Some twenty towns, relatively independent of one another, constituted the durable strength of Etruria. According to tradition, twelve of them formed a federation, the League of Twelve Peoples, the precise membership of which remains uncertain. The oldest, such as Caere and Tarquinia, with their narrow territories, lay to the south. These first towns were not far from the sea, but not actually on the coast; they were connected to harbours such as Pyrgi, which served as an outlet for Caere and even at one time for Rome. All were built on heights, ‘on the country’s back’, thus making them easy to defend (they were walled in the sixth and fifth centuries) and setting them above the miasmas of the plain, where there was probably malaria. The growth of the towns was accompanied by the draining of the surrounding plains and the exploitation of the mineral resources of the region. If Populonia was situated on the sea, this was the exception that proved the rule, the reason being that the crude iron of Elba was constantly being landed on the quays of this smoke-blackened industrial city.
Later, when Etruria declined, it was driven to depend more on its cereal-growing plains in the east, and its hillsides covered with vines and olives, where there remained a prosperous aristocracy of rural landowners. This movement eastward meant that Arezzo, with its agricultural and industrial wealth, became the centre of gravity of Etruria at the time of Scipio Africanus (its ‘lucumons’ were ancestors of Maecenas). The other towns stagnated, including stubborn Tarquinia with its fields of flax and manufacturers of sailcloth.
Etruria beyond Tuscany
Etruria, colonized by mysterious incomers, spread beyond its original limits and in turn colonized the surrounding regions, both to the south and to the north.11
From very early on, the Etruscans had reached the rich southern plain of Campania, where the Greeks had arrived before them. Etruscan Capua flourished alongside Greek Cumae. Like the Greek cities, Capua could only survive by defending itself against its highland neighbours, the Oscans and the Samnites, whose ever-present threat eventually triumphed over all the cities of the plain in the fifth century. Until this time, however, as successful excavations have shown, Capua enjoyed a period of great prosperity. Built on the broad plain, the city’s grid-plan development, imitated no doubt from the Greeks, met no obstacle comparable to those encountered by the old Etruscan towns, hemmed in by mountains, or by early Rome, hampered by its seven hills.
Capua being a ‘bridge-head’, it was necessary to have effective communications between this southern town and the ‘motherland’ of Etruria. The best place to cross the Tiber was in Rome, opposite the Isola Tiberina, on the site of the old Sulpicius bridge. We know that Rome, despite the pious falsehoods of tradition, was dominated, recreated and reshaped by the Etruscans; this strenuous tutelage left an indelible mark on the city. In many aspects of their religion, institutions, games, town planning, and the external trappings of everyday life – the lictors marching in front of the consuls, the curule chair of these magistrates – in their food and in their music, the Romans were to remain permanently marked by Etruria.
Northwards, Etruria was expanding across the Apennines12 as early as the eighth century, and this expansion had increased greatly by the sixth century. The mountains were a formidable obstacle. The splendid autostrada from Florence to Bologna allows us to admire the beauties of the landscape today and forget about the problems it posed! In antiquity, it was possible to cross the range only by way of the deep valleys cutting into it; there are many of them, it is true, but one has to make the crossing from one to another, for example from the Tiber or the Arno valleys to the valley of the Reno which runs down to Bologna, the Po delta and the Adriatic.
There was a time when specialists talked of an Etruscan Empire in the Po valley, a ‘League of Twelve Peoples’ to match that in Etruria. Today they are more cautious: in Mantua, Milan or Atria (Adria) on the Adige, there is no evidence of any political control, or of anything more than mere economic or cultural exchanges. However that may be, Marzobotto (where excavations have uncovered an ancient city whose name remains unknown), Bologna (formerly Felsina), and Spina at the mouth of the Reno, were all strongly marked by the people and arts of Tuscany. Marzobotto was laid out on a grid plan and extended across ioo hectares on its insulae (165 metres long by 35, 40 and 68 wide), with canals and high pavements. In this huge space however, the houses, shops and workshops were not particularly impressive.Spina, dating from the fifth century, was a kind of Venice, today sub-merged under the water; one can still make out a rectilinear grand canal, with subsidiary canals, and a perfect grid plan. This was a Greek as well as an Etruscan town, which no doubt explains why in the fifth century, when less pottery from Attica was being imported to Etruria, more of it was reaching Spina. It was by this route too that Etruscan traders reached the Alps, to meet the amber and copper of central Europe.
The decline of Etruria
Etruria was doubtless at the height of its power at the time when its navy, in association with that of Carthage, defeated the Phocaean fleet off Alalia in Corsica (540-535). This effectively denied the Greeks access to the Tyrrhenian Sea, which became an ‘Etruscan lake’. But this situation only lasted half a century.
In 474 Hieron of Syracuse won a decisive victory over the Etruscan fleet off Cumae. Almost immediately Capua was abandoned to its fate and forced to do a deal with the Oscans. The Etruscan presence in Rome came to an end soon afterwards. Traditionally this happened either in 507, with the revolution culminating in the proclamation of the republic, or in 504, with the end of the reoccupation of Rome by Porsenna, king of Clusium (Chiusi). These dates of 507 and 504 are questionable, however. The Roman revolution was surely similar to that of other Etruscan cities which had also got rid of their kings. It seems probable that Rome recovered its freedom a little later, when the Syracusans, after their great victory at Cumae, were devastating the Etruscan coasts and even the Adriatic ports.
