end of the twelfth century inscribed the names of men who
were of an age to carry arms; lists of households; lists of bocche
che mangiano pan (mouths that eat bread); parish registers and
so on. Thanks to these documents we know that Florence, just
before she was decimated by the Black Death in l 348, had fifty-
one thousand inhabitants, but that Corneto, formerly Tarquinii,
had in 1503 only 6,810, Orvieto 9,190, Soriano (Sovana) 1,140.
One can only make conjectures about the days of antiquity.
About thirty years ago, B. Nogara proposed that the figure for
the population of Caere, on the basis of its area of one hundred
and fifty hectares, should be fixed at twenty-five thousand. 21
And by analogy he attributed to Tarquinii, Volterra, Populonia,
Veii, Chiusi, Perugia at the time of their prosperity an approxi-
mately equal number of inhabitants. The etruscologists of today
tend to make this figure lower. At the recent Ciba Foundation
conference, certain scholars refused to accept the idea that an
Etruscan town could have contained twenty or thirty thousand
inhabitants. 26 Yet they acknowledge that the demographic aspect
of sixth-century Etruria could not have been very different from
that presented in the Middle Ages, when new capitals like Florence
with an urban population of fifty-one thousand inhabitants had
replaced the Etruscan metropolises. 'Let's say five thousand,'
suggested one. 'I'd go as far as ten thousand,' replied another.
'I cannot believe that a city like Tarquinii did not have more
than five thousand inhabitants,' J. B. Ward Perkins quite rightly
protested. Indeed these contradictory estimates and this hap-
hazard bartering of round figures are not, perhaps, the last word
in this branch of Etruscan research. G. Foti observed that we
might attempt to estimate the population of an Etruscan town by
studying the evidence of its cemeteries, but that such an approach
had not been made.
Here is how we might proceed in such a case. Naturally we
could not aim at absolute precision. The necropolises of Caere
extended over four hundred hectares, 28 and had been used con-
tinuously from the beginning of the seventh century to the middle
TllE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UIUI AN ACTIVITll·~>;
of the first. One of them in particular, the Banditaccia, has been

the object since l9I l of systematic diggings whose definitive
findings began to be published in 1955 by the Accademia dei
Lincei in the A1011ume11ti A11ticl1i. 28 Here we find detailed
descriptions and very clear plans.
Let us take, in zone A called the Recinto (enclosure), the sector
E called the Tumulus della Quercia because of an oak that had
grown over one of the tombs: 29 the northern part of this sector
constitutes a rectangle of 74 by 47 metres or 34·78 ares, which has
been almost completely explored. Here we find a huddle of one
hundred and seventy tombs of all kinds and periods, tumulus
tombs, chamber tombs, grave tombs, and even two or three
incinerary tombs. Some are filled with the most lovely Corin-
thian or Attic vases, others contain Arezzo ceramics, others
bucchero ware, others rough terracotta ware. Altogether we can
reckon 354 depositions, which gives a figure of 8·8 per are. A
second rectangle of 40 by 42 metres or 16·80 ares, in the neigh-
bouring D sector, called the Tumuli della Cornice, 30 gives us 184
depositions or 9·1 per are. Taking into account the 'blanks' in
the other sectors, it looks as if they would produce equivalent
results. Consequently, if we suppose, as aerial photography
leads us to, that the four hundred hectares of the Caere necropo-
lises were just as well filled everywhere, we are brought to the
conclusion that in the course of the six and a half centuries
(700-50 BC) in which they had been used some four hundred
thousand persons had died in the city.
Now we recall that life-expectancy at birth, according to the
calculations we presented above, was a little more than forty
years (40·88). 31 Probably Caere was not so densely populated in
the second century as it had been at the height of its prosperity.
We cannot assume that its population had been constant. But
with this reservation we can agree that the six hundred and fifty
years of its history must have renewed sixteen times (15·90 times)
these periods of normal life-expectancy. Which means that the
number of inhabitants in Caere at any given time must have
risen to four hundred thousand divided by 15·90, or 25, 157.
This is the lowest figure, for the 184 and 354 depositions in our
rectangles from the sectors D and E, the four hundred hectares
containing the necropolises of Caere, are low figures, and we do
1 47
not forget that Caere, in the course of the centuries, gradually

lost its population. But all we have attempted to do is to establish
a scale, and in this perspective the result we have arrived at, and
which agrees exactly with the suppositions of Bartolomeo Nogara,
twenty-five thousand inhabitants, may serve to give us a fairly
precise view of the situation.
II
WHAT THE TOMBS OF THE DEAD TELL US ABOUT THE ABODES OF

THE LIVING
Despite the praiseworthy efforts of contemporary archaeology to
discover the secrets of the Etruscan city's appearance from the
cities of the living, we must again descend to the infernal regions
of the necropolises which are better able to provide us with more
precise details. And probably the best-known burial-ground is
that of Tarquinii, because of the frescoes which make it the art
museum of Etruscan painting. But no less moving in the grandiose
severity of their naked stone, and even more instructive for the
solution of the problem which occupies our attention, are the
burial-grounds of Caere, with their rows of tumuli here and there
along the sepulchral road, and, below, tombs whose beauty often
is confined simply to their architecture.
We have already had an opportunity to visit one of them, the
Tomb of the Grecian Vases, 32 and to discover in it unexpected
information about the woman's place in Etruscan society. And
in preceding pages we have pointed out the riches of the recent
publication of excavation results between 1911 and 1933. 33 More-
over, considerably enlarging the domain explored, the aerial
photographs of J. Bradford have just revealed, deep under the
vegetation, the outlines of more than a thousand unknown tumuli
which we see like innumerable air-bubbles on the surface of his
pictures, showing even the entry to the tomb and, here and there,
traces of streets and squares that led to them. 34
The necropolises of Caere, from the seventh century onwards,
must have spread out all round the city, principally on two
elevated sites, the Banditaccia and Mount Abetone which extend
parallel to the city in the north-west and the south-east, beyond
I-Iouschold objects
1 The engraving on this mirror case shows one of the main Etru scan
gods, Tinia, who corresponds to the Greek god Zeus
2 A bronze brazier, 1 d ins. high, from Chiusi. Sixth century BC
3 A household colander made of bronze. On the handle 1s a figure of

Acheloos, Length 10~ ins. 520 BC
4 A strigil "ith the handle tn thl· form of .\phrod1tL
scraping her thigh "ith a stng11. 1k1ght 1 (> ins. Third
century
5 False teeth. This Etruscan pros-

thetic appliance was attached to the
natural teeth on either side
6 Fourth-century Etruscan coins
7 A tripod made of bronze from Vulci. The

lion's claw feet all rest on unusual sculptures of
frogs. In the centre are two reclining figures of
satyrs as part of the leg support. At the top,
centre, arc the figures of Hercules (wearing a lion
skin) and Iole. Height 28 ins. Sixth century Re
8 A stone seat now m the Galleria 'o rsini, Rome
9 A bronze
mirror stand with
the figure of
Aphrodite from
Naples. Early
fifth century
r l 'rans port ati on
..;,_ •t
.
.{·
~
..(I- .
.,.1 ~'d-,.
.?''
..'" '
I, I f'
10 A wall-painting from the Tomb of Hunting am! Fishing. The boat is

of the small type used for fishing and has a 'lucky eye' in front of it.
The painting is a most unusual funerary subjec t . 520-5 10 nc
11 A sculptured relief of Ulysses and the Sirens in alabaster from the front of an urn
used for cremation burial. The relief, which was painted, shows a larger type of sea-going
vessel. Ulysses is being tied to the mast by the sailors. The ship has a ram's head
figurehead, is steered by a paddle and rowed by ten oars which emerge through five
leathers on each side. The sirens from left to right are playing a lyre, Pan's pipes and
the double flute. From Volterra. Second century BC
12 A chariot and driver

with three horses riding
over the body of a man.
This is the foot of a cista
from Palestrina. About
fifth century
13 lleraclcs s ubduing the horses of Dionwde . This small hronz<· ~ lalll<'
from the lie.I of a cista from Palt-strina shows the horses \\<«Iring collar~
with bullae. lforacles is wearing a lion skin O\'er his lwnd, which is ti l'll
in front, continues down his back as a ridge of ph1it<·d hair. I ki gh1
6~ ins . Tenth to third ce nturi es Ill'
14 A bronze ceremonial chariot from Monteleone. 550-540 BC
15 A small bronze statue of Demeter m a rustic cart. From Amelia.

About fifth century
~'vf usic, drarna and spor
16 A panel from the T omh of the Triclinium . The youth, playin).( tlw
double pipes, has short, curly hair then in fashion, and a short tran span·nt
Chlamys. The mural, of \"cry high qualit y, was prohahl y worked from
sketches as there arc no incised lines and a great se nse of cohl·sion
compared to similar works. 470 nc
17 A terracotta figure of an actor. The figure probably
represents a parasite. He is holding a small covered
pot in his right hand and a ham at his side. The
figure is wearing a mask and a short chiton with the
himation over the left shoulder. The hands, feet and
face are painted red and traces of white slip can also
be seen on the terracotta
18 This painting from the Tomb of the Seven

Chimneys at Orvieto shows the typical horn instru-
ments and dress of the fourth century
19 A copy of the wall painting in the Tomb of the Monkeys at Chiusi showing wrest-
ling and riding at funerary games. The severe style represents the period of political and
cu ltural prosperity that this interior Etruscan city was enjoying in the fifth century
20 A bronze statue of i\1ars
showing the type of tunic an<l
cuirass worn in the third century.
The figure is holding in its left
hand a shield with a central
handle only and a broken sword
and the right han<l has hel<l a
spear. The helmet has check-
pieces turned-up an<l a high hair
crest reaching to the waist. The
chit6n 1s short and has an
elaborate cuirass with overlapping
plates and a double row of flaps
over the hips. The arms an<l
shield were cast separately an<l
added later. Height 12 S ins.
21 A plate with the design of an archer. The
archer carries a bow and quiver at his side
and is blowing a trumpet through a phorbeia.
From Vulci. Late style. Diameter 7~ ins.
Sixth century
22 This hronzt• ~tatllt• of
a warrior has l'll'ml'nts of
tht· primitin· Etruscan
art. I ll'ii..dit 1 t l ins.
23 This detail from a lid of an urn

shows four female archl'rs on horsl'-
back using hows. Two of the archers
have exceptionally large crests m
the shape of swans. 480 JH'
ostume and Jewellery
24 The man on the left is wearing the vestment of an Etruscan

priest and is in the act of welcoming a man carrying a sceptre
or military emblem. The woman on the right is carrying a
lance and wreath. This and 25 and 26 are paintings done on
white slabs. Sixth century
25 & 26 These two
paintings of three
women \'cry clearly
show the costume of
the period. 24, 25
and 26 arc rare
sur\'ivals of non-
funcrary Etruscan
painting. All three
arc painted in
mar\'cllous shades of
deep purple-brown,
black and yellnw-
ochrc
27 This gold fibula and
pendaglio is a particularly
fine example of Etruscan
jeweller's craft. It was
found in the Regolini-
Galassi Tomb at Cerveteri.
Seventh century
28 A pair of gold ,·oti,·e b racelets fro m a tomb at l'raenestc. Sewnth Cl'ntun·
29 A gold fibula from Vulci. Two rows of
carefully worked lions face four sphinxes
30 A carnelian scarab set in a gold ring.

The scarab shows the figure of a wounded
hero with drops of blood falling from his
his head. On the ground there is a disk.
The inscription is probably an epithet of
Apollo. Fifth century
31 A large, beautifully worked gold ring

with a sard centre. Fifth century
Religion
32 A bronze sistula or bucket from Offida, Picenum. Just below the handle there is a
relief of a winged goddess and above the foot there is Heracks strangling the ?\emean
lion . Late fifth or fourth centuries.
33 The Tomb of the Reliefs. This large family tomb is of special interest
because common household tools and personal possessions, such as
spades, spoons, game, bed linen, have been carved in realistic detail
34 A funerary couch from Caere now

in the Louvre. Late sixth century
35 A bronze stand for an
incl'nSL' howl from \ ' uki.
Thl' woman is Wl'aring
a long dose-fitting chit6n,
earrings, tutulus and shoes.
Height 8~ ins. About fifth
Cl'ntury
36 An engra\'ed frieze on a bronze cista

representing the sacrifice of Trajon captiYes
at the funeral pyre of Patroclus. The
pyre is in the centre and the cuirass and
two shields of Patroclus are placed on top.
Achilles is seen on the left plunging a
sword into the neck of a capti\·e. In the
middle left is a female deity leaning on a
rock. Athene with a spear in her right
hand stands to the left of the deity.
Behind her is a beautifully drawn owl
37 This banqueting scene from the Tomb of the Leopards has the usual graffito pre-
paration. The style and costumes show the influence of the Greeks but the brilliant
colour and movement are more Etruscan. The men have black hair and reddish faces,
and the women fair hair and white faces. 480-470 BC
38 A limestone sepulchral chest from Chiusi. The side shown depicts the banquet
scenes from the funeral and includes many details: coverlets, pillows, ducks picking up
crumbs from under the table. To the left a boy is serving fruit; to the right a boy is
playing the flute. There are still remains of the red paint that must ha,·e covered
the relief. Height 45 ins. Late sixth century
THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF URBAN ACTIVITIES
the ravine formed by two torrents, the Manganello and the Mola.
However, at the other two extremities, and especially to the south-
west in the angle formed by the confluence of these two rivers,
more ancient cemeteries, in which were crowded grave tombs
and shaft tombs provided with very poor funerary furnishings
go back to the pre-Etruscan phase in the history of the site. This
necropolis of the Sorbo is particularly important because it
allows us to grasp, as at Tarquinii and Volsinii, the uninterrupted
continuity that, ever since the iron age, united the Villanovan
and the Etruscan civilizations. We must remember that it was
on the Sorbo, and not in the Banditaccia or the Abetone that
was discovered, in 1836, the Regolini-Galassi tomb whose golden
ornaments, silver plate and ivory plaques had been placed next
to the mysterious figure of Larthia. Now this tomb is situated
in immediate proximity to the city, at the foot of its cliff, and
dominates the Villanovan cemetery to the south like a lord
surveying his vassals.
But after this period the Etruscan tombs invaded the hills to
the north-west and the south-east, and it was there, on the
Banditaccia in particular, that one can best follow their gradual
evolution. Aerial photography, as we have said, shows that
round the tumuli of larger size there are hundreds of tiny blisters
representing smaller tumuli of a diameter ranging from ten to
fifteen metres. This was the size of the most ancient (tumuletti
arcaici), and it remained the normal size until the end of the
fifth century, though meanwhile it had in certain cases increased
to thirty, forty and even fifty metres. This was because, unlike
the tumuletti arcaici, these greater tumuli covered several tombs:
they had been built over precious tumuli which in all probability
belonged to members of the same family; the descendants, when
constructing their own tomb, wanted to have their ancestors
sheltered under the same hemispherical mound of earth and
grass.
THE EXPLORATION OF A TUMULUS

One sees this clearly when one considers the large tumulus
II, whose base has a diameter of forty metres. 35 It contains
four distinct tombs, the most recent being without doubt the
tomb called after the Grecian vases, more than one hundred and
D.L.E.-II 1 49
fifty in number, and often very fine, of Attic ceramics decorated

in the severe style with black and red figures, which were scattered
on the ground and the seats. They testify to the cultural refine-
ment of the occupants, particularly the women, and also allow
us to date this tomb from the end of the sixth century. Moreover
one notices that the entrance passage's position corresponds to
a radius of the tumulus' circle, showing a passion for symmetry
which is related to the taste evidenced by those Hellenized
Etruscans we have spoken of previously: without doubt it was
they who had the great tumulus II built, comprising three
former tombs.
Let us visit these in turn. As we go along we shall be witnessing
the development of the chamber tomb from the seventh to the
fifth century, a development which naturally obeyed its own laws
of logic but which was also constantly influenced by the houses
of the living. As soon as the Etruscan tomb ceased to be just an
oblong grave dug in the rock, it grew to the dimensions of an
actual room provided with annexes, and which one reached,
often after a stairway, by means of a passage built on a gentle
slope (Greek dromos). But in order to solve the roofing problem
the interior imitated a real two-sloped roof with exposed ridge-
beam (columen), 36 One descends into it along a wide dromos
which has at its end two alcoves to right and left; it leads into a
trapezoid chamber surrounded by benches, then into another,
smaller one. This tomb was dubbed the Tomb della Capanna
because its two chambers are both surmounted by a sort of arris
vault suspended from the relievo representation of a thin beam,
and the sides of which extend right down to the ground: it re-
produces the thatch roof of archaic houses before the introduction
of tiled roofs. Likewise the door at the bottom is a rustic opening
with inclined jambs joined at the top by an arch-shaped beam.
All this recalls very clearly the primitive huts such as we know
them from the cinerary urns made in their image and which
are very frequent in the cemeteries of Latium and southern
Etruria, and from the traces their foundations left in the rock of
the Palatine and at Bolsena. 37
The funerary furnishings, particularly the cups and plates of
that rough ceramic, black and reddish-brown, known as impasto
ceramic, with the local imitations of Protocorinthian vases,
150
TllE TO\\'N S AND TIIE SETTING OF UIUIAN ACTIVITIES
confirm the dating of this tomb to the middle of the seventh

century. But shall we ever know the meaning of the grafitto
engraved on the handle of an amphora, henphatlm, which Nogara
read as Heli Phat/111, translating it into Latin as Hclia Fatinia,
presuming that it was the owner's name?
\Ve have only to pass to the two next tombs to see how, in
half a century, the plan, proceeding from that primitive outline,
became enriched and regularized. The first tomb 38 has two
names: in its anterior sector, formed from two lateral chambers
which open up at the extremity of the entrance passage, it is
called the Tomb of the Andirons (degli Alari), because, among the
abundant kitchen utensils in the left-hand chamber were found
two iron andirons. The back of the tomb, consisting of two big
rectangular chambers linked by a passage, is called the Tomb of
the Doli, because of several enormous impasto jars attaining a
height of ninety centimetres: they are still in place with the rest
of the furniture - great wine amphorae of local make, Proto-
corinthian and Corinthian vases - all of which date from around
600.
The chamber on the left of the Tomb of the Andirons had
always escaped attention, and its discovery caused a sensation.
Mengarelli's notes 39 bring to life again the excitement felt by all
when, on April 10, 1910, in the presence of Prince and Princess
Ruspoli, ambassador Titoni and other Roman personalities,
the door was solemnly loosened - a door which had not been
opened since, two and a half thousand years earlier, the remains
of an aristocratic Etruscan lady had been borne across its
threshold.
'When we had lifted away the upper blocks, we saw on the

black, wet ground several objects of gleaming gold and a
quantity of vases and objects arranged in groups together with
little Protocorinthian vases and Egyptian figurines surrounding
a funeral couch of small splinters of decomposed wood, the
wretched remains of the sarcophagus or of the bed on which
the dead woman had been placed. Yet nothing remained of
her skeleton because, as always, the acidity of Caere rock had
destroyed, over the centuries, the bones and all organic matter.
A few small Protocorinthian vases were still hanging on the
walls, suspended from oxydized nails. As we looked more

closely, without entering it, at the interior of the tomb with the
help of portable lamps, we realized the complexity of the rich
furnishings that had been placed there: gold ornaments, little
toilet vases for oil and perfumes, pyxides imitating wooden
coffers for keeping small objects in: all things which could
only have been dedicated to a woman for her life beyond the
tomb. But together with these objects were indispensable
kitchen utensils: andirons and spits, a cauldron with a tripod
to support it; finally a whole dinner service, the very one which
had been used for the funeral feast in honour of the deceased:
jugs, wine amphorae, vases for drawing water or for mixing
liquids, drinking cups and dinner-plates. In all one hundred
and nine objects.'
And Mengarelli concludes: 'The woman who was buried in this

tomb must have been a mother dearly beloved by all her family.'
The tomb, lower down and on the left, known as the Tomb of
the Beds and Sarcophagi, 40 is almost contemporaneous with the
other, perhaps a little more recent. We only possess, out of
funerary furnishings pillaged by antiquity, a late Protocorinthian
olpe (630-610), with this grafitto under the base: mi L ... ia
Apicus, the meaning of which, despite mutilation, is clear: 'I
belong to Larthia, wife of Apicius.'
But this tomb is interesting to us particularly because of
certain details of its architecture. Here again the dromos leads
to two lateral chambers, then debouches into a principal chamber,
4·30 metres by 3·70 metres, which gives on a smaller chamber
of 3·20 metres by 2·70 metres. In these two rooms the roof is
two-sloped with a wide median beam; but the two slopes come
down at a very gentle incline and rest two metres above the floor
on the lateral walls.
Communication between the dromos and the lateral chambers,
between the dromos and the principal chamber and finally between
the latter and the farthest chamber is made through two doors
with inclined jambs supporting a tympanum entirely filling a
curved arch. It is the same arched doorway as the one in the
Tomb della Capanna but has here become the trapezoidal type
of door. But in the third case the door is flanked by two narrow
THE TO\\'NS ANO THE SETTING OF URl.IAN ACTIVITIES
windows surmounted by blind arches. What were these windows

used for? The architect simply wanted to give the posterior wall
of the main chamber the familiar appearance of the front of a
house. A similar arrangement may be seen in the contemporaneous
Tomb of the Casetta (or Little House). 41 The rear chamber was
bordered, on three of its sides, by benches, but the principal
chamber and the entrance chambers were provided, against the
walls, with beds and sarcophagi which gave the tomb its name.
We have already indicated that the beds contained the remains
of men and that the sarcophagi were reserved for women.
Next comes the Tomb of the Grecian Vases, from which we
started. 42 The plan at once makes clear that the elongation of
the previous tombs had given way to a general disposition of all
the chambers in a sort of square whose sides measured about
nine metres. The central chamber was considerably widened
(8·70 metres) without being made any deeper; consequently the
beam of the columen is perpendicular to the entry. This widening
has caused it to go slightly beyond the right and left limits of the
two lateral chambers. But in addition, at the back, not one but
three chambers open on it, so that here again the total develop-
ment in width is almost equal to that of the central room. A
similar ground-plan, characteristic of the end of the sixth century,
can be found in some of the finest tombs of Caere, the Tomb of
the Seats and Shields, the Tomb of the Capitals, and the Tomb
of the Cornice.
The posterior chambers were furnished only with benches, but
the lateral chambers and the central chamber contained beds:
in the latter, on the sides, two feminine sarcophagi with triangular
frontons were preceded, near the entrance, by two masculine
beds with, at the corners, hollows in which the feet of the actual
beds were set. The door jambs of the posterior chambers had
been cut away to allow the passage of funerary beds which had
been too big to get through.
When we compare it with the one we have described in the
Tomb of Beds and Sarcophagi, we can appreciate the fine
architectonic decor provided by the wall at the back of the central
room. Of the three doors, the one in the middle is often a little
higher: it obviously gives on the chamber of the masters. All
three are trapezoidal, with their uprights and lintel framed in
153
projecting beading, originally painted green. But in the Tomb

of the Cornice the little windows with arc-shaped tympana still
survive: one on either side of the central door, and one on each
of the interior flanks of the lateral doors. In the Tomb of
the Seats and Shields43 and in the Tomb of the Capitals44
these windows have become rectangular, and there are only
two: new decorative elements have taken their place. But we
still recognize the fac;ade of a house, giving on a courtyard or a
peristyle.
We shall not repeat what we have said about the particular
cultural refinement, especially of the women, revealed by the
profusion of Grecian vases that gave the name to one of these
tombs. The same refinement is reflected also in the harmonious
arrangement of the palaces of which these fine funerary abodes
were the replicas.
THE ATRIUM
We have until now prudently avoided any other term but 'central
chamber' in speaking of the huge room round which, in the Tombs
of the Grecian Vases, of the Capitals, of the Cornice, etc., the
whole edifice was organized. But why not give it the name of
atrium, which is the one we must employ to describe the large
room or hall at the centre of the Roman house where the crowd
of clients came every morning to greet their patron and ask for
sportulae? Those familiar with Pompeii will have already made
the comparison when reading the above description. The com-
parison is even plainer when we consider a tomb like the Tomba
de/la Ripa, 45 which is a little more recent, well on into the fifth
century, and which shows, opening on the atrium not by a
narrow door but across its entire width, the tablinum or salon
of later houses: despite the relative irregularity of the plan,
we cannot fail to recognize in it an anticipation of the house
called Livia's on the Palatine46 or that of M. Lucretius Fronto
at Pompeii. 47 In the wall at the rear of the tablinum everything,
even a false door with arched top, suggests the existence, behind,
of a back exit to the hortus or vegetable plot. And this arrangement
persisted in more recent tombs, even in the tombs of the Volumnii
at Perugia 48 and the Franc;ois at Vulci, 49 tombs which, at the
height of the Roman era, also reflect the architecture of real
154
THll TOWNS AND THll SErl'ING OF UHllAN ACTIVITIES
houses and help us to realize once again the great debt that Rome
owed to Etruscan civilization.
Moreover, the Romans were conscious of this debt; there was
a variety of atrium which they called tusca11icu111, 'Tuscan', in
honour of the fact, as Varro says, 50 that they 'had begun to
imitate the interior courtyards of the Etruscans'. Moreover,
among the etymologies they proposed, Varro and his disciple
Verrius Flaccus preferred the one which linked the word with
Atria in Etruria, for 'it was among the inhabitants of Atria that
the model had been copied'. 51 \Ve have already had occasion
to mention this city at the mouth of the Po, which, from the
middle of the sixth century, must have contributed a great
deal to the hellenization of Etruria. 52 In confirmation of this
etymology, we note that the word athre appears in fact in the
inscription on the Mummy of Zagreb, though in a somewhat
obscure context. 53
Nevertheless the definition which the ancients gave of the
atrium is very much more precise than the one we have contented
ourselves with until now; the problem deserves to be studied a
little closer.
'The atrium,' we read in Festus' compendium, 54 'is a sort of
construction situated in front of the house and containing in the
centre a space where the rain, collected from all parts of the roof,
pours itself down.'
'In front of the house', ante aedem, which means that the
atrium did not properly speaking form part of it. The heart
of the dwelling was the tablinum, the master's reception-room
where his bed and the chapel of his ancestors were placed.
Such at any rate was the feeling which prevailed at the end of
the Roman Republic; it is a question debated by archaeologists,
whether it had always been so, or whether the subordination of
the atrium to the tablinum was the result of a long evolution.
Some imagine that the primitive Roman house, and therefore also
the Etruscan house from which it derived, had its true heart
in the main body of buildings with one, two or three chambers,
such as we have described as existing in the posterior sections
of our tombs, and which was originally comprised between the
atrium, courtyard or vestibule, and the hortus, the vegetable
garden. 55 Here they see a connexion with the M ycenean house,
155
where the megaron is similarly preceded by an aute. But other

scholars - and perhaps they are right - believe that the atrium
came first, that the house only contained one central room where
the fire was kept lighted in the hearth and where, against the wall
facing the entrance, the nuptial bed was placed: the alcove
wherein it was ensconced is claimed to have become the principal
bedroom, transformed thereafter into a ceremonial chamber. 56
In the majority of the tombs we have studied - before the Tomb
della Ripa, also called de/ Tablina - we are still at the point where
the future tablinum is only the master's sleeping-chamber, flanked
by those of the children: it has been said that this displays 'the
primacy of the parents over the rest of the f amilia which was
grouped in the adjoining rooms'. 57 It is not by chance that the
rooms which, at the entrance, give on the dramas, contain only -
for example in the Tomb of the Capitals - instead of ornamented
beds, simple benches: these chambers correspond, in dwellings
above ground, to the servants' quarters. Ever since the sixth
century, consequently, what we have read in Posidonius could be
verified, namely, that the atrium of the Etruscan houses served
to isolate the masters from the noise made by the swarms of
servants.
Moreover, among the Romans the atrium of necessity admitted
of an opening made in the roof (campluvium) through which the
rain-water poured into a basin placed just underneath (impluvium).
In reality, here again it is a question of a refinement which was
only introduced fairly late: the tombs, faithful mirrors of domestic
architecture, offer us no examples of this, while the oldest houses
in Pompeii, in their first state, were covered with a roof and had
no campluvium. 58 The tombs of Caere show no trace of any
opening to the sky at the centre of the roof, though all the details
of the ridge-beam, rafters, laths, cofferings are rendered with the
greatest care. Their atria, or their cavaedia - one and the same
thing - were, to employ the terminology of Vitruvius in his
description of the various forms of interior courtyards, 59 of the
type known as testudinatum, because their roof resembled the
testuda or carapace of a tortoise. One tomb however at Tarquinii,
called the Mercarecciaso, and an urn in the form of a house,
found at Poggio a Gaiella near Chiusi 61 mark a new stage: they
are lit by a rectangular orifice in the place of a campluvium. But
THE TOWNS ANO THE SETTING OF UHBAN ACTIV!Tll,S
neither is anterior to the fourth century, and their four-sloped

roof, like a truncated pyramid, is inclined towards the outside,
making the rain-water run away to the exterior of the house: it
is what VitruYius calls a cavaedium displudat11111. The co111plm:ium-
i111plm:i11111 system implies on the contrary that the four triangular
planes of the roof incline inwards towards the central opening,
and the rain-water flows along these convergent slopes. But on
this subject we do not possess any archaeological document; we
have to turn again to Vitruvius, who distinguishes between
the Tuscan atrium, the terastyle atrium and the Corinthian
atrium.
'In the first,' he says, 'the beams were placed across the width
of the atrium, with other transversal beams, and gutters that
descended from the corners of the walls to the corners of the
framework, the rafters forming the roof's eaves being all inclined
towards the compluvium.' The essential thing is that the latter
was formed by the intersection of four beams set in the walls,
and that the whole was suspended from these beams. In order
to widen the atrium, columns had to be used, four at first
(tetrastyle atrium) or an even greater number (Corinthian atrium)
on which the roof rested.
COLUMNS AND PERISTYLES

The name of cavaedium tuscanicum had remained attached to
this relatively archaic form of atrium, whose roof with the com-
pluvium was supported only by horizontal beams without the
assistance of columns. The expression indicates on the part
of the Romans a recognition of their debt and gives the borrowing
a fairly ancient date. Under the Empire, Pliny the Younger was
to mention with pride the existence in his villa near Ostia of
'an atrium, simple but not without elegance' (atrium Jrugi nee
tamen sordidum6 2 ), and in the villa he had had built in Tuscany
at Tifernum Tiberium (Citta di Castello) -where the spirit of
the place had perhaps inspired him to this return to Etruscan
traditions - he writes of his 'atrium of an old-fashioned style'
(atrium ex more veterum): by this he probably meant a Tuscan
atrium, without columns, whose bare severity provided a refreshing
contrast for his sensibility surfeited with the baroque luxury of
marble colonnades. 63 But this does not mean that the Etruscans
157
themselves, abjuring the prestige of Hellenistic colonnades,

remained eternally faithful to the formula which they were the
first to illustrate. The proof is that when Posidonius wished to
speak of the Etruscan atrium he used the word peristoion, which
in Greek is synonymous with 'peristyle'. 64
Vitruvius 65 defined a Tuscan order, distinct from the Ionic,
Doric and Corinthian orders, and comprising a very slender
column: the thickness of the shaft was a seventh of the height;
but such a column has not been discovered in any monument
which has survived to the present day. Here again it was the result
of a long evolutionary process, for the Etruscan architects, in
the course of several centuries of obscurity, had worked hard.
We know this order only in its very first stages: already in the
tombs of the sixth century which owe their name to them,
columns supported the ceiling of the atrium: there were two of
them in the Tomb of the Doric Columns 66 and in the Tomb of
the Capitals at Caere; 67 there was one in the tomb at Vignanello
in Faliscan territory. 63 These columns, remarkably stocky, rest
on a circular base, the shaft being smooth or fluted; they are
derived from a very ancient type of Grecian column which took
on a surprising development on Etruscan soil: witness the
astonishing capitals which, in the tomb of this name, display
on two opposed faces a double row of volutes between which is a
palm-leaf ornament; the sides of the capital only present vertical
sections of the volutes, repeated ten times and packed close
together as volumes on a bookshelf. It must be noted that the
faces are parallel with the dimensions in depth of the tomb;
they decorate a sort of central avenue which, prolonging the
dromos, leads ceremoniously to the principal chamber at the rear.
These capitals have been called Aeolic, and antecedents have
been found for them, with a marked oriental flavour, in Assyrian
art.
\Ve may form the idea of the sometimes exuberant taste for
colonnades that seized the Etruscans when we consider, a little
later (fourth-third centuries) the rock tombs hewn in the cliffs
of several small towns, perched like eagles' eyries in the region of
Tarquinii and Vulci, San Giuliano, Bieda, Norchia, Sovana. 69
Outside they have a portico of two, four or six Doric or Corinthian
columns; sometimes the porticoes even have two storeys, the
second one recessed. Such must have been, about 200 uc, the
loggias of the Etruscan houses overlooking the valley. They also
suggest the fa\ade of a temple, but the domestic architecture and
the religious architecture are inseparable. These rupestral tombs
are entered by a trapezoidal doorway, and it is interesting to note
in this the new forms that the Etruscan door took on since the
days of the archaic tomb: the frame was really wooden, and
the carpenter's chisel took pleasure in carving into volutes
the overhanging lintel. 1o
TRACES OF A REGULAR PLAN

But to return to the Banditaccia necropolis. It can still teach us
something about the life of the Caere inhabitants: for example,
about the streets and squares of their city. The first tombs
from what we can tell, were dug haphazardly, without the
slightest concern about orientation, without any reference to a
concerted plan. The funeral processions slowly, as it were,
bashed out their own track when proceeding to the most ancient
tombs in the area of the great tumulus II: a track which, despite
its windings, was eventually oriented in a vaguely east-west
direction like a decumanus. But no cardo ever crossed it. The
city of the dead never looked like those orthogonal cities, an ideal
which the Etruscans, as we have seen, dreamed ever since the end
of the sixth century of making rebellious nature conform to.
And yet it is interesting to see, in certain parts of the diggings
and of those areas made familiar to us by aerial photography,
the slow emergence of a new tendency towards regularity:
constructing small rectangular or triangular spaces, closed-in like
those public squares in so many present-day Italian cities; the sort
of square that Mengarelli calls the Piazzetta incassata, 'the little
enclosed place', 71 or those that appear as miniscule black squares
on Bradford's photographs; and also, along many streets, fine
long lines of identical tombs. The via XIII, called the Street of
the Grecian Vases because abundant examples of Attic pottery
are still found there, deserves to be considered rather closely
in this respect. 72 It is a modern part of the necropolis: the
whole was built at a later date, about a generation later than
the princely tombs of the Capitals or of the Shields which, under
their tumulus, expressed the desire for symmetry and majesty
1 59
in their great atrium which informed the palaces of the second

half of the sixth century. We arrive at this date from an analysis
of the furnishings, composed for the most part of Attic vases with
black figures, but often, among many others in the form of the
lecythus (tall, slender-necked vases of elegant form), of a very
shoddy style: they are recent or late 'black figures' whose pro-
duction can be dated between 515 and 480. Some 'red figures',
for example, in tomb 355, and a cup by Skythes go back to about
520; or, in tomb 343, there is an oenochoe or 'wine-pourer' from
the beginning of the fifth century. Beside this there were some
examples of bucchero* and fragments of Etruscan vases qualified
as 'late'. Such is the common character of all the tombs of the
via XIII: they must have been constructed in the first half of
that fifth century, and are all visibly contemporaneous.
The data furnished by pottery can be supplemented by those
which can be inferred from the adoption of a new type of funerary
monument which was henceforward to have no rival. These were
the a caditoia tombs, so called because of a sort of 'chimney'
which, piercing the roof of the entrance passage, rose vertically
to the surface: we hardly know what they were for, unless perhaps,
to let in a little daylight, once the slabs that obstructed them had
been cleared away. But the main thing to notice is that there is
no atrium, no more funeral couches. There are one or two
chambers surrounded by benches, on which the places for the
bodies are marked by rectangles terminated by the semi-circle
reserved for the head. They are no longer sepulchres made for
one household or family in the restricted sense of that word. The
authority of the parents over their children and over the rest of
the f amilia is no longer evident in this simple arrangement of
chambers and beds. It is quite certain that these unexpected
arrangements correspond to innovations which we know nothing
of in the religious rites - perhaps a reform with a puritan flavour
had taken place? - and in social and political institutions. Let us
not forget that the beginning of the fifth century, when these a
caditoia tombs first appear, as well as those with multiple resting-
places, coincides throughout central Italy, and not only in Rome,
"This is the name given to an often very fine type of pottery, of a very lively
and brilliant black. It was an Etruscan secret, and, ornamented with incisions
and rcliefs, was from the seventh to the fifth centuries one of their specialities.
160
THE TOWNS AN!> TllE SETTING OF URBAN ACTIVITIES
with the end of the monarchy and the coming of the Republic;
and that Etruscan decadence is about to begin.
Something also changed in the necropolis at Caere. Let us
consider the plan. While the left-hand side, that is, west of the
street, shows complete disorder in the groupin~ of the tombs, the
right-hand side, to the east, presents on the contrary a perfect
alignment of five tombs, one after the other. The first three must
certainly have been constructed at the same period, and we
cannot help wondering what the relationship was between the
various occupants. The fifth, whose dimensions are smaller, has
been carefully brought into line with the rest. There are mason's
signs on this tomb's blocks and on the door jambs. The steps
which separate the third from the fourth, and the fourth from the
fifth seem to have had no other purpose than to mark property
divisions. Of course we are lost in conjecture when we try to
imagine the modalities affecting the sepulchral rights determining
certain arrangements, and the comparison with a better-known
and more recent necropolis, the Roman one on the Isola Sacra at
Ostia, would provide us with much interesting information on
this subject. At any rate, it is curious to see that dead-straight
wall, those identical tombs, that obscure attempt to make a plan
according to set rules: in the via dei Vasi Greci and in other
parts of the Banditaccia they betray the influence of a feeling
for space which, at the same period, must have been shared no
less strongly by the living in Caere.
III
DOMESTIC INTERIORS
These more and more clearly defined streets and more and more
regular squares which the necropolises allow our imaginations
to restore in busy and noisy towns must also be re-populated
by all the coming and going of Mediterranean life - running
slaves from some comedy of Plautus, cattle being led to market
by the sound of trumpets, a magistrate's procession preceded
by his lictors, Culni riding in a carpentum to visit the Greek who
sold the Attic vases. And in addition there were the 'traffic
jams' like those Juvenal deplored in Rome, long before Iloileau
161
in Paris; although, according to the former, there was no fear, 'at

Volsinii amid its wooded slopes' of tottering tenements which
endangered the lives of passers-by in the Eternal City. 73
But what have the interiors of the tombs revealed to us about
these houses themselves, which, as we have seen, were principally
'private residences'? Only bare walls pierced by trapezoidal
doors and symmetrical windows: we must try to complete the
picture of domestic life by trying to give them, as far as we can,
some items of furniture.
ETRUSCAN FURNITURE
In fact, Etruscan furniture would appear to have been very
simple, like the Greek furniture it was largely patterned on. 74
We have already described, and shall find again, those beds with
turned feet on which one lay not only to sleep but also to eat,
when low, rectangular, two-tiered tables were placed beside
them: as in Greece, these tables had three feet. 75 There were the
seats: we shall return to those. There were linen-chests, but
no wardrobes, no chests of drawers, no shelves: this also recalls
ancient Greece. 76 There were trapezai, tables with four feet
shaped like horses' legs, on which the plate was kept. 77 The
principal luxury in the furnishings seems to have been those
bronzes which the Etruscans exported even to Greece, and whose
unequalled perfection was celebrated by Critias the Tyrant -
who had his moments as an elegiac poet - at the end of the
fifth century. He praised 'all the bronzes of Etruria which are
the ornament of the house, whatever use is made of them' 78 -
candelabra, tripods, incense-burners and braziers mounted on
wheels, for protection against the winter cold.
What about the seats? If one did not sit on the edge of the
bed there were light seats, stools and folding chairs which we
are well familiar with from Attic vases. In a painting in the
Tomb of the Augurs we can see one being carried on his shoulder
by a boy slave who is taking it to one of the referees in a boxing-
match. 79 When covered with ivory plaques, the seat became
the ceremonial chair of kings and judges, the curule chair of the
Roman magistracy.
More peculiar to Etruria proper seems to have been a type of
armchair, squat in shape, of which the Tomb of the Seats and
Shields, from the sixth century, affords us two fine examples

hewn in the rock, their backs to the rear wall of the atrium and
standing in the spaces between the doors which give on the
main rooms. The seat itself is made of a large drum of stone
surmounted by a rounded back and open in the front on a small
bench for resting the feet on. These stone armchairs perhaps
reproduced wicker-work chairs, and indeed they do remind us,
as well as of certain types of our own garden-chairs, of those
basket-work armchairs we sec in bas-reliefs from the Roman
Rhineland. 80 But they are not placed there for the repose of
visitors anxious to enter the beyond. We find them again, at
Chiusi, made of terra-cotta and of bronze, used as supports for
those human-faced ossuaries which are called canopi. 81 At Caere
too they must have borne images of the defunct in all his glory.
They were really thrones of an old indigenous model (they appear
on the situlae or bronze pails of the Bologna area which are so rich
in piquant details of local costumes and customs). 82 They were
superseded by the Greek thrones with high, straight back and
moulded arm-rests. The Barberini Tomb at Praeneste contained
one, covered with bronze plating; but at the same period there
was another in the Regolini-Galassi Tomb, one of classical shape. 83
We even know of one in marble, from the fourth to third centuries,
the Corsini throne in Rome, which, in its archaistic setting,
shows plainly the sort of seat that had been retained as ritual
furniture. 84 Displaced by the Greek fashion, they disappeared
fairly early from secular furnishings.
THE TOMB OF THE RELIEFS

If we wish to recapture the real atmosphere of an Etruscan
interior, we must inspect carefully a tomb which through the
enthusiasm of its finders was named by them, in the nineteenth
century, as if it were some great opera singer, la tomba bella,
and which we today call the Tomb of the Relicfs. 85 This because
it shows, suspended from the walls on nails, all the utensils
necessary for a comfortably distinguished life, or after-life. But
all these objects are phantom objects, modelled in stucco and
painted with fine colours - rose-pink, red, maroon, yellow, blue;
these pick out the details and, sometimes, reveal the nature of
the objects.
This tomb, a little more recent than those we have examined

so far (third century), is composed of a single room whose ceil-
ing is supported by two square pillars; the walls are hollowed
out into long niches in which the dead were placed as it
were in alcoves. There are thirteen altogether, reserved for
the most important members of the family, while a
much larger number, about thirty, of less important dead
were laid on the ground in rectangular spaces marked by a slight
ridge.
This was the family of the Matuna, a name whose first attempted
latinization is given the form Maduius (Lartia Maduia) 86 before
it was definitely translated into Matonius, Mathonius: 87 doubtless
a considerable family, one branch of which is known in another
tomb at Caere, to the north-west of the Banditaccia, near the
tomb named after the Tarquins. 88 In other towns, like Tarquinii,
inscriptions tell us the curriculum vitae of its dead: we know what
offices and priestly positions they held. Caere's epigraphy does
not give these details, for various reasons, among others because,
at that time, it was still no more than a Roman prefecture and
probably no longer had its own magistracies. All we read at
Caere in the funerary epigraphs are names of parents and relatives,
which of course is extremely interesting. 89
An inscribed cippus found near the door acquaints us with the
man who had the tomb constructed: Vel Matunas Larisalisa
ancn suthi cerichunce, 'Ve! Matunas, son of Laris, had this tomb
constructed'. 90 Besides this, nine graffiti in various niches furnish
us with the elements of a genealogy. 91
Vel Matunas had apparently married one Canatnei, whose
name was transmitted to their son and daughter:
Vel Matunas Larisalisa"-'(? Canatnei)

