The Story of Civilization: Volume III: Caesar and Christ

by Will Durant

  About 2000 B.C. northern Italy was invaded—presumably not for the first time—by tribes from central Europe. They brought with them the custom of building their villages upon piles sunk in water, for safety from animal or human attack. They settled on Garda, Como, Maggiore, and the other enchanted lakes that still lure aliens to Italy. Later they moved south and, finding fewer lakes, built their homes upon land, but still upon a foundation of piles. Their habit of surrounding these settlements with rampart and moat passed down to form features of Roman camps and medieval châteaux. They pastured flocks and herds, tilled the soil, wove clothing, fired pottery; and out of bronze, which had appeared in Italy toward the end of the Neolithic Age (about 2500 B.C.), they forged a hundred varieties of tools and weapons, including combs, hairpins, razors, tweezers, and other timeless implements.9 They allowed their rubbish to accumulate so lavishly around the villages that their culture has received the name of terramare—earth marl—from the fertilizing potency of these remains. So far as we know, they were the direct ancestors of the basic population of Italy in historical times.

  In the valley of the Po the descendants of these terramaricoli, about 1000 B.C., learned from Germany the use of iron, made from it improved implements, and, so armed, spread their “Villanovan” culture from its center at Villanova, near Bologna, far down into Italy. From them, we may believe, came the blood, languages, and essential arts of the Umbrians, Sabines, and Latins. Then, about 800 B.C.., a new flood of immigrants arrived, subjugated the Villanovan population, and established between the Tiber and the Alps one of the strangest civilizations in the records of mankind.

  II. ETRUSCAN LIFE

  The Etruscans are among the irritating obscurities of history. They ruled Rome for a hundred years or more, and left upon Roman ways so varied an influence that Rome can hardly be understood without them; yet Roman literature is as mute concerning them as a matron anxious to forget, publicly, the surrenders of her youth. Italian civilization, as literate provision, begins with them: 8000 inscriptions, as well as many works of art, mingle with their remains; and there are indications of a lost literature in poetry, drama, and history.10 But only a few unrevealing words of the language have been deciphered, and scholarship stands in deeper darkness today before the Etruscan mystery than that which shrouded the Egypt of the Pharaohs before Champollion.

  Consequently men still debate who the Etruscans were, and when and whence they came. Perhaps the old tradition has been too readily set aside; pedants love to disprove the accepted, which mischievously survives. Most Greek and Roman historians took it for granted that the Etruscans had come from Asia Minor.11 Many elements in their religion, dress, and art suggest an Asiatic origin; many, again, seem natively Italian. Most likely the civilization of Etruria was an outgrowth of the Villanovan culture, commercially influenced by Greece and the Near East, while the Etruscans themselves, as they believed, were invaders from Asia Minor, probably Lydia. In any case, their superior killing power made them the ruling caste in Tuscany.

  We do not know where they landed; but we know that they founded, conquered, or developed many cities—not mere villages of mud and straw as before them, but walled towns with geometrically laid-out streets, and houses not only of beaten earth, but often of baked brick or stone. Twelve of these communities joined in a loose Etruscan Federation, dominated by Tarquinii (now Corneto), Arretium (Arezzo), Perusia (Perugia), and Veii (Isola Farnese).I Hardships of transportation through mountains and forests collaborated with the jealous pugnacity of men, here as in Greece, to form independent city-states, seldom united against external foes; each cherished its separate security, often stood aside while others were attacked, and, one after another, succumbed to Rome. But through most of the sixth century B.C. these allied municipalities constituted the strongest political force in Italy, with a well-organized army, a famous cavalry, and a powerful navy that for a time ruled what is still called the Tyrrhene (i.e., Etruscan) Sea.II

  As in the case of Rome, the government of the Etruscan cities began as a monarchy, became an oligarchy of “first families,” and gradually gave over to an assembly of propertied citizens the right of choosing the annual magistrates. So far as we can make out from the tomb paintings and reliefs, it was a thoroughly feudal society, with an aristocracy owning the soil and enjoying in luxury the surplus product of Villanovan serfs and war-won slaves. Under this discipline Tuscany was reclaimed from forest and swamp, and a system of rural irrigation and urban sewage was developed beyond anything discoverable in contemporary Greece. Etruscan engineers built drainage tunnels to take the overflow of lakes, and cut drained roadways through rock and hill.12 As early as 700 B.C. Etruscan industry mined the copper of the western coast and the iron of Elba, smelted the iron ore at Populonia, and sold pig iron throughout Italy.13 Etruscan merchants traded up and down the Tyrrhene Sea, brought amber, tin, lead, and iron from northern Europe down the Rhine and the Rhone and over the Alps, and sold Etruscan products in every major port of the Mediterranean. About 500 B.C. Etruscan towns issued their own coins.

