And in the Louvre, not fifty yards from the Winged Victory in her stone nightgown, rests another Etruscan sarcophagus—less erotic than the Italian, a bit more crisp, more architectonic, although they were produced at about the same time in the same city, perhaps in the same workshop. Once again you meet those tilted eyes, the complacent wife’s up-curled slippers, the mild husband’s carefully shaped beard. And, if you walk around behind the sarcophagus, you see how the hair has been styled in tight Babylonian ringlets.
New York’s Metropolitan used to display three impressively sculpted Etruscans with somewhat Asiatic features: a gigantic helmeted head; a six-foot, eight-inch warrior; and the “Big Warrior” who stood eight feet tall. They turned out to be fakes, manufactured sixty years ago by a quartet of young entrepreneurs in Orvieto, but that’s not the point; the point is that even a fraudulent Etruscan seems less Italian than Eastern.
I remember the big warrior. I looked at him a number of times when he was considered authentic, and I always felt surprised that such an enormous antique could be in such good condition. When I heard he was a fake I felt incredulous, but only for an instant. Almost at once I heard myself muttering “Of course! Yes, of course! Anybody could see that!”
And what puzzled me then, as it does today, is why the experts were deceived. Because if somebody with no particular knowledge of Etruscan art could half suspect the truth, as I did—well then, how could professionals be so blind? But for twenty-eight years most of them saw nothing wrong. One or two had doubts. One or two called these giants bogus. As for the rest: they came to marvel, to offer learned praise.
Now in Copenhagen, in the basement of that peculiar Edwardian museum known as the Glyptothek, are several bona fide Etruscan figures: a shattered frieze of black-bearded warriors wearing Trojan helmets and carrying circular shields embellished with a mysterious red, white, and black whirlpool. These thick-legged businesslike fighting men are the real McCoy, and everything about them points east.
So often with Etruscan artifacts one does apprehend these long reverberations from Asia. Nevertheless, a good many prominent archaeologists refuse to buy Herodotus’ account; they consider it a fable. They reject the idea of an immense migration—half a nation sailing into the sunset—and insist unromantically that the Etruscans were natural descendants of some Italian farmers. What a gray thought. It’s like being told the Kensington runestone is a fake—that the bloody tale of a battle between Indians and Vikings in upper Minnesota never took place. One wants to imagine.
Among the cold-blooded exponents of this autochthonous theory none is chillier than Massimo Pallottino, professor of Etruscology and Italic archaeology at the University of Rome. Indeed, Professor Pallottino sounds exasperated that other professionals could be wrongheaded enough even to contemplate the migration hypothesis, which he goes about dissecting with meticulous disdain and a glittering assortment of scalpels:
Edoardo Brizio in 1885 was the first to put this theory on a scientific footing: he identified the Etruscan invaders with the bearers of Orientalizing (and later Hellenizing) civilization into Tuscany and Emilia, and he saw the Umbrians of Herodotus—i.e. Indo-European Italic peoples—in the cremating Villanovans. Among the most convinced followers of Brizio’s thesis were O. Montelius, B. Modestov, G. Körte, G. Ghirardini, L. Mariani. . . . Herodotus may have been attracted by the similarity of the name Tyrrhenian (Tyrrhenoi, Tyrsenoi) with that of the city of Tyrrha or Torrhebus in Lydia. . . .
Nor was there an abrupt change in burial rites from the practice of cremation, typical of the Villanovan period, to Oriental inhumation. Both were characteristic of early Villanovan ceremonies, he tells us, notably in southern Etruria where the idea of cremation predominated. Later, during the eighth century B.C., the practice of inhumation gradually became established—not only in Etruria but in Latium, where no Etruscan “arrival” has been postulated.
“We should now examine the linguistic data. In spite of assertions to the contrary made by Lattes, Pareti and others, a close relationship unites Etruscan with the dialect spoken at Lemnos before the Athenian conquest of the island by Miltiades in the second half of the sixth century B.C. . . . This does not mean, however, that Lemnian and Etruscan were the same language. . . . Further, the onomastic agreements between the Etruscan and eastern languages carry no great weight (as E. Fiesel correctly pointed out) when we consider that they are based upon . . .”