I
I I
A(ule) Matunas Canatnes R(amta) Matunai Canatnei
V(elus) c(lan) [VIII] [VII]
I
V(el) Matunas A(ules) c(lan) [V]"-'Ranthu Ranazuia [V]
I
Ramta Matunai V(elus) s(ec) [XIII]
THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHBAN ACTIVITIES
At this point there is a gap in the filiation; but it takes up

again in the following generations:
(?Matunas,.....,?Clatei)
I
M(arce) Matunas Clate [II],.....,Ranthus Plavti
V(elus) s(ec) [IV]
I
M(arce) Matunas M(arces) c(lan) [XIII]
There remains one La(rth) Matunas (II) whose connexion with

the family is also uncertain.
The name of Ramta Matunai Canatnei is engraved in the central
alcove of the rear wall: and everything, in the arrangement and
the decoration of the tomb, was conceived in such a way as to
give this alcove the place of honour. Right from the entrance
the eye is led, one might almost say ceremoniously conducted,
between the two pillars whose interior and internal faces are
the only ones decorated to that specially favoured niche where
there is everything to suggest the bedroom pf a young lady
fallen asleep. The bed is represented, a bed with carved feet
and legs, between which are depicted in bas-relief infernal
monsters. But the two pillows, one on top of the other, at the
right, are still awaiting the deceased girl's head. In front, a very
low footstool bears her sandals, as in Carpaccio's Dream of Saint
Ursula. On the left, a chest with a well-rendered lock, opened by
dropping the side: it is carrying a pile of carefully folded linen.
On the pillars framing the alcove vases are hung, as well as a
necklace, a feather fan and a long stick. Above these, on either
pillar, is a bust, both unfortunately mutilated; the left-hand one
seems to be that of a man, the right-hand one that of a woman,
and they are turned slightly towards the bed. Surely these would
be the parents, Ve/ Matunas and Canatnei, watching over the
daughter who had been snatched away from them?
But this is only one of the possible interpretations. It is usually
thought that this niche, the object of so much care and attention,
was made for the father and mother of the family, and that the
busts on the lateral pillars were their portraits. An impressive
argument in favour of this conclusion is that the skeleton of a man
D.L.E. 12
was found there. A feminine epitaph but a male skeleton: here is

one of those irritating contradictions which too often stand in the
historian's way: so one would have to imagine that Vel Matunas,
son of Laris, constructed this tomb for his daughter (Ramta)
and her husband. We still believe however that the single pair
of superimposed pillows, the single pair of sandals on the foot-
stool and the particularly feminine nature of the objects surround-
ing it (does the stick, or sceptre, necessarily indicate a man?)
prove that this funeral couch was intended only for Ramta. Her
brother Aule lay in the niche immediately to her left (VIII).
The parents must have been placed in a tomb preceding this.
In principle, each niche in the Tomb of the Reliefs was intended
for one body. But after the second generation a married couple
was placed side by side in niche V and even later two members
of the family (two men) were placed in niche II and in niche XIII
were placed a man and a woman, cousins perhaps, but not nec-
essarily married. The proven use of the tomb over several
centuries, the increasing clutter and disorder too must have
brought about the re-utilization of the niches, and in the most
beautiful, previously emptied of the legitimate occupant's re-
mains, the intrusion of the male skeleton which was the only one
to be discovered.
The Tomb of the Matuna had therefore been opened on the
occasion of a young girl's decease, a girl whose tranquil dis-
position is sufficiently apparent from the ornaments and the fan
attributed to her. But it was also the tomb of a family of soldiers,
and the general theme of the decoration that runs like a frieze
above the niches and along the beam holding up the roof clearly
shows, perhaps more than any other tomb in Caere, its warlike
vocation. We see helmets and greaves, circular shields, swords
in their sheaths, phalerae for horses' necks and great horns for
sounding the signal to attack.
Nevertheless the strange and charming bric-a-brac that covers
two adjacent faces of each of the pillars in the middle of the
chamber is something quite different. We have altogether four
rectangular panels about two metres high and fifty and seventy
centimetres across, on which are arranged, as in a panoply, a
collection of mainly household implements: all that was needed
for a happy home in the life beyond. They have been arbitrarily
166
THE TOWNS AND TllE SETTING OF URUAN ACTIVITIES
selected, and the choice has been determined more by a sense of

pictorial balance and by a horror of empty space than by a desire
to provide the present study with a methodically classified
documentation. Indeed several objects are hard to identifyand have
long excited, and will continue to do so, like so many picture-puzzles,
the sagacity of archaeologists who here require the specialized
knowledge of carpenters, harness-makers and ironmongers.
First, the familiar animals at the bottom of three of these
panels, as in the banquet scenes of the Tarquinii frescoes, arch
their backs in sinuous curves according to the oriental tradition.
Here are the marten that has caught a mole, the goose pecking at
the ground, the sleeping duck with his head tucked back over his
wing, and the wild cat holding a lizard in its claws. Above these
are essential items from any well-stocked kitchen. A bronze
wine-jug or oenochoe, a terracotta bowl with handles and decor-
ated with laurel leaves, a complete set of ladles and spoons and
above the basin on its tripod and to the left its pestle, a very
practical knife-rack: two knives are stuck in it, with grey-green,
that is, iron blades and light-coloured therefore wooden handles.
Immediately to the right is a bunch of spits for roasting meat.
There are also a pickaxe between a cutlass and a big coil of rope,
and tongs and pincers made for extracting those large-headed
and hooked nails from which the objects are hung. But some of
these objects require more detailed investigation.
The upper half of a panel is occupied by a light yellow
(therefore perhaps wooden) rectangular tray with a moulded
border and two handles, one on the long side, the other on the
short side; this is the one which suspends the tray from the nail,
from which there also hangs a leather pouch. Eleven horizontal
lines are traced on the surface of the tray.
Some scholars have taken this to be a table with a bronze top
ruled to receive some inscription; others, an abacus with its
divisions for counting. Recently an ingenious attempt was made
to prove that the tray was a board for kneading macaroni. 92
For this purpose were used the roller attached by a string, on the
left of another panel, and the little saw-toothed (?) wheel which
figures on the first panel between the duck and the tongs, and
which may have been used to give the paste the required form -
fettucine or tagliatelle. The pouch itself would be a flour-bag.
And the author of this interpretation seemed to think it all the

more likely as he felt that the master buried here and so obviously
concerned with arms and kitchen equipment could only be a
dealer in army supplies!
Without wishing to deny that the ancients were familiar with
macaroni (the old humanists believed the word was derived from
the Greek makar, 'happy', because of the felicity it procured its
adepts), the solution of the problem must be sought elsewhere. 9 3
We are here in the presence of a tabula lusoria, a sort of chessboard
across whose twelve compartments two players would advance
the pawns probably contained in the pouch. We know that the
ancients were passionately fond of dice and backgammon or
trictrac, or at any rate games which strongly resembled them:
the rules of these games are not known to us, but the material
evidence is supplied by figured monuments. Grecian vases and
Etruscan mirrors show Achilles and Ajax thus engaged in alleviat-
ing the tedium of the siege of Troy: seated facing each other, they
have placed on their knees a board divided into a variable number
of zones by seven or twelve parallel lines and on which we can
make out two dice or pawns. The game of dice is one known to
have been played by the Etruscans; there is that famous pair of
dice found at Tuscania and now in the Louvre, and which, the
numbers being inscribed in letters on their six faces, provide the
chief source of our knowledge of the first six Etruscan names of
numbers. But there were more than two dice in the pouch or
purse accompanying this tabula lusoria, and we may suppose that
the Matuna preferred to play a game requiring numerous pawns,
for example the game called latrunculi or little robbers of which
Varro speaks: 94 at Venafro in Campania, in a tomb from the
heyday of the Empire, a whole collection of figured pieces was
discovered, carved from bone, something to exercise the imagina-
tion of a modern chess-player, and which was destined to amuse
the dead.
Another problem which is not insoluble is that posed by a
strange object in panel 2, on its left (plate 33): it might be thought
at first glance to be a rudder with a stern-post, if we did not know
that such a device was uknonwn to antiquity, when ships were
steered by oars. It appears as two long, thin rectangles joined
together, of unequal length: the longer one is yellowish-white
168
THE TOWNS AND TIIE SETTING OF UHDAN ACTIVITIES
and a third of its width is covered by a band of red colour which

seems to be fixed on with a series of white studs or nails; the other
rectangle, the shorter, is violet, and its ends arc cased in white
iron bindings which are extended laterally by two round rods,
each of which ends in a pair of disks.
Again in this case the most diverse hypotheses have been put
forward: a rudder, as we have already mentioned; a surveying
apparatus worthy of the most advanced geometricians - this
suggestion was hazarded by the same scholars who, rightly
filled with respect for Etruscan science, see the games table as
an abacus. But many have thought that the object would only
be in its normal position if it was unhooked and placed on the
ground; then, when the two rectangles were horizontal, the
disks would be seen to be wheels. It appears to lack depth
because it is being viewed from the side, and the two wheels
in front are thought to be partially masking two behind.
It has recently been suggested that the object is ... a cradle: 95
the stuff or the red leather which is nailed to the upper part of the
frame would then dip down inside to receive the child's body.
The thick wheels whose axle-cases seem to have touched the
ground could scarcely have revolved: the whole thing was meant
to be rocked, not rolled.
All very plausible, and we should ask for nothing better than
that this ingenious explanation should be accepted if the idea of
a cradle in a tomb did not militate against it. Certainly children
were buried with their dolls. But in a tomb like this, whose
bas-reliefs are obviously designed for the comfort and satisfaction
of grown-ups, it is difficult to admit that their belief in the future
life included the possibility of procreation.
So we are compelled to turn to a less dazzling solution but
one which can be supported by comparisons of this 'trolley table'
with well-known objects in the Etruscan world: at the museums
in Orvieto and Chiusi, small bronze trolleys, of a more ancient
date, ornamented at the four corners of the upper tray with
carvings in the shape of horses' heads, offer a remarkable re-
semblance to this mysterious object (plate 2). 96 These are usually
taken to be mobile braziers, and in the case of our own object
this use seems to be excluded by the covering of red cloth or
leather; but the same contraption may have been used to transport
169
other things, foodstuffs for example, and this would be in con-

formity with the general tone of the reliefs.
There are other elements in the decoration of the pillars that
could claim our attention. For instance there are two pairs of
strange vertical rods. Each is composed of a cylindrical stem
which, about two-thirds up, divides into three branches forming
an ellipse with its axis: this part of the object seems to be made
of a small cord or of a twisted rush. The whole thing, slung on a
hook that passes through the hole, seems to be rigid, and,
extending beyond the normal framework of the panels, crosses
the capital and touches the ceiling.
It has been thought that these represented distaffs or the
sort of caduceus which apparitors carried on their shoulders in
magistrates' processions on certain frescoes. But the simplest
explanation is also the likeliest one: they are slings, similar to
those used by the huntsmen in the painting in the Tomba de/la
Caccia.
There are also two long sticks with curved ends in the form of
a shepherd's crook. Must these be identified with those litui
which Rome, borrowing them from the Etruscans, had made the
characteristic attribute of her augurs and which they used to
trace out in the heavens the sacred region within which the
flight of birds was to be observed? But the true lituus is generally
shorter: we suggest that we have here simply shepherds' crooks,
with which, in the blessed pastures, the dead man would continue
to watch over his flocks.
At all events, he liked cheese: witness the yellowish disk
hung from the top of the fourth panel, obliquely, perhaps because
it is shoved slightly to one side by the neighbouring slings.
The concentric striations on its surface have made some savants
see in it a wicker-work object, a sieve, a basket, a fiscina - a sort
of withy mould for straining cheeses in. But its circumference
shows notches that have not come there by chance: we share the
opinion of those who see in it a cheese, a little gnawed round the
edges by mice.
Finally, do not let us forget, between the wheels of our trolley,
the haversack to which a patera and a scent-bottle are attached
by interlacing straps. This mantica had to supply the necessities
for the voyage, the great voyage - the requirements for the toilet
TllE TOWNS AND TH E SETTING OF UHllA N ACTl\'ITll-S
en route, for who knows what sacrificial ritual at some mysterious

crossroads.
Such was the house of death belonging to the Matzma family.
It evokes, as we have seen, with a detail worthy of a Flemish
master, the mode of life of an Etruscan family in the third
century, in a city now incorporated into the Roman State. There
was no doubt of the family's military traditions. Dut the arms
which, hung round the chamber walls, recall the glorious
memories of fights against the Gauls and against Rome herself,
belong to a vanished past; the warlike trumpets are silent.
Perhaps the Jlfatuna did not break their swords for good; perhaps
they served again in the legions or in special cohorts under the
skies of Sicily and Africa, wherever the Punic Wars and the
Roman Conquest took them. Nevertheless their essential interests
were still of another order: making the best of the truncated
territory of Caere, they must have cultivated their domain to
assure themselves substantial revenues and become absorbed
in the enjoyment of a material prosperity within limited horizons.
These gentlemen-farmers had their flocks grazing on the sur-
rounding hills, hunted the wild duck with their slings, pruned
the trees in their orchards, raised all kinds of domestic stock,
made plump cheeses from the milk of their ewes. They were
great handymen, always with a pair of pliers in their hands.
They sometimes played trictrac. And their homes were full of
the aroma of roasting meats and the hissing of boiling liquids.
They indeed waxed fat.
IV
ETRUSCAN COSTUME
Meanwhile the daughter of the house, surrounded by women
servants who fanned her with a feather fan or took clothes out of
the chest at the foot of the bed, was getting ready to go out. \Ve
shall have much to say about Etruscan costume.
The one worn by Ramta Matunai in the Caere of the third
century scarcely distinguished her from those elegant young
ladies whose long, draped robes, secured by a shoulder-brooch,
and light shawls worn loosely round the shoulders are familiar
to us from the pages of Theocritus' Syracusans 97 and the terra-
cottas of Myrrhina. The tyranny of Greek fashion had been
171
imposed upon all the Hellenistic cities, and Caere, we imagine,

was not the last to surrender to it. Nor Tarquinii: in the paintings
in the Tomb of the Shields, 93 which are contemporaneous,
Ravnthu Aprtlmai and Velia Seitithi, both seated at the foot of
their husbands' bed, are both wearing an undergarment, the
short-sleeYed linen tunic (chiton) and on top of that a white cloak
(lzimation) with black or red border. Moreover the musicians
beside the latter are already wearing, as if they were Romans,
a toga that is more or less classical in style, as does also the famous
Arringatore ('The Orator') whose bronze statue, discovered near
Lake Trasimene, is that of a Cicero of Chiusi or Cortona at the
end of the second or the beginning of the first century. 99
But before this uniformity appeared in male and female gar-
ments the archaic monuments present us with other images. We
know those marvellous dancers from the Tomb of the Lionesses,
from the Tomb of the Leopards, from that of the Triclinium and
that of Francesca Giustiniani, the lively and fresh colours of their
cloaks, the infinitely varied cut, sometimes quite modern in
style, of their robes. Naturally we must beware of reading too
much into these. The disappearance of great Greek painting, of
which we see only an almost monochrome reflection in the pottery
with black or red figures, and the disappearance of the primitive
polychrome on their sculptures makes us peculiarly sensitive to
all that was most colourful in the Etruscan world. On the other
hand, the costumes with which these dancers and musicians are
clothed for those banquets and games that were given such
animation by their grace and talent, are stage costumes and belong
to a decor whose other side we must not neglect. Later, Posidonius
was to be struck by the magnificence of these clothes, 'more
beautiful than is fitting for slaves': here he was of the same opinion
as miserly and prosaic Cato, who wanted them to be given once
every two years a shirt one metre in length and a sagum; when they
were given new ones, the old were to be given back to be made
into rags. 100 \Vhat we are admiring here is the lucumo's corps de
ballet.
But this makes it all the more interesting: in the wardrobes
of our theatres there are preserved the armour of the knights
and the gala costumes of days long since vanished. The Etrus-
cans, when designing the costumes of their 'histrions' sometimes
172
TIIE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHBAN ACTIVITIES
had recourse, not to contemporary models, but to the enchantment

of a very distant past.
Indeed how else can we explain, for example, in the Tomb of
Francesca Giustiniani 101 the extraordinary trio composed of a
young man in a blue mantle and two women whose sumptuous
garments seem to be those of some magnificent Renaissance
court?; then we think again, and connect them, more reasonably,
with those worn by the princesses of Minoan Crete. One of the
women is playing the double flute and has short hair: we assume
she is a servant; but in the centre there is a truly regal figure: she
has her left hand on her hip, and the other arm is raised; she wears
a diadem, a necklace, bracelets and a long robe, very 'waisted',
over which she has a thick jacket. What is remarkable is not so
much the richness of the costume (in which the dominating feature
is the strong contrast between the dark red of the upper part,
which would seem to be of velvet, and the orange-pink of the
fine material of the robe scattered with little dots and stars) as
its fundamental difference from the Grecian 'line', characterized
by the vertical drapery of chiton and himation. Here, on the con-
trary, we have the hour-glass form of the bell-shaped skirt,
perhaps puffed out by a stiff underskirt or bustle, and those
broad horizontal stripes which, below the belt and along the
lower edge, echo the colour of the bodice, and the division, also
in horizontal bands, of the embroidery motifs; and we have also
the effect of kimono sleeves which broaden the shoulders and
diminish the waist.
But as Gustave Glotz rightly observed in his Aegean Civiliza-
tion,102 'never, in the continual variations of fashion, did the
Minoans display the noble posture which the folds of floating
veils and the natural hang of soft draperies gave to the Greeks
and Romans', and he insisted upon the forms which were taken
by the two essential parts of Minoan clothing, the bodice and the
skirt, analysing the brilliant use of colours in the materials, the
profusion of pleatings and puffings, the starching or the whale-
bones that stiffened the crinolines or the skirts with fly-away
panels. He even went so far as to explain the modernity of these
models by writing that the Aegeans had, 'in the space of two
thousand years, made modifications to feminine costume which
northern peoples, retarded by the long predominance of Greek
1 73
DAILY LIFE OF THE ETRUSCA..'\S
and Roman modes, took three thousand years longer to reproduce'.

This is what we meant when we spoke earlier on of the modem
cut of certain Etruscan dresses which appear modem in a para-
doxical \vay, through the archaistic conservatism which we have
pointed out se\·eral times, and through an indefectible loyalty to
the forms of :.\Iediterranean ci,·ilization, with its conception of
woman which had reigned triumphant long before the ad\·ent of
the Indo-Europeans. So we are justified in believing that some
obscure ancestral memory of former queens sometimeo, at least
as far as costume is concerned, came to life again in the games of
Tarquinii. Let us imagine that the scene in the Francesca
Giustiniani tomb represents the meeting between ..-\riadne and
Theseus or that of Phaedra and Hippolytus, while Oenone plays
the flute; Gut nothing ";u stop the young hero from mounting
the fatal chariot.
'\"hat we ha,·e just been saying scarcely applies to the women's
costumes. Only Ariadne is dressed in the ancient mode. The
flimsy mantle that barely veils the bronzed torsos of Theseus,
Hippolytus and the other male dancers in the Tombs of the
Leopards and of the Tricliniurn has not such a remote origin.
:.\Ioreover, it is more often 103 a sort of scarf rather than a
mantle, and cut so as to pre~nt in front a very low-plunging.
rounded neckline, with broad panels falling freely behind. Of
a ,;,-id colour - orange, pale green or royal blue - it is bordered,
inside and out, with an embroidered band of another colour -
yellow or blue, pale yellow ";th a maroon saw-tooth motif, or
white ";th red polka-dots. The material is thick and the folds
are heavy. We do not hesitate to give this garment the Latin
name lacerna, which is deri,·ed from Etruscan, meaning an
under-mantle, the short and narrow woollen surtout (brer:es
laenae, angusta lacerna) of which the poets speak. 104 The \Yarriors
of Horner already knew it and called it dzlaina, which passed
into Latin, doubtleos through the intermediary of Etruscan.
under the form laena, the French laine or wool.
The women wore owr their tunics very ample cloaks:
";tness on the left of the rear wall in the chamber of the Lionesses,
a female dancer 'immobile, \\;th feet ";despread': 10 ~ over her
orange-pink clzit6n embroidered ";th little flowers she h2S e->...st
a cloak of dark red wool prO\;ded ";th what appear to be broad
revers or facings of blue that fall in front like the straps of a

tippet. 'Ve see other details like these on the dancers' cloaks in
the tombs at Chiusi. 10 G
The Etruscans must have borrowed these clzlainai or lacemae
with their brilliant colours and embroidery from Ionia. We
have already had occasion to emphasize the fact that in the west
there was a great vogue for the fine dyed woollens of Miletus
which were so appreciated at Sybaris that historians saw in them
tht: main reason for the friendship between the two peoples,
and eYen for the friendship between Sybaris and the Etruseans. 107
There was no more famous garment in antiquity than the himation
of the Sybarite Alcisthenes which was to pass into the possession
of Dionysius of Syracuse before he went to Carthage: from the
start it was a museum piece and an inexhaustible theme for the
moral philosophers. 108 Our Etruscan mantles would not claim
so much. All the same they are in exquisite taste, and prove in
Tarquinii, even as late as the middle of the fifth century, the
persistence of Ionian modes after the destruction of Sybaris
(510) and Miletus (494). The Etruscan costume grafted on to
Mediterranean traditions which it had not entirely abandoned
certain orientalizing and Ionian features to which it has still
remained faithful.
FROM THE TEBENNA TO THE TOGA

Another type of Etruscan cloak was to have a much longer
history, and a more glorious one, than this fugitive-coloured
stuff which after all soon wore out: this other type was known as
the tebenna. 109 The word, which appears in the Greek authors
(though only, unless we are mistaken, from Polybius 110 onwards
and therefore belongs to a strongly Romanized Greek who may
have adopted it in Italy) disconcerted Dionysius of Halicarnas-
sus:111 where could it have come from? It did not have a Greek
look about it. For modern scholars there is no doubt about its
derivation: unless it goes as far back as the pre-Inda-European
substratum, it has every likelihood of being Etruscan. 112 And
as it happens the Pollux Onomasticon gives us the following
explanation: 'tebenna, cloak or chlamys worn by the Etruscans.' 113
Only Dionysius of Halicarnassus, at the beginning of the Empire,
was not quite sure whether the tebenna was the short cloak worn
175
by Roman knights and also called trabea, or the toga in which

Roman citizens draped their bodies.11 4 The fact is that both
trabea and toga are derived from the primitive Etruscan cloak,
the former being more or less fixed in its archaic form, the other
being longer and, in the course of time, freed from the rigid
simplicity characterizing its primitive state.
The painted terracotta plaques from Caere which are now in
the Louvre and the Campana plaques from the middle of the
sixth century show the image of a king armed with a sceptre and
seated on a curule chair before the effigy of a goddess. 115 Over
a short white tunic bordered with a red embroidered galloon
he has cast over his left shoulder an even shorter mantle, purple
in colour and bordered with a decorative motif and which leaves
the right shoulder bare. This tebenna was to go down in history
as the sign of the patrician class: with slight variations, it kept its
original form, preserving its background colour or bands of
purple or scarlet and in general its exiguous dimensions (parva
trabea): this cloak, at once sacerdotal and military, was to become,
in Rome, the trabea of the Salii and other religious colleges, the
paludamentum (longer) of the general-in-chief and the parade
uniform of the Roman knights in their ceremonial processions.
But in general, apart from these cases where ritual and tradition
preserved its character of a warrior's cloak, the tebenna was to
take on other colours, modifying its shape until it became the
long Roman toga. The most ancient and at the same time most
classic example we have of this garment is that displayed by the
Arringatore's bronze statue - that 'Orator' who, in the last century
of the Republic, was a magistrate from Cortona or Chiusi. But
we can follow the development of the trabea into the toga in
figured monuments. In the Tomb of the Augurs, 116 which is
only a few years more recent than the Campana plaques, four
persons are wearing the tebenna - the two tanasar, who, on either
side of the door, are making gestures of lamentation, and the two
tevarath or organizers of the games who, on the neighbouring
wall, are refereeing a contest between two wrestlers. Their
cloak very closely resembles that of the king, excepting that in
three cases it is black, which may be explained by the funeral
significance of their role; it is also less well-arranged, and longer,
and allows a hint of draping from the left shoulder, from which
THE TOWNS AND TIIE SETTING OF UHBAN ACTIVITIES
there falls, like the 'revers' on the cloak of the dancing girl in the
Tomb of the Lionesses, a wide red band. But by the beginning
of the fifth century it is dark in colour and decorated with a
border (toga praetexta) and covers the knees of the noble
spectators in the Tomb of the Bigae. 117 Even a legendary king,
the Nestor in the Franc;ois Tomb, is provided, over his red-
bordered tunic, with a tebenna that comes down to his feet,
while the dead man is also enveloped in a great blue embroidered
cloak (toga picta 118 ). Even the musicians in the Tomb of the
Shields are draped in a true toga, pure white. In the various
processions of magistrates at Tarquinii and Volterra we see
the gradual lengthening of the Etruscan tebenna, and this could
help us towards a more precise dating; at the same time the
disposition of the folds becomes more and more marked until,
with the Arringatore, it becomes the Roman toga.
This is why Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who called the tebenna
the 'trabea' of the Salii, uses the same word for the 'toga' with
which he clothes his Tarquinius: when he was describing the
latter's cloak, he could not help imagining it in the form he had
seen in the Rome of his time - the ample purple toga with golden
threads which Augustus and Tiberius displayed on their triumphal
progresses, and the copious, flowing robes worn in theatrical
performances by the kings of tragedies. 119 He could see only one
difference between the two, which was that the flowered cloak of
Darius was cut as a large square of stuff while the toga was cut
in the form of a segment of a circle. 120 But it is very difficult for
us to distinguish, in the paintings, whether the tebennae of the
Campana plaques and of the Tomb of the Augurs already followed
this pattern.
FOOTWEAR
The dancing girl in the Tomb of the Lionesses can teach us
something more: the long, pointed shoes she wears were also a
borrowing from Ionia, a region that was very generally admired
in Etruria. We can see similar ones on the feet of men and
women in the Tombs of the Augurs and 9f the Baron, 121 among
others, and they seem to be long slippers of red, maroon or
green cloth, opening widely at the front and reaching very high,
in a point, on the calves. These are the calcei repandi (turned-up)
177
which Cicero had noticed on the ancient statue of Juno Sospita

at Lanuvium. 122 But there were different models, though always
with turned-up pointed toes. Especially remarkable are the shoes
of the 'king' and of the deities on the Campana plaques. 123
Still 'turned-up' and split down the front, they are provided
with a long tongue and fastened, above the heel, by several
horizontal straps; in addition the top of these shoes, which
reaches mid-calf, is tied with another strap that passes through
a big eyehole (plates 24-26). They are doubtless the same as
those worn by the lady of the Caere sarcophagi whose shoes have
crossed laces below the straps which are partly covered by the
edge of the tunic (plate 24).1 24
Naturally the other dancers do not load their feet with such
heavy buskins; they wear only low shoes, and mainly light sandals,
made simply from a sole held on by crossed straps: the Tomb of
the Triclinium shows various kinds of these. Etruscan sandals,
Tyrrhenica sandalia, 125 were well known in Athens from the middle
of the fifth century, for a predecessor of Aristophanes, Cratinus
mentioned them, doubtless in one of his fiery diatribes against
the inroads being made by foreign luxury articles. Lexicographers
inform us that they had gilded straps and a wooden sole that was
often very high, thus making them resemble the cothurnus of
the Athenian tragic actor. At Bisenzio and Caere metal studs
have been found which were used to preserve these soles. 126
The sandals at the foot of Ramta Matunai's bed, awaiting her
re-awakening, are more modest: wooden soles, with semi-circular
bands and a median cord passing between the great toe and the
next.
But though the sandal became, as in Greece, the usual foot-
wear, the Etruscans did not abandon buskins, though the domina-
tion of classical taste gradually did away with those provocative
turned-up points. In the Tomb of the Shields, Velia Seitithi and
the little girl slave with the cropped hair fanning her both wear
high shoes, black, with a red strip down the middle; this seems to
have been an opening, rather like that in modern snowboots. 127
But it was the strapped boots seen on the Campana plaques that
enjoyed the greatest fame: 128 they were retained as a sign of nobility
in the ceremonial dress of magistrates, and it is well established
that they were the originals of the calcei patricii or senatorii shown
THE TOWNS AND TllE SETTING OF UHUAN ACTIVITll~
on a great number of Roman statues: with their tongue (li11g11la),

their four straps (corrigiae), their black tone and the suppleness
of their leather which was treated with alum, they faithfully
reproduce, with only slight modification, the essential features of
Etruscan shoe-making. Meanwhile a transitional stage is shown
us in the statue of the Arringatore, who, in his city on the shores
of Lake Trasimene, was already wearing authentic calcei sena-
torii.12~ A continuous evolution of which the Ancients were fully
conscious: Virgil describes the awakening of King Evander thus:
'The old man rises, puts on his tunic, and wraps his feet in
Tyrrhenian sandals',
... Tyrrhena pedum circumdat uincula plantis, 130
on which Servius comments in these terms: 'According to certain

authors, these would be calcei senatorii, because this type of
footwear was borrowed from the Etruscans.'
HEADGEAR
Finally the girl dancer in the Tomb of the Lionesses allows us
to pass from cloaks and footwear to headgear. Her conical-shaped
cap must also be attributed to an Ionian mode; it is apparently
made of the same material as the chiton, and it seems to cover a
high chignon. It is related to all the turbans, mitres, foulards,
kerchiefs and so on in which the women of Asia Minor bound
their locks, and even to the Phrygian cap and the ancient hennin
of the Aegeans. We have already seen it on the head of the
deceased wife in the Caere group. 131 It is worn by female spec-
tators depicted in the Tomb of the Bigae. 132 In particular, on
archaic bronzes, it appears as the head-dress of goddesses like
the Turan or Etruscan Venus of Perugia, 133 and even of gods, for
example the Hercules from Este. 134 It is called a tutu/us, for
thus, according to Varro and Festus, was known the pyramidal
woollen head-dress of the pontiffs and the ft.amines, as well as
the mountains of tresses which the matrons piled up in a purple
ribbon interwoven with their hair. 135 So that it was retained only
for ritual purposes. Even the Etruscan ladies tired of it in the
fifth century, and most often we see them with blonde or bleached
hair covered only by a few head-ornaments.
JEWELLERY
We have noticed the great ear-rings, disk-shaped, which adorn
our dancer in the tutu/us: we could find the exact originals in the
Campana collection at the Louvre; for example, as we look
through E. Cache de la Ferte's beautiful work on Antique jewel-
lery,136 we see a disk of rose-shapes and palm-leaf ornament in
granulations, diameter five centimetres, or another, ornamented
with nodules and globules, only measuring two centimetres.
All the women whose portraits have been preserved - the
enigmatic Mona Lisa who, in the Tomb of the Ogre, is known
to us only by her first name, Velia, 137 the beautiful Persephone
of the Golini tomb, 138 and even that young servant in the same
tomb who is supervising the preparations for a banquet, 139 and
all those who are represented on their sarcophagi, still paying
attention to their appearance like Larthia Seianti of Chiusi 140 -
have their hair, their necks, their wrists loaded with diadems,
necklaces and bracelets. But though these reproductions of a
more or less recent epoch reveal an unflagging taste for jewellery,
they cannot be compared with the actual pieces of the most
splendid period, pieces which, as it happens, we possess:
brooches, clasps, pendants, pectorals, brassards, ear-rings,
golden rings, all of which, discovered in the seventh and sixth
century tombs at Caere, Palestrina, Populonia, Marsiliana
d'Albegna, Vetulonia or Vulci, illustrate the sudden and extra-
ordinary enrichment of the Etruscan people at that time. 141
Who could forget the great brooches or clasps of the Regolini-
Galassi and Barberini tombs, ornaments whose framework
is masked by a plaque covered with a hundred or so double
heads in serried rows, in which we can make out lions, horses
and sirens? (plates 27-29). 142 Or the exquisite Corsini fibula, on
which there is a procession of a dozen ducks, 143 or again, turning
from such baroque exuberance, the pure skyphos from the
Barberini tomb whose great worth is in the quality of the metal,
the elegance of its lines and - sole ornament - the two slight
figurines of sphinxes seated on the handles? 144
They reveal, besides skill in the elementary processes of the
jeweller's craft - hammering, repousse, stamping - a peculiar
mastery in the handling of filigree and granulation. The Greeks
and the Etruscans knew how to scatter on the surface to be
180
decorated thousands of minute granules of gold, fixing them

with a secret solder which did not detract from the delicacy of
the work. Research going on at present will no doubt soon re-
discover that secret, jealously guarded by a small number of
initiates and which was lost with the fall of the Empire. It
seems that the origin of this secret, like that of all those devices
Etruscan jewellers used in their art, must be sought in the Orient,
in the region of the Caucasus, land of the legendary Chalybes,
celebrated for their immemorial experience in the arts of metal,
or in Mesopotamia, in Syria, Crete and Egypt. 145 Nevertheless,
as far as granulation is concerned, the Etruscan jewellery bears
away the palm for its regularity and the delicacy of the golden
balls, whose diameter sometimes attains the unbelievably tiny
figure of two-tenths of a millimetre. And the artists used this
exceptional skill to work with the greatest freedom: after having
used the granulation to represent their motifs on a base of plain,
flat gold, they proceeded to fill in the scene with figures: 146 an
artistic revolution which reminds us of that which took place
about the same time in Attic ceramics when the black figures
gave way to red ones. One of the most magnificent products of
this Etruscan style is the pendant in the Louvre with its image
of the river-god Acheloos: the beard and part of the hair are in
granulation, the face done in repousse. 147 It is as well to
remember, when looking at the photographs of this masterpiece,
that the head is only four centimetres high. But it is one of the
last masterpieces of Etruscan jewellery, which, with the decline
of Etruscan power, also suffered a swift decadence.
And here we find ourselves in the presence of the insoluble
mystery: we have been speaking of Etruscan jewellers, assuming,
as is more and more the case among scholars today, that these
jewels were not imported from the Orient. E. Coche de la Ferte
writes:
'Like some spontaneous creation springing from the darkness

in which the beginnings of Etruscan civilization are lost, this
jewellery appears at the dawn of that civilization, radiant with
skill of a high quality and with a wealth of decoration. We
have said what its origins may be. Nevertheless it is remarkable
to see in the tombs of central and septentrional Italy, the
D.L.E.-13 181
emergence of ornaments that have no resemblance to these

immediate antecedents: about the year 700 BC, they begin to
take the place of the bronze ornaments which are so abundant
in the Villanovan tombs.' 148
Yet in the same tombs where, at the beginning of the seventh
century, Etruscan jewellery, suddenly in full possession of all its
techniques, blazes out of the dark, the other arts, statuary for
example, are just beginning, as if they were starting from scratch,
to invent their forms and their tools. It is difficult to under-
stand that the technical virtuosity which produced, in the tumulus
of La Pietrera, at Vetulonia, a 'necklace formed of twenty
pendants, each decorated with two human heads with curly
hair, 149 could have existed alongside the laborious skills displayed
in the sculptures that decorate the tomb. 150 Nor do we know
from which Italian mines so much gold could have been mined.
But let us consider one hypothesis. It was the attraction of
Etruscan copper and iron, we have seen, which brought about
the Greek colonization of Italy and the Chalcidian founding of
Cumae in the eighth century. 'But what did the Greeks bring
in return?' it has been asked. 151 Would not the reply to this be:
gold ... golden jewellery?
CHAPTER SEVEN
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS:

BANQUETS AND GAMES
I The divisions of time

II Table delicacies -A quick look at the kitchens - Banquets -
Silver plate
III Games - Music - Dancing - Bacchic dance - Sport -
Racing - Athletics - The tribunes and the public - Gladiatorial
combats - The game of Phersu
I
THE DIVISIONS OF TIME
The temporal framework of Etruscan life was in general the same
as that of the Romans, who borrowed it for the most part from
the Etruscans, or elaborated it together with them. Our authors
are generally silent about this, because, finding in the Etruscan
calendar a system identical with their own, they assumed that
it went without saying. The rare indications they give us are
inspired by etymological inquiry or by astonishment at seeing
the Etruscans sometimes departing from the common usage.
Thus they did not count their days from midnight to midnight,
as did the Romans; nor did they follow the Babylonians who
counted them from dawn to dawn - their word for 'dawn' was
thesan 1 - nor the Athenians and the Germans who reckoned them
from sunset to sunset. No, the Etruscans measured their days
from noon to noon. 2 This curious importance given to the
moment when the sun is at its zenith is perhaps justified by the
fact that it does not depend on the seasons nor on the unequal
length of days: in Rome too, noon was always noon, and also
the end of the sixth hour, whether the sun rose early in June or
late in December. But Varro thought it absurd; a child born
at the sixth hour, at noon, on the day of the calends, would

have a birthday containing half the calends and the following
day up to noon. But this tradition spread from the Etruscans
to many of their neighbours in Umbria. 3
As in primitive Rome, they had a lunar month, that is, one
measured by the interval between two consecutive new moons.
The proof of this is in the word for month itself, which was
'luna'. Tiv was the goddess of the night, but her name reappears
as an appellative, in the genitive plural, on epitaphs: Ve! Vipinanas,
at Tuscania, died avils XX tivrs sas, 'aged twenty years and six
(or four) months'. 4
At the full moon in the middle of the month the Etruscans
celebrated the day of the Ides, and it was from them that the
Romans borrowed the name, idus, or as it was formerly written
with a mute dental, itus. Certain scholars 5 gave the word a
bizarre interpretation: itis, they claimed, meant 'confidence in
Jupiter', or in light - the same thing - because on that day the
light did not die with the setting of the sun, for the daylight was
prolonged thanks to the radiance of the full moon. At any rate,
the Etruscan ides, like the Roman ones, became consecrated to
Jupiter.
We shall say nothing of the calends (Kalendae) as the name
is not Etruscan. In Etruria there were nones (ninth day before
the ides), and, as in Rome, weeks consisting of eight full days
(nundinae): the ninth day, market day, was the one on which
the Etruscan kings held audience, and everyone had the right to
go and consult them about their personal affairs. 6
A series of eight names of the months, in Latinized Etruscan,
has been preserved by glossarists: Velcitanus (March), Cabreas
(April), Ampiles (May), Aclus (June), Traneus (July), Hermius
(August), Celius (September), Xosfer (October). 7 We see that
they proceed in sequence from the month of March, which
doubtless opened the year, as in primitive Rome. Several of
these names are to be found in inscriptions: acale ( =acle, Aclus)
and celi (Celius) in the Zagreb ritual, 8 where the date of the three
ceremonies, counted backwards, as in Latin, from the end of the
month, shows that the latter was of thirty days. Certain other
names are those of deities: Traneus (t(u)rane) was the month of
Turan (Venus) and Hermius that of Hermes. Xosfer (chosfer,
SOJ\IE ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS ; llANQUETS AND GAMES
cesfer) was perhaps formed on the name of number cezp- (eight?),

and, like October, designated the eighth month of the year. 9
Finally it is probable that the names of the months had local
variants. April.is in Latin has been cleverly interpreted as being
derived from the Etruscan name of Aphrodite-Aphro. 10 Elsewhere
people said Cabreas.
Every year (avil), at Volsinii, the Etruscans hammered a nail
into the wall of the temple of the goddess Nortia, 11 and this
ceremony, which symbolized the irrevocable fulfilment of destiny,
was adopted by the Romans and applied by them in the temple
of Jupiter Capitolinus; this formed a ba:;is for chronological
computations used by the first historians.
Finally, there were the centuries, whose variable duration,
corresponding to the duration maxima of a human life, generally
was more than a hundred years and sometimes reached l 19 or
even 123 years. The completion of each century was announced
by miracles known to the haruspices; they taught that the Etruscan
nation would last for ten centuries, an epoch that had begun in
968 BC. 12
II
TABLE DELICACIES
The Etruscan day is not known to us, unfortunately, in all its
details. Innumerable texts allow us to reconstruct in our
imaginations the day of the Greek or the Roman; but no one has
told us at what hour a lucumo left his bed or whether he received
his clients in the morning or enjoyed a siesta and a bath in the
afternoon. The only precise piece of information we have about
his timetable concerns his food: he had two meals a day.
This is something noted by a rather scandalized Posidonius
as one consequence of the fecundity of the soil and the weakness
of their character: 'Twice a day the Etruscans have their tables
sumptuously laid with everything that contributes to delicate
living; they have prepared for them bed-coverings embroidered
with flowers, and they are served from quantities of silver plate;
they have also at their beck and call a considerable number of
slaves.' 13
They sat down to a meal twice a day. The remark takes on
its full meaning only when we remember that the Greeks and the
Romans had in theory three meals a day: the Greeks had their
akratismos, ariston and deipnon, while the Romans had their
jentaculum, prandium and cena, corresponding to our breakfast,
lunch and dinner. But custom had gradually reduced the first
two meals to the very simplest of repasts: on rising, one partook
of a crust of bread rubbed with a clove of garlic or dipped in a
little wine; between eleven and noon there was a light collation
consisting of the left-overs from the evening before. Only the
dinner, after two or three o'clock, really deserved to be called a
meal. 14 One had to be a pig like Vitellius to demand three (or
even four) repasts. 15 Seneca and Pliny the Elder required very
little for their breakfast: the philosopher .a bit of dry bread; the
naturalist, a few mouthfuls (gustabat 16 ).
Though these testimonies only go back as far as the Empire
in its heyday, it is clear that the Romans of the Republic were
equally fastidious. Cicero, in his second Philippic, rails against
Antonius, who, after the Civil War, had confiscated the learned
Varro's villa at Cassino and converted that sanctuary of learning
into a house of debauchery: from the third hour (nine a.m.)
'they drank and vomited' .17 The expressions convivium tem-
pestivum and cenare de die used to describe a banquet that started
too early and a dinner that began in the middle of the day
characterized the delights of Capua and the excesses of gor-
mandizers. But already in Greece the comic poets had been
hounding with their sarcasms 'those who were not satisfied with
a single meal and even dined twice in one day' .18 Unaware of
universal reprobation, the Etruscans 'dined twice a day', and not
only for their cena but also for the prandium, which Seneca turned
into a light snack eaten standing sine mensa, they had tables laid,
before which couches were set for them to lie on.
A QUICK LOOK AT THE KITCHENS