  The people themselves are pictured on their tombs as short and stocky, with large heads, features almost Anatolian, complexion ruddy, especially in women; but rouge is as old as civilization.14 The ladies were famous for their beauty,15 and the men sometimes had faces of refinement and nobility. Civilization had already advanced to a precarious height, for specimens of dental bridgework have been found in the graves;16 dentistry, like medicine and surgery, had been imported from Egypt and Greece.17 Both sexes wore the hair long, and the men fondled beards. Garments followed the Ionian style: an inner shirt like the chiton, and an outer robe that became the Roman toga. Men as well as women loved ornament, and their tombs abounded in jewelry.

  If we may judge from the gay pictures of the sepulchers, the life of the Etruscans, like that of the Cretans, was hardened with combat, softened with luxury, and brightened with feasts and games. The men waged war lustily, and practiced a variety of virile sports. They hunted, fought bulls in the arena, and drove their chariots, sometimes four horses abreast, around a dangerous course. They threw the discus and the javelin, pole-vaulted, raced, wrestled, boxed, and fought in gladiatorial bouts. Cruelty marked these games, for the Etruscans, like the Romans, thought it dangerous to let civilization get too far from the brute. Less heroic persons brandished dumbbells, threw dice, played the flute, or danced. Scenes of bibulous merriment relieve the paintings in the tombs. Sometimes they are symposia for men only, with vinous conversation; now and then they show both sexes, richly dressed, reclining in pairs on elegant couches, eating and drinking, waited on by slaves, and entertained by dancers and musicians.18 Occasionally the meal is adorned with an amorous embrace.

  Probably the lady in this case was a courtesan, corresponding to the Greek hetaira. If we may believe the Romans, the young women of Etruria, like those of Greek Asia and Samurai Japan, were allowed to obtain dowries by prostitution;19 a character in Plautus accuses a girl of “seeking in the Tuscan way to earn her marriage by the shame of her body.”20 Nevertheless, women enjoyed a high status in Etruria, and the paintings represent them as prominent in every aspect of life. Relationship was traced through the mother in a manner suggesting again an Asiatic origin.21 Education was not confined to the male, for Tanaquil, wife of the first Tarquin, was versed in mathematics and medicine as well as political intrigue.22 Theopompus ascribed a communism of women to the Etruscan,23 but no confirming evidence has come down to us of this Platonic utopia. Many of the pictures are scenes of marital concord and family life, with children romping about in happy ignorance.

  Religion provided every incentive to a negative morality. The Etruscan pantheon was fully equipped to terrify the growing ego and ease the tasks of parentage. The greatest of the gods was Tinia, who wielded the thunder and the lightning. About him, as a committee pitilessly carrying out his commands, were the Twelve Great Gods, so great that it was sacrilege (and we may therefore neglect) to pronounce their names. Espec
ially fearsome were Mantus and Mania, master and mistress of the Underworld, each with an executive horde of winged demons. Least appeasable of all was Lasa or Mean, goddess of fate, brandishing snakes or a sword, and armed with stylus and ink to write, and hammer and nails to affix, her unalterable decrees. Pleasanter were the Lares and Penates—little statuettes kept on the hearth, and symbolizing the spirits of field and home.