Obviously this is not the stuff of which best-sellers are made, even in light doses, and with Pallottino one is forced to swallow page after page of it. The result is tedium sinking inexorably toward stupefaction, together with a dull realization that whatever the man says probably is correct. To read him is appalling. No dreams, my friend, just facts. Facts and deductions. Deductions followed by occasional impeccable qualifications. One is reminded of those medieval ecclesiastics wondering how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, it is all so academic. The difference, of course, being that these churchmen had not the least idea what they were talking about, while Professor Pallottino knows precisely.
Along the way, before telling us how it actually was, he takes a few pages to demolish that third theory, the illegitimate one. In this version, highly regarded during the nineteenth century, the Etruscans came down from the north. The reason for thinking so was linguistic: traces of an Etruscan dialect had been found among the Rhaetian Alps. But it seems that this material dates from the fourth century B.C., long after Etruscans had staked a claim in Italy.
An additional argument against it, says Pallottino, is the relationship of Etruscan to pre-Hellenic languages throughout the Aegean: “This could only be explained by accepting Kretschmer’s thesis of a parallel overland immigration into Greece and Italy originating from the Danube basin. We would then still have to explain those elements in the ‘Tyrrhenian’ toponymy. . . .”
In other words, let such nonsense be forgotten.
What remains, then, is the not particularly exciting thought that our sensuous, artistic, enigmatic Etruscans were the natural children of Villanova peasants. The name Villanova, if anybody asks, comes from a suburb of Bologna where vestiges of a previously unknown culture turned up: hut-shaped urns filled with human ashes, bronze weapons, amber jewelry, pins and combs. Apparently these ancestors of the Etruscans, if that is what they were, drifted south into Tuscany about the eleventh or tenth century before Christ and overwhelmed whatever inhabitants they encountered.
Perhaps 300 years later the Orientalizing began. This was the time of a Dark Age in Greece, between the decay of Mycenaean civilization and the emergence of those wise marble Pericleans against whom we half-consciously measure ourselves. It was a time when that templed colossus, Egypt, was beginning to crumble. Assyrian armor glinted ominously. Phrygian trumpets bellowed. Phoenician traders drove westward, dipping their sails at Carthage and Tartessus. Fresh currents rippled the length of the Mediterranean.
So, inevitably, the rude Villanova culture was affected. Greek vase painters moved to Cerveteri, bringing the alphabet and other such radical concepts. Pallottino believes that these various intellectual and artistic transfusions have given the impression of Etrurian dependence on the East, an impression to which the ancients—notably Herodotus—succumbed, and which still inhibits the thinking of twentieth-century investigators.
D. H. Lawrence, faced with the cool reason of Pallottino, might have been impatient or just disgusted. His own exploration of the subject, Etruscan Places, did not precede the professor’s Etruscologia by much more than ten years, but Lawrence illuminated a region fully ten light-years away. He was a breast-fed romantic, the Italian a most assiduous scholar. Lawrence plunged into Etruria; Pallottino picks and brushes and trowels away at it.
The experience! cried Lawrence. The experience—that was what mattered. Live! Empathize! Feel!
When he visited Tuscany in 1927, three years before he died, he was quite sick; yet the book gives no hint of it, except indirectly. “Ease, naturalness
, and an abundance of life,” he wrote. “The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and easy as breathing.” No need to twist the mind or soul. Death was simply a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. Neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment.
“From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature.”
“The goat says: let me breed for ever, till the world is one reeking goat. But then the lion roars from the other blood-stream, which is also in man, and he lifts his paw to strike. . . .”
This sort of thing annoys Pallottino, who has no time for mystics. Painted tombs littered with jewelry and elegant vases have created around his specialty “a peculiar aura of romantic suggestion, which the books of Dennis and Noël des Vergers helped to spread, never to disappear again. Scholarly uncertainties and polemics on the interpretation of Etruscan inscriptions, on the classification of the language, on the problem of Etruscan origins, gave birth to the notion of an ‘Etruscan mystery’; and this notion, rather than describing, more or less aptly, a scientific situation . . .”