The Golini tomb at Orvieto, built at the end of the fourth century
for the Leinie (Laenii) family, not only shows us in its paintings
the funeral banquet of two brothers in the presence of Hades and
Persephone, but also takes us into the kitchens where eleven
servants are busy with the preparations for the feast. 19 They are
the same as those kitchen-hands who, in an inscription of Falerii
in archaic dialectal Latin, lauded the merits of their profession:
186
SOME h'TRUSCAN DIVEHSIONS : BANQUETS AND GA:\IES
quei soueis argutiais opidque Volcani

condecorant saipisume comvivia loidosque.
'By their own skills and with the aid of Vulcan, they give
banquets and games all their lustre.' 20
The Sybarites wove laurel wreaths for their cooks. The
Etruscans must have held them in at least equal honour. In this
tomb, each one is identified by two words engraved underneath
him, the first being probably a personal name, the second a title
indicating his function: they are mostly inexplicable, but some day
their significance will be revealed, and this will be a great step
forward in our knowledge of the language.
On the entrance wall, to the left, are painted carcasses of beasts
and fowls: two small trees place this carnarium in the open air.
From a round beam there is hung, by its hind legs, a whole ox;
its chopped-off head, with large eyes worthy of a Juno, is laid
on the ground nearby. Further on, under a lean-to roof, a hare
and a hind are hung between two pairs of fowls.
The adjoining wall shows the butcher-boy slave who, with an
apron slung round his naked hips, is chopping meat with a
hatchet in front of a fire on which he will cook it.
At the other end of the fresco, pazu mulu(.)ane who is also
naked except for a brief pair of drawers, is bending over a mortar
in which he is pounding something with two short pestles. This
object, dark yellow, is probably made of bronze: standing on three
legs, it consists of a circular dish whose edge is provided with a
lip for pouring. He is perhaps the household's baker-boy, knead-
ing his dough. But the instruments in his hands remind one of
a boxer's gloves and seem to indicate that he is crushing rather
than kneading something. He is busy confectioning one of those
mixed dishes the ancients found so tasty and in which there were
all sorts of well-ground ingredients and enough hot spices to
wake the dead.
In the Moretum attributed to Virgil, a peasant prepares in his
mortar, with a small pestle, a cake composed of herbs, garlic,
cheese and wine. 21 The satura, before giving its name to a poetic
form, the satires of Horace and Boileau, was a sort of macedoine
or hotchpotch made of barley mash, dried raisins, pine kernels,
pomegranate pipes, the whole laced with honeyed wine. 22 And
Rome's Brillat-Savarin in the days of Tiberius, Apicius, whose

name we have already encountered in a Caere tomb, has left us
a collection of recipes whose secret lay in the 'pounding' (terere). 2a
To season a jugged hare, pound together pepper, lavage, chopped
celery, nuoc-mam, 24 silphium, wine and a little oil. To bring out
the flavour of a boiled chicken one places in the mortar some
chopped fennel, dried mint, silphium root; sprinkle these with
vinegar, add date honey, pour in a few drops of garum, a little
mustard, oil and boiled wine for sweetening; serve straight from
the pot. Between the rustic simplicity of the Virgilian moretum
and the imperial refinement of the Apician sauces was the cuisine
of the lucumones of Orvieto, which also demanded the pounding of
pestle in mortar, and this is what, in the painting, pazu mulu(. )ane
is doing. Let us mention in passing that his title perhaps con-
tains the Inda-European root which is found in the Latin molo,
'grind'. He is Paccius, in charge of grinding.
Standing behind him to give his movements the necessary
rhythm is one tibicen playing for his benefit: he is Tr. thun.
suplu. The abbreviation Tr. is apparently his name, trepu, Trebius;
thun is connected with the name for the number 'one', and perhaps
signifies primus; but suplu is certainly the same word as subulo,
which Varro tells us is the Etruscan word for fl.autist. 25 Moreover
we shall see further on that the Etruscans did their cooking to
music.
Also on the rear wall, is depicted a stonework oven with two
half-naked servants. One brandishes with great authority in his
left hand a casserole: he is the tesinth tamiathuras, which means,
according to an almost certainly correct interpretation, the
curator or foreman over the vassals, in other words the kitchen
superintendent or head cook. 26 Under his directions klumie parliu
who is in charge of the parla, in Latin patella, 27 is carefully
inserting into the blazing oven - or taking out - a frying-pan.
Especially appetizing are the four tables in a row between the
butcher-boy and the pounder-and-grinder, in the centre of the
painting on the lateral wall. A woman servant on the left is
running towards them; she is thrama mlithuns and is wearing a
yellow bodice and a skirt embroidered in the ancient fashion; she
is bringing two receptacles. Behind the tables are a slave and
another woman, whose name is illegible; she is very elegant: she
188
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS AND GAMES
wears a bandeau, dangling ear-rings, a necklace, a white cloak

bordered with a purple fringe. She is gesturing to thresu /(.)
sithrals, who has placed his arms round one of the tables, to carry
it before the guest couch.
These tables are rectangular with three legs (here in the form
of horses' legs) as was the fashion in Greece and Etruria. They
are already laden with three layers of pancakes, among which can
be seen two 'portions' for the two banqueters on each couch.
Everyone will have his individual cake, probably round, the
usual shape of bread and pastry in Rome and Pompeii, then
indistinct piles of victuals among which there are perhaps eggs;
finally, topping the lot, a bunch of black grapes for each guest.
But also between the two cakes is a pomegranate flanked by two
small pyramids which must be sweetmeats.
Finally the partition wall which divides the tomb into two parts.
Next to the picture of the oven this contains a very mutilated
painting of three servants behind a wooden table on which are
various receptacles: all sorts of little violet-coloured bowls (per-
haps the painter was trying to suggest the metallic shine of black
varnish), drinking-cups, goblets, etc., which seem to be filled with
yellow or reddish liquids or substances. The figures right at the
end, aklchis muifu and thresu penznas, exist only as two fine
profiles turned to the left; in the middle runchlvis papnas, with
his little pointed beard and his naked chest, has not suffered so
much damage: with his right arm raised to balance him, he is
carrying in his other hand a heavy bronze decanter of unusual
form; one might call it a kylix with large handles surmounted by
a lipped cover; it recalls certain vases of Apulian style to which the
name lepaste perhaps belongs;28 its bearer is apparently about to
pour the contents into the drinkers' cups.
BANQUETS
The pictures of kitchens given us by the Golini tomb are quite
exceptional. Representations of banquets are much more frequent,
painted as frescoes in the tombs at Tarquinii, modelled in bas-
relief on the architectonic terracottas of Velletri, or sculpted on the
urns and cippi of Chiusi which we have already met (plates 37 and
38). They are inspired by Greek traditions whose prototypes are
formed by the friezes of Larisa in Aeolis 29 and the drinking-cups
of Attic dandies: 30 here we find already the couch or bed with

two guests on it, the low table in front of the couch, the cock or
the dog scavenging under the table, the musician playing the
double flute, the cup-bearer filling the cups. Within this con-
ventional framework it is difficult for any unusual aspects of
Etruscan life to make themselves felt.
We can tell nothing about where or at what time these banquets
were held. They take place in an imaginary setting: often small
trees with feathery leaves and a bright, diffused lighting suggest
the open air, a park. Elsewhere crowns and garlands and ribbons,
fans and arms hung on an invisible backcloth invite us to place
the scene within some idealized triclinium. But in the Golini
tomb the banquet of the two brothers, Arnth Lecates and Vel
Leinies, whose preparations we have just been observing, takes
place in the light of six candles on two lofty candelabra.
Usually a man and a woman are reclining on each couch- man
and wife, we may be sure. We have already noted that this
participation of the Etruscan woman in banquets was a freedom
not granted to Greek women; in Athens it was only courtesans
who lay beside young men on banqueting couches. Even when at
home, the Greek wife did not keep her husband company while
he was dining though she might sit beside the couch on which he
took his lordly ease. This good breeding finally made itself felt,
under the Grecian influence, even among the Etruscans, and in
the Tomb of the Shields in Tarquinii, which dates from the
third and perhaps from the second century, Velia Seitithi is
seated modestly at the foot of the bed beside Larth Velcha, who
is reclining. 31 All the same, she is giving her husband's shoulder
an affectionate pat while with her other hand she is offering him
a fruit which she has taken from a basket on the table. She
shows the same melancholy tenderness which, three centuries
earlier, in the Tomb of the Painted Vases, informed the delicately
pathetic gesture of the man: taking his spouse's chin in his hand
he turns her face towards him in order to look into her eyes for
the last time.32 But we must admit that in other cases, as in the
Tomb of the Leopards, the young banqueters crowned with
myrtle are giving themselves in the most carefree manner to the
pleasures of wine and dalliance: the men have black hair and the
women are blondes; they are wearing splendid multi-coloured
SOl\lE ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : llANQUETS AND GAl\!ES
cloaks. One of the young men is holding a ring between his

thumb and first finger and flashing it in front of a young woman
who gazes at it in fascination: the neighbouring pair both turn at
the same moment to stare at a Ganymede, naked, who is passing
by with his wine-jug. It is a scene of teasing, prattling, and sudden
gusts of desire. 33
Among the luxurious appurtenances of their banquets, Posi-
donius particularly admired the coverings, embroidered with gay
colours, which adorned the beds. 34 These were doubtless the
same Milesian woollen stuffs which we described above round
the shoulders of dancers. Cicero was to accuse the embezzling
praetor Verres - whose name, by the way, reveals an Etruscan
origin in its inflexion - of having stolen wool from the Milesians 35
and of having turned all the Sicilian noblemen's palaces into
workshops turning out purple cloth, 'as if, for each of his dining-
rooms, in Rome and in all his country villas, he wanted to have
three hundred beds covered with the stuff in every room, and not
just three: covering them with magnificent materials (stragula
vestis) and with all the other stuffs that are used to decorate
banquets'. 36 Posidonius talks of stromnai antheinai, but we shall
not take the adjective in its etymological sense (anthos) by trans-
lating it as 'covered with flowers'. The Etruscan paintings often
show materials ornamented with little flowers, but antheinos, like
its synonym poikilos, signifies in a more general sense 'embroidered
with various colours', and indeed that is how we see the bed-
coverings in the Tomb of the Leopards, with their fine red check
and blue lines. 37 Such was the fashion at the beginning of the
fifth century. Later, in the Tomb of the Shields, purple was to
predominate everywhere in decorative schemes that were always
geometrical. 38
SILVER PLATE
Finally Posidonius tells us that the guests used abundant and
varied silver plate. We have already quoted the verses of Critias
the Tyrant, who celebrated, at the same time as their bronzes,
'the Tyrrhenians' gold-plated phials' 39 - phials means the little
shallow cups, with a raised piece in the centre, which were used
in libations. We have also mentioned several times all the buckets,
basins, amphorae, jugs, pitchers and cups, in silver or in silver-
gilt, sometimes with an engraved or repousse design, which

adorned the princely tombs of the seventh century in Vetulonia,
Caere or Praeneste. Moreover the silverware in the Regolini-
Galassi tomb, at least the goblets and cups, is marked with the
proprietor's name, for she seemed to attach particular value to it.
Posidonius' observation nevertheless refers to a much more
recent period, and we must acknowledge that it is not confirmed
by archaeological evidence. Neither the paintings nor the funerary
furnishings after the seventh century show this 'quantity of silver
vases of all sorts' which the philosopher saw on Etruscan tables.
In one of the frescoes of the Tomb of the Painted Vases in
Tarquinii at the end of the sixth century, it is just possible that
the white colour of a big kylix in a banqueter's hand might be
taken to indicate that it was made of silver. 40 Usually all we see in
the way of vases are bronze and pottery ones. The study of the
furnishings of a necropolis like the one at Caere leads to the same
conclusion: though it is incomparably rich in Attic pottery, it is
extremely poor in metal objects. At that time silverware seemed
to have disappeared from the Etruscan household. Must we look
for the cause of this in the people's growing poverty, in the
decadence that had cut it off from the centres of silver production,
Spain in particular? Must we believe that avarice prevented them
from sacrificing to the cult of the dead objects of great value?
Or again that their passion for ceramics, nourished at first by Greek
imports, and which had then developed in their own workshops,
from the archaic bucchero with its black glaze to the late Arezzo
red-glazed pottery, an uninterrupted manufacture of terracotta
occupied them exclusively? All these things may have contri-
buted to it. But we must note that the taste for silver vases
had not died out so completely, for they invented, in the fourth
to third centuries, in southern Etrurian centres, especially at
Orvieto and Bolsena, a silver-glazed pottery in which there was
the illusion of silver-plating. 41
From the third century onwards, Etruria, incorporated in the
Roman world, began to enjoy some of the benefits of conquest
and reserved for its own use a little of the enormous quantities
of luxury plate which from then on began to flow into Italy.
The comedies of Plautus, shortly after the Second Punic War,
show us sumptuous silver plate displayed on the sideboards
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : llANQUETS AND GAMES
of the rich. 'Those who have their houses filled with treasures',
said the slave Stichus, 'drink out of embossed beakers and
tankards and fancy goblets, while we drink out of our Samian
jug. But we drink just the same.' 42 The Etruscan luc11111011es
began drinking out of 'embossed beakers' again, out of tankards
and fancy goblets made of silver and Alexandrian gold, and from
those which their gold- and silversmiths, roused from their torpor
or seized with a spirit of emulation, had begun producing
agam.
In 206, P. Scipio Africanus brought back from Spain more
than fourteen thousand pounds of silver, not counting silver
coin. 43 In 189, his brother Lucius displayed at his triumph over
Antiochus 1,023 pounds of gold plate and 1,423 pounds of silver
plate. 44 In 161 a sumptuary law forbade leading citizens attending
the banquets at the Ludi Megalenses to bring more than one
hundred pounds of silverware. 45 Therefore one is not surprised
that one of the rare Etruscan tombs in which one glimpses a
pale reflection of what the silver plate of ancient times must have
been, the Tomb of Larthia Seianti at Chiusi, should be dated by
the presence of a Roman uncial as bearing the head of Janus
from the first half of the second century- at the earliest. We
find there, mixed up with various toilet articles, hairpins, comb,
depilatory tweezers, a few vasa argentea, a small krater, a casserole
and plates. 46 Those who entertained Posidonius in their own
homes were doubtless much richer: it was Rome that restored to
their banquets this essential part of their splendour.
III
GAMES
Whatever we are best acquainted with in the manners and
customs of the Etruscans comes from their games, because, in
the special form of funeral games, they loved to depict these on
the walls of their tombs or sculpt them on their cippi and
sarcophagi. No one has disproved that the institution went back
to a very early date: it is attested by tradition from the days
following the battle of Alalia (c 535): the Caerites, having captured
a great number of Phocaean prisoners there, had led them out
of the town and stoned them; the Delphic oracle, when consulted,
1 93
'ordered them to do what they are still doing today'. (Here it is

Herodotus speaking, in the middle of the fifth century.47) 'They
offer rich sacrifices to the shades of the Phocaeans and institute
in their honour gymnic and equestrian games.'
Moreover it is fairly certain that these manifestations of
strength and vitality which the Etruscans, like the other peoples
of antiquity, displayed at their funerals to exorcize the omni-
potence of death were not different from those which, in country
festivals, were used to excite magically the energies of Nature, or,
in urban ceremonies, to assure the gods' protection of their
Capitols. Whether they were dedicated to the shades of the dead
or to the gods made no change in their programme. Thus,
later on, in a Rome which was only following the example of the
Etruscans, the comedies of Terence would be played at the Roman
Games, the Ludi Megalenses or the Funeral Games of Aemilius
Paulus (when the Adelphi of Terence was first staged). We may
be sure that the dances and races we witness in the tombs at
Tarquinii are reflections, perhaps embellished and stylized, of
those which were held not only in the necropolises but also in
all the sanctuaries - among others the Temple of Vertumnus,
fanum Voltumnae, when the federal assembly of the nation met
there every spring. 48 It was then that were celebrated the
solemn games in which, along with the artists in their personal
troupes, the lucU1.-iones of the twelve peoples participated; we
remember the anecdote about the king of Veii, 49 who, beaten in
the elections, at once left for home with his histrions and
pugilists, just like those depicted in the Tomb of the Augurs
and the Tomb of the Leopards.
Again, these paintings not only bring back to us the great
public gatherings, with the noisy and brightly coloured activity
of the nearby fairground, but also the political intrigues which
began in the shadows of the sacred woods; these festivals were
simply an opportunity, returning at regular intervals, to live out
more intensely the gestures of everyday life. These spectacles
reflected, like a magnifying but not a distorting mirror, the
various activities of common reality. Just as the funeral banquets
introduced us into the intimacy of their two daily meals, the games
make us see what music, dancing, sport - and also, naturally, the
theatre - meant to the Etruscans.
194
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS AND CAl\IES
MUSIC
The enormous place occupied by music in the lives of the
Etruscans is certainly one of the most striking features of their
civilization. Here our intention is not to diminish in any way the
superiority of the Greeks, who made music - and not only in the
sense of a cult of the Muses and of intellectual culture, but in the
strict acceptance of the terms 'instrumental' and 'vocal music' -
the foundation of their cities and the nourishment of the soul. 5o
Certainly it is to the Greeks we owe the myth of Orpheus
charming the animals, the rocks and even the gods with the sound
of his lyre. The whole fable is full of names of legendary cithern
and flute-players, disciples or rivals of Apollo, Orpheus, Linos,
Amphion and Marsyas who, by the power of music, raised the
fortifications of cities and tamed savage beasts. And in effect
Athenian and even Spartan education placed first on their
syllabus 'the lyre, light dancing and singing'. 51 Concerts are a
favourite subject for the painters of fifth century vases. 'There
was no feature of any importance in urban or rural existence -
marriages, funerals, harvests, grape-gatherings - which did not
have a more or less well-developed musical accompaniment.' 52
In this as in everything else the Etruscans were pupils of the
Greeks. But they found ways of extending the empire of music
to domains where it had never before penetrated. It was indis-
pensable at the games, where it regulated the movements of the
dancers; it was natural that it should contribute to the drunkenness
of guests at banquets; that it should come into the liturgy of
religious ceremonies was quite a normal thing; and it had always
been used to excite the ardour of troops in battle. But we share
the astonishment of Aristotle who noted as a significant indication
of moral weakness that the Etruscans conducted boxing-matches,
whipped their slaves and even cooked to the sound of the flute. 53
Thus all their occupations, even the most banal, were accompanied
by music. One thing that must have been difficult to find in an
Etruscan city was silence. One must imagine their activity
against a continuous background of noise: not just il Lieto rumore,
'the happy murmur' of Leopardi which fills Italian villages on
Saturday evenings, but rather the sort of thing we hear strolling
home through the outskirts of Florence, after dinner - the ever-
lasting radio, turned on at full volume, transmitting from villi110
to villino, through thousands of wide-flung windows, the entire

Norma of Bellini.
Italian music was already triumphant and played everywhere
in the days of the Etruscans, but whatever Aristotle says, it was
quite the reverse of anything effete and languorous. For in his
enumeration of these three apparently incongruous uses of the
flute, the philosopher does not seem to understand that their
object was to regulate three types of violent movement. In
Greece, too, the auletes or flute-player helped the rowers to keep
a concerted rhythm; armed with a megaphone, he can still be
found in our boat-races. The blows of Etruscan pugilists were
also scanned in this way, but this custom, which turned boxing
into a sort of measured dance, was by no means intended to
soften the blows. The swish of the vibrant rod on the bare flesh
of a slave had also to be administered according to certain rhyth-
mical laws, but despite what Plutarch says in his treatise On the
art of restraining anger, 54 music in this case was not intended to
soften the feelings either of master or of slave. As for cooking,
we are better able to understand what Aristotle meant thanks to
an indication given us by the Sicilian historian Alcimos: 55 the
latter does in effect speak of 'kneading bread', a labour which
must have been performed in a rhythmical manner. We have
noticed, in the paintings in the Golini tomb, the flute-player,
suplu or subulo, who is helping pazu mulu(.)ane, bent half-naked
over the ingredients he is energetically kneading or grinding,
and here the music is not provided to slow up his movements or
to make his sauce turn out badly.
Then there was hunting, in which music played a considerable
part. Not only were there horns and trumpets to encourage the
hounds. The Characteristics of Animals composed in the third
century AD by Aelian alludes to an Etruscan tradition according
to which music brought the game into the nets. 56
'There is an Etruscan story current which says that the wild

boars and the stags in that country are caught by using nets
and hounds, as is the usual means of hunting, but that music
plays a part, and even the larger part, in the struggle. And
how this happens I will now relate. They set the nets and other
hunting gear that ensnare the animals in a circle, and a man
SOME ETRUSCAN !JIVEHSIONS : BANQUETS AND GAMES
proficient on the pipes stands there and tries his utmost to play
a rather soft tune, avoiding any shriller note, but playing the
sweetest melodies possible. The quiet and the stillness easily
carry the sound abroad; and the music streams up to the heights
and into ravines and thickets - in a word into every lair and
resting-place of these animals. Now at first when the sound
penetrates to their ears it strikes them with terror and fills
them with dread, and then an unalloyed and irresistible delight
in the music takes hold of them, and they are so beguiled as to
forget about their offspring and their homes. And yet wild
beasts do not care to wander away from their native haunts.
But little by little these creatures in Etruria are attracted as
though by some persuasive spell, and beneath the wizardry of
the music they come and fall into the snares, overpowered by
the melody.'
It is difficult to tell where Aelian, who was from Praeneste and

knew well the circumstances of Italic life, could have found the
material for this passage still quick with a mysterious feeling for
the life of wild creatures and for the magic power that music has
over them. Aristotle knew of this curious kind of trap, but he
only mentioned it in connexion with the hunting of the deer, an
animal whose musical sensitivity had struck the ancients: the boar
seems to be a casual addition from the Etruscan source. 57 How-
ever such a method of hunting is not entirely imaginary. It is
reported that on the Ivory Coast the hunters 'attract the antelopes
by playing a long flute, and the inquisitive beasts, charmed by
the sounds, approach unsuspectingly and are soon slain with a
lance or an arrow'. 5s But perhaps the origin of the distant echo
which we find in Aelian resides in some poem where a hunting
prince, a Gilgamesh or some unknown Cyrus of the epics of
Vulci or Chiusi hunted the deer and the wild boar accompanied
by a marvellous Etruscan Orpheus who turned his musical gifts
to cruelly utilitarian ends. But unlike the legendary player on
the lyre, the Etruscan Orpheus would have drawn his irresistible
notes from a flute.
All through their history the flute remained the favourite
instrument of the Etruscans. The paintings and the cippi of the
sixth and fifth centuries show, throbbing under the fingers of
D.L.E.-14 1 97
their players, lyres and citherns of seven strings and more,

according to whatever new refinements the Greek lute-players
had brought to the instruments at that period. And the flute-
players are inseparable from these players of stringed instruments,
at least in the early days. But then the duet between the Apol-
lonian lyre and the Dionysiac flute was interrupted, but in
different ways, in Greece and Etruria. In the former, the flute
which Pericles had played like a virtuoso fell under the dis-
approval of Plato and Aristotle. 59 In the latter, only the flute was
heard at public and private concerts. Authors and monuments
have made us familiar with many varieties of flute, which modern
musicians would prefer to call clarinets or oboes. According to
Virgil, the ones used at sacrifices were made of ivory; Pliny says
they were made of box-wood. 60 In archaic times small, short
ones were preferred; 61 on a late urn from the Tomb of the Volumii
at Perugia a 'German' flute - that is, one held sideways - is
depicted. 62 But on the whole Etruria remained faithful to the
double flute, which is composed of two pipes, and Rome followed
her, hardly ever using anything but tibiae, in the plural.
So it was the song of the flute that constituted the background
of the sounds we imagined we could hear in the Etruscan street.
We should like to know more about it, but the music of the Greeks
is very little known: even less so that of the Etruscans. Was it
perhaps more chromatic than the Grecian modes? We must
suppose that, conservative as they were, and obstinately attached
to the flute and the tradition of wind instruments that had
favoured the emergence of the enharmonic mode and the taste
for the nuances of fractional tones, they cultivated those musical
fashions of Asia Minor which perhaps stirred atavistic memories
in them: the Phrygian mode, for example, and that Hypolydian
mode whose character, according to the musicologists of antiquity,
was 'dissolute, relaxed and voluptuous'. But the rhythm of it
must sometimes have been fairly brisk, to keep the baker pounding
his dough.
In any case, the reputation of Etruscan flautists conquered
the world: an Athenian philosopher at the beginning of the third
century, who was too fond of the flute was saddled with the
mocking nickname of 'Tyrrhenos'. 63 Rome in particular soon
got into the way of bringing from Etruria the subulones who
were indispensable at the ritual celebration of sacrifices, which

they would prelude with an air on the flute. In the Eternal City
they formed a college that was very jealous of its rights, and that
reserved for itself the monopoly in this art. One day, at the end
of the fourth century, they went on strike, and, because they had
not been given their traditional banquet at the Capitol, moved
away to Tibur (Tivoli). The Senate was obliged to give way,
and, in order to get them back, had to have recourse to a ruse:
various families in Tivoli, having announced that they would be
holding banquets, invited the musicians for dinner (the anecdote
could be illustrated by a fresco from Tarquinii) and made them
drunk - for as Livy says (but it is a Roman speaking), 'these
people have a taste for drink'. Carried off in chariots, they did
not wake up until they were at the Forum, where their privileges
were restored to them. 64 We shall see further on that the
Etruscan dancers were one day to join their flute-playing
countrymen in Rome, where they collaborated in the creation
of the Latin drama.
As well as its sacred music, Rome borrowed Etruria's military
bands. Ever since Aeschylus the ancients praised the excellence
of the Etruscan trumpet. Tyrsenike salpinx, Tyrrhenica tuba 65 -
the straight trumpet whose horn swells out in the form of a bell.
Another type of trumpet with a curved end, like the lituus of the
augurs, is represented in official processions, as are the semi-
circular trumpets which resemble our hunting-horns. But
whether straight, curved or semi-circular, tubae, litui and cornua
sounded the attack for the Etruscan armies and the fanfares for
their official parades; it was they that sounded the attacks at
Sentinum and Philippi, and even the haruspices thought they
could hear them in the sky, proclaiming the end of a century or
announcing the will of the gods:
Tyrrhenusque tubae mugire per aethera clangor. 66
(The Tyrrhenian trumpet-blast rang through the heavens.)
DANCING
There were dances both sacred and profane in Etruria - the
distinction between the two is however rather uncertain - and
we must mention first the warrior dances, similar to those which
1 99
the Salii - their name, etymologically speaking, means 'dancers' -

practised in Rome, clashing together their sacred ancilia or
shields fallen from the sky. 'They chanted hymns accompanied
by rhythmical leaps and ritual dances.' 67
This armed dance was held in great honour throughout the
whole of Central Italy, and a small votive buckler, bilobate
like those of the Salii, and which R. Bloch found in a Villanovan
tomb at Bolsena, 68 shows definitely that it came before the full
flowering of Etruscan culture which adopted it into its ceremonies:
an intaglio in the archaeological museum at Florence and dating
from the fourth-third centuries represents two Salii carrying
ancilia. Moreover, in Greece itself, many religious festivals
included a mock battle which, danced to the sound of the flute,
was called Pyrrhic. We find echoes of these in the Tomb of the
Bigae and on the cippi of Chiusi.
In the festivals of the Salii, there was a coryphaeus, a leading
dancer, the praesul, meaning 'he who dances in front'. He
executed dance steps which the rest of the dancers did after him.
Two old Latin verbs which rapidly became obscure characterized
these two movements of the dance: amptruare and redamptruare. 69
The prefix amp- indicates a circular movement: the leader first
made a turning jump (amptruabat) which was repeated by the
ensemble (redamptruabat). The radical -truare is unknown:
apparently it had a meaning in Etruscan.
At the time of Augustus, Rome witnessed the resumption of
an ancient parade on the Campus Martius, in which three armed
squadrons of young horsemen of high birth took part. This
display was called the troia; the expression was troiam ludere,
'to celebrate the troia', and lusus troiae, 'the game of the troia';
and there was no doubt among scholars that, by virtue of a
convenient etymology, the institution of this game went back
to the legendary origins - Trojan origins - of Rome; it was the
'game of Troy'. Virgil had encouraged this delusion, by giving
the troia a place among the funeral ceremonies in honour of
Anchises which he describes in Book V of the Aeneid. There
he depicted first of all, in celebrated verses, the parade of the
Troiae juventus, 'the youth of Troy', then the horsemen's
evolutions, whose twistings and turnings reminded him of the
Cretan Labyrinth. 70 ~,
200
SOl\IE ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS AND GAl\IES
'They galloped apart in equal ranks, and the three companies,

parting their bands, broke up the columns; then recalled, they
wheeled about and charged with levelled lances. Next they
enter on other marches and other countermarches in opposing
groups, interweaving circle with alternate circle, and making
an armed mimicry of battle.'
Now an oenochoe discovered at Tragliatella, near Bracciano,

about ten kilometres from Caere, and whose style, of Proto-
corinthian influence, reveals an Etruscan work of the late seventh
century, presents, roughly engraved on its flanks, a labyrinth
from which are emerging two armed horsemen preceded by
seven foot-soldiers performing a warrior dance. 71 Within the
labyrinth, we can clearly read, in Etruscan characters, the word
truia. It is generally admitted that this word meant either a
sort of armed dance or the place or arena, perhaps a fortified
camp, in which it took place, and that it was perpetuated in Latin
in the ritual vocabulary of the Salii (amptruare) and that the
lusus troiae also owes its name to this. 72 From the seventh to the
first centuries, the troia survived in obscure forms throughout
the whole history of Etruscan orchestics, finally conquering Rome
herself where it provoked mythographists to draw the most
fanciful etymological conclusions.
BACCHIC DANCE
But it was Dionysos rather than Mars who seems to have brought
self-awareness to Etruscan dancing and given it a permanent
style. Everywhere in Graeco-Etruscan Italy we see Sileni and
Maenads dancing mad farandoles across the cornices of temples,
on the covers of lebes or funerary cauldrons, ornamenting candel-
abra and tripods and decorating vases and drinking-cups. Using
various dissociated examples, an attempt has been made to re-
create the successive steps of a whole choreographic sequence. 73
The first movement, an invitation to the dance, is represented by
a handle which shows Silenus leaping joyfully towards a Maenas
who, startled, is attempting to escape. Proceeding to the delight-
ful antefixes of Falerii, Lanuvium and Satricum, the Silenus and
the Maenas are progressing with their arms around each other,
'as if they were dancing parallel steps'. Finally, the last figure of
201
the dance - shown on a bronze in the Metropolitan Museum of

New York - the Ma en as is hoisted on the shoulder of the triumph-
ant Silenus 'as if on to a living pedestal'. So this dance also
seemed to have a mimed significance, a dramatic subject: it was
the ballet of the Abduction. 74
The Bacchic inspiration behind Etruscan dancing persisted,
with all the paraphernalia of masks and disguises it implied,
right up to the time of the procession that was held in Rome on
the occasion of the games at the Circus Maximus: this procession
consisted, after the serious dances were over, of burlesque dances
of Sileni and Satyrs, the former wearing shaggy tights and
flowered cloaks, the latter goatskins with an upstanding mane on
their heads. 75 Dionysius of Halicarnassus adds that he had seen,
at the funerals of illustrious persons, troupes of dancers disguised
as Satyrs proceeding in front of the coffin. All this was probably
a very ancient and persistent tradition imitated from the Etruscans.
The funerary paintings omit the accessories of the thiasus, but
the dances they represent still preserve, with different costumes,
the character of orgiastic folly that is peculiar to the Bacchic
dance. This can be seen in the Tomb of the Lionesses and in
the one which is actually named dei Baccanti, circa 520; and in
the Tomb of the Triclinium, dating from about 470, are several
pictures which allow us to follow the evolution of the dance over
the fifty years during which the tomb was used.
In the Tomb of the Lionesses, on the rear wall, on either side
of a big krater, are, crowned with the ivy of Dionysos, a flute-
player and a cithern-player. To the right and left there are
dancers. 76 On the right: a couple. 77 The male dancer's naked
body is brick-red; both he and the female dancer, who is clad in a
transparent tunic, with castanets in her right hand, and is facing
him, are driven, as M. Pallottino very rightly notes, 'by the
agitated rhythms of the tripudium'. Tripudium is an old Latin
word which designated a dance in three-four time in which one
stamped three times on the ground; more generally it indicated,
whether in three-four time or not, a dance composed of leaps.
Here our dancers are doing both things, and performing the same
gestures: stamping one foot on the ground, raising the other leg.
Is it a dance in three-four time? We cannot tell. The important
thing is the leap which lifts them from the ground and the position
202
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS ANIJ GAMES
of the arms, one lowered, the other in the air, which prolongs
their flight. What is very remarkable is that the dancer is at the
same time raising his right arm and right leg, the female dancer
her left arm and left leg, without any consideration for the law
of opposites which governs and balances regularly-composed
dances, but not Bacchic ones.
On the other side, a single female dancer, heavily coiffed, shod
and clad, in complete contrast to her lightly-garbed partners, is
making a long, sliding step to the left, but it is also a turning
step, as can be seen from her cloak which is still giving a front
view of its folds. Of her two arms, one is raised, the other lowered
from the elbow, and both hands are bent back in opposite direc-
tions. This cheironomia plays a great part in Etruscan dancing,
which is done with the hands more than with the legs. The famous
ceramologist, Sir John Beazley, who makes a study of it in his
Etruscan Vase Painting, has a profound admiration for this 'Etrus-
can dancer's hand' when he sees it on the wine-cups and stamnoi
of Chiusi. 'I know an Italian family,' he declares, 'a mother and
two daughters, who can make Etruscan-dancer gestures with their
hands, but judge the faculty to be uncommon even in Italy.' 78
As we proceed from tomb to tomb, leaps and gesticulations
become more and more free, until we arrive at the marvellous
figures in the Tomb of the Triclinium (plate 16), where the players
of flute and cithern themselves enter into the dance among the
bushes of an enchanted garden. Perhaps their leaps are more
restrained, their gestures more sober, their heads inclined a little
more gently. But the classicism resides in the painter; the
dionysiac intoxication still informs the dancing figures absolutely.
Rome, which had already had recourse to Etruscan flute-
players, called upon these dancers (tradition has it, in 364).
Livy, in a charming litotes, said the Romans much appreciated
their 'not ungraceful evolutions': motus haud indecoros. 79 At the
same time he tells us their Etruscan name, ister, which was
latinized into histrio, giving us our 'histrion'. In Latin they were
also called 'ludions' (ludii). Now the essential feature of their
art still lay in the leaps of the tripudium. Ovid, in his Art of Love, 80
evokes anachronistically the games of Romulus' day at which the
Sabine women were abducted because they were distracted by
the spectacle of the dance and unaware of danger, 'while to the
203
Tuscan flute-player's rude strains the dancer struck thrice with his
foot the levelled floor, in the midst of the applause ... the king
gave the people the expected sign of rape'.
But already in Plautus' Curculio we find a lover playing a
serenade outside his loved one's house: he addresses himself to
the bolts on the door, that they may burst and let him in:
Bolts, ah, bolts, I greet you gladly:
Take my love and hear my plea,
Hear my prayer, my supplication,
Fairest bolts, ah, favour me.
Change to foreign dancers for me,
Spring, I pray you, spring on high,
Send a wretched man his dear love,
Love that drains his life-blood dry ... a1
(Trans. Paul Nixon.)
When they arrived in Rome, the Etruscan ballets must have
produced something like the same impression as the Russian
Ballet did on Paris in 19II, and their leaps did not seem to have
been any less vertiginous than Nijinsky's.
SPORT
Sport was also consecrated in the games celebrated in honour
of the gods and at funerals: here again the Etruscans, disciples
of the Greeks, were the educators of the Romans. The tradition
was long-established: Tarquinius the Elder had scarcely ascended
the throne before he gave, after his first victory, the most
magnificent games, better organized than those of any of his
predecessors.
'It was then that the ground was first marked out for the circus
now called Maximus. Places were divided amongst the Fathers
and the knights where they might each make seats for themselves;
these were called "rows". They got their view from seats
raised on props to a height of twelve feet from the ground.
The entertainment was furnished by horses and boxers,
imported for the most part from Etruria. From that time
the Games continued to be a regular annual show, and were
called indifferently the Roman and the Great Games.' 82
(Trans. B. 0. Foster.)
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SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS ANO GAMES
The event is believed to have been as early as the end of the

seventh century. In the days of Cicero the Etruscan nobles still
had their racing stables: Aulus Caecina, heir of one of the greatest
equestrian families in Volterra, raced his quadri'gae at the Circus
Maximus; when he went to Rome he would take with him
swallows which he would release to announce the result to his
friends in Etruria; they would return to their nests dyed with the
colour of the victorious team. 83
RACING
The figured monuments abundantly illustrate the place which
the gymnasium, the stadium and the hippodrome occupied in
Etruscan life. Quite recently - on March 26, 1958 - there was
unearthed in Tarquinii a new tomb with frescoes, and it im-
mediately received the appellation of 'Tomb of the Olympic
Games' after the games which were later to take place at Rome,
and whose success this magnificent discovery, due to the photo-
graphic soundings of the engineer Lerici, seemed to portend. 8 4
There had been painted on its walls, about 525-520, the principal
gymnic and equestrian contests that figured in the programme of
ancient games: these included the discus, high-jump, boxing
and especially racing, both human and equestrian. On the right-
hand lateral wall is depicted a foot-race between three athletes
who have almost reached the tape: all three are naked, save for a
skimpy loincloth; all three are swinging their arms to the rhythm
of their racing feet; but they are diversified by the curious pointed
beard sported by the first and the third runners, and even more
so, in a very subtle way, by the different expressions on their
faces, corresponding, in their confidence, determination and
hopelessness, to the order of their arrival at the end of the race.
Even more remarkable, on the left, is the race between four
bigae or chariots drawn by two horses; these, too, are in sight of
the post; they are out in the open country and not in the level
arena of a circus. Each auriga wears a jockey's jacket, either blue
or red; but the horses' and the chariots' colours are also blue or
red, alternately, which perhaps is due to the artist's taste, though
possibly we can see in this arrangement an indication - as during
the Roman Empire and even, as we have seen, in the days of
Caecina - of the faction to which they belonged. One detail
205
that was previously unknown: the two reins are tied behind the
charioteer's back, forming an immense knot. Each one is
belabouring his horses furiously. The first, already almost the
winner, is turning round to see how far ahead he is; the third is
on the point of overtaking the second on the left; the fourth
chariot has just overturned, one of its horses is on its back with
all four feet in the air while the other is rearing and the charioteer
is being thrown backwards: three women watching the event
have put their hands to their heads and are screaming with fright.
There is more elegance, more talent in other paintings at Tar-
quinii. The value of this one derives from the extraordinary
dynamic quality that animates it, and the lively humour, the
narrative ingenuity with which the Etruscan painter, in rendering
the things he has seen, interprets the Greek tradition.
If this unfortunate charioteer in the overturned chariot had
been driving, instead of a biga, a quadriga, we might well have
called him Ratumenna, the name of an Etruscan auriga whose
wonderful story is told us by Plutarch and Festus; 85 he lived at
about the same time as the Tomb of the Olympic Games was
constructed. He was of illustrious birth: which goes to prove that,
as in archaic and classical Greece, sports - the noble sports in
any case - were practised by amateurs and not by professionals,
by men of high condition and not by slaves. At that time there
was a difference between Rome and Veii about a quadriga made
of terra-cotta which Tarquinius Superbus had ordered from a
workshop in the Etruscan town; it was to crown the temple of
Jupiter Capitolinus; but the authorities at Veii did not wish to
deliver this masterpiece, because of an omen that had revealed
it would give Rome the supremacy. Ratumenna, at the end of a
race he had won at Veii, had just received the victor's crown and
was driving his chariot at a walking-pace out of the race-course
when his horses took fright and ran away; he could not restrain
them, and they set off at a gallop for Rome, where they did not
halt until they had reached the Capitol, having thrown to the
ground their driver whose name was given to the Ratumenna Gate.
ATHLETICS
Of the various representations of gymnic and equestrian games
which figure in the tombs of Tarquinii and on the cippi of Chiusi,
206
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : l.IANQUETS AND GAMES
we have chosen those, more recent, of the Tomb of the Olympic

Games. But we can learn much from other tombs. The Tomb
of the Augurs, dating from about 530, shows a subject whose
origin was in Asia Minor, two wrestlers, completely naked;B 6
not only have they been given splendid muscular development
but also a well-defined oriental type of features: ebony-black hair
and beard, very long eyelashes, thick lips and a receding forehead;
one would think they had been picked up in some Levantine
slave-market, but it was probably an Ionian model, caricatural
himself, who inspired the painter. The latter, in any case, gave
them Etruscan names, Teitu, Latithe; the first of these is not
known, but the second was borne by honourable families of
Cortona and Chiusi. Again, two important personages, wrapped
in their cloaks, are standing near the wrestlers; one of them, who
lifts in his right hand a curved stick (lituus), carefully referees the
holds. Both of them are, as can be seen from the inscription
repeated above their heads, tevarath, that is, agonothetes or
organizers of the games, referees. Between the wrestlers three
great vases of bronze stand waiting to be awarded to the
victor.
Another tomb, the Tomb of the Bigae (beginning of fifth
century), has a painting right at the top of its walls, a little frieze
which does not seem to omit any of the sporting tests included in
the Games.s 7 The taste for slim silhouettes and the assured
finesse of the drawing prove that in this new stage of its evolution
Etruscan painting followed the progress made by its Grecian
masters, as it was reflected in the Attic ceramics of that period.
Here we have the procession of the bigae before the starting signal,
and also the preparations for a horse-race with jockeys; we see
wrestlers, with pugilists fighting bare-fisted or wearing boxing-
gloves; there is discus-throwing and javelin-throwing, high-jump
and armed dancing. Athletes resting converse before entering
the arena. Agonothetes carrying the lituus wander among the
groups.
THE TRIBUNES AND THE PUBLIC

But we would draw particular attention to the tribunes or stands
reserved for the public.ss They are placed two by two at the
extremities of each part of the frieze, facing each other and
207
turned towards the spectacle taking place at the centre. We

wonder perhaps if it does not represent - but nothing in the style
of ancient painting authorizes this hypothesis - a cross-section
of an amphitheatre, showing only sections of stands which actually
went right round an arena in the form of an ellipse or a circle.
Whatever the explanation, they recall very precisely, though they
are less high, the 'seats raised on props' which Tarquinius the
Elder had set up in the Circus Maximus for the Roman senators
and knights. 89 The ones found in paintings comprise beams at
least three feet high supporting a wooden platform over which is
stretched a velum which protects the spectators from the sun.
They are crowded eight or ten to a platform, seated one behind
the other on a single bench; it is impossible to say whether this
is shown from the front or the side. But here we recognize, in
the liberal promiscuity we have mentioned, older men, youths
and women wearing the tutulus - all the high society of Tarquinii.
In the rather confined space between the platform and the ground,
crouch or recline as best they can a host of turbulent slaves:
those who can see anything appear to be watching and sometimes
applauding; those crowded to the back pass the time in a way that
proclaims their liberal spirit but is not always innocent.
A similar stand appears again on a cippus from Chiusi, 90 but
this time it is the jury sitting there for the distribution of awards.
Two magistrates who seem to think they are gods and imitate
the attitude of Olympians in the frieze round the treasury of the
Siphnians turn towards each other, sceptre or lituus in hand,
and deliberate. Behind them, an apparitor, evidently belonging
to the police, points with the end of his stick underneath the
platform, where are assembled the vases offered as prizes. On
the edge of the stand, a secretary with a diptych open on his
knees is writing down the names of the victors: the first of these,
wearing a crested helmet and holding a lance and a buckler has
just been dancing the pyrrhic; he is followed by a whirling female
dancer wearing a helmet and a skirt which recall the costume of
the women in the Francesca Giustiniani tomb; a flautist accom-
panies her; finally we see a discobolist and his trainer.
This scene, taken as a whole, and despite the lituus of one of
the judges and the costume of the female dancer, could be Greek
and situated for example in Sicily, not far from that Palermo
208
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS ANO GAMES
where the fate governing collections caused the dppus from

Chiusi to be preserved. But at the same period, still at the
beginning of the fifth century, and in the same city of Chiusi, the
Tomb of the Monkey mingled with the common themes of
Hellenic civilization - wrestlers, pugilists, armed dancers, eques-
trian virtuosi - more particular subjects which have a popular
and local accent. 91 It has been said: 'The Greek taste for palaestra
and stadium here seems to give way to an air of peasant festivity.'
It is not just the presence of the monkey and the bearded dwarf
that gives it this character: enveloped in a huge black cloak
which covers her neck and hair, and from which her face emerges
as from a cowl, is a lady in deep mourning seated on the edge of
a chair or a bed, her feet placed on a stool; she is sitting in the
shade of a parasol whose handle she is holding upright in front of
her with both hands.
This is certainly the dead woman whose tomb it is, gracing
with her presence the games given in her honour. During these
some strange mountebanks have made their entry: a female
dancer and her flautist . . . but the dancer is also a juggler; as
she dances she carries on her head a sort of candelabrum, and
one could almost swear that its candle is lighted; she does not
hold it with her hands which, brought forward over her chest,
are playing castanets. She is wearing very modern clothes - or
very archaic: a chemisette or bodice, crossed-over at the front,
and, falling from an embroidered belt, a real skirt, all black.
The musician's costume is even more bizarre: very tight tights,
of a light flesh-tint, coming right up to his neck, contrasting with
the brick-red colour of his arms that are three-quarters bare,
and with his face, as well as with the broad belt round his waist
from which there hang in front, over his thighs, three flaps. In
addition he wears a broad-brimmed hat which does not have its
like in all antiquity, unless perhaps it is the hats on the situla of
the Certosa and on Bolognese bronzes, 9 z or again that worn by
the warrior of Capestrano. 93 It is an odd garment, which we might
expect to have seen in the wardrobe of the Commedia dell' Arte.
We shall see, in fact, that certain masks worn in Etruscan revelries
are forerunners of those familiar faces, Harlequin and Punch.
But rather than an anticipation it was a survival from a very distant
past; these things were brought out of chests to clothe this pair of
209
mountebanks when, at the funeral of a great lady of Chiusi,

obscure indigenous traditions claimed their rightful place despite
the overwhelming influence of the Grecian style, and provided,
among more modish contests, an unforeseen intermission in the
country's taste.
GLADIATORIAL COMBATS
These games were sometimes bloody ones. It appears that the
Etruscans long remained faithful to the barbarous custom of
sacrificing prisoners to the shades of their dead warriors. Before
the opening of the funeral games in honour of his friend Patroclus,
Achilles had immolated on the funeral pyre 'four noble mares,
two of his hounds and twelve noble sons of the magnanimous
Trojans'. 9 ~ This vision of the funeral of Patroclus never ceased
to haunt the imagination of the Etruscans. The ceremony was
reproduced everywhere: on vases from Falerii and Chiusi, on a
cista from Praeneste, a sarcophagus from Orvieto, an urn from
Orvieto, an urn from Volterra, paintings at Tarquinii and above
all at Vulci in the famous Frani;:ois tomb. Sir John Beazley
counted seven of these monuments, stretching in time from the
fourth to the first centuries, and all of which are derived from
the same lost original. 95 And without any doubt the representa-
tions of massacres no longer corresponded to any actual massacre;
they were not carried out any more, much as at Rome in the
Argeian festivities twenty-four wicker-work dummies were thrown
into the Tiber instead of living victims. It enabled the families
of dead persons to enhance their mourning by raising it to the
level of the Greek legend, and to console themselves for the
mortal condition of humanity through the enchantments of
poetry. Yet the history of the Etruscans sometimes gives glimpses
of sudden returns - and not token ones either - to a furious
lust for blood. In the middle of the sixth century, the Caerites
had stoned the prisoners they captured at the battle of Alalia. 96
In 358, during a war between Rome and Tarquinii, 307 soldiers,
Romans, were immolated in the Forum of that city. 97 During
the civil wars, when Octavius captured Perugia, he sacrificed
three hundred of her nobles to the shades of the J ulii, cynically
claiming that he was giving his enemies a taste of their own rites;
perhaps the Etruscans in his camp had inspired them. 98
210
SOl\tE ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS : BANQUETS AND GAMES
So we cannot ignore certain testimonies and certain facts

which attribute to the Etruscans the institution of the gladiatorial
games, which the ancients regarded as progressive because,
instead of killing prisoners on the tomb, they were made to fight
in front of it, which gave them a chance. Nicolaus of Damascus,
who wrote under Augustus, stated that Rome had borrowed this
custom from them, probably in the first half of the third century. 9 9
Again, the word lanista, which means 'superintendent of the
gladiators', was, according to those grammarians of antiquity
approved by modern scholarship, of Etruscan origin.100 Finally
the Fathers of the Church, indignantly denouncing the sanguinary
madness of the amphitheatres, witnessed there, between combats,
a clown whose task was to carry away the corpses: he used to
wear - significant survival - the costume and the attributes of the
Etruscan Charon with his mallet. 101
Yet it was not in Etruria but in Campania and in Lucania that
the gladiatorial games must have come to their full development
and taken on their classic form. From the fourth century, in the
paintings of Capua and Paestum, we see pairs of gladiators
fighting it out, in their aigretted helmets, carrying buckler and
lance, covered with wounds and dripping with blood. 102 In
southern Italy, the Samnites of the mountains provided abundant
material for these games: among the various classes in which the
gladiators had to arrange themselves, those called after the
'Samnites' were the most ancient, and the only kind that was
known before Sylla added the 'Thracian' and Caesar the 'Gaulish'
kinds. Samnis was for a long time a generic term, and the Cam-
pania always remained the main area for the recruitment of
gladiators, the centre for their schools and the theatre of their
revolts. 103
Nothing like this is known to have existed in Etruria. We
search in vain in bas-reliefs and paintings for examples of these
duels between two gladiators, sword in hand. 104 But we do find
something else, which is more ancient, more mysterious and
richer: though the gladiatorial games reached their full develop-
ment elsewhere, they were based on a principle whose ancient
manifestations can be followed, from the sixth century, in the
frescoes at Tarquinii.
211
THE GAME OF PHERSU