  The sacred science of ascertaining the future by studying the livers of sheep or the flight of birds had probably come down to the Etruscans from Babylonia; but according to their own traditions it had been revealed to them by a divine boy, grandson of Tinia, who sprang to life from a furrow freshly turned, and at once spoke with the wisdom of a sage. Etruscan ritual culminated in the sacrifice of a sheep, a bull, or a man. Human victims were slaughtered or buried alive at the funerals of the great. In some cases prisoners of war were massacred as a propitiation of the gods; so the Phoceans taken at Alalia in 535 B.C. were stoned to death in the forum of Caere, and some 300 Romans captured in 358 B.C. were sacrificed at Tarquinii. The Etruscan appears to have believed that for every enemy slain he could secure the release of a soul from hell.24

  The belief in hell was the favorite feature of Etruscan theology. The dead spirit, as seen in the sepulchral representations, was conducted by genii to the tribunal of the Underworld, where in a Last Judgment it was given an opportunity to defend its conduct in life. If it failed, it was condemned to a variety of torments that left their mark on Virgil (reared on Mantua’s Etruscan lore), on the early Christian conception of hell, and, through these and twenty centuries, on Tuscan Dante’s Inferno. From such damnation the good were spared, and the sufferings of the damned might be shortened by the prayers or sacrifices of their living friends. The saved soul passed from the Underworld to the society of the gods above, there to enjoy feasts, luxuries, and powers depicted hopefully on the tombs.

  Normally the Etruscans buried their dead. Those who could afford it were laid to rest in sarcophagi of terra cotta or stone, and the lid was topped with reclining figures carved partly in their likeness, partly in the smiling style of the archaic Greek Apollos; here, again, Etruscan traditions contributed to medieval art. Occasionally the dead were cremated and placed in cinerary urns, which also might be adorned with the figure of the deceased. In many cases the urn or tomb simulated a house; sometimes the tomb, cut into the rock, was divided into rooms, and was equipped for post-mortem living with furniture, utensils, vases, clothing, weapons, mirrors, cosmetics, and gems. In a tomb at Caere the skeleton of a warrior lay on a perfectly preserved bed of bronze, with weapons and chariots beside it; and in a chamber behind his were the ornaments and jewelry of a woman presumably his wife. The dust that had been her beloved body was clothed in her bridal robes.25

  III. ETRUSCAN ART

  Etruscan art is nearly all that we know of Etruscan history. We can trace in it the manners and morals of the people, the power of religion and caste, and the changing tides of economic and cultural contact with Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. It was an art fettered by ecclesiastical conventions and liberated by technical skill; it reflected a brutal and obscurantist civilization, but expressed it with character and force. Oriental influences—Ionic, Cypriot, Egyptian—dictated its earlier forms and styles, and Greek models dominated its later sculpture and pottery. In architecture and painting, however, in bronze statuary and the working of metals, Etruscan art spoke with its own voice and was unique.

  The architectural remains are never more than fragments or tombs. Parts of Etruria’s city walls still stand—heavy structures of uncemented masonry firmly and accurately joined. The homes of rich Etruscans defined the classic design of the Italian house: a deliberately forbidding external wall, a central atrium or reception room, an opening in the roof of the atrium to let rain fall into a cistern below, and a circuit of small chambers surrounding the atrium and often faced by a colonnaded porch. Vitruvius has described Etruscan temples, and the tombs sometimes take their form. Essentially they followed Greek models; but the “Tuscan style” modified the Doric by leaving the column unfluted, giving it a base, and planning the cella on a six-to-five proportion of length to breadth, instead of the more graceful Attic relation of six-to-three. A cella of brick, a peristyle of stone, architraves and pediments of wood, reliefs and ornaments in terra cotta, the whole resting on a podium or elevation, and brightly painted outside and within: this was the Etruscan temple. For secular mass architecture—for city gates and walls, aqueducts and drains—the Etruscans (so far as we know) introduced the arch and vault to Italy. Apparently they had brought these majestic forms from Lydia, which had taken them from Babylonia.III But they did not follow up this brilliant method of covering great spaces without a confusion of columns and an oppressive weight of architraves. For the most part they walked in the grooves worn by the Greeks, and left Rome to consummate the arcuate revolution.