On and on he goes in his oddly dry, convincing prose—much less gratifying than the rainbows whipped up by Lawrence. And what he is insisting is that these people twenty-five centuries ago were neither more nor less enigmatic than you and I; which is to say that they are interesting by themselves, never mind the blather.
Physically they were small, judged by skeletal remains. The men averaged five feet, four inches, the women just above five feet. On the basis of tomb information their life expectancy was about forty.
Early historians denounced them as decadent and drunken, promiscuous lovers intoxicated by comfort, a reputation they shared with the Sybarites. Theopompus wrote in the fourth century B.C. that they copulated publicly and did not consider it shameful. “They all do the thing, some watching one another. . . . The men approach the women with great delight, but obtain as much pleasure from young men and adolescents. They grow up, in fact, to be very beautiful, for they live luxuriously and shave their bodies. . . .”
Posidonius, a Stoic author of the second century B.C., after observing that the Etruscans once were valorous, attributes their degeneration to the richness of the land—its minerals, timber, and so on. Later critics explained the decline with equal facility. Victorians, for example, thought they collapsed because of a perverse religion. Our twentieth century is less positive: we aren’t sure just what happened to their world. From our balcony they appear to be at once naive and sophisticated, artistic and materialistic, radical, conservative, industrious, indolent, foolish, clever, ad infinitum. That is to say, a disorganized bellowing parade of contradictory mortals.
Despite meager evidence we do know a little about their activities and concerns.
Etruscan women liked to bleach their hair—a fancy that has been entertained, it seems, from the female prototype to the latest model. And depilatories were popular. Try this: boil a yellow tree frog until it has shrunk to half its natural size, then rub the shriveled frog on the unsightly area. Now, it’s too bad we have no testimonials from satisfied beauties of Vetluna or Caere, but that does not mean the treatment is useless. These people sometimes equaled or surpassed us in the most unexpected ways.
Etruscan hunters understood the compelling power of music far better than we do. Aelian, who wrote in the third century, reveals that after the nets and traps had been set a piper would come forth playing his sweetest tunes. Wild pigs, stags, and other beasts at first would be terrified. But after a while, seduced, they draw closer, bewitched by these dulcet sounds, “until they fall, overpowered, into the snares.” And we have the word of Polybius, five centuries earlier, who asserts that Etruscan swineherds walk their charges up and down the beach, not driving them as we would expect, but leading them by blowing a trumpet.
In dentistry, too, one must salute these creative sons of Villanova. Skulls found at Tarquinia contain teeth neatly bridged and capped with gold.
Insecticides, which we regard as a small miracle of our century, were commonplace. The agronomist Saserna recommends an aromatic vine called serpentaria. Soak the root of this vine in a tub of water, then empty the tub on the infested earth. Or let’s say you become conscious of ravenous little guests in your bed at night. Should that be the case, dampen your bed with a potion of ox gall and vinegar.
Take an ordinary business such as the production of cheese. Here again the Etruscan surprises us. Do you know those great wheels made in Holland and Denmark? Listen, my friend, Etruscans in the village of Luni fashioned wheels of goat cheese weighing 1,000 pounds.
Yet right along with such innovations they clung obstinately to the mindless beliefs of their fathers. Even the Romans, who are not celebrated for a liberal imagination, had begun to grasp the nature of things more clearly. Seneca, commenting on the difference between Romans and Etruscans, offers this example: “Whereas we believe lightning to be released when clouds collide, they believe that clouds collide so as to release lightning.”
Another difference, more curious, which has not yet been explained, is that the Greeks and Romans and everybody else in that part of the world faced north when attempting to determine celestial influences. Only the Etruscans, those perverse, contradictory individuals, faced south. Why? Tomorrow, if the gods so ordain, we’ll dig up the answer.