Two tombs from the second half of this century show, among
the scenes of funeral games which decorate their walls, a strange
combat which is at the same time an example of corporal
punishment which proclaims from afar the future martyrdoms
of the Roman amphitheatres. In a painting from the Tomb of
the Augurs, 105 a man condemned to death is being subjected
to the attacks of a savage dog which has planted its fangs in the
man's left leg. His body is completely naked except for a loin-
cloth, and is already bleeding in many places. For it is in vain
he tries to defend himself with the club he holds in his right
hand: his head is covered with a sack or bag which prevents him
from seeing anything and forces him to strike out like a blind
man. The chances of this ludicrous Hercules saving his life are
very small.
Now the same picture, formerly quite unique, has since been
found to have a double, which proves that it represented not
some unusual fantasy but a consecrated rite. In the Tomb of
the Olympic Games we find, among the equestrian and gymnic
games we have described, the same desperate duel between a
blinded man and the wild beast tearing him to pieces. 106
Of course, the Imperial amphitheatres also knew combats
against lions and bears. 'The pleasure of these festivities was
not complete,' Tertullian was to write, 'unless the human bodies
were torn to pieces by savage beasts.' 107 But at least the bestiarii
were armed, and though for most of the time they apparently
fought naked or very scantily clothed, at least they could keep
their eyes on their adversary's approach and try to counter it;
besides, they could move about freely.
Now behind the figure of our gladiator with the bag over his
head there stands, in the attitude of the referees in the adjoining
boxing-match, the man in charge of this cruel game. He seems
both attentive and remote; he is not merely there to observe the
outcome of the combat: he holds up delicately in his left hand a
leash which perhaps is attached to the dog's collar, but which is
also tangled round the neck, arms and leg of the gladiator, whose
movements it impedes.
He wears an extraordinary assortment of c~othes which helps
us to recognize him elsewhere and in other situations, on the
212
opposite wall of the Tomb of the Augurs, where he is running as

fast as he can from an adversary who is now invisible;IOR in the
Tomb of the Olympic Games, where he appears at the end of a
track along which chariots are dashing, and his superhuman
size seems that of a god; finally, in a third tomb, contemporaneous
with the preceding two, and called, for reasons we shall see later,
the Tomb of Pulcinella, despite small differences of costume, we
see him again, unmistakably, walking with a light step and waving
his arms. 109
And at first he is, incontestably, masked; for his head disappears
beneath a mock bonnet imitating a helmet - a Phrygian helmet
with raised visor, lateral head-pieces and ear-covers; below is a
mask of some dark colour to which is attached a long black beard.
In the Tomb of Pulcinella the head-dress resembles more a
magician's pointed hat, with a pompom at the top.
His clothes are no less singular: a short jacket and, generally,
short breeches; but in one of the paintings in the Tomb of the
Augurs the red of the jacket is sewn with tiny scraps of light-
coloured stuff, and in the Tomb of Pulcinella it is chequered
with alternate black and white squares. We understand why it
reminded the Italian archaeologists of the Neapolitan Pulcinella.
One might also have said: Harlequin.
Finally, completing our astonishment, Pulcinella, in the
Tomb of the Augurs, reveals to us his real name, twice: it is
Phersu. Now Phersu, with the omission of the familiar Tuscan
aspiration and with the addition of a diminutive suffix, is no
other than the word that survives in the Latin persona, which
properly signifies 'mask', then 'dramatic role', then 'person';
the point of departure for an extraordinary semantic evolution
which, reaching as far as our modern 'personality' and its deriv-
atives, marks out one of the main roads through the history of
civilization. 110
So at the beginning it was the Mask, an infernal demon whose
name is connected with that of Persephone (Phersipnai), who
reigns over the dead by the side of Hades (Eita). He is the
most ancient of those Hieronymus Bosch devils of the Etruscans,
devils that later, under the names of Tuchulcha, Charon or Orcus,
with their hooked noses, hair made of writhing snakes, vengeful
mallets and fatidic scrolls, were to populate the tombs on frescoes
D.L.E.-r5 213
and urns. It is interesting to note that, from the sixth century

onwards, Phersu plays the role of a nonchalant organizer of
tortures but that he sometimes takes to his heels when the spec-
tators start stamping in the stands during funeral games in which
elements of comedy and horror are mixed. 'vVe should not be
surprised at this; there is an age-old association between the
nervous release of laughter and the dread of death, against which
laughter is a powerful defence. For example, Terence's Adelphi
was on the programme of the funeral games in honour of Aemilius
Paulus. The popular spectacles of early Rome in which the
Etruscan influence was not unknown were full of hallucinating
and grotesquely scarifying creatures, formidines, ogres and bogies,
worthy imps, not of Satan, but of someone almost as bad, Phersu,
and brought out to affright and delight children of all ages. At
the end of the procession which annually paraded round the
Circus Maximus on the occasion of the ludi maximi, the crowd
awaited the entrance of laughable and terrifying figures, ridiculae
formidolosaeque, in a state of delicious apprehension that drove
away the spleen; among these figures were a drunken old woman
and a screeching gossip, but the one they applauded most
was Manducus (from mandere, 'to chew') who would open
wide his fearsome chops, making a sound of horribly grinding
teeth. 111
Through all later manifestations of the Italian comic spirit
there runs a tenuous but solid thread linking them with Phersu.
Apuleius, enumerating the accessories of a theatre in his days,
describes the tunic worn by the mimes and calls it centunculus -
a garment made of various patches sewn together.11 2 But even
before that an Atellana by Pomponius was entitled Pannuceati, 113
from pannus, a piece of stuff, and this recalls the jacket of Phersu.
These Pannuceati were not so much 'the Tatterdemalions' (as it
is usually translated) as 'the Harlequins'.
We have just mentioned the Atellana: this was a kind of popular
farce which had enjoyed its first success in Atella, a small town
near Naples, in a thoroughly etruscanized Campania, before
being transferred to Rome. Now one of the essential features of
the Atellana performers was that they should be masked. It was
the poet Naevius, from Capua, who at the end of the third century
first produced a Latin Atellana: f abula personal a, a masked comedy
214
SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS AND GA!\IES
which was played by actors called Atella11i, qui proprie ·voca11t11r

perso11ati, 'who are properly called the Masks (or Maskers)'.114
These masks are fairly well known to us: 115 they were l\Iaccus
the glutton with his fat chops, Bucco the fool, gossip and gormand-
izer, Pappus the grandfather, Dossenus (Punch) the hunchback.
The latter's name is generally recognized to be Etruscan. The
plays that they presented in a lively manner were often of an
impudent tartness and had such titles as Maccus the Tavern
Keeper, Maccus in Exile, Maccus the Soldier, Maccus the Virgin.
Sometimes, following the classic pattern of the Menaechmi,
there were two of them, twins, twin Macci and twin Dosseni.
Bucco was a gladiator and adopted son, Pappus a farmer and an
unfortunate candidate. Despite the vexing lack of authorities, we
can recognize in these figures the ancestors of Harlequin, Scapin,
Brighella, of Capitan Spavento and Capitan Matamore who later,
during the Renaissance, would set off from Naples to conquer
London and Paris. The Commedia dell'Arte knew all about
this, for its Pulcinella's birthplace was given out to be the
Campanian town of Acerra.
We shall not go so far as to attribute the Commedia dell'Arte
to the Etruscans. Even without Phersu, the Italian vis comica
could not have failed to produce its own Pulcinella. But it was
not without interest and profit to follow right to its end this
guiding clue and to note that the paradoxically religious tradition
of which Phersu is the origin persisted right through the pranks
of Maccus and Harlequin and established quite definitely the
masks, the costumes and to a great extent the form of broad
farce. On the other hand there is no reason why we should not
imagine, in Etruria proper, the existence of comic games similar
to the Oscan games 116 of one of its provinces, echoes of which are
preserved in the Atellanae. Perhaps it was not altogether due to
chance that the greatest comic genius of Rome, the Umbrian
Plautus, was born at Sarsina on the Etruscan frontier and had
begun in the theatre, like Moliere, as an actor and director, playing
at fairs in small towns lost in the country the role of Maccus, the
clown with the fat chops.
215
CHAPTER EIGHT
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
I Alphabets and spelling books - Tablets and scrolls - The

wrappings from the Mummy of Zagreb
II The books offate - The Etruscan religion and its prophets -
The haruspices
III Did the Etruscans have a profane literature? - Fescennine
hymns and songs - Dramatic spectacles - Historical literature -
The traditions of the great f amities - Geneaological trees -
Maecenas - The writings of Maecenas
ALPHABETS AND SPELLING BOOKS

We should like to know to which of their national heroes the
Etruscans attributed the invention of writing, which the Greeks
attributed to Cadmus or Palamedes, and the Romans to the
ancient king Evander. In any case the part they played in
spreading through northern and central Italy, from Campania
to the Alps, an alphabet derived from the Greek one is one of the
most important aspects of the Etruscans' civilizing influence.
The Umbrians of Gubbio, the Veneti of Este, the Osei of Capua,
the Latins of Praeneste and the Romans themselves learnt to
perpetuate their first texts by writing them down in Etruscan
characters, more or less adapted or rearranged according to the
needs of their various dialects and languages. 1 But dating from
the earliest times are monuments whose authenticity allows us to
imagine how the little Etruscans learnt their a b c.
A little town in maritime Etruria behind the lagoon of Orbetello,
Marsiliana d' Albegna, had known, in the seventh century, a
prosperity equalling that of Vetulonia and Caere; then about 600
216
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
it had declined, doubtless due to the progress made by its rival

upriver, Saturnia. Now its tombs have given us, besides a
celebrated golden fibula adorned with a delightful line of ducks,
numerous orientalizing ivory objects, among which is a little
writing-tablet, nine centimetres by five, still containing remains
of the wax on which a schoolboy, using a stylus, had practised his
pothooks: on one of the long sides of the frame there was an
alphabet of twenty-six letters which he used as a model.2
The same alphabet, a little later in the course of this seventh
century, is found at the base of a bottle (leguncula) in bucchero
ware from the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Caere: 3 moreover a
syllabary is inscribed on the side: ci ea cu ce vi va vu ve zi za zu
ze, etc.
In imitation of the Etruscans, who themselves imitated the
Greeks in this respect, the whole peninsula began to learn its
letters. We have several alphabets like this on the wine-cups
from Nola in Campania, 4 and at Este, at the mouth of the Po,
numerous bronze tablets show, set out in squares, lists of letters
to be used in the teaching of writing and even particular rules of
punctuation which were current among the Veneti. 5
Yet it would be inexact, just because these model tablets
conjure up in an innocent light the primary schools of all times
and all lands, to think that their use was entirely pedagogic.
M. Lejeune has rightly remarked in one of his fine studies of
Venete philology: the alphabetic tablets of Este were part of a
collection of votive objects offered to the goddess of the place,
Reitia, and it cannot be doubted that their didactic nature also
had a magical or sacred significance. 'This teaching, originating
in the sanctuary, for a long time kept a sacerdotal character.' 6
Those who, having mastered the secrets of writing, were able
to seize words on the wing suddenly found themselves in
possession of a redoubtable weapon, an admirable, powerful
and disturbing one proper to the subjugation of primitive
imaginations. The Greeks themselves were never to be free
of the 'religious respect' with which they regarded the letters
of the alphabet, stoicheia or elementa, from which their philoso-
phers were to create the primordial elements of things. 7 Then
what about the Veneti? The Etruscans, always deeply involved
in the supernatural, were also unable to regard their alphabets
217
and syllabaries simply in the light of their didactic utility: the

tablet from Marsiliana d'Albegna is not so very different from
other tabulae ceratae which have been preserved at Pompeii and
elsewhere because instead of being in wood it is of ivory because
this luxury object was found in a tomb. 8 The same applies
to the vase from Caere and the other alphabets. We even
know of some that had never been used for didactic purposes
by the living before accompanying them in death: a chamber
tomb, at Colle near Siena, shows, painted on one of its walls,
a fine example of a b c d . . . and of ma me mi mu. 9 \Vriting,
liberating men from the domination of the moment and from the
fatality of oblivion, was obstinately bound up with the idea of
permanence, if not of eternity or immortality.
It so happens that the act of writing is one for which we know
the word in Etruscan. According to a bilingual epitaph at
Chiusi, Ve! Zicu was called in Latin Q. Scribonius C.f., 10 which
suggested the idea that the root zic- or zich- was equivalent to the
root scrib- and this key has opened every door we have been able
to try it on. A verb in the preterite ziclzuche, ziclzunce, at the end
of the ritual of Capua and of the convention of setting the bounds
of Perugia concludes the inscription: 'So-and-so wrote this.' 11
It is even possible that this word, inscribed on vases, might have
had the meaning of the Greek egrapsen, and introduced the
signature of the painter. 12 Moreover Larth Vetes zichu, on an
ossuary, 13 was probably Lars Vettius scriba, that is, a secretary or
a registrar. Finally the volumen which the supposed magistrate
of the tomb at Tarquinii unrolls before him and which recalls
his career has at the opening of the inscription the words ancn
ziclz, 'this writing,' which gives us the name of the book in
Etruscan. 14
TABLETS AND SCROLLS

The writing material at the disposal of the Etruscans was no
different from that used by the other Mediterranean peoples:
what we know of it comes almost entirely from the evidence
provided by funerary monuments, confirming what we have just
said about the sacred and magical character attached to all
written things. The Books of Death which, in the form of a
diptych or a scroll, appear in the tombs in the hands of the dead
218
ETRUSCAi."'l LITERATURE
person or of infernal divinities conjure up the irn:vocable sentences

of the fatum.
A diptych, consisting of two tablets joined together on one of
their long sides, is depicted clearly in one of the paintings of the
tomba degli Scudi (Tomb of the Shields) at Tarquinii.15 A young
demon with naked body and large red wings is seated cross-legged
before a large diptych, one of whose tablets rests on his knees,
while the other hangs down in front. Two black marks in the
space between the two tablets indicate the hinges by which they
were attached. On the tablet hanging down three lines are
written along the rectangle, beginning from the inner edge.
The banker Caecilius Jucundus, at Pompeii, uses his tablets in
the same way. On the other tablet, the demon is writing with an
invisible stylus the next part of his text: he has reached the end
of the second line. We are able to read: zilci Velus Hulchniesi
Larth Velchas Velthurs Aprthnalc clan sacnisa thui eitlz suthith
acazr, meaning: 'Under the magistracy of Ve! Hulchnie [ =
Fulcinius] (in Rome we would have a consular date), Larth
Velcha (Lars Volcius], son of Velthur and of Aprthni [Aburtennia],
received in this tomb the funeral honours.' Only two of the words-
sacnisa acazr - cannot be fully explained, but the meaning is
certainly very close to what we have written.
Another diptych can be seen on a mirror from Bolsena16 of
which we have already spoken: on it we can see Aulus and Caelius
Vibennae attacking the augur Cacus in his sacred wood; he is
singing, accompanying himself on the lyre; crouching at his feet,
a young listener, Artile (Ar(n)tile), little Arruns of Clusium, is
also singing as he reads from a diptych open on his knees. He
reminds us of the musical angels of Piero della Francesca and of
Luca della Robbia. But in the absence of any other profane
representation of educational scenes, this picture is of particular
interest to us, offering as it does, in a legendary setting, the
image of an Etruscan schoolboy reciting his lessons.
Much more frequent, in decorations on urns and in paintings,
is the representation of the volumen or scroll: whatever signs may
be traced on it, the name of a Fury or the epitaph to the dead
person, it is a symbol of the imprescriptible decrees of fate.
This is why it is held by, among others, Charon, no less re-
doubtable than the mallet which the guardian of Hell brandishes
219
in the other hand. Lying on the lid of their sarcophagus, the

dead often hold one in their hands. 17
What material was this scroll made of? It is very unlikely
that it was papyrus, though Strabo names papyrus among the
aquatic plants which grew on the edge of Lake Trasimeno
and Lake Bolsena, and he adds that whole shipments of it were
sent down the Tiber to Rome: it would seem that all kinds of
reeds and rushes, not suitable for paper-making, were called by
this generic name in Italy. 18 Perhaps there existed, even before
the spread of parchment to the west, 'books of skin', if that is
really the meaning, in the inscription at Tarquinii, of the zich
nethsrac of Laris Pulenas. 19 But the majority of the scrolls were
doubtless of cloth, and similar to those libri lintei which, so the
historians tell us, were preserved in the temple of Juno Moneta
at Rome and which contained lists of magistrates going back to
the fifth century.20
THE WRAPPINGS FROM THE MUMMY OF ZAGREB

An extraordinary stroke of luck has made one of these books
available to us, not in the form of a painting or of a relief but
in the shape of an actual book. 21 In the middle of the nineteenth
century, a Croatian tourist brought back from Egypt a female
mummy which, after having adorned his collection in Vienna,
went, on his death, to the museum at Zagreb. But when, after
having unrolled and somewhat torn the wrappings in which
she was encased, someone gave them a closer look, it was seen
that they bore writings which at first were taken to be Arabic or
Ethiopian, until J. Krall recognized them for Etruscan.
It had needed an unusual concatenation of circumstances to
bring us into possession of an outstanding monument to the
sacred literature of this people about whom we know so little.
Theophile Gautier's Tale of the Mummy seems very ordinary
when we consider the fantastic history of this volumen, which
came, judging from the characteristics of the language, from
northern Etruria, from Chiusi or Perugia therefore; this volumen
which was intended to shroud the remains of a woman somewhere
(we do not know exactly where it was found) in the Delta or the
Faiyum where the arid climate assured its preservation, and
which a last migration was to bring to Europe, finally coming
220
lffRUSCAN LITERATUHE
to rest in a museum in Jugosla\'ia. \Ve arc lost in conjecture

about how it could have got to Egypt, at a date - a fairly late one -
which it appears could be fixed between 150 and 30 BC. The
physical type of the dead woman tells us nothing about her race:
she measured l m. 62, and though her hair today has a reddish
tinge, this may be due to the discoloration brought about by
time or by the chemical preparations used in embalming her.
Whether she came from Etruria proper or was born on the banks
of the Nile, she was certainly the wife or daughter of an Etruscan
who had settled in Egypt and who, converted to the funerary
rites of the country of his adoption, had all the same wrapped
her in the folds of a relic he had brought with him and which
reminded him of the religion of his fathers. It has been thought
that he might have been a mercenary in the service of the
Ptolemies - we know of some of these, of Etruscan origin, from
the third century onwards - and installed as a cleruch or soldier-
peasant in a home in central Egypt. It is quite possible. Except
that we can hardly see how - though religious life was intense
in the Hellenistic armies - our Miles Gloriosus could have possibly
carried round in his luggage so precious and fragile a document.
But there were haruspices in the entourages of Roman generals
like Gabinius, Caesar, Antony and Cornelius Gallus who stayed
in Egypt at various times. Above all, the Hellenistic world
brought priests, magicians and soothsayers into close contact
with each other; Egypt, land renowned for its mysteries, where,
in the Hellenistic period, there came about a syncretism of all
religions, was such a powerful centre of attraction that one can
see many reasons why an adept of the Etrusca disciplina should go
to compare its tenets with the teachings of the Alexandrian clergy
or the traditions of the scribes of Memphis; we have already seen
that there were zarapiu, Serapion, in Etruscan families. 22
The text itself did not concern personally the woman whose
shroud it was; it did not even contain, as did the Egyptian Books
of the Dead, prescriptions drawn up to assure her happiness in
the beyond: it appears that no matter what sacred book, whatever
its contents, could express as well as any other the omnipotence
of fate. The document under discussion, whose general meaning
we are able to grasp thanks to the labours of Krall and Torp and
later of Herbig, Runes and Cortsen, Pallottino, Vetter and Olzscha,
221
was a ritual in the form of a calendar indicating at their dates in

the year (June 18, September 26, etc.) the ceremonies to be held in
honour of Jupiter, Neptune and other gods. 23 Here again, the
etruscologists know much more than is generally supposrd, though
naturally much less than they would like.
Meanwhile the wrappings of the mummy of Zagreb form a
unique example of an antique volumen. It was a 'book of linen',
and this, in an Egypt where papyrus was used, is sure confirmation
of its foreign origin. What is left of it - about one half - is
formed of twelve strips of varying lengths (from 17 cm. to 3m. 24)
and of a fairly constant width (from 6 to 7 cm.). Fortunately
several could be joined up with others to form the elements of
a reconstituted whole. This was originally a scroll whose total
length was 13 m. 75 (papyrus scrolls were usually much shorter:
twenty sheets placed end to end, or about 5 m.). 24 But the width
cannot be reckoned, though it was more than 33 cm. This band
was divided longitudinally into twelve columns separated by
perpendicular lines; each column was 25 cm. wide and, in the
best-preserved parts (four superimposed fragments), containing
twenty-three or twenty-four lines: there must have been about
thirty all told. The text was read, as was normal in Etruscan, from
right to left, and, also reading from right to left, the columns are
numbered XII, XI, X, IX, ... III, II, I. The whole thing-
letters and dividing lines - is done in red ink with a neatness and
care which go to show the value attached to this book by the
haruspex who had transcribed it.
Indeed there is no doubt that the volumen of Zagreb is one of
the famous Etrusci libri of which Latin authors frequently speak,
particularly at the end of the Republic, when, in order to obtain
a more precise knowledge of them, they could make use of Roman-
ized Etruscans who were still proud of their native traditions,
Aulus Caecina of Volterra, friend of Cicero, or Lucius Tarquitius
Priscus, friend of Varro. Moreover, they were beginning to be
more widely known by the general public: the misfortunes of the
times and people's disturbed consciences encouraged a demand
for esoteric writings and especially for these old black-books with
their certainties and consolations that were frowned upon by
official religion and the schools of philosophy. Lucretius vainly
put forward rationalist theories for natural phenomena; more and
222
ETRUSCAN LITERATUHE
more people preferred to interpret them by having recourse to

the 'Etruscan books'.
'This is to understand the true nature of the fiery thunderbolt,
and to see by what power it plays its part; not by unrolling
backwards the scrolls of Tyrrhcnian charms, vainly to search for
signs of the hidden purpose of the gods.'
non Tyrrhena retro volventem carnzina .frustra
indicia occultae divunz perquirre nzentis. 25
Usually the words retro voh:entem are translated as 'reading and
re-reading', as if retro meant nothing more than 'once again'.
But the historian Niebuhr, at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, was correct in assuming here a reference to 'retrograde'
writing, or rather, to the succession of columns, read backwards,
from right to left, in an Etruscan book which, like that encasing
the mummy of Zagreb, must have unrolled from left to right, in
a contrary direction to that to which the Romans were accustomed.
'Rolling Tyrrhenian songs backwards' must have appeared as
strange to Lucretius as leafing through the Koran would to a
Christian. This proves that he had seen and handled some of
these Etruscan books. (It has sometimes been suggested that he
was Etruscan by birth, and that his protests against belief in the
tortures of Hell were directly inspired by a properly Etruscan
anguish at the prospect of death.) There is proof also of the attrac-
tion this strange literature had for the contemporaries of Cicero;
the orator himself, quoting in his De Divinatione some verses which
he had devoted to his consulate of the year 63 and to the strange
natural events which two years earlier, at a moment when Catiline
was weaving the web of his conspiracy, had disturbed superstitious
Romans, states that the She-wolf of the Capitol was struck by
lightning that destroyed the Twins she was suckling: 'Then what
diviner, in turning the records and tomes of the augurs, failed to
relate the mournful forecasts the Etruscans had written?' (trans.
William Armisted Falconer). 26
II
THE BOOKS OF FATE
The ancient authors make many references to these books and
even make some borrowings which supply us with many details
223
about them. It was usual to class them in three categories: 2 7

the libri haruspicini first of all, in which were registered and
recorded the secular experiences of the Etruscan people in the
scrutiny of the entrails of victims (exta), and this was the real
domain of the haruspices; then there were the libri fulgurales,
which handled the interpretation of thunder and lightning, and of
which one part is known to us, among others, through Seneca's
Naturales Quaestiones; finally, the libri rituales, whose contents
covered much wider ground, for they embraced 'prescriptions
concerning the founding of cities, the consecration of altars and
temples, the inviolability of ramparts, the laws relating to city
gates, the division into tribes, curiae and centuriae, the constitution
and the organization of armies, and all other things of this nature
concerning war and peace'. 28 We may therefore say that there
was nothing either in public or private life whose course had not
been foreseen and fixed by the 'ritual books'. It is among these
that we must place the ritual in the form of a calendar from the
mummy of Zagreb. They also included in particular certain
'Acherontic Books', which were intended to guide the dead along
the paths of the beyond, and the libri fat ales which gave knowledge
of the workings of destiny: herein were preserved all conceivable
forms of prodigy (ostenta) through which the experts claimed to
see the hidden will of the gods.
Thus the whole surroundings of Etruscan life could suddenly
reveal, in the innocent plants and the familiar animals, unexpected
threats or promises. 29 One had to beware, in an orchard, of all
kinds of trees which were presumed to be maleficent, and to
burn at once, as soon as they showed above the earth, the
eglantine, the fern, the wild pear, the dogwood whose branches
are coloured red, the black fig and those plants which gave black
fruits and berries, for they were protected by the infernal powers.
On the other hand, the laurel could bring good fortune to
ambitious people: if by chance one grew on the stern of your
trireme, you could be sure of a victory at sea. A laurel in a
garden grew up beside a peach tree (persicum) and in less than a
year overtopped it: an omen which no one doubted meant the
defeat of the Persians . . . The habits of bees deserved close
attention: despite the favourable things said about them in
legends, for example, that they had settled on Plato's mouth
224
ETHUSCAN LlTFRATUHE
when he was in his cradle 'thus foretelling the sweetness of his

discourse', the Etruscans considered omens coming from bees
to be sinister, as when a swarm settled right in the Forum at
Cassino. It is true that at the same time, at Cumac, mice had
gnawed the gold deposited in the temple of Jupiter. If a huge
lion happened to leap upon an army on the march and succumbed
to its arrows, the haruspices who even as late as the fourth century
AD accompanied the emperor Julian concluded that a king was
about to die. But who? Julian, or his adversary Sapor? They
did not say. Serpents often intervene in Etruscan divination,
bringing ambivalent omens. And the same with birds: one day
a woodpecker perched so tamely on the head of the praetor
Aelius Tubero, who was sitting in judgement in his tribunal
in the Forum, that it was easily seized; the haruspices said that
if it was released, the Empire, and if it was killed, the praetor
would be threatened with dire catastrophe. The praetor at once
killed the bird, and there was the defeat of Cannes, from which
Rome recovered, but at which seventeen members of the gens
Aelia perished.
We have already recalled how Tarquinius the Elder, on his
arrival in Rome, saw an eagle steal his cap, carry it off and then
put it gently back on his head, whereupon Tanaquil did not
hesitate to entertain the highest hopes of the future. Again it
was told how the future Augustus, while still a child, was
picnicking in a wood just off the highway when an eagle suddenly
swooped down, snatched his piece of bread, only to restore it to
him a few moments later. But particularly remarkable is that
text which was translated, almost literally, it would seem, from
Etruscan into Latin and which Virgil remembers in his Fourth
Eclogue: ' "If the fleece of a ram or of a sheep be specked with
purple or gold, it forebodes for the prince a great happiness and
prosperity in his order and lineage, a growth of glory and prolific-
ness in his lineage and offspring." In the world regenerated by the
mysterious child's birth, of himself the ram in the meadows shall
change his fleece, now to sweetly blushing purple, now to saffron
yellow; of its own will shall scarlet clothe the grazinglambs.'
(Trans. Rushton Fairclough.)
We may imagine with what close attention the Etruscans
investigated the nightmares of pregnant women: premature
225
births, androgynes, two-headed daughters, boys with elephant

heads, and that calf born - in the reign of Nero - by the wayside
in the region of Placentia, which had its head on its hindquarters.
The haruspices concluded from the latter that preparations were
being made to give the Empire a new head, but that it would not
be very secure; nor would the plot be well concealed, because the
animal's head had been like that when it was still in its mother's
belly and had been brought into the world by the roadside.
Above all, celestial phenomena excited the ingenuity of the
interpreters of omens. Not only the flight of birds but the course
of the stars and in particular the appearance of comets, were
generally considered as a bad omen, as well as storms and rains -
rains of milk, of blood, of iron, of wool or of brick, all announcing
public disasters; but a rain of white chalk, in 98, was interpreted
as an earnest of a good harvest and fine weather. The great civil
convulsions at the close of the Republic were preceded by sudden
earthquakes, mysterious trumpet-blasts and inexplicable sounds
of arms clashing in the sky.
We possess a speech of Cicero from 56 which illustrates the
authority that ancient Etruscan civilization exercised over the
Roman mind. 30 Violent, dull grumblings had one day terrified
a whole quarter at the gates of Rome. The haruspices were
appealed to; they consulted their books and pronounced that it
was the sign that consecrated places had been profaned. Publius
Clodius, the sworn enemy of Cicero, declared it was the ground
that the latter was rebuilding his house on that was being defiled;
his house had been destroyed during his exile and the land had
been confiscated and dedicated to the goddess of Liberty. Not
at all, retorted the orator, it was the neighbouring house, the one
belonging to Clodius, that the gods were referring to: despite the
sanctuary and the altars inside it, he had made it a place of
debauchery. Then, developing his counterblast, Cicero proved
that if the libri fulgurales were more deeply studied, it appeared
that other offences, for which Clodius was responsible, had also
been committed: public games neglected or degraded, ambassadors
murdered, solemn oaths violated, ancient mysteries not celebrated,
and finally a state of mortal danger created in the Senate and
among the chiefs of State by discord in the Conservative party.
It has been noted that in diagnosing these evils the haruspices
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
were not so much defining Roman society as Etruscan society

which had consigned to their sacred books its religious obsessions
and its aristocratic institutions.
This also emerges from the examination of another /iber
fulguralis which M. Piganiol discovered in a Greek translation
by a Byzantine author; 31 the text, some six centuries earlier, had
been translated from the Etruscan into Latin by a contemporary
of Cicero, Nigidius Figulus. It is a 'brontoscopic' calendar,
that is to say, indicating the significance of thunder-claps for
every day of the year: if it thunders on September II, the clients
of noble houses will foment a political revolution; if it thunders on
October 24, the people will overthrow their masters because of
the disagreements among the latter; if it thunders on December 3,
a dearth of fish will cause men to eat the flesh of their flocks;
if it thunders on March 26, convoys of slaves will enter the port;
if it thunders on July 14, power will return to the hands of a
single man, who will wield it unjustly; if it thunders on August 19,
women and slaves will carry out assassinations.
THE ETRUSCAN RELIGION AND ITS PROPHETS

The Etruscan religion, unlike the Greek and Roman religions,
but like the Jewish and Christian religions, was a revealed
religion. 32 All the books we have just been talking about were
held to contain the teaching of a few inspired people, semi-divine,
who had made known to men the secrets of the universe. The
most celebrated of the prophets, Tages, 33 was particularly
venerated in the religion of Tarquinii. It was said that one day
a ploughman had dug his ploughshare too deeply into the earth,
and that Tages had at once sprung from the furrow. He had the
appearance of a child, but the wisdom of an old man. The whole
of Etruria had soon gathered together to listen to him and to
take down his words in writing. A mirror from Tuscania shows
Tages teaching Tarchon the art of foretelling the future from the
entrails of victims. A number of sacred books were ascribed to
him: the brontoscopic calendar translated by Nigidius Figulus,
for example, was attributed to him. The libri Tagetici, as they
were called, enjoyed great favour even in Rome, and particularly
from the second century AD were tirelessly read and re-read and
commented by the philosophers who extracted from them an
227
esoteric doctrine capable of rivalling Christianity: Apuleius,

author of the Metamorphoses (or The Golden Ass) had devoted a
book to the elucidation of Tages' poems.
Elsewhere the prophet took the name Cacus from an old
Italic divinity who, in Latium, appears under quite a different
light as a frightful brigand who stole the oxen from Hercules. 34
On the contrary, several urns and a mirror from Etruria make
Cacus appear as an inspired Apollo prophesying while accom-
panying himself on the lyre; at his feet Artile or Ar(n)tile, little
Arnth or Arruns, hero of Clusium, sings the responses to his
song. 35 But Caelius and Aul us Vibennae make a sudden appearance
in the wood and endeavour to seize the lyrist. This theme of
the capture of the diviner, from whom ordinary men try to
wrest by violence the secrets he tells only to initiates has other
examples in Etruscan religion, but it was also widespread in
Mediterranean folklore. The old man of the sea, Proteus, is
well known: the Menelaus of Homer and the Aristaeus of Virgil
laid hold of him so well that he tried to escape them by meta-
morphosing himself into a lion, a serpent and running water;
only then did he speak. 36 And Silenus, in the sixth Bucolic, only
very unwillingly consented to sing the creation of the world,
the loves of Gallus and the works of Apollo after two young
shepherds had surprised him in drunken sleep.
Again sometimes it is a 'nymph' who is entrusted with the
divine message. And just as in Rome that pious king, Numa
Pompilius, conversed nightly with the nymph Egeria who gave
him instruction in the forms of worship, so at Clusium, Arruns,
in certain forms of the legend, learnt from the nymph Vegoia
'the decisions of Jupiter and of Justice'. 37 Tarquitius Priscus,
in the days of Cicero, transcribed into Latin the libri Vegoici,
which were preserved in the temple of Apollo Palatinus, and, by
extraordinary good luck, a fragment of this has come down to
us under the title: Extract from the books of Vegoia to Arruns
Velthumnus of which we have already quoted the beginning;
here is the complete translation:
'Know that the sea was separated from the sky. Now when
Jupiter had claimed back the land of Etruria, he established
and commanded that the plains should be surveyed and the
228
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
fields limited. Knowing well what human avarice and passions

are excited by land, he desired that everything should be
defined by boundary-marks. One day, when moved by the
avarice of the end of the eighth century someone will treat
these bounds with contempt, men, by fraudulent means will
violate them, lay hands upon them or displace them. But
whoever shall touch and displace them in order to extend his
property and diminish that of others shall for this crime be
condemned by the gods. If such men be slaves, they shall be
brought into an even lower state of servitude. But if there
be complicity on the part of the master, soon the house of the
latter shall be extirpated and his race shall perish utterly.
Those who displace the bounds shall be stricken by worse
sicknesses and worse wounds, and their weakened limbs shall
be affiicted. Then shall the earth often be shaken by tempests
and whirlwinds that shall make it tremble. The harvest shall
frequently be spoiled and laid flat by rain and hail, shall wither
beneath the canicular heat and shall be destroyed by mildew.
There shall be numerous dissensions among the people.
Know that such punishments shall take place when such
crimes occur. Therefore be not of bad faith, nor speak
deceitfully. Plant our teachings in your hearts.'
We shall not comment here on the details of this prophecy:

it inserts into an account of the creation of the world, which at
times reminds us of certain verses in Genesis, a vengeful
imprecation against those who break the laws, pronounced by
Jupiter himself, of landed property. The Etruscan Jupiter -
we have already had occasion to demonstrate this - is a Jupiter
of boundaries, whose inviolability he guarantees, and Etruscan
civilization defines itself here, among all Italic civilizations, as a
civilization of peasant farmers passionately attached to the 'right
of Etruscan land', ius terrae Etruriae. They proudly defended the
sanctity of their boundaries, and this attitude went right back
to the origins of their race, when Jupiter had established his
reign; our fragment is probably of very ancient inspiration.
But it did not appear in this form until the moment when
Etruscan soil was undergoing mortal difficulties, when the
agrarian reforms of the Gracchi and their successors threatened,
D.L.E.-16 229
by planting new colonies in Etruria, the age-old security given

by the boundaries. Usurping the legendary name of Vegoia,
taking upon himself the style and the formulae of traditional
divination, a haruspex at the end of the eighth Etruscan century,
that is to say in the years before 88 BC renewed the malediction
of the sacred books addressed to those who interfered with the
boundaries. We have recently shown that the date of this can
be precisely stated: it was in 91 that Vegoia's prophecy first saw
the light of day in the form of a popular propaganda pamphlet, an
expression of Etruscan revolt against the programme of the tribune
Livius Drusus, who is referred to in the text only in an anonymous
fashion which befitted oracular language, as 'someone'; but we
know that his policy provoked a march on Rome by Etruscans
who had sprung to arms at the call of the consul Philippus, and
that he perished in the uprising. It is the fevered atmosphere of
that year which gives this fragment its frantic tone, but its general
feeling is authentically Etruscan: a final wave from the ocean
of time coming to expire on the shores of the classical era. 91
was also. the year in which Cicero sets the serene and learned
conversations, held in a villa in Tusculum, of his De Oratore:
what a difference between that stormy, lightning-struck evening
and those pure summer mornings!
The truths revealed by Tages, Cacus and Vegoia and consigned

to the sacred books constitute a body of doctrine, a tradition,
a teaching to which the Etruscans gave a name we are still ignorant
of, but which perhaps is hidden, according to a hypothesis
recently put forward by S. Mazzarino, in the inscription on the
cippus from Perugia: tesns rasnes. 38 In any case, it was what the
Romans called the Etrusca disciplina. The expression recurs
often in our texts, and Latinists will not fail to notice that in this
stereotyped formula the adjective always precedes the substantive:
an emphatic position, clearly indicating opposition of this tradition
foreign to the national tradition. 39
The Etruscan discipline, whose birth had been presided over
by the most famous lucumones of legend, one Tarchon at Tarquinii
and one Arruns at Clusium, remained for a long time the common
patrimony of the great aristocratic houses. But we are not in-
formed of their fidelity to it until the moment when the aristocracy
230
ETHUSCAN LITERATUHE
was in decline and on the point of escheating this patrimony.

Cicero in his De Divi11atio11e40 mentions an assembly of the Senate
which passed an edict that must date from the second century; it
prescribed that in each of the twelve peoples of the confederation
the noble families should give the State six of their sons to study
religion: this remarkable course brought about the official organ-
ization of the Etruscan discipline under the protection of the
Senate which thus proclaimed its interest in a science it had so
often had recourse to, and would so often have recourse to again.
Cicero retained this decree among the laws of his ideal constitution:
'Let Etruria teach princes the discipline': Etruria principes dis-
ciplinam doceto. 41 In fact, the formula was not very clear, Cicero's
text quickly became corrupted, so that a rather muddled thinker
like Valerius Maximus at the beginning of the Empire was
capable of believing that it was young men from the Roman
nobility who were to be sent, ten at a time, to each of the Etruscan
peoples to learn their discipline. But the interpretation we have
given, and which conforms with the views of nearly all historians,
is confirmed by the allusion made by the emperor Claudius in
one of his speeches on the college of haruspices: he showed then, in
AD 47, his determination to struggle for the preservation, in face
of the waves of foreign superstitions, of 'the most ancient dis-
cipline in Italy', and he founded his policy on the example of the
past, the days when 'the great in Etruria, either by their own
accord, or by the instigation of the Senate, had maintained and
propagated this knowledge in the families'. 42
THE HARUSPICES
The assembly of the Senate in the second century had expressly
aimed at reacting against the indifference to their national tradi-
tions which had been brought about by the decline of the lucumones
'so that so great an art, in consequence of the humble condition
of those who devoted themselves to it, might not be deprived of
the dignity proper to a religion and reduced to the level of daily
toil for gain'. The crisis in the recruitment of haruspices which
reigned among the upper classes is in fact attested by the contempt
into which they had fallen: a sacerdotal vocation had become a
sordid job. As the number of qualified haruspices diminished,
there arose a host of village soothsayers, haruspices vicani, who,
231
under a name that took no one in except the naive, exploited the
latter's credulity. 43 Plautus and Pomponius have nothing but
sarcasm for these charlatans, and Cato, anxious to keep good order
in his rural domain, forbade the entry of 'haruspices, augurs,
fortune-tellers and astrologers'. The same Cato felt astonishment
that a haruspex could look at another without bursting into
laughter. 44 Still later, at Gubbio, L. Veturius Rufio, avispex,
extispicus, an expert in the observation of the flight of birds and
in the scrutiny of victims' entrails, called himself sacerdos publicus
et privatus, public and private priest; apart from his official
functions, he gave individuals private consultations, evidently
well paid. 45 There was a worse danger to be feared: Augustus
passed a law forbidding haruspices to receive private visits and to
deliver prognostications concerning the decease of individuals. 46
Nevertheless the Senate's effort to resuscitate religious vocations
among the aristocracy does not seem to have been in vain. Thanks
to superstition, there were still as many, if not more, unofficial
haruspices. Under the Empire, haruspices are found everywhere,
practising their art in the municipalities and the legions, in the
houses of provincial governors and at the court of emperors. 47
We know that as late as 408, at the moment when the approach
of the Goths of Alaric constituted a mortal threat to Rome,
there were in the city Etruscan haruspices whom the invasion
had driven out of Tuscany and whom the prefect of the city
and Pope Innocent the First did not disdain to consult. 48 But
among these more or less accredited functionaries we note,
mainly after the beginning of Claudius' reign, the existence of an
'order of the LX haruspices', organized as a college and having its
centre at Tarquinii and then in Rome, with a president elected for
one year and funds administered by a treasurer: this ordo hence-
forward played the role of authorized guardian of the Etruscan
discipline, and assured its long survival, right to the end of
antiquity and even into the Byzantine epoch. 49
From the last century of the Republic, the renewed loyalty of the
lucumones to their traditions is shown by certain facts: first of all
by the quality of the haruspices whom the great men of State en-
gaged not only as technicians butalsoas trusted friends - Herennius
Siculus, who, involved in 121 in the downfall of C. Gracchus,
proudly committed suicide just as he was about to be imprisoned;
232
ETRUSCAN LITEHATUHE
Postumius, who, through the sagacious interpretation of an omen,

helped Sylla in 89 to capture the Samnite camp outside Nola;
finally, Spurinna who warned Caesar, who right up to the last
moment refused to believe him, of the ineluctable outcome of the
Ides of March. All three were certainly of good Etruscan stock:
the first, Tuscus despite his surname which merely expresses the
fact that either he or his family had interests in Sicily; the second
perhaps from Perugia; the third probably from Tarquinii. 50
But above all among the contemporaries and friends of Cicero
we see representatives of families from central Etruria in whom the
'discipline' is piously transmitted from father to son like something
in a direct line of inheritance. We have already had the occasion
to mention that Tarquitius Priscus 51 whom an epigram attributed
to the youthful Virgil disrespectfully associates with Varro and
other high-flown rhetors. 52 His fame lasted to the final years of
antiquity as one of the masters of the arts of divination: he had
translated into Latin collections of supernatural events (Ostentaria
Tusca); Pliny cites him as one of the sources of this material, and
the libri T arquitiani were still being consulted in the fourth
century. Now two inscriptions at Tarquinii, 53 made in the days
of the emperor Claudius and which perhaps had been placed in
the premises of the ordo LX haruspicum, inform us, despite their
mutilations, about this person and his son. The first had published
Latin translations of several Etruscan books, one of which con-
cerned the ritual of public assemblies (ritus comitialis). Others,
even more important, contained the legendary teachings of Arruns
of Clusium, given after the revelation he had received of the
will of Jupiter and of Justice through the medium of the prophetess
Vegoia: sacra quibus placare numina Arruns a magistra edoctus erat
ex Javis et Justitiae effatis. And he had taught his art in Rome for
over thirty years. The second, probably his son, had learnt from
him the art of interpreting thunder, and, after his death, had
succeeded him, without great distinction, in the same high office.
But these two 'eulogies' of the Tarquitii Prisci at the end of the
Republic had been drawn up at the beginning of the Empire, at
the request of a third Tarquitius Etruscus by a fourth Tarquitius
Priscus who in the middle of the first century of our era was the
counsellor of the emperor Claudius in his policy of religious
revival; he was hostile to the 'foreign superstitions' and to combat
233
them relied on 'the most ancient Italian discipline', which was

the Etruscan discipline. Thus the attachment to this discipline
over four generations by a Tarquinii family whose membership
of the equestrian order is sufficient to show its high local origins,
was not relaxed.
Even better known, and no less proud, even in the days when
it participated in the political life of Rome, of the memories of
its race's grandeur, was the gens Caecina, of Volterra. 54 The
theatre of its native town has recently been excavated, and is full
of inscriptions bearing this name, reserving the seats of honour
for the family in its hemicycle. 55 But long before its accession
to the consulate under Claudius with C. Caecina Largus, the
family had had its representatives in the clientela and in the inti-
mate circle of friends of Cicero. 56 Aulus Caecina, in 69 or 68 BC,
had been defended by the orator in a case concerning the land he
had received from his wife Caesennia, a rich heiress of Tarquinii:
for the Etruscan nobility rarely made misalliances with foreigners.
At the time of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, A.
Caecina had fought against the former, and had been condemned to
banishment. It was from then, in 46, that can be dated an epistol-
ary exchange between him and Cicero - three letters from Cicero,
one reply from Caecina - which show the esteem they had for
each other and their intellectual affinities. Caecina was a good
writer: he had the gift of eloquence. Apart from the very violent
pamphlet he had written against Caesar, and the later plaintive
retraction which earned him, to soften his exile, the privilege
of residing in Sicily, he had left writings on Etruscan science,
notably on the interpretation of thunder, which were used by
Seneca in his Naturales Quaestiones and by Pliny in his Book II.
He was an expert in divination, and an entire letter from Cicero
contrasts amusingly the predictions he made from his own augural
experiments and those which Caecina was able to base on the
Etruscan discipline; and what he says is worth quoting here:
ratio quaedam mira Tuscae disciplinae, quam a patre, nobilissimo
atque optimo uiro, acceperas, 'the truly marvellous teaching in the
Etruscan discipline which you received from your father, whose
merit equalled his birth'. 5 7
With Tarquitius Priscus, with Caecina, we find ourselves in
an Etruria which, thanks to the efforts of the Senate in the second
234
ETHUSCAN LITERATUHE
century, of Cicero at the end of the Republic, of Claudius at the

beginning of the Empire, struggles obstinately to sur\'i\'e. I Jere
it is permissible to go further back in time and quote an example
at least of the piety with which the leading Etrurians spontane-
ously (spo11te) upheld the 'discipline' in their families. Such indeed
is the lesson to be learnt from the lengthy epitaph we have already
referred to engraved on a sarcophagus at Tarquinii, known im-
properly as the sarcophagus of the Magistrate: it should more
correctly be called 'of the Priest'. 58 The dead man, shown semi-
recumbent on the lid of the sarcophagus, is a little old man with a
big head and weak features on whom the heroic accoutrements
sit rather badly: his chest is bare, and he wears two wreaths,
one round his neck, the other round his head - this one at first
sight might be taken for a beret. Yet with his stern regard and
his frowning brows he affects a vaguely Napoleonic authority.
He was an eminent local ecclesiastical personality. He unrolls
before him a volumen, and we have already seen that the presence
of a book was frequent in the decoration of funerary objects,
suggesting as it did the laws of destiny. This book is in fact
identified at the beginning of the inscription by three words
ancn zich nethsrac which seems to signify 'this haruspicinal
book', 59 and to designate one of those libri fat ales in which the
precepts of the Etruscan discipline were written down. But here
the parents of the dead man have seized the opportunity to
inscribe on it his curriculum vitae: nine lines of which only one
part presents a clear and undisputed meaning, but of which the
general gist is plain. Lars Pulenas - such was his name - had held
numerous religious offices at Tarquinii; he had been, among other
things, the equivalent of what was known in Rome as the rex
sacrorum, and had instituted and practised certain rites; in par-
ticular he had played an important part in the celebration of the
Dionysiac mysteries, which, introduced from Greece, had been
greeted with fervour in Etruria and which were to spread from
Etruria to Rome 'like some morbid pestilence' as Livy says, there
to provoke, in 186, the famous disorders connected with the
Bacchanalia. The epitaph can be dated from about 200.
But the onomastic formula with which it opens: Laris Pule11as,
Larces clan, Larthal papacs, Velthurus nefts, prumts Pules Larisa!
Creices is no less informative; it proudly enumerates, going right
235
back to the fourth generation, the ancestors of Laris Pulenas: his

father, Laree Pulenas, then his paternal uncle, Larth Pulenas,
then his grandfather, Velthur Pulenas, and finally his great grand-
father, Laris Pule Creice, all of which reserve until the end,
inverting the usual order of words, the really extraordinary
surname the last one bears. Translated, we read: Laris Pulenas,
son of Laree, nephew of Larth, grandson of Velthur, great grandson
of Laris Pule the Greek.
So the founder of the Pulena family, whose name was to
survive in Latin, during tht! Empire, in the gens of the Pollenii,
was one Laris Pule or Pules, whose descendants liked to imagine
that he had come from Greece in the fourth century. Whether
this was so or not, there is nothing astonishing about such an
attitude. The Romans liked to set the origins of their civilization
in Greece, and many great families claimed Ulysses or Aeneas
among their ancestors. But the Etruscans had got in before
them and continued to out-do them in their Philhellenism. A
priestly family of Tarquinii could not do less than the Aemilii
of Rome, who boasted of having the blood of Pythagoras in their
veins. 60
Moreover, Pule, in Greek Polles, is in fact the name of an ancient
Greek diviner who had no equal in divinatory talent except the
celebrated Melampus, 'Black Foot', sung by Homer. A proverb,
referring to an omen difficult of interpretation, says that it required
the art of a Melampus or a Polles to unlock its secret. 61
... Polles, cui penna loquax dat nosse futura. 62
Or: 'Polles, whom the talkative plumage (of the birds) allows to
know the future.' But we must not think that this mysterious
Polles came from Lydia - where the name is particularly well
known - about 350 BC to bring Tarquinii the benefits of the
Etrusca disciplina, but simply that a rather far-fetched homonymic
had allowed the Pulena to regard themselves as the depositaries
of his art; having transmitted it without a break for four genera-
tions, they were to perpetuate the tradition for many more cen-
turies, for under Marcus Aurelius we see one of their descendants,
Pollenius Auspex, acceding to the consulate: his cognomen shows
the continuance of an ability to predict the future by observing
the flight of birds.
ETRUSCAN LITERATUHE
III
DID THE ETRUSCANS HAVE A PROFANE LITERATUim?