  The most renowned of Etruria’s products is its pottery. Every museum abounds in it, setting the weary navigator of ceramic halls to wonder what unseen perfection exonerates these stores. Etruscan vases, when they are not clearly copies of Greek forms, are mediocre in design, crude in execution, barbarous in ornament. No other art has produced so many distortions of the human frame, so many hideous masks, uncouth animals, monstrous demons, and terrifying gods. But the black wares (bucchero nero) of the sixth century B.C. have an Italian vigor, and perhaps represent an indigenous development of Villanovan styles. Fine vases were found at Vulci and Tarquinii—imported from Athens or imitated from black-figured Attic shapes. The François Vase, a huge amphora discovered at Chiusi by a Frenchman of that name, was apparently the work of the Greek masters Clitias and Ergotimus. The later urns, red-figured on a black ground, are elegant, but again evidently of Greek manufacture; their abundance suggests that the Attic potters had captured the Etruscan market and driven the native workers into merely industrial production. All in all, the robbers were justified who, when they rifled Etruscan tombs, left so much of the pottery.

  We cannot speak of Etruscan bronzes with such reckless irreverence. The bronze casters of Etruria were at the top of their craft. They almost rivaled the potters in productivity; one city alone is reported to have had two thousand statues in bronze. What remains to us from their hands belongs mostly to the period of Roman domination. Among these reliefs two masterpieces stand out: the Orator who now holds forth, with Roman dignity and bronze restraint, in the Archeological Museum at Florence; and—also at Florence—the Chimera found at Arezzo in 1553, and partly restored by Cellini. It is a disagreeable figure, presumably the monster slain by Bellerophon—head and body of a lion, a serpent for a tail, a goat’s head growing anomalously out of the back; but its power and finish reconcile us to its biological extravagance. Etruscan bronze-workers produced, often for distant export, millions of statuettes, swords, helmets, cuirasses, spears, shields, utensils, urns, coins, locks, chains, fans, mirrors, beds, lamps, candelabra, even chariots. Greeting the visitor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is an Etruscan chariot: body and wheels of wood, sheathing and tires of bronze, the high front embossed with figures of considerable grace. Many bronze objects were delicately engraved. The surface was coated with wax, the design was etched in with a stylus, the piece was dipped into acid, the wax-freed lines were burned into the metal, and then the wax was melted away. In the working of silver and gold, bone and ivory, the Etruscan artist was the heir and peer of the Egyptian and the Greek.

  Sculpture in stone was never popular in Etruria. Marble was scarce, and the quarries of Carrara were apparently unknown. Fine clays were at hand, however, and soon took shape in a profusion of terra-cotta reliefs, statuettes, and sepulchral or architectural ornaments. About the end of the sixth century an unknown Etruscan artist established a school of sculpture at Veii, and molded the chef-d’oeuvre of Etruscan art—that Apollo of Veii which was found on the site in 1916, and until lately stood in the Villa Giulia at Rome. Modeled on the I
onian and Attic Apollos of the time, this engaging statue shows an almost feminine Mona Lisa face, with delicate smile, archly slanting eyes, and a body of health, beauty, and life; the Italians call it il Apollo che cammina—“the Apollo that walks.” In this, and in many excellent figures on sarcophagi, Etruscan sculptors carried to perfection the Asiatic stylization of hair and drapery, while in the Orator they or their Roman heirs established a tradition of realistic portraiture.

  Etruscan painting collaborated with that of Greek Italy in transmitting another art to Rome. The elder Pliny described frescoes at Ardea “of older age than Rome itself”; and at Caere others of “still greater antiquity” and “supreme beauty.”27 The art used pottery, and the interiors of homes and tombs, for its surfaces; only tomb frescoes and vase pictures remain, but in such quantity that every stage of Etruscan painting can be traced in them, from Oriental and Egyptian, through Greek and Alexandrian, to Roman and Pompeian styles. In some tombs we find the first Italian examples of windows, portals, columns, porticoes, and other architectural forms mimicked by painting on inner walls, in the very manner of Pompeii. Often the colors of these frescoes are faded; a few are astonishingly fresh and brilliant after more than a score of centuries. The technique is mediocre. In the earlier pictures there is no perspective, no foreshortening, no use of light and shade to give fullness and depth; the figures are Egyptianly slender, as if seen in a horizontally convex mirror; the faces are regularly in profile, wherever the feet may point. In the later examples perspective and foreshortening appear, and the proportions of the body are represented with greater fidelity and skill. But in either case there is in these paintings a frolicsome and impish vivacity that makes one wonder how pleasant the life of the Etruscans must have been, if their tombs were so gay.