You can see them as they were, just as they were, on the ragged stone sarcophagus lids. You see the rich and powerful, of course, rather than the poor, because nobody commemorates the poor; but the features of affluent Etruscans have been studiously registered on their coffins. And there can be little doubt that these sculpted effigies are portraits of unique men and women, not blind symbols.
At least so it seems to an impressionable observer. However, one must be cautious. When making little terra-cotta votive heads the Etruscan coroplasts often used molds, then a touch or two with a modeling tool could give an effect of individuality. In other words, a mass-produced standardized face with a few singular characteristics—let’s say a bobbed nose, a couple of warts, and a triple chin—is not the same as a portrait. Therefore one should regard the sarcophagus sculpture with mild distrust; maybe these figures, too, were only impersonations of life.
Yet no matter how they were done they do give the sense of being particular people. They are quickly recognizable and somehow appalling, like faces on the society page, and they tell quite a lot.
For instance, toward the end—while Etruscan civilization deteriorates—the sarcophagus men and women grow flabbily plump. They project an air of self-indulgence, of commercial success. And they seem strangely resigned or dissatisfied, as though they could anticipate the falling curtain. Yet if you look back a few centuries, not at these phlegmatic inheritors but at the pioneers who lived seven or six centuries before Christ, you notice a quality of strength or assurance like that found on prehistoric terra cotta statues from India and Thailand and Mexico. It is surprising and alarming to perceive what happens to a nation.
The despair these people felt has been reflected also in the late tomb paintings. Gone are the joyous leaping dolphins, the pipers and dancers. Instead, the hereafter looks grim. Mournful processions of the dead are escorted by gray-green putrescent demons with pointed ears and snakes in their hair. Ghoulish underworld heralds brandish tongs, ropes, and torches; they carry hammers and clubs with which to smash the skulls of the newly deceased. Everything seems to prefigure medieval Christianity.
Perhaps the Libri Fatales were responsible, not the minerals and timber, nor a degenerate religion—though it is true that the Fatales were religious texts. These books concerned the division of time, with limitations on the lives of men and women, and they placed a limit of ten saecula on the life of the Etruscan nation. A saeculum was a variable period, averaging about 100 year
s, and it was up to the priests to determine when each had ended. During the eighth and ninth saecula, while their city-states gradually were being absorbed by Rome, the people must have realized that the end was near, that nothing could save Etruria from extinction. Thus the prophecy became self-fulfilling.
In 44 B.C. when Julius Caesar was murdered a comet gleamed overhead, sheeted corpses gibbered in the street, and the Etruscan seer Vulcatius proclaimed an end to the ninth saeculum.
Claudius died ninety-eight years later—the last high Roman to understand the Etruscan language. His wife Plautia Urgulanilla was Etruscan, and Claudius had written a twenty-book history of them, Tyrrhenica, which has been lost. At his death, we are told, another brilliant comet appeared and lightning struck his father’s tomb, marking the end of the final saeculum. Archaeologists find no evidence of what might properly be called Etruscan civilization after that date.
These ominous books, the Fatales, were part of a complex prescription covering rules of worship, life beyond the grave, civil and military ordinances, the founding of cities, interpretation of miracles, et cetera. Much of it has vanished, but some was transcribed by Greek, Roman, and Byzantine chroniclers, so we have—along with the Fatales—the Libri Fulgurales and Haruspicini.
Because it derives from the verb “to lighten,” fulgurale, the first of these books naturally had to do with divination from objects hit by lightning. According to the sound and color of the bolt, and by the direction from which it came, a soothsayer would deduce which god had ordered the stroke and what it meant. The next step was to consult the Libri in order to learn what should be done. This was not easy. Any of nine gods might have thrown it, and Jupiter himself could hurl three different kinds of lightning. Etruscan skill at interpretation seems to have impressed the Romans; they themselves could recognize only one bolt from Jupiter’s hand. If the regnant god was enraged he struck, and that was that. Consequently they would call for an Etruscan whenever they wanted a truly subtle reading. It was an Etruscan, Spurinna, who advised Caesar against the Ides of March.
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