The preceding pages have perhaps made clearer what was one
part of Etruscan literature, the Etrusca disciplina, a collection of
holy scriptures such as were possessed by all oriental civilizations.
Greece had none at all, and Rome herself probably knew of them
only through the influence of the Etruscans from whom she had
received her Sibylline books. Did there exist, alongside this
sacred literature, a profane literature intended for amusement
and instruction and a heightening of life, like the poems of
Homer, the comedies of Plautus, the histories of Tacitus? This
seems to be the implication of a phrase by Posidonius in Diodorus:
'They cultivated the art of letters, natural sciences and theology.' 63
Here we see that the humanities were scrupulously distinguished
from what was properly the Etruscan discipline.
This difficult problem has for long enough been answered in
the negative. Even as late as thirty years ago Pericle Ducati
maintained that 'the Etruscan people were not a literary people:
devoting their time to commercial activities, to industrial and
agricultural enterprises, producing many engineers, particularly
specialists in hydraulics, and many doctors whose practical
knowledge bordered on magic and superstition, the Etruscans
did not rise to the level of creating poems which reveal not only
the fires of the imagination or the passion of personal feelings but
also the sublime soaring of the spirit freed from the daily cares of
material existence'. 64 That is a big mouthful, and a rather rash
deduction confusing pell-mell statements of fact, value judge-
ments and attempts at explanation. Already a great scholar like
Bartolomeo Nogara was attempting to break away from such
summary negations, 65 and new data have come along to prove
him right.
There are three points to be considered. First of all, we may
be sure that the genius of the Etruscans, as it is revealed in the
skill of their technicians as well as in the talent of their artists,
was in no way, a priori, incapable of literary expression. Secondly,
though their works have almost entirely perished, there remain
at least traces of them, and especially a memory and a considerable
237
impression in other literatures. Then as to whether their literature

was good or bad, original in its inspiration or slavishly imitative,
written in a noble style or in a coarse form, is a question we cannot
answer here, though here again we are able to make certain
guesses.
We owe to Livy an affirmation which at first sight is surpris-
ing but deserves our attention. 66 We are at the close of the fourth
century, at a moment when Rome is undertaking the conquest of
Etruria. Tradition always ascribed to this period a great military
exploit, the march through the Ciminian forest which, in the region
of present-day Viterbo, to the east of the Lake of Bolsena, seemed
to place a redoubtable obstacle in the way of the Roman legions,
one as terrifying as that which, at the time when Livy was writing,
made them pause at the entrance of the wooded defiles of Ger-
mania. But a reconnaissance of its impenetrable ways was made,
that year, in 310 by a member of the gens Fabia; according to the
texts, the Claudii also claimed the merit for these operations.
This person, Caeso Fabius according to some, C. Claudius
according to others, the brother by the same father or only by the
same mother of the consul Q. Fabius Rullianus, disguised himself
as a peasant and accompanied by a single slave succeeded in
slipping into enemy territory where without being discovered he
established an itinerary that took him right to Chiusi in the Val
di Chiana. What saved his life on this hazardous expedition was
his perfect knm-vledge of the Etruscan language, so that he never
for one moment aroused the suspicions of his interlocutors and
guides.
How did he come to know Etruscan so well? He had been
educated in Caere, in a family connected with his own by the
bonds of hospitality, and there he had been instructed 'in Etruscan
letters'. Livy adds, weighing his words, 'I have texts which prove
that it was the usual custom in those days to instruct young
Romans in Etruscan letters, just as today they are instructed in
Greek letters: Habeo auctores vulgo tum Romanos pueros, sicut
nunc Graecis, ita Etruscis litteris erudiri solitos'.
What does he mean by 'Etruscan letters'? It is clear that it
did not mean simply learning to read and write on alphabet
tablets and syllabary boards like those from Marsiliana and
Caere. The word 'letters' is ambiguous: it not only means the
h"fRUSCAN LITEHATUHE
letters of the alphabet but also, and indeed more so, grammar anti
literature. What literature could it be?
Livy is not here thinking of the Etruscan discipline properly
speaking. The comparison he makes in this respect with the
Greek education of young Romans of his time sends us off in
quite another direction: 'just as today they are instructed in Greek
letters.' He is evidently thinking of boys under seventeen (pueri)
who, attending the school of a grammaticus (the word for 'gram-
marian' in Latin is Greek), learnt to read Homer, the Tragic
Poets and Menander. It was in order to coach his sons in the
Odyssey that Livius Salinator in the third century had brought
from Tarentum the Greek poet Andronicus; it was to give the
best grounding in Greek to young Scipio Aemilianus that Aemilius
Paulus in the second century surrounded him, in the library of
Perseus which he had brought from Macedonia, with a whole
team of Greek professors, painters, sculptors, etc. And even in
the days of Livy the study of the Latin poets in secondary educa-
tion had scarcely overtaken that of the Greek poets. Cicero read
and spoke Greek as well as his mother tongue. For many centuries
Roman culture was bilingual. 67
This is what Livy found in his sources, and it astonished him
as much as it does us. But he insists: 'I have texts .. .' in the face
of the sceptics. Texts in which several annalists are in agreement
that before turning to Greece Rome had sought in Etruria a
cultural initiation whose elements were lacking in her own
background.
And is there anything very shocking in that? There is nothing
so very unlikely in Caere, for example, at the end of the fourth
century, having the attraction of an intellectual capital for youthful
Fabii or Claudii; what its monuments and works of art tell us
seems to make it very possible, despite what Pericle Ducati
says, that Caere raised herself above 'the daily cares of material
existence'. After Veii fell in 390, Caere was not only the nearest
Etruscan metropolis to Rome, only about fifty kilometres away
along the future via Aurelia. It was also the most active centre
of Hellenism in central Italy - and Rome aspired towards
Hellenism through Etruria. Did not Caere have its treasury at
Delphi, as if it were an authentic Greek colony? The tombs
have shown us with what passion the inhabitants collected the
239
finest examples of black-figured and red-figured Attic vases.

Greek artists had even come to the place in order to satisfy more
easily an insatiable clientele. From the curved flanks of their
vases, to say nothing of other imported articles, the Caerites
had long since learnt to recognize the heroes of legend: the
Trojan War, the voyages of Ulysses, the labours of Hercules,
the crimes of the Atreids were no secrets to them.
Indeed the problem is not to know whether or not the
Etruscans had a taste for literature. If there ever existed a
Boeotian race, the hydriae or water-jars of Caere and the frescoes
of Tarquinii were not made for its members. What is more to be
feared is that the prestige of Greek might have been so great that
it discouraged the Etruscans from using, in order to express
their sense of the tragedy and joy of life, the uncertain resources
of their own language. We can imagine the existence of a bilingual
Etruscan aristocracy, similar to the Roman nobility, composing
its first Greek essays and keeping its native tongue for the somewhat
disdainful composition of its sacred books. In general, that is
what must have happened. Yet certain facts seem to show that
the Etruscans did more than that.
FESCENNINE HYMNS AND SONGS

The memory of oral poetry composed by the Etruscans had not
entirely disappeared in the classical period. Dionysius of
Halicarnassus knew that at the annual festival of Juno Curitis at
Falerii a chorus of young girls used to sing in honour of the
goddess 'hymns composed by their ancestors'. 68 But though
Falerii was part of the Etruscan federation, it was ethnically
and linguistically a double town in which were mingled Etruscan
and Italic elements and the girls sang perhaps in a Faliscan dialect,
one close to Latin and Sabine. With reference to the verses by
Virgil in Book 8 of the Aeneid, in which he describes the dances
and songs of the Salii who, he says, 'chant praises of Hercules
and his lofty deeds', it was remarked that certain people attributed
to the king of Veii, Morrius, perhaps Mamarrius, the institution
of the Salian rites (the Salii were priest-dancers in Rome) in
which the Salii must have celebrated the founder of his race,
Halaesus, son of Neptune. 69 Here again, except for the mention
of Veii, there is nothing specifically Etruscan. Halaesus was also
ETRUSCAN LITEHATUHE
the eponymous hero of Falerii; moreover we have shown already7o

in connexion with the double-indented buckler similar to the
ancile or sacred shield of the Salii which Raymond llloch
discovered in a Villanovan tomb at Ilolsena, that these warrior
dances or armed dances had spread throughout the whole of
central Italy since the first Iron Age. Finally we remember the
'Fescennine Verses', that sort of rustic poetry consisting of
unbridled puns and obscene abuse which, it is said, the peasants
formerly sang 'to a rude and clumsy metre'. They got their name
from the small town of Fescennium, from where they had made
their way to Rome. Here again we have an Etruscan town,
though in Faliscan territory. All we can say is that the fescennini
versus represented a spontaneous vein of popular comic doggerel,
widespread in all the central part of Italy, and which, at Fes-
cennium, under Etruscan influence, began to take on some
artistic form: these first refinements led to a generalization of the
name which thenceforward was applied to all similar manifesta-
tions of rustic mirth. 71
These three testimonies, curiously localized in the same
region, at the bottom of the southerly curve of the Tiber where
some very ancient Etrusco-Latin osmoses took place, are far
from being the works of literature, even oral ones, that we were
hoping for. The last example however recalls another fact
which the Etruscans played in the beginnings of Italic farce: we
have already spoken of the place given in their funeral games to
masked demons, the distant prototypes of the Commedia dell'
Arte. 72
DRAMATIC SPECTACLES
Yet with Phersu, however influential the impulse he provided
for the Atellana, we are still in the domain of mime, still far
removed from spoken drama, let alone written drama. But
Varro mentions a certain Volnius who had 'written Etruscan
tragedies'. 73 In order to appreciate the value of this testimony,
we have to go back to the celebrated chapter, already quoted,
in which Livy describes the arrival in Rome of the Etruscan
dancers and the beginnings of the Latin theatre. 74 That year,
364 BC, a plague ravaged the city: with the failure of all medi-
caments, the people turned to religion. In order to appease the
241
celestial ire, scenic games were started: this was a great novelty
for a people that so far had only known the chariot-races at the
circus. 'Without any singing, without imitating the action of
singers, players who had been brought in from Etruria danced
to the strains of the flautist and performed not ungraceful
evolutions in the Tuscan fashion.' Roman youth, which had
long been accustomed to exchanges of obscene and abusive
verse-dialogues known as Fescennini versus got the idea of imi-
tating the Etruscan players by adding to the choreography this
spoken element, and by adapting the movements to the words.
And the game became perfected with practice: there was a period
when professional actors of Roman stock and 'called histrions
because in Etruscan ister is the word corresponding to player',
performed 'satires', properly speaking 'farcical plays', which
resembled revues or farces in which there was a mimed dance,
accompanied by singing, and a musical score containing all these
elements. But we have to wait until the middle of the third
century and the arrival in Rome of the Tarentine Livius
Andronicus bringing in his luggage the whole repertoire of Greek
tragedy and comedy before these improvisations were given a
plot, a subject and a final text.
It was probably from Varro's Antiquitates Rerum Humanarum
et Divinarum that Livy borrowed this erudite reconstruction of
the origins of the Roman drama: 75 we see how it lays bare the
various sources and note the successive intervention of each
in a progressively unified ensemble. And at once the evident
artificiality of the process, which tries to find in this evolution
the stages which, according to Aristotle's Poetics had marked
the emergence of the Greek theatre, invites us not to accept what
we are told quite literally: facts are never as simple, nor as
systematic as that. We have Livy stating, not without astonish-
ment, that an art which was to have such a noble future had
started very insignificantly, and even came from abroad, from
Etruria. Moreover he gives us the Etruscan word for these
artistes, ister or hister, a word which, latinized into histrio, was
to have great fame. But the initial responsibility accorded to
these is confined to the dance, a dance whose beauty he does not
deny: haud indecoros motus tusco more dabant: 'they performed not
ungraceful evolutions in the Etruscan manner.' And this litotes
242
ETRUSCAN l.ITERATUHE
reminds us at once of the marvellous dancers in the archaic

paintings at Tarquinii. But their dances were done to the flut e
only: they were not accompanied by any carmen or rhythmed
speech. In fact, however hard we look, we can find no singer
represented in the tombs; 76 nor do these dancers attempt to
mime feelings like love or actions like fighting: it is so to speak
pure dancing they perform - and that indeed is what the choreo-
graphic movements in the paintings on the walls of the Tomb
of the Lionesses, of the Leopards and of the Triclinium appear
to be.
Yet we may wonder if, in this analytical preoccupation with
giving everyone his due, the patriotism of Varro and Livy had
not tended to over-emphasize the part played by Rome. The
Etruscan historians at the beginning of the fourth century had
perhaps themselves, under a Greek influence which could not
fail to make itself felt on a public as Hellenized as theirs, begun
to realize that great theatrical possibilities lay within their dances.
Above all, it is inconceivable that once the theatre had been born
somewhere in central Italy the community of culture which as
we have already said united Rome, Caere, Praeneste, Tarquinii
and Chiusi should not have produced everywhere the same
results, and that the development which Livy attributes to the
games in the Circus Maximus should not at least have had
repercussions on the games of the Etruscan federation at Volsinii.
Why should Etruria have deprived herself of dramatic spectacles
when Sicily and southern Italy were full of them? Right from the
first half of the fifth century, Syracuse had a magnificent theatre
where Aeschylus saw his Persians performed and on whose
stepped seats Pindar and Plato sat. Tarentum had two theatres
in which Livius Andronicus applauded Euripides before intro-
ducing him to Rome; Apulian ceramic with its numerous scenes
from tragedies painted on its vases offers definite proof of the
splendour of their productions. 77 It is true that farther north
Velia, Paestum and even Cumae have still not been found to
possess a theatre in stone, that Pompeii did not have hers until
the beginning of the second century, and Rome until 55. But
we know that the theatres of stone were preceded, in Rome,
by wooden trestle stages on which were played the tragedies of
Ennius and the comedies of Plautus. If there were scenic games
z43
in Etruria, they must have used temporary installations which

have disappeared.
Etruscan tragedy seems to be reflected, as far as the third and
second centuries are concerned, on the sarcophagi and urns of
Tarquinii, Chiusi and Volterra. 78 All the legends of the epic
and tragic repertory of the Greeks are represented there, especially
scenes of carnage, as if they were offering the defunct a modest
equivalent, but raised to a higher level by the prestige of the
legend, of the human sacrifices which he could not afford and
which we hope the increasing mildness of custom had abolished.
Thus a famous sarcophagus in the Vatican illustrates the classical
themes of the Oresteia: here between two servants struck dumb
with horror and behind Electra who is crouching down in a
dreamy pose, is depicted an altar upon which lies, head thrown
back, the half-naked corpse of Clytemnestra. To the right,
Aegisthus is struck down by Orestes assisted by Pylades. To
the left the Erinyes are already pursuing the murderer. The
rear face represents the duel between Eteocles and Polynices, and
other episodes from the tragedy of Seven Against Thebes. On
one of the short sides, exactly as shown by Euripides in his
Telephus, the hero of this name is seizing the boy Orestes and
threatening to cut his throat. On the other short panel, just
as the same poet had related in his Hecuba, Polyxena is being
sacrificed by the Greeks on the tomb of Achilles. 79 Elsewhere,
we see the sacrifice of Iphigenia, Philoctetes abandoned on
Lemnos, Andromeda chained to her rock, Hippolytus dragged
along by his chariot.so
M. Andre Piganiol, in his Researches on the Roman Games,
remarks that the composition of these reliefs often imitates the
decor of a theatre, the cave or the temple in front of which the
actors performed, the port where they embarked, the tower or
the ramparts of the besieged city, the door of the palace opened
on the chamber where Agamemnon is expiring, together with
altars and other ordinary accessories used in setting a scene.
On urns at Volterra Medea appears in a chariot drawn by
dragons. It was in such an equipage that, in a lost tragedy of
Euripides, she fled from Corinth after having slain her children.
And doubtless the funerary symbolism could be interpreted as
an earnest of immortality. But we also know that the Latin
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
tragic writers of the second century were very fond of this

complicated machinery: a fragment of Pacuvius describes the
angues i11gentes alites iuncti iugo, 'the enormous winged serpents
harnessed to a yoke' of Medea. And the satirist Lucilius mocked
those who, in order to inflame the imaginations of their spectators,
had recourse to such puerile devices. 81
Still other urns show a child attacked by a warrior on horseback,
and here we recognize at once an episode from the legend of the
king of Thessaly, Athamas who, during a hunt, was struck by
madness and killed his son Learchus. This was the subject of a
tragedy by Euripides, 1110, from which Ennius took his Athamas.8 2
The imagery on all Etruscan urns presents these kinds of
correspondences, not only with Greek myth in general, but with
adaptations which Latin tragedy from Livius Andronicus to
Accius had made from the myths. We might wonder perhaps if
the tragedies which inspired this imagery were not so much
Etruscan as Latin tragedies which came into being from about
250 to 100 BC. But apart from the fact that it is difficult to believe
that such performances could have influenced from a distance
and in so tyrannical a way, the workshops of Volterra, we have
reason to believe that the sculptors had a more direct and local
knowledge, expressed in their own language, of the subjects they
treated.
For these personages of Greek myth, on certain paintings and
certain mirrors, are for the most part referred to by very deformed
proper names: 83 Agamemnon becomes Achmemrun or Achmenrun;
Achilles, in Greek Achilleus, becomes Achile or Achle; Clytem-
nestra (Klutaimnestra) Clutumsta; Alexander (Alexandros), that
is to say, Paris, is changed to Alechsantre, Elachsantre and even
Elcste; Ganymede (Ganumedes), the cup-bearer of the gods, is
almost unrecognizable as Catmite, which insinuates itself even
into Latin in the Catamitus of Plautus. 84 These deformations
can perhaps be explained here and there because the borrowing
from the Greek is from dialect sources; but they are generally in
accordance with the tendencies of Etruscan phonetics: syncope,
metathesis and aspirations which are well known to us from
inscriptions where they have been studied and defined with
prec1s10n. Some features of these phonetic peculiarities even
seem to have been perpetuated through the centuries in certain
D.L.E.-17
characteristics of Tuscan pronunciation: in Florence, one always

hears la hasa, not la casa.
What conclusion must we draw from this? It is that the painters
who placed these proper names on their mirrors, paintings or
vases were not docilely copying them letter for letter from Greek
models; they were transcribing them as they sounded to their
ears, and consequently Agamemnon, Achilles, Clytemnestra,
Alexander and Ganymede had passed through Etruscan mouths
before changing to Achmemrun, Achle, Clutumsta, Elcste and
Catmite: in short, they had had in Etruria a long oral life which
can only be explained by recitations of lyric, epic and especially
of dramatic works.
It is certain that there must have existed Etruscan tragedies,
at least during the third and second centuries which saw the
parallel emergence of Latin tragedy, and it is in this perspective
that the Volnius of Varro finds his right place. It is in speaking
about the names of the three primitive tribes of Rome that the
erudite author, in his De lingua Latina, quotes this unknown writer.
'The Roman territory was divided originally into three regions,
whence the names of the tribes - the Titienses, the Ramnes and the
Luceres. These names, according to Ennius, were derived from:
Tatius, in the case of the Titienses, Romulus in the case of the
Ramnes and, according to Junius, from Lucumo in the case of the
Luceres. But Volnius, who wrote tragedies in Etruscan, declared
that all these words were Etruscan: sed omnia haec vocabula
Tusca, ut Volnius, qui tragoedias Tuscas scripsit, dicebat.' 85
We know nothing more about Volnius: his name, a very com-
mongentilicium in the form of Velna or Velina,notably at Volterra,
Siena, Chiusi, Perugia, Bologna, does not indicate exactly where
he came from. Whatever Varro says, it does not follow that he
had written a tragedy, as did Naevius at the end of the third
century, on Romulus and the foundation of Rome. But he was,
as well as a dramatic author, a scholar who, like Accius in the
second half of the second century, combined his poetic vocation
with the labours of a philologist. Accius had disagreed with
Lucilius on the reform of orthography. Volnius, quoted here
after M. Junius Gracchanus, friend of C. Gracchus and historian
of common law, had intervened in the discussion, which had
raged since the days of Ennius, on the etymology of the names
ETHUSCAN LITEHATUHF
of the three Roman tribes. Everything points to the fact that he

too may have lived in the days of the Gracchi or a little later and
that he was admitted into Roman literary circles. He divided his
time between the capital and his homeland, to which he was
evidently very attached. He claimed an Etruscan origin for the
three disputed words, and in this he is supported by modern
philologists. 86 He was proud of his native traditions, and it was
perhaps in a spirit of despairing loyalty to a cherished and threat-
ened cause that he wrote his Etruscan tragedies: erudite and
archaistic works which perhaps were played on the last trestle-
stages of Chiusi or Volterra and there revived in extremis a fire that
was about to be extinguished. That Varro says tragoedias Tuscas
scripsit does not mean that he was the only one to do so or that
no one had done so before him. He simply means that this
Volnius whom we have seen among us, such a cultured man,
who spoke Latin so well, and who, after all, was a Roman like
everybody else, had composed tragedies in his native language, a
language very difficult to understand. But we can be sure today
that Volnius was only the epigone of a long line of poets whose
names we shall never know but whose productions were reflected
in the decorations on funerary urns, whose verses echoed in the
memory of workmen, whose tragic style finally imposed itself on
Etruscan historiography and gave it its particular form.
HISTORICAL LITERATURE
The Etruscan certainly had an historical literature. But the
problem it raises is no more easy of solution than that of the
drama. For it, too, has entirely disappeared, and though its former
existence is testified by two irreproachable witnesses, we cannot
find it except partially translated and naturally deformed by the
use that was made of it by Latin historiography.
The two authors who mention it can be trusted. First, there is
Varro: his friends, the haruspices, either Tarquitius or Caecina,
told him about the Tuscae historiae, and he had found in them,
among other things, a general theory about the saecula which
determined the destiny of the nation, the total number of centuries
of existence it would have, the variable duration of each of the
centuries and the specific omens that marked the passage from
one century to the next. But Varro knew that these Histories
2 47
had been composed ·during the eighth Etruscan century, and it

has been calculated that this coincided with the second century
BC.87
The emperor Claudius' knowledge of Etruscan things was, as
we have shown above when referring to his historical works,
derived from the best sources: in a famous speech delivered at
Lyons in 48, the text of which is preserved on a bronze tablet
and in which he spoke of the ancient legend of Servius Tullius,
he was well qualified to discuss certain details of it as he had been
able to compare the account given by the Latin annalists with the
translation of it by men whom he expressly referred to as auctores
Tusci. 88
Already before Claudius, Verrius Flaccus in the reign of
Augustus and Varro at the time of Caesar seem to be referring
to these Etruscan authors; but they are not known to us now,
excepting one who is no other but Aulus Caecina, Cicero's
correspondent and expert in the art of divination; or, if it is not he,
it is his father, who had instructed him in that science. In any
case, we possess, in Caecina's name, a tiny fragment which
attributes to Tarchon, the hero of Tarquinii, the conquest of the
province of Padane Etruria. Crossing the Apennines with an
army, he had founded the first city, which he called Mantua from
the Etruscan name for the god of Death, then eleven others which
were likewise dedicated to Mantus; thus there was formed in
Cisalpine areas a confederation of twelve cities similar to those in
Etruria proper. Caecina adds that Tarchon had consecrated the
foundations according to the rites and had organized the 'year',
that is, had divided up the year with calendar feasts. Only
a few lines, but they define fairly well the historian's attitude,
and the insistence with which he underlines the religious rather
than the military character of Tarchon's work relates it closely
to the general tone of the Etrusca disciplina. We also see that
Caecina had written his history in Latin, evidently from Etruscan
sources. 89
The anonymous Tuscae historiae which we know of through
Varro also enter into the category of sacred literature. Varro
quotes from them a Latin phrase: either the entire work had been
translated by an Etrusco-Latin haruspex, or else he had had trans-
lated for his own use the passage about the centuries, which
ETRUSCAN LITEHATUHE
interested him. But everything gives us to understand that the

original text was in Etruscan, like the other libri rituales.
\Ve are told that it dates from the second century nc, from
some date between the years 206 and 88 nc, the years which cover
the eighth Etruscan century. And this too is an interesting fact,
for it shows the parallel development of the Latin and Etruscan
literatures within a common culture. The second century is
precisely when Latin historiography began. The annalists, who
at first wrote in Greek, because it was the language of cultured
men which Herodotus and Timaeus had imposed upon the
historical genre, soon began trying to express themselves in
their native tongue for the special benefit of their compatriots
who had become deeply conscious of the significance of the Roman
past. It is remarkable that a similar evolution should have brought
into being, in Etruria, and at the same period, that collection of
historical works (which is, it seems, the precise meaning of the
plural historiae), in which the Etruscan people manifested the
awareness that had come to them, a little late perhaps, of the
importance of their destiny. The publication of the Tuscae
historiae reminds us of the collection and publication of the old
official chronicles of Rome known under the name of Annales
Maximi about 123 during the pontificate of P. Mucius Scaevola.
As we have said above, the Roman Senate had taken the initiative
of reviving the teaching of the discipline in Etruscan families;
this makes us wonder if similar counsels or spontaneous emulation
could explain the awakening of an historical sense which conformed
more to the Roman temperament than to the particular vocation
of the Etruscans.
It has often been remarked 90 that the Roman genius for
methodical and tenacious conquests of the world of reality never
found better expression than in its representations, in paintings
or bas-reliefs, of historical events. 'Love whatever one shall
never see twice!' Alfred de Vigny's line defines fairly exactly one
of its fundamental attitudes. But the Etruscans were perhaps
less themselves in their worldly activities than in their other-
worldly preoccupations with the will of the gods. They lived more
naturally in the absolute, and, when the contemplation of celestial
signs did not occupy their minds, they pondered the marvellous
substitute given them by Greek mythology, through which for a
249
long time they interpreted the vicissitudes of their personal fate.

From the sixth century onwards, the quarrel of Apollo and
Hercules over a sacred hind was what they displayed on top of a
temple in Veii. 91 In their funerary monuments, they showed
Achilles waiting to kill Troilus, or the Trojan prisoners sacrificed
to the shades of Patroclus, which they felt expressed exactly
their attitude to death. 92 It was not until very much later, and
then very rarely, that Etruscan myths were introduced into this
imagery. 93
Hence the extraordinary interest of the paintings in the Fran<;ois
tomb at Vulci, if we admit, as is right, the recent date - second
century or even beginning of the first - which the best judges
give them. We have already described a part of these, the one
which, on the right-hand wall of the rear chamber, represents
Mastarna cutting the bonds of Caelius Vibenna, while his com-
panions massacre the enemy princes who held him captive. This
epic battle, the account of which the emperor Claudius was to
read later in his auctores Tusci, is borrowed from the purest native
traditions of the Etruscans. But on the left-hand wall, facing it,
the usual Greek subjects are displayed: Nestor, flanked by the
owner of the tomb, Vel Saties, clad in his fine embroidered toga
and scanning a flight of birds; Eteocles and Polynices, with the
corresponding figures of Maree Camitlnas and Cneve Tarchunies;
finally the sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners at the funeral of
Patroclus, opposite the battle raging round Vulci. 94 This con-
frontation is full of significance; it is carried out symmetrically
on the opposite walls of a single tomb that is contemporary with
the awakening of Etruscan historiography - an episode from the
Iliad against an episode from the Vulcian gesta, a Greek legend
against an Etruscan legend; in short, a confrontation of what was
mythological and what for the Etruscans was becoming historical.
The Fran~ois tomb is one of the rare monuments of this
people in which native tradition claims a place in a repertory
reserved almost exclusively, until now, for foreign elements.
We cannot help thinking of what was to happen in Latin
literature at the end of the Republic, when Rome ventured to
face up to Greece with a courteous and even admiring pride,
when Virgil did not hesitate to claim that his Aeneid was equal
to the dignity of the Homeric poems and to sing of the foundation,
250
ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
on Latin soil, of a new Troy whose emergence had not been

prevented by the efforts of new Achilles and new Ulysses. 'Ye
shall lack nothing,' his Sibyl prophesies, 'neither the Simois nor
the Xanthus nor the Dorian camp. A second Achilles has been
born for Latium.' Some hundred years earlier the Etruscan
historians were basing a Vulcian cycle on the plan of the Trojan
and Theban cycles: non Simois tibi nee Xantlms ... def11eri11t alius
'Etruriae' iam partus Achilles, one might say, replacing, in Virgil's
line, Latia with Etruriae. 95
THE TRADITIONS OF THE GREAT FAMILIES

Such, it seems to us, were the characteristics and the influence
of the Tuscae historiae which had come to the notice of Varro.
Closely dependent on the Etrusca disciplina, in natural or intentional
accord with the development of Latin annalistics they had brought
together all kinds of disparate traditions into a systematic scheme
dominated by the concept of the saeculum and by a determinism
whose tendencies were confirmed by Chaldean preaching and the
lessons of Stoicism. But though this consolidation saved from
oblivion obscure local chronicles, revived in the decadent
Etruscans the sense of its own historical importance and perhaps
determined the upsurge of national pride which inspires the
frescoes in the Franc;:ois tomb, it is quite obvious that it had not
created all of a piece the elements it brought into play. It supposes,
distinct from that current of sacred history, another current,
ancient and diversified, which, in retracing the origins of cities
and the deeds of heroes, was concerned less with the laws of
fatality than with the variable nature of particular events and
deeds. Claudius' speech at Lyons unconsciously reflects this
different aspect of historical development: 'Mastarna, the most
faithful friend of Caelius Vibenna, and his inseparable companion
in all his adventures (casus), Mastarna, whom the vicissitudes of
fate (varia fortuna) had driven from Etruria .. .' After all,
the Etruscans were not altogether lacking in imagination and
memory. Dedicated to the eternal as they were, they had been
brought up in an Ionizing spiritual world and nourished on
Hellenistic affabulations; the Clio of Herodotus and his successors
had not completely abandoned them: before writing history,
they had told stories.
251
Very ancient traces of these stories, dating to before the

compilation of the Tuscae historiae, can still be glimpsed. There
is one in the rather absurd romance of Arruns of Clusium who,
according to Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, was one of
the immediate causes of the invasion by the Gauls at the beginning
of the fourth century: 96 Arruns of Clusium was an old man to
whom the lucumo of the town had confided, on his death-bed, the
guardianship of his son: the ungrateful youth seduced Arruns'
wife, and Arruns, seeking vengeance, had encouraged the Gauls
to attack his country by acquainting them with the delights of
the white wine of Montepulciano. Now this legend, evidently
a composite one, and which we might be tempted to attribute
to the disordered imagination of a late annalist, was already
current and complete in 16o BC. The adulterous loves of Arruns'
wife had already been recounted in detail by the austere Cato
in Book II of his Origines. 97 Witness a short phrase which has
come down to us, shorn of its context, but which finds its echo
in the account by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. 'He was not
content, says Cato, until he had publicly dishonoured the woman
he had already corrupted in private. Neque satis habuit, quod eam
in occulto uitiauerat, quin eius famam prostitueret.' But Dionysius,
doubtless taking this titbit from the same source, adds: 'He not
only sought to have commerce with her in private, but also in
public.'
It was not Cato who invented such a tale: his indignant tone
assures us of that. The adultery shocks him less than the
scandal - and here we find again the characteristic astonishment
of the Roman at a society which tolerated such promiscuity
between men and women. He took it from one of those original
documents, city chronicles (in this case Clusium), regional
archives and even inscriptions which his curiosity had made good
use of, unless a preceding annalist had already compiled the
facts in a book of his own. In any case, it had already entered
into the vulgate which Polybius had at his disposal; but the
latter, too serious to report such imbecilities, only makes a
disdainful reference to them which betrays the knowledge he had
of them. 'The Gauls, on a very flimsy pretext, invaded Etruscan
territory.' 98
Before this, a good number of Etruscan traditions had already
ETRUSCAN LITEHATUIU!
been incorporated into the growing works of the annalists. We

know that the annals were first created during the Second Punic
War by Fabius Pictor who was the first to give the history of
Rome a continuity which his successors could develop, rectify
or deform according to their temperament or interests but which
he had fixed ne ·varietur as far as its chronology and essential
facts were concerned. For example, everything Livy tells us
about the reign of the Tarquins and the war waged by Porsenna,
apart from the analytical and dramatic elements, was already to
be found in Fabius Pictor.
An interest in Etruscan things was something this Fabius'
ancestors had all enjoyed. Among the Roman families who, as
we have seen, sent their sons to Caere at the end of the fourth
century 'there to learn Etruscan letters' there had been a Fabius.
The gentilitiary archives of the Fabii were full of accounts of
battles waged in that Etruria which had in a way become their
domain. One of their most illustrious members, Q. Fabius
Maximus Rullianus, five times consul from 322 to 295, had
opened the Ciminian forest to the Roman conquest, been the
first to enter inner Etruria and with the lucumones of Chiusi,
Arezzo and Perugia had formed bonds of hospitality and
clientele which are confirmed by local epigraphy: a bilingual
text from Clusium is inscribed in the name of Au. Fapi. Larthial -
A. Fabi(us) Iucnus. 9 9 After that, his son (or grandson), Q.
Fabius Maximus Gurges, was the victor at Volsinii in 265; but
the surname he bears, and which the Latins were pleased to
interpret as 'gulf or abyss' was in fact nothing more than the
transcription of a proper name, Curce(s), twice attested at Chiusi. 100
So it need not surprise us that Fabius Pictor, in writing of the
Etruscans, displayed a familiarity with them which he got from
his own relatives; he had at his disposal, when writing of the
Etruscan centuries in the history of Rome, materials of a richness
that, as soon as Tarquinius and Tanaquil appeared on the scene,
garbed in brilliant colours, relegated to the shades the bloodless
shapes of Romulus and Tullus Hostilius. This was because
'histories' of the Tarquins existed before he started to write;
and the Fabii had assimilated in the course of their campaigns,
at the same time as members of the gentes of Etruria established
in Rome, the Volumnii, the Ogulnii, who enter the Fasti at the
253
turn of the fourth and third centuries, these stories which they
passed on to the Roman public.
It is possible, and even very likely, that, just as the Annales
of Fabius Pictor were written in Greek, these stories too were
put into Greek, either by Etruscans or by Greeks. The legends
relating to the origins of Rome, and especially those which
connected them with the arrival of Aeneas and his Trojans in
Latium, furnished the third century with an outstanding theme
developed with feverish ingenuity by a host of Graeculi of whom
we know only the name: Diodes of Peparethos or Derkyllos. 101
Among them was 'a certain Promathion', as Plutarch says,
author of a History of Italy, who interests us directly. This
is how he recounts the miraculous birth of Romulus: 102
' ... they say that Tarchetius, king of the Albans, who was most
lawless and cruel, was visited with a strange phantom in his
house, namely, a phallus rising out of the hearth and remaining
there many days. Now there was an oracle of Tethys in
Tuscany, from which there was brought to Tarchetius a
response that a virgin must have intercourse with this phantom,
and she should bear a son most illustrious for his valour, and
of surpassing good fortune and strength (rome). Tarchetius,
accordingly, told the prophecy to one of his daughters, and
bade her consort with the phantom; but she disdained to do so,
and sent a handmaid into it. When Tarchetius heard of this,
he was wroth, and seized both the maidens, purposing to put
them to death. But the goddess Vesta appeared to him in his
sleep and forbade him the murder. He therefore imposed
upon the maidens the weaving of a certain web in their
imprisonment, assuring them that when they had finished
the weaving of it, they should then be given in marriage.
By day, then, these maidens wove, but by night other maidens,
at the command of Tarchetius, unravelled their web. And
when the handmaid became the mother of twin children by
the phantom, Tarchetius gave them to a certain Teratius
with orders to destroy them. This man, however, carried
them to the river-side and laid them down there. Then a
she-wolf visited the babes and gave them suck, while all sorts
of birds brought morsels of food and put them into their
254
ETRUSCAN LITEHATUHE
mouths, until a cow-herd spied them, conquered his amazement,

ventured to come to them, and took the children home with
him. Thus they were saved, and when they were grown up,
they set upon Tarchetius and overcame him. At any rate,
this is what a certain Promathion says, who compiled a history
of Italy.' (Trans. by Bernadotte Perrin.)
We recognize in this bizarre story a variant, or rather a first <lraft,

which posterity cast aside, of the fable of the twins exposed
on the banks of the Tiber by a tyrant, suckled by a she-wolf,
taken in by a shepherd. Scholars have seen in it references to
the web of Penelope and done etymological research into the
meaning of the name of Rome in Greek (rome =strength) which
would reveal the author's Hellenic culture; as if Promathion,
derived from Prometheus or in Dorian Promatheus, were not
sufficient indication of his origins. But we also notice here that
the role played by the phallus is exactly the same as that attri-
buted to it in the birth of Servius Tullius, 10a in which there is
expressed the cult, widespread among the Italics, of sexual
energy. But above all we notice the Etruscan character of the
denominations, and this would appear even more clearly if they
had not been deformed by Plutarch's Greek: Tarchetius is
obvious, for we know of Tarquitii at Veii, Chiusi, Sutri, Capena
and Caere: here a tomb has given us numerous inscriptions in
the name of the Tarchna; Teratius probably conceals a Terrasius,
a Tarracius, or that Tarrutius who figures as 'a rich Etruscan'
in the legend of Acea Larentia. These proper names indicate
an effort to etruscanize the origins of Rome: it was an Etruscan
king who ruled at Alba Longa; it was an Etruscan cow-herd
who watered his beasts on the banks of the Tiber. What is
more, it was an Etruscan oracle that Tarchetius consulted, an
oracle by the sea, for it was Tethys, wife of Neptune, who
reigned there, or perhaps the nereid Thetis, with whom she is
frequently confused. The location is difficult, but if we modify
a little Klausen's suggestion, who placed the oracle in a temple
of Fortuna at Caere,104 we believe that this Tethys or Thetis
was no other than the nereid Leucothea venerated in the port
of Caere, Pyrgi, where excavations now taking place will perhaps
reveal her sanctuary. 105 Because of his Etruscomania, and even
255
more so because of the links he seems to have with Caere, it is

not impossible that Promathion was a Greek or a Hellenized
Etruscan of that city, and his story, scabrous as it is, one of those
products of Etruscan literature which the young Romans went
to Caere to study.
Fortunately a recent discovery has proved the reality and
clarified the nature of these native sources of Etruscan history
which until now we have only been able to sift from a host of
allusions, echoes and resemblances. In 1948, Pietro Romanelli,
publishing the result of diggings he made before the war on the
site of Tarquinii, has made known epigraphic fragments which
probably came from the forum of that city. 106 They are bits of
'eulogies' (elogia) which in Rome and Italy it was usual to engrave
under the bust or statue of a magistrate or general whose career
and victories they would relate. 107 A whole collection of them
was found, devoted to the great legendary or historical figures of
Rome - Aeneas, Appius Claudius, Marius, etc. - in the ruins of
the forum of Augustus, dedicated in the year 2 BC. Likewise the
public squares of certain colonies in the peninsula, notably
Pompeii and Arezzo, have furnished us with elogia singing the
exploits of Romulus, Fabius Cunctator or Aemilius Paulus.
Here we find a strange thing: Arezzo, one of the twelve Etruscan
capitals, where the ancestors of Maecenas ruled, forgot, at the
beginning of the first century BC, its own glories and concentrated
on the illustrious heroes of Roman history: this lapse of memory
makes us wonder; perhaps it is explained by the extinction of the
local aristocracy in the civil wars, from which only those nobles
had escaped who, like Maecenas, had dedicated themselves with
Augustus to the achieving of Italian unity. But the attitude
of Tarquinii must have been quite different; for the thing that
characterizes the Elogia Tarquiniensia, forming in fact its principal
interest for us, is that they celebrated only the heroes of Etruscan
tradition, heroes otherwise quite unknown to us: in Latin,
certainly, and according to formulae inspired by Roman eulogies.
But their contents have obviously been taken from native sources,
from those auctores Tusci mentioned, because he had used them,
by the emperor Claudius. So this ancient metropolis, this
religious centre of the Etruscan people that proudly claimed to
come right from the origins of its history, to have founded its
ETRUSCAN LITEHAT URE
empire, to have revealed its religion, did not hold its glorious
past so cheaply. Behind the severe, closed doors of its palaces
were preserved the family archives guarded jealously with pride
and piety. And it is these which came to light again fragmentarily
when Tarquinii, inspired to emulation by the example of Rome,
encouraged by the Etruscological sympathies of Claudius, decided
about AD 40 to create a companion-piece, in its own forum, to
the Elogia in the forum of Augustus.1os
Just as in Rome the series opened with a eulogy of Aeneas,
in Tarquinii it opened with one to the city's eponymous ancestor,
Tarchon, though unfortunately the mutilation of the inscription
does not allow us to add very much to his legend: we can only
make out, under his name, that of Etruria, then Tarquinii, and
then HAM .. . which remains unexplained. 109 Another elogium,
more complete, related in eight lines the lofty deeds of a praetor,
or zilath, who remains anonymous - the top part of the stone
is broken - but who was the first of all the Etruscan captains
to lead an army into Sicily and who, in reward for his meritorious
conduct, had received the insignia of triumph - a sceptre sur-
mounted by the eagle and the crown of gold. 110 There has been
much discussion about which overseas expedition this referred
to, though in any case it was in the very remote past; it has even
been claimed that it referred to the immemorial migration which
had carried the Etruscans from Asia Minor to Italy, with a call
in Sicily.m The event has been placed at the beginning of the
fifth century, for at that period the naval policy of the Etruscans,
in the region of the Sicilian straits, seems to have been singularly
active. 112 It has been dated to 414-413, a time when, responding
to an appeal from the Athenians besieging Syracuse, the Etruscans
sent to Sicily a contingent of land forces as well as three warships
each with fifty rowers. 113 Again it was thought that the so-called
praetor of Tarquinii was only one of the mercenary chiefs who
often intervened, at the end of the fourth century, in the wars
between the Greeks and Carthaginians in Sicily. 114 It is difficult
to make the correct choice among these divers hypotheses.
The important thing for us here is that we glimpse a fragment
of Etruscan history relating to facts of a high antiquity and
totally independent of Roman or Greek history. In it things
were related exclusively from the viewpoint of the Etruscan
257
people, even when its armies formed a part of the coalitions in

Mediterranean politics during the fifth and sixth centuries.
A third fragment, 115 no less remarkable, praised a person whose
names are also unknown to us: one of his names, beginning with
S, perhaps read Saturius or Saturnius; his origins are proved in
the second line by the adjective Orgolaniensis: he came from that
little town in Norchia known in the Middle Ages as Orcle or
Vicus Orclanus, whose rock tombs, about twenty kilometres to the
north-east of Tarquinii, we have already described. 116 This man
had conquered a king of Caere, triumphed in the war at Arezzo
and seized nine strongholds from the Latins (or the Aretines) .
. . . . . . . . . VS.S . . . . VR ..
. . . . . . . . ORGOL(ani)ENSis
.CAERITVM REGEM VI(cit
. ARRETIVM BELLO. . . . ..
De La)TINIS NOVEM O(ppida cepit
Here again the inscription brings us back to the heroic epoch
when Tarquinii, without any sense of the solidarity which, one
would think, united it with Caere and Arezzo, waged against
other Etruscan cities inexpiable battles, somewhat similar to
those which Rome, in the sixth and fifth centuries, waged against
her neighbours. We recall once more the frescoes in the Frans:ois
tomb, where the princes of Vulci battle against the lords of
Volsinii and Sovana, and not the least interest of this text is that
it authenticates, to some extent, the tradition which inspired
these paintings by showing that it, too, must be very ancient;
later it would fall to the scholars like Varro and Claudius to try
to reconcile these specific and heterogeneous facts with those of
Roman historiography.
GENEALOGICAL TREES
Such are some of the elogia which a decree from the municipal
council of Tarquinii brought into being round its forum. They
were put up to show the Roman administration, which in any
case was very sympathetic in the person of the emperor Claudius,
that Tarquinii had lost nothing of her patriotic pride. Then the
council had to requisition the archives that filled the tablinum
of each house, and take down the ancient inscriptions that com-
mented on the ancestral portraits at the top of the family trees
ETHUSCAN LITEHATUHE
which climbed the wall of the atrium. 117 For the Etruscan
aristocracy had no less concern for its noble quarterings than the
Ponticus of Juvenal who, 'armed with two rods tied end to end'
strained to reach, in order to point them out to his visitors, the
masks of wax, gnawed away by time and covered with smoke,
of the dictators who had formerly made his name illustrious.us
Already Persius of Volterra had taken to task one of his fellow
citizens who was puffed up with pride because, 'on a Tuscan
family tree, he was at the head of a branch, the thousandth .. .'
Stemmate quod Tusco ramum millesime ducis.11 9
There was no well-born Etruscan who did not have these
stemmata Tusca. Maecenas himself, remote as he may seem from
such vanities, had his own in the atrium of his villa on the
Esquiline, and the poets he entertained there had often gazed
reverently upon it. When Horace in his Odes and Propertius in
his Elegies sang of the royal blood that flowed in his veins
(Tyrrhena regum progenies . . . Maecenas 120 ), it was no vague
statement on their part: they had followed their patron's genealogy
along the garlands that ran from one inscription to another, as
far back as those Cilnii who, in the fourth century, had ruled at
Arezzo; and they were all the more penetrated by the grandeur
of his birth because he was not the sort of man to show off about
it. Horace, son of a freed man, was grateful to him for not
despising his common origin, 'though of all the Lydians that are
settled in Tuscan lands none is of nobler birth than you,
Maecenas, and though grandsires of yours, on your mother's and
father's side alike, commanded mighty legions in days of old, .. .'
... avus tibi maternus fuit atque paternus
olim qui magnis legionibus imperitarent. 121
Do not these two verses seem to embrace with one vast gesture
the whole extent of Maecenas' family tree, and to condense into
one general impression ('commanded mighty legions in days of
old') all the detail of the wars which was made explicit in cir-
cumstantial elogia? And if we remember that it was through his
maternal ancestors that Maecenas was linked to the royal dynasty
of the Cilnii, even the precedence given these by Horace (avus
maternus), whom he names before the paternal ancestors (paternus),
seems to express a characteristic feature of the stemma - although,
259
to tell the truth, it may be for metrical reasons (a is long m

maternus) that the two adjectives were placed in this order.
MAECENAS
We have just referred to Maecenas, and perhaps it would be fitting,
at the end of this inquiry into Etruscan culture, to pause at this
eminent and complex personality whose political role and literary
influence were so important, and whom the Romans found no
less disconcerting than the strange people he had issued from.
Indeed, it would appear that certain of his vices and virtues, or
at least the majority of his 'little ways' can be explained as in-
heritances from his distant ancestors, the lucumones of Arezzo.
Or rather we can imagine him as a very fine specimen of what could
be produced in extremis by the Etruscan aristocracy at a time
when, almost on the point of extinction, it was becoming the new
Italian governing class without quite abandoning its distinctive
characteristics and one might say its patina, without having its
vitality undermined by the weight of the past and the conscious-
ness of being the last of its kind. For it was a marvellous quirk
of history to associate with Augustus, as his most dependable col-
laborators in the creation of the Empire, two men as different as
the plebean Agrippa, a forceful soldier, perpetually frowning, 'more
rustic', cries Pliny, 'than refined!' - and this prince of Tuscany.
What particularly astonished contemporaries of the man whom
Augustus had made 'a general administrator of Rome and Italy' 12 2
was that, while exercising power, he disdained its outward show.
Agrippa was consul several times, and even, having married Julia,
daughter of Augustus, received the proconsular imperium and
tribunitial power. 12a Maecenas never intrigued for public position,
and lived quite satisfied with the purple-bordered toga and the
gold ring of the knights of Rome. 'He was no less dear to the
prince than Agrippa,' comments Velleius Paterculus, 124 'but he
had less honours and contented himself all his life with equestrian
rank. He might easily have risen as high as the other, but he did
not care to.'
This attitude has been compared 125 with that which Cicero had
already attributed to the Roman knights in the days of the tribun-
ate of Drusus (91), among them a certain C. Maecenas, who was
probably the grandfather of Maecenas on his father's side: these
260
ETRUSCAN LITERATUHE
knights had refused to enter the Senate, declaring that they

preferred to remain in 'their own class and that of their parents;
that they preferred to enjoy a quiet life far from the storms pro-
voked by public animosities' .126 This reserve on the part of the
aristocracy of the Italian cities, whose fortunes placed them in the
equestrian order and apart from any honour-seeking career, is
connected with its hostility, in principle, to the policy of the
Gracchi and their successors: we shall not enter into the problem
here. But it is clear that this was the same attitude which, two
generations later, Maecenas adopted when he pretended to show
coolness towards the Roman magistracies. Propertius acclaimed
it as a philosophical merit in him: 127 ('parcis et in tenues humilem
te colligis umbras'); ' ... yet boldest thou back and dost withdraw
in lowly wise to modest shades.' (Trans. H. E. Butler.) P. Boyance
has also detected in him that 'orgulous modesty' shown by those
'heirs of illustrious families' who, from the cradle onwards, appear
so blase about official positions and think themselves above 'all
else they might henceforward be accorded'. There was something
of all this in Maecenas.
Only if Maecenas announced he was going to devote himself to
the administration of his immense patrimony, of his vineyards
and gardens, these 'modest shades' were no sinecure. For thirty-
five years he was Augustus' most faithful minister, the most
vigilant, the most efficient, and the one to whom he confided the
duty of replacing him when he was absent from Rome. Let us
state briefly here his talents as a diplomat: he was one of those
of whom Horace says that they are 'old hands at settling feuds
between friends'. 128 (aversos soliti componere amicos); the rivalry
between Antony and the future Augustus gave him many an
opportunity to exercise his conciliatory gifts; his political realism,
too, if it is true that in a memorable debate with Agrippa he
advised the prince to create institutions better adapted to the
dimensions of the Empire rather than to make a chimerical return
to the past; 129 his sang-froid and his humanity, which more than
once allowed him to bring an irritated Augustus round to
clemency, as has been shown by Corneille;130 the way he guided
the domain of letters, helping poets like Virgil, Horace and
Propertius to discover their true vocation and orientating this to
fit in with the regime's ideal. 1 31
D.L.E.-I8 261
In this considerable activity, we feel everywhere a superior

intelligence; everything reveals an innate experience of business
and an intuitive understanding of men. If the 'Roman revolu-
tion'132 which carried Augustus to the principate was started by
'new men', Maecenas was only a 'new man' when he was in Rome:
he had behind him several centuries of political culture.
But with what nonchalance, true or affected, he accomplished
that overwhelming labour! We might almost say that he merely
lent himself to the State, and Romans disapproved of anyone who
did not pretend to throw himself into things whole-heartedly.
His air of a distrait and condescending grand seigneur reminds
us a little, if we may be permitted the comparison, of Count
Mosca in Charterhouse of Parma, and when Horace introduced
himself to him for the first time his feelings cannot have been very
different from those of La Sanseverina when, in a box at the
Scala, she first encountered His Excellency. 'The frankness, the
disinvoltura with which this minister of so redoubtable a prince
was speaking aroused the countess's curiosity; she had expected
to find a pedant full of self-importance, but instead she saw a
man who was ashamed of the gravity of his position.'133
Because he pretended to be interested only in pleasure, and the
most refined pleasures at that, public opinion kept its eye on him.
The Republican opposition seized every chance it could find to
calumniate Augustus' grey eminence. The Stoic philosophers,
who suspected in him an epicureanism not theoretical but prac-
tical, unleashed their fury after his death. And doubtless he had
vices, those of his time. But the thing that Seneca, who loses no
opportunity to defame him, finds most intolerable in his conduct
is: vitia sua latere noluit, that 'he did not wish to hide them'. 134
We must believe that Maecenas' hedonism at least had this
advantage, that in apparently concentrating his attention on
pleasure he allowed his virtues to retain their spontaneity and
their modesty. A Stoic cannot credit a morality that requires no
effort: for them, it is an exercise on the short rein: one must be
able to hear the will puffing and panting. With Maecenas, pleasure
is sometimes a little forced, but fine sentiments, cloaked in
modesty and discretion, are naturally developed. He was most
improbably faithful to his friends, but the word fidelity is never
uttered.
262
ETHUSCAN LITEnATUIUl
He was especially criticized for wearing too-ample garments.

For costume and morals are often linked. In the seventeenth
century in England, the conflict between Puritans and Cavaliers
was typified by the name Roundheads assigned to the former and
the right not to cut their locks claimed by the latter. In Rome,
the disagreement was about the dimensions of the toga. About
the middle of the first century BC there had been a revolution in
men's wear which today provides archaeologists with a means of
dating bas-reliefs, 135 but which at the time divided society into
two camps. Instead of the narrow toga, toga exigua, of ancient
times, the dandies adopted a wider toga whose capacious folds
shocked righteous conformists. Agrippa, the austere, remained
faithful to the narrow toga, but the gilded youth that hovered
round deliciously frivolous Julia displayed togas of gloriously vast
proportions. Maecenas didevenworse. Hehad replaced the Roman
toga with the Greek pallium which foreign actors and professors
had introduced into Rome, and this cloak, liberally draped over
a loose tunic, seemed the symbol of every depravity. Seneca always
calls Maecenas discinctus, 'without a belt'. He declared: 'Maecenas
was indeed a man of noble and robust native gifts, but in prosperity
he impaired these gifts by laxness.' 136 (Trans. Richard M. Gum-
mere.) In fact, his vices would hardly have been noticed, if he had
said he was a Stoic and had worn a narrow toga.
It is strange that in attacking the 'laxness' of Maecenas, in
criticizing the purple stuffs he adored draping himself in, casting
sour glances at the swansdown litters he had himself borne along
in, as well as finding fault with his indolent demeanour in walking,
the warmest baths in which he swam, the meat of ass's foals he
had made fashionable, his passion for the actor Bathyllus and even
the infidelities of his wife Terentia, 137 it is strange that his detrac-
tors never remembered his origins nor the traditional accusations
made by Greeks and Romans against Etruscan ways. Vie said at
the beginning of this study what we must think of this, but we
must admit that Maecenas did have. some of the characteristics
of those lucumones of the decadence whose relaxed pose we have
noted on the lids of sarcophagi in Tarquinii and Chiusi. From
an epigram he addresses to his friend Horace, we may even con-
clude that he was not altogether lacking in a certain rotundity of
figure. 138
Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that the Etruscan way of life

resembled that of no other people: this was true of Maecenas,
whose eccentric behaviour deliberately cocked a snook at public
opinion. Not only did he drape himself in a pallium, but it is
claimed that in all the ceremonies in which he took part he had
a way, seen in no other person, of covering his head so that only
his ears appeared. Seneca says this made him look like those
escaped slaves in mimed plays who try in this way to conceal
their faces. 139 In fact, this is a caricature such as statesmen like
Mazarin or Louis-Philippe have always had to put up with.
Here a malicious pen has presented as habitual the grotesque
appearance of Maecenas one day when illness forced him to show
himself in public wrapped up in his pallium in order to protect
himself against the cold or the heat of the sun. For - need we
say it? - it will already have been guessed: Maecenas' health was
very delicate; he suffered from perpetual fevers and during the
last three years of his life Pliny assures us that he never slept for
longer than an hour at a time. 140 In an admirable phrase which
this time evokes Shakespeare rather than Stendhal, Seneca
shows him to us 'drained by love and in despair at the rebuffs of
a whimsical jade, imploring sleep to the soft harmonies of a
distant music' (the Latin is more beautiful: per symphoniarum
cantum ex longinquo Lene resonantium). 141 And here we cannot fail
to remember, prompted by these invisible harmonies which,
played behind the shrubbery of his gardens on the Esquiline,
soothed the raw nerves of an unhappy lucumo, the place held by
music in the civilization whose heir Maecenas was.
Well, then, he was a nonconformist, a peculiar person; and it
was as to a peculiar person, though a dearly loved one that Augustus
addressed himself to him, for example in that letter in which he
gently mocks his exquisiteness, his rarefied taste for precious
stones and strange materials: 'Farewell, my ebony of Medullia,
my ivory of Etruria, my silphium of Arezzo, my diamond of the
Adriatic, my pearl of the Tiber, emerald of the Cilnii, jasper of
the Iguvians, beryl of Porsenna, carbuncle of Italy, and, in fine,
courtesans' mattress.'142
THE WRITINGS OF MAECENAS

But Maecenas' bizarre nature appears most resplendently in his
ETRUSCAN LITERATUHE
literary works. For Maecenas was a writer. Probably he had no

illusions about his talent. He surrounded himself with the greatest
poets, whose classical genius, simple grandeur, natural tone and
taste he perceived, encouraged and doubtless preferred to his
own leanings. And the poets, who were not sparing of eulogies
to the great man, the statesman, the benevolent and discreet
friend, preserve a significant silence regarding the author. His
writings were not a subject of conversation. Nevertheless
Maecenas went on writing, in prose and verse, epigrams, dialogues,
a symposium, a Pronzetheus, a De Cultu suo, a title we should like
to translate as 'On the Cult of Oneself' but which means 'On my
way of life'. In any case the fragments we have been left of it
resemble nothing else that has come down to us from antiquity. 142
It is not so much the inspiration behind all this which aston-
ishes us: too little of it remains for us to judge properly. All the
same we see in it an irrepressible love of life which comes out
again and again. While all the philosophers from the most heroic
to the most cynical, proclaimed that death is not a disaster, he
insisted that even a glorious death, even one with the compensa-
tion of immortality, is the worst of all possible disasters, and that
life, however low and degraded, however mutilated, is the only
thing that counts. 'I shall have nothing to do with the tomb: nee
tumulum curo. 143 I should not bother to attend my own funeral,'
he declared. His best known lines are those burlesque and
macabre ones, adorned with expressions at once rare and popular
of which translation can give only an imperfect idea:
Fashion me with a palsied hand,
Weak of foot, and a cripple;
Build upon me a crook-backed hump;
Shake my teeth till they rattle;
All is well, if my !ife remains.
Save, oh save it, I pray you,
Though impaled on a stake!1 44
The scandal was caused by his mannerism. Augustus regarded
it as the height of precociousness and bad taste and amused him-
self with pastiches of what he called the 'scented sweetmeats'
of his darling Maecenas. Seneca recognized in it his way of
life: 'Is his style not as lax as he himself, discinctus? Arc not
his words as infamous as his attire, his house, his wife?'I45 An

attempt has been made recently to rehabilitate Maecenas the
writer by calling him 'baroque' .146 Let us say only that certain
types of modern poetry would perhaps help us to a greater
appreciation of his hermetism.
It is to Seneca we owe our knowledge of a few fragments of
his Prometheus and his De Culto suo. And at once we see that
this prose is really prose poetry, and that the 'intoxication of
language' with which people reproached Maecenas is simply the
result of taking to the extreme those liberties which poets are
commonly allowed. There is certainly some injustice in re-
proaching him with this phrase in his Prometheus: 'It is their
very elevation that thunderstrikes the peaks', claiming that what
he should have written was: 'that draws down lightning on the
peaks.' 147 These fragments seem to be composed of short bits of
phrases using a hard, uncertain syntax that excludes all preposi-
tions and in which there swarm images expressed by rare words
which are only found in him or in vulgar Latin. In a piece written
in satirical vein, if a lover winks at a woman 'he pleats (or wrinkles)
his face with a wink': cinno crispat; if he snatches a kiss, 'he pecks
at her with his lips as do doves': labris columbatur, a verb invented
for the occasion. Maecenas likes to spin out his metaphors, a
habit the Latins disapproved of. Describing a boat trip between
banks wreathed in verdure, he describes the gardens mirrored
in the water in this way: alveum lintribus arent versoque vado
remittant hortos (the phrase is in the subjunctive); he takes the
epic expression 'furrow the sea' (aequor arare) and applies it to
the bed of the stream (the Tiber) by restoring its original sense
of 'to plough': 'they plough with their barks the bed of the river',
and prolongs the artifice with: 'and as they turn the waters, verso
vado (because one says that a plough 'turns the earth', terram
vertit), 'they reflect there', or 'they cause the gardens to be
reflected there'.
We can understand how this metaphorical mania often resulted
in proper conundrums. There is one, rather curious, which does
not appear to have been understood: lrremediabilis f actio rimantur
epulis lagonaque temptant domos et spe mortem exigunt. What's he
driving at? The key to the enigma is in the words mortem exigunt,
which are inspired by the common locution exigere vitam, 'to
266
ETRUSCAN LITEHAT UHE
spend one's life'. It is too banal to say the living spend their lives
hoping. Here a play on words gives us to understand that people
spend their deaths hoping, and these can only be the Shades.
A time-honoured belief was that at certain festivals, during
the Athenian Anthesteria and the Roman Lemuria, the souls of
the dead should be invited back to their former homes; then,
after having tasted the offerings of food prepared for them, they
had to be ritually expelled by the Pater familias. 148 Ilut many
people were convinced that the ghosts permanently haunted the
outsides of houses, which they tried to enter at night in order to
feed on the left-overs from meals. A type of mosaic very common
in the days of Maecenas, called 'the unswept room' (assarotos
oikos), represents on the ground chicken-bones, fish skeletons,
shells and fruits which the amphitryon, it is thought, had left on
the floor to feed the revenants. 149 It is this maleficent and much-
feared band of spirits that Augustus' Minister of the Interior
calls here, with highly relished impropriety, by a name taken
from political vocabulary, a faction, a party, a conspiracy, qualified
by a neologism which perhaps gave him the long adjectives,
irremeabilis, inextricabilis, employed by Virgil in his descriptions
of the lower regions. It was certainly Virgil who gave Maecenas
the expression rimantur epulis, 'seeking their food', which appears
in the Aeneid150 in a description of the eagle that tears at the liver
of the chained Titan: rimaturque epulis. But what is astonishing
is that Virgil's dative (epulis=ad epulas) has not been understood
by his imitator who, thinking it an ablative, associates it with
lagona. If we add that the collective singular f actio could easily
call forth a plural verb, and that the spirits were no less eager to
drink than to eat, whence the vulgar little decanter (lagona)
instead of the noble cantharus of the mosaics, we shall have no
difficulty in translating thus: 'The irremediable faction on the
look-out for food and drink haunts our dwellings and passes its
death in hoping.'IS1
While we admit that he did not attach much importance to
such trifles, all this corresponds very closely to the idea we have
of Maecenas: a fine sensitivity, somewhat sickly, attentive to the
reflections of leaves in water, appreciative of pastoral concerts of
soft music, conscious of the omnipresence of the dead in everyday
life, displaying a nonchalance that is pleased to treat serious
subjects in a mocking way - just as royal personages occasionally

like to stoop to the use of slang, and indeed Latin satire does like
to mingle the familiar and the sublime; we are aware also of his
subtle ability to seize the secret relationships between things,
which, joined to a curious scorn of classical syntax, drags him
into an obscurity in which he is rivalled only by one other poet -
simple coincidence? - the satiric poet Persius Flaccus, the most
difficult of the Latin poets, Etruscan by birth and education.
Then must we attribute all these singularities to an ethnic
atavism, to inherited culture and luxury, even to a morbid im-
poverishment of the blood? Perhaps. But we must not forget,
when analysing the defects and absurdities of Maecenas, to recall
his virtues: in this author, almost too refined for words, a true
knack of divining real literary value in others; in this self-indulging
and idle playboy, constancy and loyalty, and a very human
lucidity in his counsels. If, by way of conclusion, we were to
attempt a resume in a single image of what counts most in him,
we could imagine him as an intelligent and devoted dilettante
who knew how to gird up his loins when occasion demanded it;
who travelled all the roads of Italy to reconcile divided friends;
we see him rudely shaken by the paving-blocks of the Appian
Way, escorted by all the great poets of the period riding and
capering round his carriage. Or if we moved to another century
we might well see him, with a few inevitable alterations, as a
Roman or Florentine prelate of the Counter-Reformation, as a
Scipio Broghese or an Antonio Barberini. He would have pro-
tected the artists of that time, would have caused many fine
baroque churches to be built; he would have composed very
precious mythological poems in the style of Marino. But above
all he would have brought to the resolution of human conflicts
that wise prudence, that art of not compromising the essentials
by an ignorant preoccupation with accessory factors, that genius
for conibinazioni which has so long been one of the best of Italian
political traditions, and which often provides, in fact, the only
means of repairing the damage done to the world, through their
intransigence and violence, by men like Savonarola, by the Borgias,
by Brutus and Antony. In saying this, we are not so far removed
from the character of the Etruscans, for as we have already seen,
if we look for an Etruscan we find an Italian.
268
CONCLUSION
Our present study has confirmed us in the view we stated at the

outset that Etruscan civilization, which we have attempted to
bring to life again in its concrete form, to present in its character-
istic attitudes and its daily life, is really only a moment, a long
moment but one of the most ancient, most brilliant and most
richly significant moments in the history of Italian civilization.
Moreover, this was fundamentally the feeling of the Romans
themselves. Despite the astonishment they felt, at the end of
the Republic, in observing the manners and customs of this
reputedly strange people, despite the legends in which its origins
were lost, Livy for example never doubted that Tanaquil was of
Italic stock; 1 Varro or Verrius Flaccus often attributed their
Etruscan etymologies to those whom they simply called the
antiqui, 'the ancients'. 2 A great feeling of filial gratitude gradually
took the place of hostile prejudices originally copied from the
Greeks.
Their strangeness seems to us due less to a difference of race
than to a difference of chronology. We have described an archaic
civilization, a sort of continent slowly submerging which, despite
the onslaught of the waves, obstinately sticks to its traditional
forms of life. The social structure, the relationships between
the sexes, the insignia of power, certain items of clothing retained
their immemorial aspect much longer than was usual in other
peoples. For the Romans, to make the journey from Rome to
Tarquinii or Chiusi must have been like entering a kind of vast
natural reservation of Mediterranean antiquities. There they
still flourished the bipennate axe of Minos, and Phaedra was
played in the crinolines of that era. Political evolution and
agrarian reforms were constantly held up by a natural, native
conservatism.
And yet this fidelity to a very ancient past had nothing
hidebound or sclerotic about it: it was on the contrary very
active and lively. The Etruscans, as soon as an access of pro-
digious wealth had enlarged their horizons, were converted
to Hellenism with an enthusiasm which made of them, in Italy,

the most ardent propagandists of their faith: barbarians in the
eyes of the Greeks and in the proper sense of the word (since
they did not speak the language of Homer), they nevertheless
established the most fervent of all Greek outposts in the western
or the eastern world. Herodotus tells us the story of some
princes in Scythia, Anacharsis or Scyles, who were sacrificing
clandestinely to Cybele and Dionysos, and whose greatest
pleasure was to visit a colony on the coast of the Black Sea,
there to divest themselves of their national costume and to stroll
about dressed as Greeks, until one day when they returned home
they were betrayed and put to death. 3 But the Philhellenes of
Etruria did not need to hide, quite the contrary. The entire
nation could think of nothing finer than to live like Greeks: it
was eager to possess everything that came from the workshops
of Ionia or Athens, and to see the latest refinements in their
techniques. Etruria was the best market for Attic ceramics and
imitated its productions; it immediately adopted the orthogonal
plans of Hellenic urbanists and gave the warmest welcome to
missionaries bringing them the Grecian mysteries. So much
so that often the daily life of the Etruscans resembles the daily
life of the Athenians. But we have striven to show that part of
the Etruscan temperament which resisted complete assimilation.
Heirs to a world that goes back beyond historical time, and
passionate imitators of the Greeks, the Etruscans were also the
educators of Rome and thus the creators of the future. We
have demonstrated with the greatest possible precision all that
the Eternal City owed them in the domain of institutions,
religion, ceremonial and liturgy; owed not only to those who had
reigned over her and really founded her, but also to those whom
she later subjugated to her own laws and with whom in the
course of many centuries of struggles and cultural exchange
she had evolved her own civilization. But in tracing the course
of these borrowings, we were not so much aiming at establishing
the persistence of Etruria in the Roman world as defining at
source the forms of an Etruscan State which are unknown to us.
The Roman triumphs of the Republic tell us something because
they are the reflections of Etruscan triumphs of which nothing,
or almost nothing, is known to us directly.
270
CONCLU ION
Finally, we have given great importance to the intellectual

life of the Etruscans, for since the fear of the gods and a pas ion
for the arts occupied so much of their time, we should have
neglected an important part of their daily life if we had not
tried to form some idea of what their literature could have been.
One of our predecessors assures us nothing is known of the daily
life of the lower classes: 4 however, we have tried, thanks to
epigraphical studies, to lighten a little the darkness that weighs
upon them. Without wishing to disguise the insufficiencies and
lacunae in this picture, we trust that it will perhaps help people
towards a better understanding, in a context of the history of
ancient Italy, of one of the fundamental manifestations of her
genius which seemed beyond the common limitations of time
and space.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
I - THE ORIGINS:
Thirteenth Century Legendary migration of the Lydians

BC from Tyrrhenos.
Ninth to Eighth Villanovan civilization. Beginning of
Centuries Greek colonization in Italy and Sicily
(about 770 Chalcidians settle on Ischia,
then at Messina and Cumae).
Seventh Century Orientalizing civilization: rise of the
Etruscan cities.
II - THE HEYDAY OF ETRUSCAN POWER:
sixth Century Alliance of Etruscans and Carthaginians

gives their navies control of the western
Mediterranean.
About 535 Naval victory over the Phoceans off
Aleria (Corsica).
616-509 Reign of the Tarquin Dynasty in Rome.
Second half of the century: Etruscan expansion in the valley
of the Po and in Campania.
III - DECLINE OF THE ETRUSCAN EMPIRE:
End of Sixth Century Liberation of Rome (509: expulsion of

- Beginning of Fifth the Tarquins; 508: fighting come-back of
Century Porsenna, king of Clusium, master of
Rome; 504: victory of Aristodemus of
Cumae and of the Latins at Aricia over
a son of Porsenna; 499: victory of Rome
over the Latins at Lake Regillus).
474 Naval battle at Cumae: the Etruscans,
crushed by the Syracusan fleet, lose
control of the Tyrrhenian Sea.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
423 Capture of Capua by the Samnitcs.

About 400 Beginning of Gaulish invasions in Italy:
the Etruscans suffer a set-back.
IV - THE ROMAN CONQUEST:
Capture of Veii by the Romans.

The Gauls reach Rome, which they
besiege and set fire to.
Alliance between Rome and Caere.
Dionysius of Syracuse raids Caere.
Start of the war between Rome and the
Etruscans.
353 Victory of Rome over Caere.
35 1 Victory of Rome over Tarquinii.
310 March through the Ciminian Forest;
conquest of inner Etruria; victories over
Arezzo, Cortona and Perugia.
308 Surrender of Tarquinii.
301 Uprising against the Cilnii at Arezzo.
295 Defeat of the Gauls and the Etruscans at
Sentinum; surrender of Volsinii, Arezzo
and Perugia.
280 Treaty of alliance with Volsinii, Arezzo,
Perugia, Vu lei, Rusellae, Vetulonia and
Populonia.
273 Founding of the Latin colony of Cosa.
265 Capture and destruction of Volsinii.
V - ROMAN ETRIJRIA
(264-241 - First Punic War)

245 (?) Founding of the Roman colony of Pyrgi.
241 Destruction of Falerii; construction of
the via Aurelia and the via Amerina.
225 Victory of the Romans and their
Etruscan allies over the Gauls at
Telamon; construction of the via Clodia.
(218-201 - Second Punic War)
273
218 Founding of the Latin colony of

Placentia.
205 The Etruscan cities contribute towards
Scipio's expedition against Carthage.
l 96 Revolt of the slaves in Etruria.
189 Founding of the Latin colony of Bologna.
183 Founding of the Roman colonies of
Parma and Modena.
181 Founding of the Roman colonies of
Graviscae and Saturnia.
177 Founding of the Roman colony of Luni
and the Latin colony of Lucca.
154 (or 125) Construction of the via Cassia.
(133-121 -Agrarian reforms of the Gracchi, which do not
affect Etruscan territory)
91 March on Rome by Etruscans hostile to
the laws made by the tribune M. Livius
Drusus.
90-88 Social war, after which the Etruscan cities
receive the rights of Roman citizenship.
82 After the First Civil War, in which
Etruria had fought on the side of Marius,
Sylla takes the rights of suffrage from
Arezzo and Volterra and confiscates part
of their territory.
42 During the Second Civil War, Perugia,
occupied by the troops of Mark Antony,
is besieged and burnt by Octavius.
NOTES
The bibliography is vast. In the notes we have given the titles of the
principal works and articles consulted, in addition to the references
to texts.
We have also listed below a few general works which form the basis
of our researches and the source of our illustrations, or where
further reproductions of Etruscan sculpture not shown in this book
may be found.
MUELLER, 0., DEECKE, w. Die Etrusker, Stuttgart, 1877 (M.D.)
MARTHA, J. L' Art etrusque, Paris, 1889
DUCAT!, P. Etruria Antica, Turin, 1927; Storia dell'
Arte Etrusca, Florence, 1927
SOLARI, A. With an excellently illustrated appendix
by A. Neppi Modona, Florence, 1931
(N.M.)
NOGARA, B. Gli Etruschi e la loro Civilta, Milan, 1933
(B.N.)
GIGI.IOLI, G. Q. L'Arte etrusca, Milan, 1935 (A.E.)
PALLOTTINO, M. Etruscologia, Milan, 3• ed. 1955 (first
edition revised, translated by R. Bloch,
Paris, 1949); La Peinture itrusque, 1952
(P.E.); Testimonia Linguae Etruscae,
Florence, 1954 (T.L.E.)
Rns, P. J. Etruscan Art, Copenhagen, 1953
BLOCH, R. L'Art itrusque, Paris, 1959
INTRODUCTION
1 Dion. Hal: 1, 30, 2
2 Her.: 1, 94 (trans. Ph.-E. Le-Grand)
3 The thesis of Oriental origin has been strongly upheld by P. Ducati:
Le Probleme itrusque, 1938; more recently by A. Piganiol: Les
Etrusques, peuple d'Orient, Cah. d'Hist. mondiale, 1, 1953, pp. 328-
352. The chief criticism of this view has been made by M. Pallottino:
L'Origine degli Etruschi, 1947
4 Cic.: De Div., 11, 50
5 M. Pallottino: ibid, p. 152 et seq; F. Altheim: Der Ursprung der
Etrusker, 1950, p. 34 et seq
6 R. Bloch: Le Mystere itrusque, 1956, p. 216- 217
7 J. Bayet: St Etr., XXIV, 1955-1956, p. 5 et seq
8 G. Vallet: Rhigion et Zancle, 1958, p. 57
9 J. Heurgon: Capoue priromaine, 1942, p. 77
10 J. Heurgon: L'Etat itrusque, Hist. VI, 1957, p. 86 et seq
11 R. Bloch: Les Origines de Rome, 1959, p. 98 et seq
275
NOTES: THE PHYSICAL TYPE
12 S. Mazzarino: Dalla Monarchia allo Stato repubblicano, 1946,

p. 95 et seq
13 The Elementi di Lingua Etrusca of M. Pallottino remains after more
than twenty years the clearest and most accurate exposition. The
Etruscan texts are collected in Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum
(abr. C.l.E.), in course of publication; the most important can be
found in Testimonia Linguae Etruscae (abr.T.L.E.) by M. Pallottino,
1954, to which in most cases we shall refer
14 T.L.E., 142
15 T.L.E., 129
16 T.L.E., 136
17 E. Vetter: Gl., XXVIII, 1940, p. 168 et seq
18 S. Mazzarino: Hist. VI, 1957, p. 108 et seq
CHAPTER ONE, THE PHYSICAL TYPE

1 G. de Beer: Sur l'origine des Etrusques, Rev. des Arts, 1955, p. 139
et seq.
2 G. E.W. Wolfstenholme and C. M. O'Connor: A Ciba Foundation
Symposium on Medical Biology and Etruscan Origins, 1959
3 M. Pallottino: L'Origine degli Etruschi, p. 130; A. Neppi Modona:
The Scientists' Contributions to Etruscology, in A Ciba Foundation
Symposium, p. 67, with bibliography
4 C. S. Coon: The Races of Europe, cited by G. de Beer; ibid, p. 143
et seq
5 A.E., pl. 116-119
6 Ch. Picard: La Sculpture antique, II, 1926, p. 325
7 E. Fischer: Rassenfrage d. Etrusker, Sitzungsber. d. Preuss. Akadem.,
Phys. Math. Kl., 1938
8 E. Bux: Die Herkunft d. Etrusker, Klio, XXXV, 1942, p. 17, et seq
9 Cat.: 39, 11; Virg.: Georg., II, 193
10 R. Herbig: DieJungeretr. Steinsarkophage, 1952, On the Sarcophagus
of San Giuliano, Herbig, n° 90, pl. 23; cf. Arch. Anz., 1934, p. 516
et seq, fig. 6 et 7; Ch. Picard: R.E.L., XIV, 1936, p. 146; M.
Pallottino: Tarquinia, Mon. Ant., XXXVI, 1936, p. 462, fig. 118;
on the sarcophagus at Partunu, Herbig, n° 107, pl. 26 a; on the
sarcophagus at the Musee de Florence, Herbig, n° 21, pl. 60 a;
cf. A.E., pl. 365
II Gell.: N.A., VI, 22; Plut.: Cato Mai., 9
12 Lucil.: 75 M
13 Lucil: 1235 M
14 A. Oltramare: Les Origines de la Diatribe romaine, 1926, p. 50:
'Obesity is a sign of depravity'
15 T. Dohrn: Rom. Mitt. LII, 1937, p. n9 et seq; J. D. Beazley:
Etruscan Vase Painting, 1947, p. 128
16 L. Cipriani: St Etr., III, 1929, p. 363 et seq
17 R. Etienne: Demographie et Epigraphie, Atti de! III, Congrcsso
Intern. di Epigrafia Greca e Latina, 1959, p. 415 et seq.
NOTES: THE MORAL TEMPEH
18 H. L. Stoltenberg: Gl., XXX, 1943, p. 234 et seq

19 T.L.E., 98
20 T.L.E., 32+
21 C.I.E., 109; 5385; 54
22 C.l.E., 5421; cf. Pliny the Younger Ep., III, 1
23 C.I.E., 18 et seq
24 C.l.E., 159
25 J. Beaujeu-Garnier: Geographie de la population, 1956, p. I8o et seq
CHAPTER TWO, THE MORAL TEMPER

1 Her.: 1, 167
2 Virg.: Aen., VIII, 483 et seq
3 Timaeus: in Ath., XII, 519 b
4 G. Vallet: Rlu!gion et Zancle, 1958, p. 166 et seq
5 Corn. Nep.: Alcib., 11; cf. A. Croiset: Hist. de la Litt. gr., IV, p. 688
6 Ath.: 1, 23 d
7 F.H.G., II, 16, p. 217
8 Ath.: IV, 153 d; XII, 517 d
9 Ath.: XII, 517 d, et seq. We thank here L'Association GuillaumP.
Bude for letting us use this hitherto unpublished chapter from the
translation of Desrousseaux
10 Diod. Sic.: V, 40; sur Posidonius, source de Diodore, F. Jacoby:
F. Gr. Hist., II, A, 87, 119 and C, 154 et seq
11 Virg.: Georg. II, 533
12 Liv.: V, 1, 6
13 Fest.: p. 486 L
14 Paul. Fest.: p. 38 L
15 P.E., p. 120; cf. Cat. de l'Expos. de 1955, p. 77
16 R. Bloch: L'Art etrusque, pl. 81
CHAPTER THREE, ETRUSCAN SOCIETY

1 A. Alf5ldi: Rom. u. der Latinerbund um 500 v. Chr., Gymnasium,
LXVII, 1960, p. 193 et seq
2 Pl.: N. H., XXXVI, 91 et seq
3 Infra, p. 136
4 J. Heurgon: Ver Sacrum, 1957, p. 18 and n. 5
5 Liv.: IV, 20, 7
6 T.L.E., 36, 38
7 A. Degrassi: Inscriptiones Latinae liberae Reipublicae, I, n° 8 64 and
237; St Weinstock: Gl., XXXIII, 1954, p. 307, docs not acknowledge
any connexion with Tolumnius-Tolonios
8 Paus.: V, 12
9 Infra, p. 318
IO Serv.: ad Aen., II, 178
II Cic.: De Rep., II, 14; Prop.: El., IV, 1, 29
D.L.E.-19
NOTES: ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
12 Liv.: I, 34, 10
13 W. Schultze: Zur Gesch. d. !at. Eigennamen, p. 179
14 T.L.E., 131
15 T.L.E., Itx (2): interpretation argued recently by K. Olzscha:
.lEgyptus, 1959, p. 351 et seq
I6 Dion. Hal.: III, 61, 1
17 A.E., pl. 108, I
18 B. Bilinski: De Catone Si/ii in Italiae descriptione un solo Jonte,
1937, p. 42 et seq
19 Sil. Ital.: Pun., VIII, 483 et seq
20 Not. Sc., 1898, p. 156; A. M. Colini: II Fascio Littorio, 1933
21 G. Glatz: La Civilisation egeenne, 1923, p. 268 et seq; Ch. Picard:
Les Religions prehelleniques, 1948, p. 82, 102, 163, 190 et seq, 199
et seq
22 A.E., pl. 59, I
23 T.L.E., 363; E. Vetter: St Etr., XXIV, 1955-1956, p. 301 et seq
24 T.L.E., 35; C.V.A., France, 16 (Musee Rodin), pl. 28-30; J. D.
Beazley: Etruscan Vase Painting, p. 25 et seq; M. Pallottino: Etrusc.,
p. 104, pl. IX, I
25 A.E., pl. 398, 1; 404, 3; F. Messerschmidt: Jahrb. d. Inst., 1930,
p. 76 et seq
26 Varr.: De L. L., V, 46 et seq; Tac: Ann., IV, 65; Paul Fest.: p. 38 L
27 Fest.: p. 486 L
28 C.l.L., XIII, 1668; A. Momigliano: L'Imperatore Claudio, 1931,
p. 35; J. Heurgon: C.R.A.I., 1953, p. 92 et seq
29 F. Messerschmidt: Jahrb. d. Inst., Erg. Heft, XII, 1930, A.E.,
pl. 266- 270; R. Beach: L' Art etrusque, pl. 80
30 F. Munzer: Rh. M., 1898, p. 607; G. de Sanctis: Klio, 1902,
p. et seq
31 S. Mazzarino: Dalla Monarchia a/lo Stato Repubblicano, p. 136 et seq
32 J. Heurgon: L'Etat etrusque, Hist., VI, 1957, p. 66 et seq, with the
previous bibliography
33 T.L.E., 324
34 T.L.E., 325
35 R. Lambrechts: Essai sur les Nlagistratures des Republiques etrusques,
1959, P· 117; T.L.E., 137
36 R. Lambrechts: ibid, p. 123 et seq
3i Cic.: De Rep., 11, 55
38 P.E., p. 125; N.M., fig. 49
39 Diod. Sic.: V, 40; supra, p. 50
40 Sen.: Ep., 47, 2 et seq (trans. H. Noblot)
41 Diod. Sic.: V. 40; supra, p. 50
42 Liv.: V, 1
43 Plut.: Tib. Gracch., 8, 9
44 Liv.: IX, 36, 12
45 Liv.: 11, 44, 7
46 Dion. Hal.: IX, 5, 4; J. Heurgon: Les Penestes etrusques chez Denys
d'Halicarnasse, Latomus, XVIII, 1959, p. 713 et seq
NOTES: ETRUSCAN SOCIETY
47 Cf. Scullard, A History of the Roman World, p. 3q: 'Closely attached

to the gens or family, were the dependants (clientes) who stood in a
filial relationship to their patrons (patroni)'
48 Juv.: VIII, 180
49 Mart.: IX, 22, 4
50 Liv.: X, 3, 2
51 R. Bloch: Volsinies itrusque, M.E.F.R., LIX, 19+7, p. 9 et seq
52 Ps. Arist.: De Mir. Ausc., 94 A; cf. Steph. Ilyz.: s.v.; A. Solari:
Topografia storica dell' Etrnria, II, p. 27 et seq
53 Val. Max.: IX, l, Ext. 2; Flor.: I, 21; Zonar.: VIII, 7
54 Liv., Per.: XI; Acta Triumph. Capitol., C.l.L., I, p. 46
55 Rn dernier lieu, Th. Frankfort: L es Classes serviles en Etrurie,
Latomus, XVIII, 1959, p. 3 et seq
56 Liv.: XXXIII, 36, l
57 Oros.: Adv. Pagan. IV, 5; Aur. Viet.; De Vir. Illustr., 36
58 C.l.E., 3692: In what follows we are using chiefly the memoirs of
S. P. Cortsen: Die etruskzschen Standesund Beamtentitel, 1925;
and E. Vetter: Die etruskischen Personennamen lethe, lethi, und die
Namen 11nfreier oder halbfreier Perso11en bei den Etruskern, Jahresh.
des Oesterr., Arch. Inst., XXXVIII, 1948, p. 56 et seq
59 C.l.E., 3704; 3001
60 Ernout-Meillet: Diet. etym., s.v. famulus
61 Pl.: N.H., II, 199
62 C.1.E., 719-721, 1508, 1667- 1675, 4700
63 C.l.E., 1671; T.L.E., 554
64 E. Vetter: ibid, p. 64, 87
65 S. P. Cortsen: ibid, p. 61
66 R. Mengarelli: Not. Sc., 1915, p. 347 et seq; 1937, p. 355 et seq
67 E. Vetter: ibid, p. 67 et seq
68 C.l.E., 4143
69 M. Lejeune: R.E.L., XXXI, 1953, pp. 130 and 152
70 C.I.E., 4379
71 C.l.E., 2013
72 C.I.E., 2422, 2426
73 C.l.E., 40; T.L.E., 387; cf. C.I.L., XIII, 6740 a; Dess., 7085;
G. Dottin: La Langue gauloise, p. 273
74 C.I.E., 2383
75 C.l.E., 1601
76 C.I.E., 4046
77 C.I.E., 3088; E. Vetter: ibid, p. 86
78 C.I.E., 2096, 2934-2935; E. Vetter: ibid, p. 68
79 C.I.E., 4144; E. Vetter: ibid, p. 66
So T.L.E., 169
81 }. Heurgon: Hist., VI, 1957, p. 96
82 Pol.: II, 17, 12
83 C.I.E., 4549
84 Liv.: XLIII, 16, 4
279
NOTES: THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE ROLE OF WOMEN
CHAPTER FOUR, THE ETRUSCAN FAMILY AND THE

R6LE OF WOMEN
1 Strab.: XVI, 4, 25
2 Caes.: B.G., V, 14
3 Her.: I, 173
4 T.L.E., 131
5 T.L.E., 586-587
6 Supra, p. 48
7 T.L.E., 136
8 C.l.E., 678-679, 802; B. Doer: Die Rom. Namengebung, 1937,
p. 158 et seq; F. Slotty: Zur Frage des Mutterrechtes bei den Etruskem,
Archiv Oriental11i, XVIII, 1950, p. 262 et seq
9 C.I.L., XIV, 3607
10 Supra, p. 4
11 Pl.: Cist., 562-563
12 R. Flaceliere: La Vie quotidienne en Grece, p. 75 et seq
13 Infra, p. 261
14 Paus.: VI, 20, 9
15 Liv.: I, 57, 4 et seq (trans. G. Baillet)
16 Theopompus: supra, p. 48
17 Bi.icheler: Carm. Lat. Epigr., 52, 8
18 A. Blakeway: Demaratus, J.R.S., XXV, 1935, p. 147 et seq
19 Liv.: I, 34, 4 (trans. G. Baillet)
20 Paul. Fest.: p. 253 L: Priscus Tarquinius est dictus, quia prius fuit,
quam Superbus Tarquinius
21 Liv.: I, 41
22 On this transformation of character. J. Heurgon: Tite-Live et les
Tarquins, L'lnf. Litter., VII, 1955, p. 56 et seq
23 Tac.: Ann., II, 34; IV, 21, 2; 22; J. Heurgon: C.R.A.I., 1953,
p. 92 et seq
24 C.l.L., XIV, 3605- 36o7
25 Her.: I, 173
26 L. Euing: Die Sage von Tanaquil, 1933, p. 16 et seq
27 Cic.: Ad Att., II, 1, 8
28 Liv.: I, 46, 4 et seq
29 Liv.: I, 48, 5
30 Liv.: I, 46, 6; cf. J. Heurgon: R.E.L., XXXVIII, 1960, p. 38
31 L. Pareti: La tomba R egolini-Galassi, 1947. (We summarize here
the conclusions of an article in M.E.F.R., 196!)
32 Id.: ibid, p. 129
33 G. Q. Giglioli: Arch. Class., II, 1950, p. 85
34 Mon. Ant., XLII, 1955, p. 241 et seq
35 Xen.: Econ., IX, 18 (trans. P. Chantraine)
36 Not. Sc., 1915, p. 353 et seq; 1937, p. 355 et seq
37 F. Altheim: Rom. Gesch., I , p. I06
38 Mon. Ant., XXXVI, 1937, p. 394
39 St Etr., I, 1927, p. 164; cf. XI, 1937, p. 84 et seq
280
NOTES: COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF RUHAL LIFE
40 Mon. Ant., XLII, 1955, p. 450 et seq

41 R. Vighi: Not. Sc., 1955, p. 111
42 Ibid, p. 46 et seq
43 Mon. Ant., ibid, p. 565, 595, 802; p. 771
44 Mon. Ant., ibid, p. 1057
45 J. Heurgon: M.E.F.R., LXXIll, 1961
CHAPTER FIVE, THE ETRUSCAN COUNTRYSIDE AND
1 Diod. Sic.: V, 40; cf. supra, p. 51
2 Liv.: IX, 36, 11
3 Liv.: XXII, 3, 3
4 Pl. the Y.: Ep., V, 6, 7 et seq
5 Dante: Inf., XIII, 9 (tra Cccina e Corneto); XXV, 19; XXIX, 48
6 Plut.: Tib. Gracch., 8, 9; supra, p. 76
7 Prop.: El., IV, 10, 27 et seq
8 Strab.: V, 2, 3
9 Rut. Nam.: De Red. suo, 285-286
10 Sid. Apoll.: Ep., I, 5
11 L. Domitius Apollinaris: consul suffectus in 97
12 Pl. the Y.: Ep., V, 6, 2
13 M. Pallottino: Tarquinia, p. 580
14 Virg.: Aen., X, 184; Rut. Nam.: De Red. suo, 282
15 Cat.: Or., II, 20; in Serv.: ad Aen., X, 184
16 Liv.: XXVIII, 45, 15 et seq
17 Cic.: De Div., II, 50
18 Strab.: V, 1, 7
19 N. Toscanelli: La Malaria e la fine degli Etruschi, 1927
20 Pl. Fraccaro: St Etr., II, 1928, p. 197 et seq; B. Nogara: Gli
Etruschi e la loro Civilta, 1933, p. 116 et seq
21 Ed. et Et. Sergent: Histoire d'un Marais algerien, 1947
22 Cite, p. 165. - Doctor P. Decoufle who studies the anatomical
models which compose many votive offerings tells us that the
spleens are always hypertrophied
23 Pl.: N.H., III, 115
24 Liv.: I, 38, 2
25 Liv.: I, 56, 2
26 Cic.: De Rep., II, l 1
27 J. Gage: Apollon Romain, 1955, p. 71 et seq
28 F. E. Brown: Cosa, I, History and Topography, Mem. of the Am.
Acad. in Rome, XX, 1951; J. Bradford: Ancient Landscapes, 1957,
p. 227 et seq, pl. 54-55
29 A.E., pl. 57; N.M., fig. 63
30 La Blanchere: Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., s.v. cuniculus, p. 1592
31 Liv.: V, 15, 12; J. Gage: M.E.F.R., LXVI, 1954, p. 39 et seq
32 Varr.: Men., Ouinquatrus, in Nonius
33 Pl.: N.H., XXVI, 16, 30; Sen.: Q.N., III, 15; Plut.: Paule-Emile, 13
281
NOTES: COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF RURAL LIFE
34 Ed. and Et. Sergent: ibid, p. 202

35 Cic.: P. Mil., 74
36 Rut. Nam.: De Red. suo, 283 et seq
37 Virg.: Aen., VIII, 327
38 Virg.: Georg., I, 128 et seq; J. Bayet: L' Experience sociale de
Virgile, Deucalion, II, 1947, p. 197 et seq
39 Lachmann: Gromatici Veteres, I, p. 350
40 S. Mazzarino: Hist., VI, 1957, p. 101 et seq
41 T.L.E., 571
42 T.L.E., 675-677, 689
43 T.L.E., 692
44 T.L.E., 515
45 T.L.E., 632
46 G. Devoto: Tabulae Iguvinae, p. 158
47 T.L.E., 570
48 T.L.E., 515; S. Mazzarino: ibid, p. 106 and uo, n. I
49 C.I.L., XI, 3370; J. Heurgon: Latomus, XII, 1953, p. 402 et seq
51 Serv. Dan.: ad Aen., I, 2
52 S. Mazzarino: ibid, p. 109
53 Papers of the British School at Rome, XXIII, 1955, p. 44 et seq;
XXV, 1957, p. 67 et seq; J.R.S., XLVII, 1957, p. 139 et seq
54 Varr.: R.R., I, 9, 5
55 Liv.: II, 34, 5; IV, 52, 5
56 J. le Gall: Le Tibre, fteuve de Rome dans l' Antiquite, 1952, p. 56
57 Varr.: R.R., I, 44, I
58 Pl.: N.H., XVIII, 66
59 Col.: II, 6
60 Ov.: Medic. fac., 65
61 Mart.: XIII, 8
62 Pl.: N.H., XVIII, 87
63 Pl.: N.H., XVIII, 86
64 Pl.: N.H., XVIII, 109
65 Pol.: II, 15, 2; Strab.: V, 1, 12
66 Ath.: XV, 702 b
67 Dion. Hal.: I, 37, 2
68 Mart.: XIII, u8, 2
69 Pl.: N.H., XIV, 68
70 Id.: ibid, 67, with notes by J. Andre in his edition
71 Hor.: Sat., II, 3, 143; Pers.: V, 147; Mart.: I, 103, 9; II, 53, 4;
III, 49, I
72 Pl.: N.H., XIV, 67
73 Id.: ibid, 24
74 T.L.E., 678
75 Pl.: N.H., XIV, 36
76 Id.: ibid, 38, cf. 35
77 Liv.: V, 33, 2
78 Sil. Ital.: Pun., IV, 223
282
NOTES: COU N TRYSID E AN D PATTERNS OF HUHAL I.IFE
79 Grat.: Kyneg., 36; Pl.: N.H. , XIX, 10; J. Aymard: I.es Chasm
romaines, 1951, p. 213
So Pl.: N.H., XV, 1
81 Cat.: De Agr., 42 et seq., 64 et seq., 143 et seq
82 T.L.E., 762; G. Buonamici: St Etr., X II , 1938, p. 317
83 Varr.: R.R., I, 2, 6
84 Virg.: Georg., IV, 125 et seq
85 Pl. : N.H., XV, 102
86 Pl.: N.H., XXIII, 105
87 St Gsell: Hist. anc. de l'Afr. du N ord, I V, p. 18 et seq
88 J. Andre: Lex, des termes de botanique en latin, 1956, p. 93
89 Id.: ibid, p. 81
90 References in H. Nissen: Ital. Landeskunde, I, p. 457
91 Ov.: Am., III, 13, 1
92 Cat.: De Agr., 156 et seq
93 H. Nissen: ibid
94 R. Pampanni: St Etr., IV, 1930, p. 293 et seq; A. Neppi Modona:
in A Ciba Symposium ... , p. 68
95 St Gsell: ibid, p. 32
96 P.E., p. 57 and 75
97 P. Grima!: L' Art des jardins, 1954, p. 20
98 Macr.: Sat., III, 20, 3
99 G. Vitali: St Etr., II, 1928, p. 409 et seq; IV, 1930, p. 427 et seq;
VII, 1933, p. 321
100 Macr.: Sat., V, 19, 13
IOI Pl.: N.H., XVIII, 173
102 E. Saglio: Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., s.v. aratrum; F. Benoit:
L'Outillage rural et artisanal, 1947, p. 30 et seq
103 A.E., pl. 410, 3
104 A.E., pl. 82; A. Grenier: Bologne villanovienne et itrusque, 1912,
p. 371 et seq
105 A.E., pl. 253
106 Varr.: R.R., I, 18, 6
107 Id.: ibid, I, 2, 25 et seq
108 Id.: ibid, I, 2, 22
109 Id.: ibid, I, 16, 5
IIO Id.: ibid, I, 18, 2 et seq
111 Id.: ibid, I, 19, I
II2 G. E. F. Chilver: Cisalpine Gaul, 1941, p. 146 et seq
n3 Mart.: VI, 73
II4 Col.: VI, 1, 1; Ov.: Am., III, 13, 13
u5 Pl.: N.H., XI, 241; Mart.: XIII, 30
u6 Pol.: XII, 4; Varr.: R.R., II, 4, 20
II7 Rut. Nam.: De Red. suo, 615 et seq (trans. J. Vessereau)
u8 Virg.: Aen., VII, 651; J. Aymard: Les Chasses romaines, p. 26 et seq
119 Stat.: Silv., IV, 6, lo
120 A.E., pl. 82; M. Pallottino: Tarquinia, p. 57
121 Varr.: R.R., III, 12, 1
NOTES: COUNTRYSIDE AND PATTERNS OF RURAL LIFE
122 Infra, p. 245

123 J. Aymard: ibid, p. ro
124 B. Bonacelli: St Etr., VI, 1932, p. 341 et seq; A. Neppi Modona:
A Ciba Foundation Symposium .. ., p. 73
125 A.E., pl. 204
126 St Gsell: Hist. anc. de l'Afr. du Nord, I, p. ro9
127 Ath.: XII, 18 f.
128 Pl.: Peen., ro74
129 T.L.E., 8rr; Strab.: XII, 626, 4, 6; Pl.: N.H., XIII, 82; Bonacelli:
ibid
130 Pl. : N.H., X, 37
131 T.L.E., 807, 8ro, 821
132 V. Baldasseroni: St Etr., III, 1929, p. 383
133 P.E., p. 49 et seq; R. Bloch: L'Art etrusque, pl. 32-33
134 Strab.: V, 2, 6; Ath.: VI, 224 c; Col.: VIII, 16
135 H. Nissen: ltal. Landesk., I, p. 432; II, p. 301
136 Supra, p. 127
137 Virg.: Aen., VIII, 599; IX, 521; Theophr.: Hist. pl., V, 8; Strab.:
v, 2, 5
138 Pl.: N.H., XXXVI, 168; cf. 135; M. Pallottino: Tarquinia, p.
437
139 G. Vallet: Rhigion et Zancle, p. 57, n. l
140 Virg.: Aen., X, 174; A. Minto: St Etr., XXIII, 1954, p. 291 et seq;
L. Cambi: dans Tyrrhenica, 1957, p. 97 et seq; A. Neppi Modona:
A Ciba Foundation Symposium .. ., p. 65
141 Strab.: V, 2, 6
142 R. Dion: Laiomus, XI, 1952, p. 306 et seq; J. Carcopino: Promenades
historiques aux pays de la Dame de Vix, 1957, p. 24 et seq; see also
G.-Ch. Picard: La Vie quotidienne a Carthage, 1958, p. 169 et seq;
and F. Villard: La Ciramique grecque de Marseille, 1960, p. 137
et seq
143 R. Joffroy: Afon. Piot., XLVIII, 1, 1954
144 Two Villanovian bronzes from Etruria have shown the same
proportion on analysis: 8, l 5 and rr, 6 p. roo
145 G. Germain: Essai sur les origines de certains themes odysseens,
1954, p. 172; Macr.: Sat., V, 19, I I et seq.; Minto: ibid, p. 313 et seq
146 A. Minto: ibid, p. 299; L. Cambi: ibid, p. ro7
147 A. Minto: ibid, p. 304
148 Ps. Arist.: Mir. Ausc., 93
149 Strab.: V, 2, 6
150 Diod. Sic.: V, 13, 1- 2
l 5l Its prosperity and the development of its economic activity are
vouched for by the creation of a gold and silver coinage which
was the most plentiful in the whole of Etruria
152 Supra, p. 127
153 Diod. Sic.: ibid
154 Lucil.: 122 M; Ch. Dubois: Pouzzoles antique, 1907, p. 126
155 Cat.: De agr., 135: one buys iron tools at Cales and Minturno
NOTES: TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHllAN AC'TIVITIES
156 The allusion to arms (oplon) is a correction of the text "hich

refers, nonsensically, to birds (oiseaux)
157 Pl.: N.H., XXXIV, 146
158 Rut. Nam.: De Red. suo, 4u et seq
159 Th. Ashby: St Etr., III, 1929, p. 177
160 H. Bianchi-Ilandinclli: S<Yvana, 1929, p. 27
161 Liv.: X, 47, 4
162 P. Romanelli: Not. Sc., 1948, p. 223
163 H. Koch, E. von Mercklin, C. Weickert: Rom. Mitt., XXX, 1915,
p. 190 et seq
164 M. W. Frederiksen, J. B. Ward Perkins: Papers of the British
School at Rome, XXV, 1957, pp. 117 and 141
165 P. Romanelli: Not. Sc., 1948
166 C.I.L., XI, 5265
167 A. Minto: Populonia, 1943, p. 131; L. Pareti: La tomba Regolini-
Galassi, p. 252
168 A.E., pl. 87-<Jo
169 Infra, p. 258
170 F. de Ruyt: Charun, 1934, p. 48 et seq
171 Id.: ibid, n° 75, p. 70, fig. 33
172 Id.: ibid, n° 74, fig. 32; A.E., pl. 402, 1; Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom.,
s.v. carpentum et camara
173 Liv.: I, 34, 7 et seq
174 Ov.: Fast., I, 619
175 Liv.: I, 48, 5
176 Prop.: El., IV, 8, 23
177 Liv.: V, 25, 9
178 Liv.: XXXIV, 3, 9
179 Tac.: Ann., XII, 42
180 Suet.: Cal., 15
181 R. Cagnat, V. Chapot: Man. d'Archiol. rom., II, p. 292, fig. 516
182 A. Ernout, A. Meillet: s.v. carrus; J. Carcopino: Les Etapes de
l'lmperialisme romain, 1961, p. 239 et seq; P. M. Duval: La Vie
quotidienne en Gaule, 1952, p. 245
183 Liv.: XXXI, 21, 17; Flor.: I, 18, 27
184 J. Carcopino: ibid
CHAPTER SIX, THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF

URBAN ACTIVITIES
1 P. Ducati: La Citta etrusca, Historia, IX, 1931, p. 3 et seq
2 E. Kornemann: Po/is und Urbs, Klio, V, 1905, p. 72 et seq
3 Fest.: p. 258 L
4 P. Lavedan: Hist. de !'Architecture urbaine, 1926, P· 99
5 Serv.: ad Aen., I, 422
6 Corp. agrim. Rom. (Thulin), I, p. 145 . . .
7 I. Falchi: Not. Sc., 1895, p. 274, fig. l; P. Ducat1: Etrurw ant1ca,
II, 94; Stor. dell' Arte etrusca, fig. 420
285
NOTES; TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF URBAN ACTIVITIES
8 R. Bianchi-Bandinelli: Sovana, p. 15
9 F. Castagnoli: Ippodamo di Mzleto e l'urbanistica a pianta ortogonale,
1956
10 G. Devoto: St Etr., II, 1928, p. 331
l l On the date of the founding of Capua, M. Pallottino: La parola del
passato, XLVII, 1956, p. 85
12 J. Heurgon: Capoue priromaine, 1942, p. 8 et seq
13 Cic.: De Leg. agr., II, 96
14 A. Grenier: Bologne villanovienne et itrusque, with fig. p. u6,
pl. III; P. Ducati: Etruria antica, II, p. 93. On the recent excava-
tions, Fasti Archeologici, VI (1951), 2530; VIII (1953), 2198;
IX (1954), 2904. It is possible that the remains date only from a
reconstruction of the town in the third century
15 N. Alfieri: Spina e le nuove scoperte. Problemi archeologici e
urbanistici (Atti del I. Convegno di Studi Etruschi, 1959), p. 25
et seq
16 Fasti Archeologici, X (1955), 2479. A report on current excavations
was given in May 1955 at the III Congresso degli Studi Etruschi,
by Mlle Fogolari
17 G. Vallet: Athenes et l'Adriatique; M.E.F.R., LXII, 1950, p. 33
et seq
18 R. Chevallier: R.E.A., LIX, 1957, p. 446
19 P. Romanelli: Not. Sc., 1948, p. 193 et seq
20 R. Bloch: M.E.F.R., LIX, 1947, p. 9 et seq; LXII, 1950, p. 53 et seq
21 R. Bartoccini: in Tyrrhenica, p. 52 et seq; St Rom., VI, 2, 1958,
p. 126 et seq; C. M. Lerici, E. Carabelli, E. Segre: Prospezioni
geofisiche nella zona archeologica di Vulci, I, 1958
22 G. Lugli: L' Urbanistica delle Citta italiche, le mura difortificazione,
1946-1947, p. 43 et seq; La Tecnica edilizia romana, 1957, p. 83
et seq
23 A. Boscotrecase, villa rustica de Ti. Claudius Eutychus, with 9
cellae on the ground floor, and 9 others on top (Not. Sc., 1922,
p. 459); a Gragnano, villa rustica with 19 cubicula and a large
ergastule (Not. Sc., 1923, p. 275 et seq)
24 J. Carcopino: La Vie quotidienne a Rome, p. 39 et seq. For what
follows, LIV: XXI, 62, 3; Diod.: XXXI, 18, 2; Cic.: De Off., III,
66; De L. a., II, 95; P. Cael., 18
25 R. Bianchi-Bandinelli: Sovana, p. 104 et seq.; C. Weickert: Rom.
Mitt., XXX, 1915, p. 291, fig. 84; A.E., pl. 425, l and 2
26 K. J. Beloch: Bevolkerungsgesch. Italiens, 1937, I, p. l et seq;
II, p. 57; P· 132
27 B. Nogara: Gli Etruschi e la loro Civilta, p. 46; R. Mengarelli
(St Etr., I, 1927, p. 145) did not hesitate at computing the popula-
tion of Caere, at its greatest, at eighty thousand
28 A Ciba Foundation Symposium, p. 80 et seq
29 J. Bradford: Ancient Landscapes, p. u6: 'more than 1,000 acres'
30 G. Ricci: Mon. Ant., XLII, 1955
31 Pl. XI
286
NOTES: TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHBAN ACTIVITIES
32 Pl. X
33 Supra, p. 45
34 Supra, p. 114
35 R. Vighi, G. Ricci, M. Moretti: Mon. Ant., XLII, 1955
36 J. Bradford: ibid, p. II 6 et seq, pl. 30-32, fig. 8 an<l 9
37 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 233 et seq
38 Id.: ibid, p. 346 et seq
39 R. Bloch: Bull. Soc. Ant. de Fr., 1957, p. 57 et seq; S. M. Puglisi:
JI.ton. Ant., XLI, 1951, p. 1 et seq
41 Id.: ibid, p. 329, n. 1
42 Id.: ibid, p. 233
43 Id.: ibid, p. 803, fig. 181
44 Id.: ibid, p. 241 et seq
45 M. Moretti: ibid, p. 1065 et seq
47 R. Vighi: Not. Sc., 1955, p. 106, fig. 72-73
48 G. Lugli: Roma antica, Il Centro monumentale, 1946, p. 459, fig.
136
49 R. Cagnat, V. Chapot: Man. des Ant. ram., I, p. 283, fig. 147
50 A. von Gerkan, F. Messerschmidt: Das Grab der Volumnier bei
Perugia, Rom. Mitt., L VII, 1942, p. 122 et seq
51 F. Messerschmidt: Nekropolen von Vulci, Jahrb. d. Inst., Erg.
Heft, XII, 1930, p. 62
52 Varr.: de L. L., V, 161; P. Ducati: Etruria antica, II, p. 94 et seq
53 Varr.: ibid; ab Atriatibus Tuscis; Paul. Fest.: 12 L
54 Supra, p. 170
55 T.L.E., I
56 Paul. Fest.: 12 L
57 G. Patroni: R end. Acc. Line., 1936, p. 808 et seq
58 E. Saglio: Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., s.v. atrium
59 P. Grimal: L es Jardins romains, 1943, p. 216
60 E. Saglio: Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., s.v. cavaedium, p. 982
61 Vitr.: VI, 3
62 E. Saglio: ibid, fig. 1274
63 E. Saglio: ibid, fig. 1275
64 Pl. the Y.: Ep., II, 17, 4
65 Id.: V, 6, 15
66 Supra, p. 50
67 Vitr.: IV, 7; R. Cagnat, V. Chapot: Man. d'Archiol. ram., I,
p. 33 et seq
68 M. Pallottino: La Necropoli di CeT'veteri, p. 13
69 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 450 et seq, fig. 102
70 G. Q. Giglioli: Not. Sc., 1916, p. 41 et seq. On the Etruscan column,
lastly, P. J. Riis., An introduction to Etruscan art, 1953, p. 51 et seq
and pl. 22 .
71 G. Rosi: Sepulchral Architecture as illustrated by the Roch I•arade.~
of Central Etruria, J.R.S., XV, 1925, p. 1 et seq
NOTES: TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF URBAN ACTIVITIES
72 Id.: ibid, fig. 49-51, 53, 55-56

73 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 966 et seq and pl. XV; J. Bradford: Ancient
Landscapes, p. 122
74 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 829 et seq and pl. XI
75 Juv.: Sat., III, 191
76 G. M. Richter: Ancient Furniture, 1926
77 Cf. In the Tomb of the Shields at Tarquinii (P.E., p. 105 and 107),
and the Urn of Chiusi reproduced in A.E., pl. 136, 1
78 G. M. Richter: Were there Greek Armaria? Romm. Deonna,
p. 418 et seq
79 Cf. the Tomb of Oreo at Tarquinii (M. Pallottino: ibid, p. 114)
80 Ath.: I, 28 b
81 A.E., pl. 199, I
82 P.-M. Duval: La Vie quotidienne en Gaule, p. 79 and 88
83 A.E., pl. 60, 62, 63
84 A Grenier: Bologne, p. 371 and 397
85 A.E., pl. 17, 1; L. Pareti: La Tomba Regolini-Galassi, pl. 23
86 A.E., pl. 316, I
87 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 893 et seq, pl. XIII-XIV
88 G. Ricci: ibid, p. 722
89 W. Schultze: Zur Gesch. d. lat. Eigennamen, p. 274 et seq.
90 R. Mengarelli: Not. Sc., 1937, p. 402
91 The inscriptions will be found in G. Ricci: ibid, p. 911
92 T.L.E., 51
93 Cf. E. Fiesel: Das grammatische Geschlecht im Etruskischen, 1922.
We have modified his genealogy at one point, taking account of
the new reading, by G. Ricci, of the patronymic of Ramta Matunia
(XIII)
94 P. Mingazzini: Archeol. Class., VI, 1954, p. 292 et seq
95 A. Stenico: St Etr., XXIII, 1954, p. 201 et seq
96 Varr.: de L. L., X, 22; Arch. Anz., 1941, p. 618 et seq
97 A. Stenico: ibid, p. 197 et seq
98 A.E., pl. 104, 6; D. Levi: Il Museo Civico di Chiusi, fig. 64 and
p. 118
99 Theocr.: XV, 21 et seq
100 P.E., p. 105 and 107
IOI A.E., pl. 369; on the date, B. Schweizer: Die Bildniskunst d. rom.
Republik, 1948, p. 8; P. J. Riis: ibid, p. 109 et seq
102 Cat.: De Agr., 59
103 P.E., p. 87; R. Bloch: L'Art etrusque, pl. 53
104 G. Glotz: La Civilization egeenne, p. 88
105 P.E., p. 68, 78, 87; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 45-54
106 Stat.: Silv., II, 1, 130
107 P.E., p. 45; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 22
108 A.E., pl. 136, 2: 142, 4; 144, 1 and 3, etc.; N.M., fig. 83
109 Ath.: XII, 519 b
110 Ath.: XII, 541 a; J. S. Callaway: Sybaris, 1950, p. 76
111 0. Mueller, W. Deecke: Die Etrusker, 1, p. 247, with texts
288
NOTES: TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF UHllAN ACTIVITIES
112 Pol.: VIII, 2

113 Dion. Hal.: III, 61, 1
114 A. Ernout: Philologiea, I, p. 27
115 Poll.: Lex., p. 584, 17
116 Dion. Hal.: II, 60, 2; III, 61, 1
117 A.E., pl. 108, 1; A. Alfoldi: Friihrom. Reiteradel u. seine Ehre11ab-
:::eiehe11, 1952, p. 36 and pl. 1
118 A.E., pl. 109, 1; P.E., p. 37; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 14- 18
I 19 A.E., pl. 115, 2; N.M., fig. 67
120 A.E., p. 265; P.E., p. 121; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 81-82
121 R. Lambrechts: Essai sur Les klagistratures des republiques etrusques;
cf. especially pl. II, VII, XXII
122 A. Alfoldi: Gewaltherrseher und Theaterkonig, Stud. A. M. Friend,
p. 15 et seq
123 Cf. R. Cagnat, V. Chapot: Man. d'Areheol. rom., II, p. 367
124 P.E., pp. 55 and 57; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 14-16, pl. 29, pl. 32
125 Cic: De Nat. Deor., I, 82
126 A.E., pl. 108; Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., s.v. calceus, fig. 1021;
A. Alfoldi: Friihrom. Reiteradel, p. 60, pl. I
127 A.E., pl. 116; Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., ibid, fig. 1022
128 0. Mueller, W. Deecke: ibid, I, p. 254 et seq, with texts
129 N.M., fig. 44; G. Ricci: Mon. Ant., XLII, 1955, p. 592
131 A. Alfoldi: ibid, p. 54 et seq
132 Diet. des Ant. gr.-rom., ibid, fig. 1017; N.M., fig. 42
133 Virg.: Aen., VIII, 457
134 A.E., pl. 119
135 A.E., pl. I I 5, 2
136 A.E., pl. 122, 2 and 3
137 A.E., pl. 124, 3
138 Varr.: De L. L., VII, 44; Fest., 484 L
139 E. Coche de la Ferte: Les Bijoux antiques, 1956, pl. 34, 1 and 2,
and p. 120
140 M. Pallottino: ibid, p. 101; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 72
141 Neppi Modena: fig. 99
142 Id.: fig. 100
143 Id.: fig. 72
144 E. Coche de la Ferte: ibid, p. 72 et seq
145 A.E., pl. 23-27; R. Bloch: ibid, pp. 8--9; Cat. de /'Expos. de 1955,
fig. 21, n° 104
146 A.E., pl. 19; Cat., fig. 20, n° 94
147 Cat., fig. 17, n° 85
148 E. Coche de la Ferte: ibid, p. 16
149 Id.: ibid, p. 82 ..
150 Id.: ibid, pl. 37; Cat., fig. 22, n° I 12; R. Bloch: 1b1d, pp. 28- 29
151 Id.: ibid, p. 72
152 A.E., pl. 66; Cat., n° 102
153 On the origins of Etruscan stone sculpture, particularly at
NOTES: SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS AND GAMES
Vetulonia. A. Hus: M.E.F.R., LXVII, 1955, p. 71 et seq; LXVIII,

1956, p. 37 et seq
154 G. Vallet: Rhegion et Zancle, p. 57, n. 1
CHAPTER SEVEN, SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS:

BANQUETS AND GAMES
1 Shown on mirrors, and mentioned in the ritual of Zagreb
2 Tac.: Germ., 11; Cic. ap Serv.: ad Aen., I, 738; VI, 535
3 Varr. ap Gell: N.A., III, 2, 6; Pl.: N.H., II, 188
4 T.L.E., 181
5 Macr.: Sat., I, 15, 14
6 Macr.: Sat., I, 15, 13
7 T.L.E., 801, 805, 818, 824, 836, 854, 856, 858
8 M. Pallottino: St Etr., XI, 1937, p. 213
9 E. Fiesel: St Etr., X, 1936, p. 324
JO E. Benveniste: B.S.L., XXXII, 1931, p. 68 et seq
1l Liv.: VII, 3, 7
12 Censor: 17, 6; C. 0. Thulin: Die etr. Disciplin, III, p. 63 et seq
13 Diod.: V, 40; supra, p. 50
14 J. Carcopino: La Vie quotidienne aRome, p. 304 et seq, from whom
we have borrowed the details following
15 Suet.: Vit. 13, 1
16 Sen.: ad Luc., 103, 6; Pl. the Y.: Ep., III, 5, JO et seq
17 Cic.: Phil., II, 104
18 Plat. Le Comique ap. Ath.: I , 47 d
19 G. Conestabile: Pitture murali, 1865; J. Martha: L'Art etrusque, fig.
266, 279, 292; N.M., fig. 74; P.E., p. 97 et seq; R. Bloch: L'art
etrusque, pl. 74-76. Inscriptions in T.L.E., 220 et seq. But see now
by the same Eutruscologia, 4th ed. 1957, p. 362, 5th ed. 1963, p.
397
20 C.I.L., I, 364; A. Ernout: Textes Lat. arch., p. 36
21 App. Verg.: Mor., 92 et seq
22 Varr.: ap. Diom., G.L.K., I, P. 486
23 Apic: VIII, 8, 1; VI, 9, l. Note 'the aromatic wine of Chiusi'
(conditum Camerinum, I, 2) and the 'Kid a la Tarpeiane' (haedus
Tarpeianus, VIII, 2, 9)
24 Obviously an anachronistic translation which gives rise to the
study of P. Grimal on La veritable nature du 'garum', R.E.A.,
Liv, 1952, p. 27 et seq
25 Varr.: de L. L., VII, 35; Fest.: 403 L
26 M. Pallottino: Stud. Funaioli, p. 304
27 0. Danielsson: Gl., XVI, p. 86; T.L.E., 715
28 Walters-Smith: Cat. Brit. Mus., IV, p. 8, fig. 17 (F 470-472)
29 R. Demange!: La Frise ionique, p. 437 et seq; A. Amdren: Archi-
tectural Terracottas from Etrusco-Italic temples, p. LXXXV et seq,
fig. l I
30 F. Villard: Les Vases grecs, p. 71, 77, pl. I, 1: XXIX, 3, etc
NOTES: SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS AND CAl\I ES
31 P.E., p. 107; R. Bloch: !,'Art etrusque, pl. 78

32 P. Ducati: Stor. dell' Arte etrusca, fig. 232; Ncppi l\lodona: fig. 87
33 P.E., p. 67; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 44 and 48
34 Supra, p. 50
35 Cic.: Verr., II, 1, 86
36 Cic.: Verr., II, 4, 58
37 P.E., p. 67; R. Bloch: L' Art etrusque, pl. 44 and +S
39 Ath.: I, 28 b; cf. supra, p. 200
40 N.M., fig. 87, p. I 17
41 J. D. Beazley: Etruscan Vase Painting, p. 284 et seq
42 Pl.: Stich., 694 et seq
43 Liv.: XXVIII, 38, 5
44 Liv.: XXXVII, 59, 5
45 Gell.: N.A., II, 24
46 R. Bianchi-Bandinelli: Clusium, Mon. Ant., XXX, 1925, p. 306
et seq; N.M., fig. 73, p. 114
47 Her.: I, 167
48 J. Heurgon: L'Etat etrusque, Hist., VI, 1957, p. 88, with the texts
49 Supra, p. 7 5
50 Th. Reinach: La Musique grecque, 1926; P. Boyance: Le Cu/te des
Jlrfuses chez Les philosophes grecs, 1937; H. I. Marrou: Hist. de
de l' Education dans l' Antiquite, 1948
51 Theogn.: I, 791; H. I. Marrou: ibid, p. 75
52 Th. Reinach: ibid, p. 132
53 Arist.: F.H.G., II, p. 178
54 Plut.: De cohib. ira, 460 c
55 Ath.: XII, 518 b
56 Ael.: Nat. an., XII, 46
57 Arist.: Hist. an., IX, 5, 6i 1 b; J. Aymard: Les Chasses romaines,
p. 336 et seq
58 E. Merite: Les Pieges, cite par J. Aymard: ibid
59 H. I. Marrou: ibid, p. 189
60 Virg.: Georg. II, 193; Pl.: N.H., XVI, 172
61 Dion. Hal.: VII, 72, 5
62 A.E., pl. 407, 4
63 Ath.: XIII, 607
64 Liv.: IX, 30, 5
65 Mueller-Deecke: Die Etrusker, II, p. 206, with texts; Esch.:
Eum., 567
66 Virg.: lEn., VIII, 526
67 Liv.: I, 20, 5
68 R. Bloch: M.E.F.R., 1958, LXX, p. 7 et seq
69 Fest.: 334 L
70 Virg.: Aen., V, 545 et seq
71 G. Q. Giglioli: St Etr., III, 1929, l l 1 et seq; A.E., pl. 80
72 F. Bomer: Rom. und Troia, 1951, p. 18 et seq
73 J. Heurgon: M.E.F.R., 1929; XLVI, p. 3 et seq
NOTE: SOME ETRUSCAN DIVERSIONS: BANQUETS AND GAMES
74 Ch. Picard: Genava, I935, XIII, p. 63 et seq

75 Dion. Hal.: VII, 72, 10 et seq; A. Piganiol: Rech., sur Its jeux
romains, I923, p. I5 et seq
76 P.E., p. 43
77 Id.: ibid, p. 45; R. Bloch: L'Art etrusque, pl. 2I
78 J. D. Beazley: Etruscan Vase Painting, p. II4
79 Liv.: VII, 2, 6
So Ov.: A.A., I, III
SI Pl.: Cure., I50
82 Liv.: I, 35, 9
83 Pl.: N.H., X, 7I
84 R. Bartoccini, C. M. Lerici, M. Moretti: La tomba de/le Olimpiadi,
I959
85 Plut.: Pub!., I3, 4; Fest.: 340 L; J. Hubaux: Bull. de l'Acad.
royale de Belgique, XXXVI, I950, p. 34I et seq; J. Gage: Bull. de
la Fae. des Lettres de Strasbourg, XXXI, I953· p. I63 et seq
86 P.E., p. 39; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 19; cf. P. Demargne: C.R.A.I.,
I952, p. I67; Fouilles de Xanthos, I, I958: two fat wrestlers holding
each other by the neck
87 N.M., fig. 67
88 A.E., pl. II 5, 2; M. Pallottino: Etruscolo1;ia, 3c ed., pl. 57
89 Supra, p. 255
90 A.E., pl. 149; E. Gabrici: St Etr., II, I928, p. 73 et seq
9I A.E., pl. 204; P.E., p. 65 et seq
92 A. Grenier: Bologne, p. 401
93 W. Borgeaud: Les Illyriens en Grece et en ltalie, I943, p. I44;
R. Bloch: Bull. Soc. Ant. de Fr., I9591 p. 97
94 Hom.: II., XXIII, 175
95 J. D. Beazley: Etruscan Vase Painting, p. 90
96 Her.: I, 167
97 Liv.: VII, I5, IO
98 Suet.: Aug., I5, 2
99 Ath.: IV, 153 f; Liv.: Per., XVI
Ioo Isid. de Sev.: Or., X, I59; Ernout-Meillet: Diet. etym., s.v. lanista
IOI Tert.: Ap., 15, 5
102 F. Weege: Osk. Grabmalerei, Jahrb. d. Inst., XXIV, 1909,
p. 99 et seq.; P. Sestieri: Tombe dipinte di Paestum, Riv. dell' Jst.
di Archeol. e Stor. dell' Arte, V-VI, I956-I957, p. 65 et seq
103 J. Heurgon: Capoue prhomaine, p. 431
104 F. de Ruyt: Charun, p. 30, points out, hypothetically, a repre-
sent~tion of this kind on an urn from the vicinity of Perugia
105 A.E., pl. 109, 2
106 R. Bartoccini, C. M. Lerici, M. Moretti: La tomba delle Olimpiadi,
fig. I4
107 Tert.: Spect., 12, 4
108 P.E., p. 41; R. Bloch: L' Art etrusque, pl. I7
rn9 P. Romanelli: Tarquinia, fig. 33
110 F. Altheim: Maske u11d Totenkult, dans Terra Mater, 1931, p. 48
NOTES: ETRUSCAN LITERATURE
et seq; J. Heurgon: Capoue preromaine, p. 434 et seq; H. Rhcinfcldcr:

Das Wart 'Persona', Zeitschr. f. roman. l'hilol., Bcihcft 77, 1928
Ill Fest. Paul.: n5 L; cf. 52 and 281
u2 Ap.: Apol., 13, 7
113 P. Frassinetti: Fab. Atell. Fragm., p. 22
114 Fest.: 238 L
u5 On the mines of the Atellanus, most recently, l'. Frassinctti:
Fabula Atellana, 1953, p. 65 et seq
u6 On the ludi Osei, Cic.: Fam., VII, 1, 3
CHAPTER EIGHT, ETRUSCAN LITERATURE

I G. Buonamici: Epigrafia etrusca, 1934, p. 111 et seq; J. G. Fevrier:
Hist. de l'Ecriture, 2° ed. 1959, p. 440 et seq; M. Lejeune: Observa-
tions sur !'alphabet etrusque, Tyrrhenica, 1957, p. 158 et seq.
2 A. Minto: Marsiliana d'Albegna, 1921, p. 122 and 236, pl. XX;
A. Grenier: M.E.F.R., 1924, XLI, p. 1 et seq; A.E., pl. 30, 2;
M. Pallotinno: Etruscologia, 3• ed., pl. 64
3 L. Pareti: La tomba Regolini-Galassi, p. 132, pl. 46; T.L.E., 55
4 F. Weege: Vasculorum Campanorum lnscriptiones ltalicae, 1-3
5 M. Lejeune: R. Ph., 1952, XXVI, p. 199 et seq; R.E.A., 1953,
LV, p. 58 et seq
6 Id.: R. Ph., 1952, XXVI, p. 204
7 H. I. Marrou: Hist. de !'Education dans l'Antiquite, p. 211
8 M. Lejeune: Tyrrhenica, p. 161, n. 6
9 T.L.E., 423
10 T.L.E., 472; B.N., P· 385, fig. 229
l l T.L.E., 2, 62; 570
12 T.L.E., 69
13 T.L.E., 601
14 T.L.E., 131
15 C.I.E., 5288, p. 227; T.L.E., 91; A.E., pl. 388, 2; F. de Ruyt:
Charun, p. 131
16 Gerhard-Korte: Etr. Spieg., V, 127; cf. supra, p. 64 and n. 25
17 F. de Ruyt: Charun, p. 158 et seq
18 Strab.: V, 2, 9; N. Lewis: L'lndustrie du papyrus dans l'Egypte
greco-romaine, 1934. p. 14
19 M. Pallottino: St Etr., VI, 1932, p. 559 (MS. p. 254, Author's
addition)
20 Liv.: IV, 7, 12; 13, 7; 20, 8
21 The fragments of the Etruscan linen book preserved in the
Museum of Zagreb are the subject of a monograph, apart from
C.I.E., Libri Lintei Etrusci fragmenta Zagrebiensia, 1919-19~1,
by G. Herbig and 0. Danielsson. For the interpretation we cite
particularly M. Pallottino: I! conte11uto de! testo de/la Mummia di
Zagabria, St Etr., XI, 1937, p. 203 et seq; K. Olzscha: Interpretation
der Agramer Mumienbinde, Klio, Heih. XL, 1939
D.L.E.-20 293
22 Supra, p. 88
23 K. Olzscha: Die Kalenderdaten der Agramen Mumienbinden,
Aegyptus, 1959, p. 340 et seq
24 Th. Birt: Die Buchrolle in der Kunst, 1907, p. 215 et seq
25 Luer.: VI, 381-382
26 Cic.: De Div., I, 20, v. 47; J. Carcopino: La Louve du Capitole,
1925, p. 34 et seq
27 C. 0. Thulin: Die Etr. Disciplin, 1909, III
28 Fest.: 358 L
29 Reference in C. 0. Thulin: ibid, III, p. 86 et seq
30 Cic.: De Haruspicum responso
31 A. Piganiol: Le Calendrier brontoscopique de Nigidius Figulus,
Stud. A. C. Johnson: 1951, p. 79 et seq
32 A. Grenier: J,es Religions itrusque et romaine, 1948
33 Collection of texts in M.D., II, p. 23 et seq; A. Grenier: ibid, p. 27
34 Liv.: I, 7, 4 et seq; J. Bayet: Les Origines de l'Hercule romain, 1926,
p. 203 et seq
35 Supra, p. 274
36 Hom.: Od., IV, 351 et seq; Virg.: Georg., IV, 387 et seq
37 Lachmann: Gromatici Veteres, I, p. 350; St Weinstock: Vegoia,
in Real-Enc., VIII, A l, p. 577 et seq; J. Heurgon: The date of
Vegoia's prophecy, J.R.S., 1959, p. 41 et seq; cf. supra, p. 133
38 S. Mazzarino: Hist. VI, 1957, p. 109
39 J. Marouzeau: L'Ordre des mots en latin, 1953, p. 7 et seq
40 Cic.: De Div., I, 92; cf. Val. Max.: I, l, l
41 Cic.: De Leg., II, 21
42 Tac.: Ann., XI, 15
44 Cat.: De Agr., 5, 4; Cic.: ibid, I, 132
45 C.1.L., IX, 5824
46 Cass. Dio.: LVI, 25
47 C. 0. Thulin: ibid, III, p. 136 et seq
48 Zosim.: V, 41 et seq
49 C. 0. Thulin: ibid, III, p. 142
50 On Herennius Siculus, Val. Max.: IX, 12, 6; Veil. Pat.: II, 7, 2;
F. Miinzer: in Real-Enc. (46); E. Babelon: Descr. hist. des monn.
de la Rep. rom., I, p. 567. Sur Postumius, Cic.: De Div., I, 172;
Val. Max.: I, 6, 4. Sur Spurinna, Cic.: Fam., IX, 24; De Div.,
I, 119; Suet.: Caes., 81; Val. Max.: VIII, II, 2
51 J. Heurgon: Tarquitius Priscus, Latomus, 1953, p. 402 et seq
52 App. Verg.: Cat., V, 3
53 C.l.L., XI, 3370, 7566
54 F. Miinzer: in Real-Enc., III
55 Not. Sc., IX, 1955· p. 114 et seq
56 Cic.: Pro Caecina; Fam., VI, 5-8
57 Cic.: Fam., VI, 6, 3
58 T.L.E., 131; J. Heurgon: Influences grecques sur le religion etrusque,
R.E.L., XXXV, 1957, p. 106 et seq
294
NOTES: ETRUSCAN LITERATUHE
59 Supra, p. 275, n. 19
60 J. Carcopino: La Basiliquc pyt!tagoricic1111c de la Porte lllajeure,
1927, p. 183
61 Hom.: Od., XV, 225; Suidas: III, 419, p. 349 A
62 Drac.: Romul., VIII, 480
63 Supra, p. 50
64 P. Ducati: Etruria antica, I, p. 164
65 B.N., p. 405 et seq.
66 Liv.: IX, 36, 3; cf. supra, p. 76
67 H: I. Marrou: Hist. de l' Education da11s l' A11tiq11ite, p. 329 et seq
6S D10n. Hal.: I, 21, 2
69 Serv. Dan.: ad Aen., VlII, 2S5
70 Supra, p. 249
71 Hor.: Ep., II, 1, 139 et seq; Fest. Paul.: 75 L; G. \Vissowa: Real-
Enc., VI, p. 2223 et seq
72 Supra, p. 264 et seq
73 Infra, p. 303
74 Liv.: VII, 2
75 J. H. \Vaszink: Varro, Livy and Tertullian, Vig. Christ. II, 1948,
p. 224 et seq
76 The lyre player of the Tomb of the Lionesses has the mouth shut.
That on the tomb of the Citrarede if one can believe the drawin
which is all that remains of it, has the lips _parted, and it is possible
his music had words (J. Martha, L'Art Etrusque, fig. 2S9, p. 43S)
77 P. Wuilleumier: Tarente, 1939, p. 612 et seq
7S A. Piganiol: Recherches sur les jeux romains, 1923, p. 32 et seq
79 Brunn-Korte: Rilievi delle Urne etrusche, I, pl. 73, 2-3; pl. So, u;
II, pl. 20-26; A.E., pl. 355, l; 356, 1-3
So Brunn-Korte: ibid, I, l, 4; 4, u; II, 13; lS; A.E., pl. 400, 3;
404, l; 405, l
S1 Brunn-Korte: II, 2; Pacuv.: Medus, 397 R; Luci!.: 5S7 M
S2 Brunn-Korte: II, pl. S9- 92
S3 E. Fiesel: Namen des griech. Mythos im Etruskischen, l92S
S4 Pl.: Men., 144
S5 Varr.: L.L., V, 55
S6 A. Emout: Etymologica, I, p. 117; G. Dumezil: L'Heritage i11do-
europeen d Rome, p. 191
S7 Censor.: 17, 6; C. 0. Thulin: Die etr. Disziplin, III, p. 63 et seq
SS C.l.L., XIII, l66S; P. Fabia: La Table Claudiemze de Lyon, 1929
S9 Schol. Veron.: ad Aen., X, 200; A. H. G. Zimmermann: De A.
Caecina scrip tore, lS 52
90 F. Altheim: Rom. Gesch., I, p. 191 et seq
91 A.E., pl. lSg--196; les 1zou·veaux fragments dans M. Pallottino:
La Scuola di Vulca, 1945; Archeol. Class., II, 1950, p. 122 et seq;
Etruscologia, pl. lO
92 p .E., p. 31; R. Bloch: L' Art etrusque, pl. II; supra, p. 263
93 For example, the myth evoked by Porsenna, Brunnkortc: III,
pl. S, l; A.E., pl. 401, l; cf. Pl.: II, 140
295
94 Supra, p. 65 et seq; P.E., p. u5 et seq; R. Bloch: ibid, pl. 80-82

95 Virg.: Aen., VI, 88-89
96 Liv.: V, 33, 3; Dion. Hal.: XIII, I4 et seq
97 Gell.: N.A., XVII, I4, 4
98 Pol.: II, I7, 3
99 T.L.E., 47I
IOO W. Schulze: Zur Gesch. d. !at. Eigennamen, p. 287
IOI J. Perret: Les Origines de la ligende troyenne de Rome, I942, p. 458
et seq
I02 Plut.: Rom., 2 (trans. R. Flaceliere)
I03 Dion. Hal.: IV, 2, I; F. Altheim: Griech. Gotter im alten Rom,
I930, p. 5I et seq
I04 L. Ross Taylor: Local Cults in Etruria, I923, p. I20
Io5 M. Pallottino: Archeol. Class., IX, Ig57, p. 206 et seq; X, I958,
p. 3I5 et seq
106 P. Romanelli: Not. Sc., I948, p. 260 et seq
I07 A. Degrassi: Inscr. Italiae, XIII, III, I937
I08 J. Heurgon: M.E.F.R., LXIII, I95I, p. u9 et seq; 1\1. Pallottino:
Etr., XXI, I950-I95I, p. I47 et seq
I09 P. Romanelli: ibid, n° 44; The 1\1 is certain which excludes the
reconstruction of M. Pallottino: ibid, p. I70: bello Hannibalico.
Perhaps it should be Hamertes instead of Camertes
IIO P. Romanelli: ibid, n° 48; Ann. ep., I95I, n° I46. On Aquila
reservations by E. Vetter: Gl., XXXIV, I954. p. 59
II I U. Kahrstedt: Symb. Osl., XXX, I953· p. 68
II2 J. Heurgon: ibid, p. I3I; M. Pallottmo: ibid, p. I62
u3 F. Della Corte: St Etr., XXIV, I955. p. 75
u4 J. Heurgon: ibid, I33. after a suggestion by J. Bayet
u5 P. Romanelli: ibid, n° 77, completed by number I8 which cor-
responds there
I I6 M. Pallotting: Tarquinio, p. 584; inscr. etrusques de Norchia,
T.L.E., I64 et seq; supra, p. I95
II7 Pl.: N.H., xxxv, 6
u8 Juv.: Sat., VIII, I et seq
u9 Pers.: Sat., III, 28
I20 Hor.: Cann., III, 29, I; Prop.: El., III, 9, I
I2I Hor.: Sat., I, 6, I et seq
I22 Pl.: N.H., XXXV, 26
I23 Tac.: Ann., VI, II, 3
I24 Veil. Paterc.: II, 88, 3
I25 P. Boyance: Bull. Ass. G. Bude, I959· p. 332 et seq
126 Cic.: P. Clu., I53
I27 Prop.: El., III, 9, 29
I28 Hor.: Sat., I, 5, 29
I29 Cass. Dio.: LII, I-+I
I30 Sen.: De Clem., I, 9
I3 I P. Grima!: Le Siecle d' Auguste, p. 58 et seq
I32 The title of a memorable work by Sir Ronald Syme: Tlze Roman
NOTES: CONCLUSIO
Revolution, I939, which studies the arrival of a new ruling class

during the reign of Augustus
I33 Stendhal: La Chartreuse de Parme, chap. VI.
134 Sen.: ad Luc., 114, 4
I35 Fr. Goethert: Zur Kunst der rom. Republik, i931
136 Sen.: ad Luc., 92, 35
137 Juv.: Sat., I, 66; XII, 38 et seq; Pl.: N.H., VIII, 174
I38 Suet.: Vit. Hor., p. 45 R
I39 Sen.: ad Luc., 114, 6
140 Pl.: N.H., VII, 172
I4I Sen.: De Prov., I, 3, 10
142 Macr.: Sat., II, 4, 12
I43 They have been collected and studied by F. Harder, Progr. Berl.
I889, and P. Lunderstedt, Comment. Philo!. Ienenses, IX, 1, 1911
144 Sen.: ad Luc., 92, 35
145 Sen.: ad Luc., IOI, 11
146 Suet.: Aug., 86, 3; Sen.: ad Luc., 114, 4
147 H. Bardon: La litterature lati11e inconnue, II, p. 13 et seq
148 Sen.: ad Luc., I9, 9. The fragments which follow in 114, 5 et seq
149 F. Cumont: Lux perpetua, p. 82 et seq, 396 et seq
I50 M. Renard: Pline l'Ancien et le motif de l' 'assarotos oikos', Homm.
iedermann, p. 307 et seq
151 Virg.: Aen., VI, 599
CONCLUSION
I Liv.: I, 40, 2: Tarquin is not Italicae Stirpis because son of the

Corinthian Demaratus
2 Fest.: p. 222 L
3 Her.: IV, 76 et seq
4 A. Hus: Les Etrusques, I959, p. I55
297
INDEX
a caditoia tombs, I6o Ariminus river, 120

Abetone, Mount (Caere), I48, I49 Arimnestos, 'king of the Etruscans',
Accius, 49, 245, 246 42
actors, 2I4-I5, 232-3 aristocracy, 40, 49-54; family trees,
Adria, I2, I3, Io4, I I I 258-60; religious vocation, 230-I,
Aelianus Claudus, I I9, I96--'7 232, 249; traditions of, 25I-8
Aeneas, 254, 256 Aristotle, I3, 34, 76, I95, I97, I98,
aerial photography, I48, I49, I 59 242
Aeschylus, 243 Arretium, I2
affranchised men, 60, 6I-5 Arringatore (Orator) statue, I72,
agriculture, 36, 37, 57, 67; imple- I76, I77, I79
ments, u4-I5; treatises on, Arruns of Clusium, 228, 230, 233,
u5-I7 252
Agrippa, 260, 26I, 263 art, animal motifs in, I I9
Agrippina, I33 assembly, federal, 12, 5I, 194
Agylla, I37 Assyria, 5
Alalia (Aleria), I3, 32, I93, 2IO Atella, 2I4
Alban Lake, 105 Atellana (farce), 2I4-I5, 241
Alcimos, I96 Athenaeus, 34
Alcisthenes, I75 Athens, 50
alfni family, 65-6 athletics, 206--'7
Algeria, Io3 Ati, 9I, 92
alphabets, 2I6-I8, 238 Atria, I40, I55
aluminium, I I atrium (courtyard), 54, I39, I54--'7
Ameria, I29 augurs, 38, Io5, I70, 22I, 224, 225,
Amiata, Monte, 98 226, 231-6
Amphipolis, 58 Augustus, Emperor, 8I, 83, 84, 85,
amphitheatres, 208, 2I I, 2I2, 234 225, 232, 260, 26I-2, 264-5, 266
amphorae, 9I-2, I5 I Aulus Feluscus the Victor, 45, 46
Andre, Jacques, I I 3 axe, in fasces, 45, 53
animals, II8-2I, 224-5
Amzales Maximi, 249 Bacchic dance, 20I-4
Antiochus, I93 Bachofen, J. J., 84-5
Antonius, I86 Banditaccia necropolis (Caere), I47,
Apicius, I88 148, I49, I59-6I
Apollo, I05 banquests, 34, 36, 77, I86, 189--9I,
apparitor, 52, 53 I95
appearance, 2I-8 Barberini tomb, 10-II, I63, I8o
Appeninic civilization, 7 Bartoccini, R., I42
Apuleius, 2I4, 227 Bayet, Jean, 88
Aquae Caertanae, 99 Beazley, Sir John, 203, 2IO
aquiline races, 23 beds, I62, I65, 19I; funerary, 93,
Archons, Athenian, 50 94, 95, 153
Arezzo, I4, 42, 57, 58, 59, IOI, I IO, beech-trees, I 22
III, II5, I29, I37, I92, 256, 258, Beer, Sir Gavin de, 20, 2I-2
259, 260 bees, 224-5
Argentario, Monte, I22 Bernardini tomb, 10-II, 90
Ariadne, 96 Bieda, 105, 129, 130, 145, 158
Ariminum (Rimini), I20, I2I birds, I2I, 225, 226
INI>EX
births, abnormal, 225-6 Campania, 10, 11, 12, 111, 112,211,

Bisen2io, 178 214
Bloch, Raymond, 6, 10, 59, 142, Campiglia l\ larittima, n4, 125,
200, 241 126
blood-groups, 20-1 ca11opi, 163
boar hunts, 118-19 Capanna tomb, 150, 152
boat-building, 122-3 Capua, 12, 138, 141, 143, 218
Bocchoris, Pharaoh, 4 Carcopino, Jerome, 124, t.H
Bologna, 12, 13, 115, 132, 140 carpentum (two-wheeled cart), 132- 4
Uolsena (ancient Volsinii), 6, 59, Carrara quarries, 58, 123
61, 142, 192, 200, 219, 238, 241; carrus (four-wheeled chariot), 134
lake of, 98, 122, 123 Carthage, 13, 32, 67, 68, 113, I 14,
Bomarzo, 69 115, 120, 121
books, 218-23 Cassino, 225
Books of the Dead, 218, 221 Castel Giubileo, 130
Books of Fate, 38, 223-7, 235 Castel San Mariano, 13 1
Boufarik, 103 Castiglione, Lago di, 102
boundary marks, 108, 109, 125, Catiline, 88, 223
136, 229 Cato, 26, 86, 100, 112, 113, 116,
boxing, 195, 196 I 17, 133, 172, 23 I-2, 252
Boyance, P., 261 cattle, 117
Bracciano, lake of, 122 Catullus, 24
Bradford, J., 148, 159 celestial phenomena, 224, 226
braziers, mobile, 169 centuries, 185
British School, Rome, 109 ceramics, 91-2, 149, 150, 151, 181,
bronze, 123, 124-5, 126; imple- 192, 207
ments, 114 cereals, 110-11
Bronze Age, 7 Cerveteri, 22, 24
bucchero pottery, 160, 192, 217 Cesena, 111
burial customs, 6, 52-4, 89 chairs, 162-3
buskins, 178 Chalcidians, 120, 123
Bux, Ernst, 24 Chaldea, 5
chamber tombs, 6, 218
chariot-races, 132, 205-6
cabbage, 113 chariots, 125, 131-2, 134
Cacus, 228, 230 charms and recipes, 116
Caecina family, 30, 234 cheese, 117, 170
Caecina, Aulus, 205, 222, 234, 248 cherries, 113
Caere (Cerveteri), 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, chess, 168
14, 57, 67, 75, 99, 101, 110, 114, Chiana valley, 98
122, 123, 130, 131, 143, 238, 239, children, tombs of, 94
253, 255-6, 258; cemeteries of, chiton (tunic), 172, 173, 179
89--<)o, 91-6, 112, 142, 146-'], Chiusi, 23, 41, 43, 57, 69, 71, 73,
148-54, 158, 159-61, 163-']9, IOI, 108, 109, I 10, I 19, 122, 129,
192, 217, 239-40; kings of, 41-2; 141, 146, 163, 169, 180, 193, 200,
population, 147-8 203, 206, 208--<), 218, 238, 253
Caesar, Julius, 74 Ciba Foundation, 21, 146
calcei patricii (boots), 178--<) Cicero, 30, 86, 106, 138, 178, 186,
calcei repandi (slippers), 22 191,223, 226, 230, 231, 234, 239,
calendar, 183-5, 222, 224; 'bronto- 261
scopic', 227 Cilnii family, 42, 59, 85, 259, 260
Caligula, Emperor, 133 Ciminian Forest, 56, 98, 122, 238,
Camillus, Marcus Furius, 133 253
Campana plaques, 176, 177, 178, Cimon, 58
180 cinerary urns, 6, 10, 23, 52, 62, 65,
299
INDEX
66, 68, 7I, 72, 75, 89, I32, I50, courage, 37

I56, 244-5 Cratinus, I78
cippi (tombs), 70, 93, 94, 96, 108, cremation, 6, 2I, 89
109, I64, I93. 206, 208-9, 230 Crete, 45, I73
cities - see towns Critias the Tyrant, I62, I9I
citrons, 113 crooks, shepherds', I70
Citta di Castello, 98, I57 crops, 56, 57, 110-11
Civitacastellana, I3I 'cubist' sculpture, 25
claruchies, 108 Culni, 9I-2
Claudius, Emperor, 76, 84, 23I, Cumae, I2, I3, 34, I40, I82, 225,
233, 24~ 250, 25I, 256, 257, 258 243
Claudius Centumalus, 145 cuniculi, 105
clay quarries, I 16 curule chair, 44, 52
clientela, 58
clients, 72-3, 144 dairying, 117
cloaks, 172, 173, 174~, 263 dance and dancers, I72, I77-·8,
Clodius, Publius, 106, 226 I79-80, I99-204, 208-<), 24I,
cloth, I75. 191 242-3
Clusium (Chiusi), 12, 41, 110, 228, Dante, IO
252, 253 Decius Mus, Publius, 60
Coche de la Ferte, E., 180, 18I Demosthenes, 58
colonization, 108-9, 1 I5, 138, I39, devils, 213-14
229 dice, I68
columbaria, I45 dictatorship, 48
columen (ridge-beam), 150, I53 Diodorus Siculus, 36, I27, I28, I43,
columns, I57- 9 237
Cornacchio, I40, I4I Diomedes, 140
comets, 2.26 Dion, Roger, I24
Commedia dell' Arte, 215, 24I Dionysiac mysteries, 235
compluvium (rain-water opening), Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I, 7,
I56, I57 I5,32,43,44,57, 5~6I,7~ III,
condottieri, 45-<J, 78 175, I77. 202, 240, 252, 264
consuls, 41 Dionysius of Syracuse, I75
cooking and cooks, I87-9, I96 diptyches, 2I8-I9
copper, 11, 124, 125, 126 discipline, 230-1, 233, 235-6, 237,
Cornelia, 96 239, 25I
Corsica, 13, 32 disease, 100-4, 105, Io6
Cortona, 12, 108 distaffs, 170
Cosa, 100, 105 diviners, 38, 105, I70, 22I, 224,
costume, 22, 77, 144, 17I-7, 209, 225, 226, 23I-6
263-4; royal, 43-4; slaves', 55; Domitius Apollinaris, 100
women's, 22, 77, 17I, I74-5, drainage, 104-6, 139
I71-82 drama, 2I4-I5, 24I~
couches, funeral, 93-5, I53 drinking vessels, I9I-2, I93, 2I7
countryside: agricultural imple- dromos(tombpassage), I50, I52, I56
ments, II4-I5; agronomists, Ducati, Pericle, 237, 239
115- 17; cereals, I10-11; fertility
of, 97-100; fishing, 121-2; hunt- eagles, 8I, 225
ing, 118-2I; hydraulics, 104-6; Earth Mother, 96
malaria, Ioo-4; mining, 123-<); earthquakes, 64, 226
peasants, 56-<); property rights, education, I4, 217, 238-<), 253
106-Io; roads, I29-3I; stock- Elba, 11, I23, I24, I25-6, I27-8
raising, I I7-I8; timber industry, elogia, 256-8
I22-3; travel, 129-34; vines and entertainments: athletics, 206~;
trees, I 1 I- I4 dancing, I72, I77-8, I79-80,
300
INDKX
I99-204, 208-<J, 241, 242-3; flax, I 12

games, I4, I32, I68, I74. I76, flora, I I2-I4; superstitions about,
I93-4, 204-I5; gladiatorial com- 224
bats, 2IO-I2; music, I95-9; Florence, 25-6, 114, 129, 146, 195,
Phersu, game of, 2I2-I5; racing, 200
205-6; slaves in, 55, 62; sports, Florus, 134
204-I5 flute, 197-9, 203
epitaphs, I7-I8, 29, 66, 75. See food, I85-6
also inscriptions footwear, 22, 44, I77-<)
ergastula (slave prisons), 58-<), 67, forests, I 22
I44 fortifications, I43
Este, 68, 69, 2I7 Foti, G., 146
etera, 72, 73 foundation rites, I36-7
Etrusca discipli11a, 8, I4, 38, 22I, Fran~ois tomb, I4, 38- 9, 47, 48,
230-1, 233, 235-6, 237, 239, 251 IOI, I2I, I54, 177, 2IO, 250, 258
Etrusci libri, 222-3 freed men, 30, 37, 58, 60, 6I-5;
Euripides, 243, 244, 245 marriage, 70-I; private dwellings
of, I43-4; status, 70-3
Fabii family, 56-7, 238, 253 frescoes, 38-<), 47, 52, 54, 77, 148,
Fabius, Caeso, 238, 253 186-9, I92, 205-<), 211, 2I2-I3,
Fabius Gurges, Quintus, 60 243, 250, 258
Fabius Maximus Gurges, 253 fruit, I I2-I3, I I4
Fabius Maximus Rullianus, 56-7, Fufluns (god), 127
238, 253 Fulvius Flaccus, Marcus, 6I
Fabius Pictor, 82, 253-4 funeral games, 55, I I9, 193, I94,
Falerii (Civitacastellana), 15, 231, 202, 204, 209, 212, 2I4, 24I
240-I funeral rites, 52-4, 89
Faliscan region, II2, 1 I3, II7, I30 funeral sacrifices, 2IO, 2I2
familia, 62-5; rustica, 56, I I7; funerary furnishings, I50-2, I6o,
urbana, 54 I65-71, 192, 2I7, 2I8
families: genealogical trees, 258-60; furniture, I62-71
life of, 74-5; separate dwellings
of, I44. I45; traditions of, 25 I-8
farms, size of, I I7 Gabii, 78
Farnese, I29 game reserves, I I 9
fasces, 44-5, 53 games, 14, I32, I68, 174, I76,
Fate, Books of, 38, 223-7, 235 I93-4, 204-15; federal, 55, 243;
fauna, 118-22; superstitions about, funeral-see funeral games; music
224-5, 226 at, I95. I96
feasts, 54-5 gardens, 114, I54, I55
Felsina (Bologna), I2 gates, town, 136
Ferrara, I40 Gaul and Gauls, 69-70, 72, 111,
fertility, 97-IOO I I5-16, I34, 143, 252
'Fescennine Verses', 24I, 242 genealogy, 258-60
Festus, I55. 179, 206 Giustiniani, Francesca, tomb of,
fever, IOO-I, I02-4, Io5, Io6 172, I73. 174
Fidenae (Castel Giubileo), 130 gladiators, 2IO-I2
fields, marking-off of, I07 Glatz, Gustave, I73
Fiesole, Io8, I34 gluttony, 26-7, 33
Fiora river, 98, 142 gods, 105, Io7, Io9, I27, 184, 185,
fir trees, I22 222, 227-30
Fischer, Professor, 23 Golini tomb, 180, I86-7, I88-9,
fishing, I 21-2 I90, 196
Flaccus, Verrius, 46, 47, I55. 248, Gracchi family, 229, 261
270 Gracchus, Tiberius, 56, 68, 99, 100
301
INDEX
grafitti, 151, 152. See also m- 151, 152, 164-5, 186, 218, 230,
scriptions 233, 235-6, 256-8
Graviscae, 12, 100-1, 106, III insulae, 136, 139, 144
Greece: admiration for, 2, 15, 23, ~onia, 22, 23, 24, 138, 175, 177
271; enmity with, 12-13, 32-3; iron, 11, 124, 125, 126-8
influence of, II, 171-2, 173, 189, irrigation, 106
190, 242, 243-4, 245, 246; lschia, 11, 120, 123
music, 195, 198; war on shipping
of, 13, 32-3 Julian, Emperor, 225
groma (surveying instrument), 136,
Jupiter, 107, 109, 184, 228-9, 233
138 Juvenal, 58, 161, 259
Grosseto, 106
gynaecocracy, 85-8
kings, 41-5; costume, 176-7; in-
Harlequins, 214-15 signia of, 43-5; proclaimed by
haruspices (diviners), 38, 64, 105, queens, 87; titles of, 42-3
221, 224, 225, 226, 231-6 kitchens, 186-<); utensils, 167-8
headgear, 22, 179-82 kline (Greek funerary bed), 93, 94,
Heraclides Ponticus, 34 95
Herbig, Reinhard, 25 knights, Roman, 40, 65, 261
Herennius Siculus, 232-3 Krall, J., 220
Herodotus, 3-4, 5, 6, 7, 33, 74, 85,
102, 194, 25 I, 271 lacerna (mantle), 174, 175
hetairoi (clients), 72 Laelius the Wise, 26
Hiero of Syracuse, 34 lagoons, 102, 105, 140, 141
himation (cloak), 172, 173, 175 land: fertility of, 97-100; ownership
Himera, 13 of, 106-10, 229
Hippodamus of Miletus, 137, 138, landscape, 97-9
141 language, 1, 2, 3, 5, 16-19, 108, 138,
historical literature, 247-51 245-6
Horace, 15, 259, 260, 261, 262, 264 Lars Tolumnius, king of Veii, 42
Horatius Codes, 41 Larthia, tomb of, 89-<)o, 149
horse-races, 205-6, 207 latifundia (estates), 56, 59, 100, 113,
hortus (vegetable garden), 154, 155 117
houses, 36; architecture of, 154-<); Latium, 12, 13
furnishing, 162-71; interior of, lauchme (king), 42-3
161-']1; private, 143-5; sar- lautni (ex-slave), 62-3, 66, 67, 69,
cophagi as, 92-3, 94, 96; tene- 70-3
ment, 144-5 Lemnos, 5
hunting, 57, 118-21; music m, lemons, 113
196-'] Leonardo da Vinci, 10, 103
hunting-nets, ll2, 118, 196 /ex Oppia, 133
hydraulics, 104-6 libertini, 62
hymns, 240-1 lictors, 36, 44, 52-3
life-expectancy, 28-31, 147
Ides, 184 Liguria, 69
impasto ceramic, 150, 151 limitatio, 108, 109, 136
imperium, symbolism of, 53-4 literature, 216-69; alphabets and
implements: agricultural, 114, 131; spelling books, 216-18; Books of
household, 166-70 Fate, 38, 223-7, 235; drama,
inhumation, 6, 89 241-7; genealogy, 258-60; his-
Innocent I, Pope, 232 torical, 247-51; hymns and
inscriptions, 12, 14, 16-18, 29-30, songs, 240-1; Maecenas, writings
42, 45, 49-50, 51, 65, 70, 72-3, of, 265-9; profane, 237-41;
75, 76, 83, 91, 107, 108, 112, 130, religious, 223-36; tablets and
302
INDEX
scrolls, 218-23; traditions of Massa l\1arittima, 123- 4

great families, 251-8 mater familias, 85, 86, 94
litui (augurs' staves), 170 Maternum (Farnese), 129
Livia, Empress, 83, 84 matriarchy, 85-8, 90
Livius Andronicus, 242, 243, 245 matronymics, use of, 75-6, 85, 89
Livy, 38, 39, 43, 49, 55, 56, 57, 59, Matuna family, 164--J1
60, 61, 68, 73, 77-9, 80, 81, 86, Mazzarino, Santo, 18, 230
87, 88, IOI, 104, IIO, 122, 132, meals, 185-6
I 34, 199, 203, 235, 238--<), 241, medical biology, and origins, 20- 2
242, 243, 252, 253, 269 Melpum (possibly Milan), 12
Lucania, 58 Mengarelli, Raniero, 91, 93, 94, 95,
Lucano, Monte, 83 151-2, 159
Lucilius, 26, 245, 246 Menon of Pharsalos, 58
Lucretia, 79-80 mercenaries, 45
Lucretius, 222-3 Messalina, 133
Lucullus, I 13 metal deposits, 11
lucumo (king), 42-3, 48, 62, 231, metallurgy, 58, 123--<), 139
232, 260 Mezentius, king of Caere, 33, 41,
Luni, 58, 111, 114, 117, 123 137
luxury, 27, 33, 36--J, 262, 268 Michelangelo, 10
Lycians, 85, 86 Milan, 12
Lydians, 3-4, 77 Milesians, 33
Miletus, 33, 175, 191
macaroni, 167-8 millet, I 11
Machiavelli, 10 mining, 58, 123--<J
Macstarna, 47-8, 129, 250, 251 Minto, Antonio, 125
Maecenas, 42, 85, 256, 259-65; Modena, 12, 64
writings of, 265--<J Mogetius, tomb of, 70
Magilii family, 67 monkeys, 119-21
Magistrate, Sarcophagus of the, Monteleone, 131
235-6 Montepulciano, 76, 108, 252
magistrates, 43, 49-51, 218; funeral months, 184-5
processions, 52-4, 177; insignia morals, 32--<), 76--J, 79-80, 252,
of, 52-4 262-3, 266
Mago, 67, 115 Morrius, king of Veii, 42
malaria, 100-4, 105, 106, 111 mountebanks, 209-10
mancipium, 61 Mucius Scaevola, 41
mantles, 174 Murgentina vine, 111
Mantua, 12, 69, 248 muscatels, 111
manumissio, 62, 64 music, 195--<); role of, II8, 119
marble, 123, 126
Maremna, 97, 100, 102, 106 Naevius, 214, 246
Mari, 5 names, 17, 18, 62, 63, 65, 66, 67,
maritime power, 12-13, 32-3, 34, 68, 70, 71, 75-6, 85
35, 36 Nepete (Nepi), 131
market day, 184 Nepi, 131
marriage, 70-1 Nepos, Cornelius, 34
Marseilles, 32 Nicolaus of Damascus, 211
Marsiliana d'Albegna, 131, 216-17, Nicosthenes (potter), 91, 92
218, 238 Niebuhr, B. G., 223
Martial, 59, 111, 117 Nogara, Bartolomeo, 146, 148, 151,
maru (priests and magistrates), 50, 237
52 Nola, 12, 217, 232
Marzabotto, 12, 13, 139-40, 141 Norchia, 130, 158, 258
masks, 202, 209, 213- 15, 241 Nortia (goddess), 185
INDEX
Nuceria, I2 Petronii family, 75

numbers, names of, I7, I8, 29, I68 Phaedra, 96
Nun-painter, 28 Phersu, game of, 2I2-I5, 24I
Phocaea, 32
obesity, 24, 25-'] Phocaeans, I 3
Ogre, Tomb of the, I8o physical characteristics, 20-3 I, 264
Oinarea (or Oina), 59, 60 Piacenza, 5
olives, I I2 Picard, Charles, 22
Ombrici, 4 piety, 38-<)
Ombrone river, 98 pig-breeding, 117-I8
'omen books', I2I Piganiol, Andre, 244
omens, interpretation of, 5, 36, pilentum (ceremonial vehicle), I33
38-<), 224-'] Piombino, I23
'Orator' statue, I72, I76, I77, I79 piracy, I 2, 42
Orcia river, 98 Pisa, 110-I I, 118, I22-3, I29, I46
Orcle, 258 Pithecusa (Ischia), I2o, I23
Orient: influence of, I I, 20-I; Plato, I98, 224
possible origin in, 2, 3-7, 8, Plautius Pulcher, M., 84
20-I, 77 Plautius Silvanus, M., 83-4
origins, 2, 3-9; medico-biological Plautus, 76, I20, I92, 204, 2I5, 23I
view, 20-2; Oriental, 2, 3-'], 8, plays, 2I4-I 5, 24I, 244-6
20-I, 77 Plinythe Elder, 64-5, Io4, I2I, I23,
Orvieto, 54, 59, 77, I37, I46, I69, I28, I8~ I98,233, 234, 260, 264
I86, I88, I92 Pliny the Younger, 98-<), Ioo, I I7,
Oscan games, 2I5 I57
Ostia, I45, I6I ploughs, 114-I5
Ovid, 110, II3, I32, 203 Plutarch, 56, I96, 206, 254-5
Po river, rn4, I40, I4I
Paestum, 243 poetry, 240-I
Paglia, valley Poggio a Gaiella, I56
painting, 27-8, II9, I2I-2, I48. Pollenius Auspex, 236
See also frescoes Polles, 236
Pais, Ettore, I 5 Polybius, 72, 118, I75, 252
Palestrina, I o pomegranate, I I4
pallium (cloak), 263, 264 pomerium, Io8, I36
Pallottino, M., 93, I22, 202 Pompeii, I2, I54, I56, 2I9, 243,
papyrus, 220, 222 256
parental terms, 75 Pomponius, 23 I
Pareti, Luigi, 90 population, I45-8
Parma, I2 Populonia, 11, 58, 59, IOI, I22,
Paras, I26 I23, I25, I26-'], I28, I3I, I46
Partunu tomb, 25, I23 Porsenna, king of Clusium, 4I, 48,
pasta, I I I I4I, 253
paterfamilias, 63, 65, 74, 93, 94, 267 Porto Clementina, IOO
Patroclus, 2Io Portonaccio, temple of, 42
Paulus, Aemilius, 67 Posidonius of Apamea, 35-'7, 55,
peasants, 56-<), 6I-5 I27, I28, I43. I44. I45. I56, I72,
pecorino (cheese), I I7 I85, I9I, I92, I93. 237
Pelasgians, 24 Postumius (haruspex), 232-3
penestes (free men), 57-8, 6I pottery, 9I-2, I49, I50, I5I, I8I,
peristyles, I 57-<J I92, 207
Perugia, IO, I5, I8, 23, 43, 57, 68, Pozzuoli, I27- 8, I29
69, 7I, 73, 75, IOI, I08, I09, I IO, Praeneste (Palestrina), IO, 11, I4,
I22, I37, I46, I54, I98, 2IO, 2I8, I23, I30, I63; Bernardini tomb,
230 IO-I I, 90
INDEX
praetors, 5 I 40, 230- I, 232, 249; society,

Prilius, Lake (Lago di Castiglione), classes of, 40; Tarquins and, 81;
I02, I06 troia, 200; vehicles, 132- 4; view
principes (great men), 49, 50 of Etruscans, 37- 9, 76, 78, I 12,
prisoners-of-war: sacrifice of, 210- 116, 252; women of, 77, 80, 82,
11; as slaves, 67-8 84, 92, I32- 3
private dwellings, I43-5 Romulus, 42, 46, 104, 254- 5, 256
processions, official, 52- 4, I77 ruling class, 40- 54; condollieri,
Promathion, 254-6 45-<); kings, 41- 5; magistrates,
Propertius, 259, 26I, 262 49-5I; processions, official, 52- 4;
Propertius, king of Veii, 42 sovereignty, insignia of, 43- 5
property rights, 106-10 Rusellae, II, 99, IOI, IIO, I22
prophets, 227-36 Rutilius Namatianus, 99- Ioo, Io6,
Pseudo-Aristotle, 59-60, 126, 128 I 18, 129
Ptolemy Philometor, I45
Pulcinelia, Tomb of, 213
Pulena family, 235-6 Sabine women, 88, 202
punishment, 58-<) sacrifices, 39, 210, 2I2
purple cloth, I91 sail-making, 112
purth (president of zilath), 5I, 52 Salerno, 12
Pyrgi, I2, I22, 255 Salii, 200, 201, 240, 241
Sallust, 88
quarries, 58, 116, 123, 126 Samnites, 15, 211
Samos, 119
racing, I32, 205-6 San Giuliano, 25, 158
Ratumenna (charioteer), 206 sandals, 178, I79
Ravenna, I2, I02 sanitation, Io4-5
recipes, cookery, I88 sarcophagi, 22, 25-6, 27, 52, 93, 94,
Regolini-Galassi tomb, 89-9I, 149 95-6, 153, I93. 244
I63, 180, 192, 217 Sardinia, I3, 32
religion, 4-5, 8, 36, 38-9, 96, 105, Sarsina, 215
106, 221-2, 227-3 I; aristocracy, Sarteano, 66, 71
vocation of, 230-I, 232, 249; Saserna, 67, u5-17
books of, 223-36; prophets, satura (hotchpotch), I87
227-36 Saturnia, I29, I3o
remedies and recipes, I I6 scenic games, 242, 243
Rimini, I2o Scipio Aemilianus, 67
ritual, 38-<); of city foundations, Scipio Africanus, 58, IOI, I27, 193
I36-7 scrolls, 219-z3
'ritual books', 136, 222, 224 sculpture, 22, 23-6, 27, 52, 53, 89
roads, 129-3 1 seats, 162-3
rock inscriptions, 130; tombs, Sempronia, 88
158-<), 258 senators, 40, 230-I, 232, 249
Romanelli, Pietro, I42, 256 Seneca, 54-5, 63, 186, 224, 234,
Rome, I2, 13-I5, 36, 69, uo, 13I, 262, 263, 264, 266
186, 194, 2I4, 2I6, 226, 230, 235, sensuality, 34-5, 37, 39
27I; attacks on, 69; calendar, Sergent, Emond and Etienne, 103
183, 184; clothes, I76, 177; Sergi, Giuseppe, 21
colonies, 100, 106, 108-<), I 16, servant class, 30, 36-7, 54- 73, 187,
136; drama, 24I-3; houses, 188-<); affranchised, 61- 5; clients,
I44-5, I54-6; kings of, 41; 72-3; composition of personnel,
knights, 40, 65, 176, 26I; lictors, 65-70; peasants, 56-<); quarters,
53; music and dance, 198-9, 156; real condition of slaves,
203-4, 24I; origins, 236, 246, 70- 2; revolts, 59-61
253-6; roads to, I29-30; Senate, servi, 62
INDEX
Servius Tullius, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, Tages (prophet), 8, Io2, I09, I I4,
78, 82, 86, 87, 90, I33. 248, 255 I25, I29, 227, 230
sewers, Io4-5 Talpona wine, 11 I
sexual act, 35 Tanaquil, 28, 80-3, 86, 90, I32,
Shades, 267 I4I, 269
sheep-farming, 57, 64, 65 Tarchetius, 254-5
shoes, 22, 44, I78-<) Tarchon, 109, I37, 227, 230, 248,
Sicily, 257 257
Sidonius Apollinaris, Ioo Tarentum, 243
Siena, I46 Tarquin dynasty, 2, I2, I3, 4I, 104,
Silius I talicus, 44, 45 253; tomb, I64
silver plate, 90, I9I-3 Tarquinii, 4, 6, 11, I2, I3, I4, I7,
size and stature, 24-6, 28 23, 25, 29, 4I, 42, 52, 54, 72, 77,
skull, shape of, 2I-2 80-I, 86, 93, IOO, IOI, I02, I09,
slaves, 30, 36, 54-?3; affranchised, 112, I I4, I I9, I30, I32, I37, I4I,
6I-5; country, 56-<); degrees of, I42, I43. I48, I49. I58, I72, I74.
54-6; as entertainers, 55, 62; I75. I90, I92, 205, 206, 211, 2I8,
marriage among, 70-I; prisoners- 2I9, 220, 232, 233, 235, 236,
of-war as, 67-8; punishment of, 256-8; population, I46
58-9; real condition of, 70-2; Tarquinius Collatinus, 79
revolts, 59-6I; separate dwellings Tarquinius the Elder (Priscus), 28,
of, I43-4; status of, 6I-5, 70-3 43, 47, 48, 49, 78, 80-2, 85, 90,
slings, I70 104, I32, I77. 204, 208, 225
slippers, 22, I77 Tarquinius Superbus, 47, 49, 78,
social classes, 40-?3; ruling class, 86-?, Io4, I4I, 206
40-54; servant class, 54-73 Tarquitius Priscus, Lucius, 222,
songs, 240-I 228, 233
Sorbo necropolis, I49 tebenna (cloak), I75-7
Sorrento, I2 Telamon, 114
Sovana, I30, I37, I45, I46, I58, temples, 4, I36, I42, I94; sar-
258 cophagi as, 96
sovereignty: insignia of, 43-5; of tenement houses, I44-5
women, 8I-9I Teratius, 254-5
Spina, I2, I3, I04, II2, I40-3 Terence, I94, 2I4
sport, 204-I5; athletics, 206-7; Tertullian, 2I2
gladiators, 2Io-I2; Phersu, game Tethys, 254-5
of, 2I2-I5, 24I; racing, 205-6 textiles, I I2, I75, I9I
Spurinna (haruspex), 232-3 theatres, 2I4-I5, 243, 244, 247
stadiums, 205, 207-<) Thebris, king of Veii, 42
Statonia, I I I, 119 Theophrastus, I22
stock-raising, I I7-I8 Theopompus, 34-5, 75, 76
Strabo, 74, 99, 120, I2I, I23, 126, Thessalia, 57, 58
I28, I29, 220 thrones, I63
streets, I36, I37, I38, I39, I59, I6I thunder, 226, 227
superstitions, 224-?, 267 Tiber river, 98, 99, Io4, 105, I29,
swing-ploughs, I I4-I5 I30
Sybaris, 33-4, 175, I87 Tifernum Tiberium, 98, I57
Syracuse, 243, 257 Timaeus of Taormina, 33, 34
timber industry, I22-3
time, divisions of, I83-5
tables, I62, I89 tin, II, I24, 126
tablets, writing, 2I7-I9 titles, 49-50
tablinum (salon), I54, I55, I56 Todi, Io8, 11 I
tabula lusoria, I68 toga, 44, 172, I76, I77- 263
Tacitus, 83 Tollara, 108
INDEX
Tolumnia family, 42, 46 tripudi11111 (dance), 202, 203

tombs, 6, 10-11, 14, 15, 22, 25-6, troia (armed display), 200- 1
52, 54, 6S, 70, S9-1)6, IOI, 'trolley table', 168-70
119-20, 121, 123, 130, 131, 141, trumpets, 36, 44, 11 S, 199
14S-54, 156, I 59-61 , 162-'71, Tubero, Aelius, 225
173, 176-S2, 1S6-9, 192, 193, Tuder (Todi), 10S
202-3 , 205--1), 212-13, 243; of T11demis wine, 1 1 1
the Andirons, 151; Augurs, 55, Tullare (Tollara), 10S
121, 162, 176, 177, 194, 207, 212, Tullia the Elder, S6-S, 133
213; Ilarberini, 163; Baron, 114; tumuli, 148-54
Beds and Sarcophagi, 152-3; tunics, 172, 173, 174
Iligae, 132, 177, 179, 200, 207; tunny-fishing, 122
CacciaePesca, 121, 17o;Capanna, Tuscae historiae, 247, 248-51
150, 152; Capitals, 94, 153, 154, Tuscania, 50, 129, 130, 168
156, 15S, 159; Casetta, 153; Tuscany, 8, 9-10, 98, 100, 102-3
Cornice, 153, 154; Doli, 151; Tusculum, 14
Doric Columns, 15S; Fran9ois, tutulus (head-dress), 22, 179, 20S
14, 3S-I), 47, 4S, IOI, 121, 154, Typhon, tomb of, 54
177, 210, 250, 25S; Golini, 1So, Tyrrhenian Sea, 4, 13, 36, 11S, 140
1S6-?, 1SS-I), 190, 196; Grecian Tyrrhenians, 4-6
Vases, 91, 14S, 149-50, 153-4, Tyrrhenus, 3, 4, 6, 102
190, 192; Leopards, 77, So, 172,
174, 190, 191, 194, 243; Lion- Urgulania, 83-4
esses, 172, 177, 202, 243; Mer-
careccia, 156; Monkey, 209; Val d: Fucinaia (Elba), 125
Ogre, 1So; Olympic Games, Valerius Maximus, 62, 231
205-6, 207, 212-13; Painted Valerius Publicola, 53
Lions, 95; Partunu, 123; Re- Varro, 41, S3, 106, 110, 112, 116,
golini-Galassi, S9-1)1, 149, 163, 11S, 119, 126, 12S, 155, 168, 179,
1So, 192, 217; Reliefs, 163-?1; 1S3, 186,233,241,242,243,246,
Ripa, 154, 156; Scimmia, 121; 247, 248, 251, 25~ 269
Seats and Shields, 153, 154, 159, vase-painting, 27-S
162, 172, 177, 17S, 190, 219; vases, 91, 139, 140, 142, 149,
Sette Camini, 120; Tablinum, 150-1, 154, 159, 160, 192, 218,
94, 95; Triclinium, 77, So, 114, 240
121, 172, 174, 17S, 202, 203, vegetables, 1 13
243; Veneti, 6S, 72; Volumnii, Vegoia (prophetess), 107, 109, 228,
154, 19S 229-30, 233
tortures, 39, 212-13 vehicles, 131- 4
towns, 135-4S; fortifications, 143; Veii, 11, 14, 55, 99, 100, 105, 109,
foundation rites, 136-?; planning 111, 130, 131, 133, 137, 145, 146,
of, 137-S, 159-61; population of, 194, 206, 239, 250; kings of, 42;
145-S; private dwellings, 143-5; wars with Rome, 57, 58
streets, 136, 137, 13S, 139, 159, Velia (Elea), 32, 243
161 Vellius Paterculus, 260
trabea (toga), 44, 176, 177 Venafro, 112, 168
traffic, 129-31, 161 Veneti, 6S-I), 72, 140, 216, 217
Tragliatella, 201 Verres (praetor), 191
transport, 131-4 Vertumnus, Temple of, 194
Trasimene, Lake, 172, 179 Vespasian, Emperor, 24
travel, 129-34 Vetter, Emil, 18
trees, 112-13, 114, 122, 224 Vetulonia, 11, 12, 44- 5, 99, 100,
trestle stages, 243, 24 7 101, 102, 123, 131, 137, 1S2
tribunes, 207-S Veturius Rufus, L., 232
tripe, I 17 Vetusia, 90
INDEX
via Aemilia, 64; Amerina, I29, I3o; walls, town, I36, I43
Appia, I3o; Aurelia, 68, 8I, 97, Ward Perkins, J.B., Io9, I30, I46
I29; Cassia, I29; Clodia, 97, I29, warrior dances, I99-201, 241
130 wheat, IIO-II, 140
Vibenna, Aulus, IOI, 114, II5, water-diviners, 105, 106
181-5 water-fowl, I2I
Vibenna, Caelius, 46-7, 250, 25I wines, I l I-12
Vi co, lake of, I 22 women: 'audacity' of, 88; at
Vignanello, I58 banquets, I9o; costume of, 22,
Villanovan culture, 6, II, I23, I49 77, l7I, I73, I74-5, 177-82;
vines, III-I2 culture of, 9I-3, I50, I54; first
Virgil, I2, 24, 30, 33, 37, 4I, 50, name given to, 75-6, 85; freedom
IOO, I07, II2, I22, I23, I79, I87, of, 76-80; funerary privileges,
I98,200-I,225,233,240,250-1, 93-6; as 'king-makers', 87;
262, 267 matriarchy, 85-8; Mediterranean
Vitellius, I 86 traditions, 84-<)I; political au-
Viterbo, 23, 56, 238 thority, 80-4; in public, I32-3,
Vitruvius, I56, I57, I58 190; size, 28; sovereignty, 81-<)1;
Volnius, 24I, 246-7 status, 75-6, 84-8; tombs, 89-<)I,
Volsinii, 6, 7, II, I4, 15, 54, 55, 94, 95-6, I5I-2, I65-6
I29, I3I, 141, 142, I43, 149, I62, woollens, 175, l9I
I85, 243, 253, 258; slave revolt wrestlers, 207
in, 59-6I, 62 writing, 2 I 6-20
Volterra, I2, 23, 27, 29, 30, 43, 52,
53, 59, 70, IOI, IIO, I22, 132,
I34. I37. 143, I46, 205, 234, 244,
245 Xenophon, 92
Voltumna, Temple of, I2, 55
Volumnius, tomb of, lo, I98
Vulcan, 127
Vulci, II, I2, I4, 38, 46, 47, 48, 99, Zagreb, mummy of, 220-3
IOI, I30, 142-3, I54, 158, 210, zilath (magistrate), I4, 17, 50, 51,
250, 258 52, 53, IOI
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

MEDICAL CENTER LIBRARY

Daily L~fe of the Aztecs on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest by

G WEIDENFELD AND NICOLSON

English translation© 1964 by

First published in France in 1961 under the title

MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY

I THE PHYSICAL TYPE

II THE MORAL TEMPER

VI THE TOWNS AND THE SETTING OF

4 Etruscan costume - From the tebenna to the toga -

I An engraved mirror case (Photo: British Museum)

30 Carnelian scarab set in a gold ring (Photo: British Museum)

l,•'"o ll1 f' 1 ,• I

''' '''• .. :"/~)·

of all nobly surrendered themselves to a passionate admiration

WERE THE ETRUSCANS OF ORIENTAL ORIGIN?

a country; till at last, after coasting along many nations in turn,

Such, in the words of a Greek writing in the fifth century before

linking the Etruscans with the ancient empires of the Orient.

Is the case not proved, then, and what is it that prevents a

(ancient Volsinii) itself the foundations of huts from the preceding

THE THEORY OF AUTOCHTHONOUS ETRUSCANS

barbarians, Italians or Greeks, might have temporarily subdued

we have in the Etruscans were confined to that, we would be

ETRUSCAN CIVILIZATION: THE FIRST GREAT CIVILIZATION IN ITALY

Campania, produced the same miracle twice? Michelangelo,

contemporaneous with the Regolini-Galassi tomb at Caere, sud-

Clusium, Perugia, Cortona, Arretium and Volterra and they held

means 'adventurer' indicates the jealous disposition of rivals who

simultaneous solidarity at Tarquinii, Volsinii, Arezzo, Tusculum

for superior modes of civilization, meaning Greek civilization,

WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE ETRUSCAN LANGUAGE

archaeologists may unearth a long inscription detailing on both

According to this analysis, the following translations are not

nevertheless we now have at our disposal a fairly well-established

THE PHYSICAL TYPE

Evidence of medical biology - The evidence of monuments

What makes an Etruscan? Faced with the wonderment that these

THE EVIDENCE OF MEDICAL BIOLOGY

boundaries of Tuscany - in which the proportion of groups A

anthropologists' descriptions the type of the couple on the sarco-

THE EVIDENCE OF MONUMENTS WITH FIGURES

Klio claimed that the fundamental and distinctive character of

several servants would be needed to support him. The nudity of

luxury and debauch, it was natural, as soon as their degeneration

ETRUSCANS AND TUSCANS

chosen by historians of Etruscan ceramics as representative of

LIFE-EXPECTANCY OF THE ETRUSCANS

now in full swing and these can attempt an explanation, by their

Ravntza from Ravntu), as is the dignity with which those babies

mortality and therefore perhaps should be reduced by what has

THE MORAL TEMPER

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who had devoted critical reflections

which has been attributed to it; the Chalcidian c1t1es of the

THE GOSSIP OF THEOPOMPUS

'Theopompus, in Book XLIII of his History, says that the

same manner as their protectors, passing the most of their time

THE JUDGEMENT OF POSIDONIUS