Etruria may have been on a downhill slope, but these repeated blows did not destroy it. The gradual process of its disappearance took more than two hundred years. The Celts, who had been attacking its strongholds beyond the Apennines, took Felsina (Bologna) in 360. Then Rome, which was fighting all the peoples of Italy, engaged Etruria in a war of attrition punctuated by deceptive reconciliations – a kind of civil war. Veii was taken in 396, Volsinii in 265, Falerii in 240. This last date could perhaps be regarded as the final stage in this very complex process of annexation. The Etruscan cities still retained their magistratures, their claims, their aristocracies, their peasant populations chained to the soil like serfs, their harshly treated miners. But Roman civilization and the Latin language were taking a hold that would last for centuries.
What Rome created with some difficulty – the unity of the Italian peninsula, as a prelude to the conquest of the Mare nostrum– could also have been achieved by Etruria. In terms of political strategy, its misfortune was to have too many enemies at once and to be itself divided among towns all jealous of their independence – the annual assemblies of the Etruscan cities, at the Fanum Voltumnae on the territory of Volsinii, were religious gatherings, not the makings of a political body. Etruria suffered from the same weakness which caused the disasters of the Greek cities.
Like them, however, it did survive after a fashion: Tuscany has remained a world apart in Italy. Is it just an illusion that today, in the streets of Oryieto, Tarquinia or Florence, one seems to recognize in the men or women one meets the smiling faces and strong features of the Etruscan tombs? An art-loving friend of mine used to say of the Italians of the Renaissance: ‘They are Etruscans, not Tuscans’, an idea borne out by the portrait of the Etruscan we find in Jacques Heurgon’s description of Maecenas, a descendant of the ‘lucumons’ of Arezzo, ‘minister of the interior for the emperor Augustus’, protector of Horace and Virgil. His nonchalance and subtlety, his easy-going way of life, taste for the ornate, passion for music, scorn for vulgar distinctions, acute understanding of his fellow men and determination to reconcile them �
�� one is tempted to see all Maecenas’s attractive qualities, leaving aside a few darker elements, as a legacy of the ancient civilization of Tuscany which lay buried but not dead beneath the glory of Rome!
Ever-present gods
Perhaps we should feel less frustrated by the enigma of the Etruscans if we knew more about the religion central to their lives than the hints we find in later sources of doubtful reliability. It was a religion of the book, or rather of several books, but we do not possess these books. We have a few extracts from them, and some commentaries from Roman times, but nothing really to reveal the kind of ‘structure’ which would organize it all into a coherent world-system.
With its origins in the archaic east, this Etruscan religion was very much alive. The pantheon was overcrowded (the forty-four squares on the bronze sculpture of a liver at Piacenza are not enough to contain all the gods) and it welcomed foreign deities almost indiscriminately– Italic, Greek and occasionally Phoenician.
The presence of the Italic gods with ‘deformed but recognizable’ Latin names raises a number of problems. Uni comes from Juno, Nethuns from Neptune, Maris from Mars, Satre from Saturn, but it was no doubt Menrva, an Etruscan goddess, who gave her name to the Latin Minerva. And as the Greek gods flooded in, their personalities, mythologies, and spectacular, complicated romantic adventures became identified with those of the Etruscan gods. Tinia, the supreme god of Etruria, who is shown holding a sceptre and brandishing a thunderbolt, is inevitably seen as a copy or avatar of Zeus. Menrva is naturally born from the head of the king of the gods. The Etruscan Hermes has his own Etruscan name – Turms – but he wears ‘the chlamys, petasos and caduceus of Hermes’. As for Herakles, he was simply transformed into a god, the god of war, travellers and sea-voyages, as well as the admired conqueror of Hades.
The specific features of the Etruscan religion are hidden behind this confusing medley of Greek and Italic names and these images which herald the pantheon of the Romans (Tinia, Uni and Menrva are the essential trinity, comparable to that of the Capitol). One would like to know more about Vertumnus, an important young god, who changed his costume with the seasons and according to Roman tradition abandoned the Etruscan cause for that of Rome. But where did he come from? There is in any case one sure sign which points to an oriental origin: unlike those of Greece and Rome, Etruscan religion was a revealed religion. Its sacred books transmitted the revelation uttered by the nymph Vegoia and by Tages, the child with an old man’s wisdom, who emerged one day from a ploughman’s furrow in Tarquinia.
But it was only late in the day that the orally transmitted disciplina etrusca, as the ancients called it, was given a fixed form in the books which so fascinated the Romans of Cicero’s time: the libri haruspicini, on the art of examining the entrails of victims; the libri fulgurales, on the interpretation of thunder and lightning; and the libri rituales, libriAcheruntici, an Egyptian-type manual on the voyage of the dead. In a word, it offered a complete system of protective magic for divining (and thus not crossing) the redoubtable will of the gods; for foretelling the future by consulting the entrails of victims; and for interpreting portents, particularly lightning in its various forms, depending on where it appeared in the sky and whether it struck once or repeatedly, etc. The system gave rise to rules applying equally to the life of individuals and the existence of the state.
With all these things to worry about, the Etruscans were, according to the Ancients, the most cowed and religious of people. But that is only in comparison with Roman or Greek religion. Perhaps we should simply say that they did not escape the magic circles of oriental religion with its fears and formal rituals. Etruscan religion weighed heavily on the faithful, but does not seem to have set out any ethical system or promise of rewards – though there were punishments enough, as we shall shortly see. But was this not equally true of many oriental religions?
Can the dead speak to us?
The Etruscan cities, with their mainly narrow streets and their great walls of stone blocks piled up without mortar, have almost entirely disappeared. But the many hundreds of tombs have their own strange story to tell.
The earliest, dating from the Villanovan period, were mere pits containing bi-conical (or house-shaped) urns with the ashes of the dead. But soon burial became general; first came lengthwise graves, and then, from the seventh century, chambered tombs for the rich, cut into the volcanic rock. Near the site of the ancient city of Caere, outside the city walls as was customary, there are three necropolises covering a total area of 350 hectares, so that the city of the dead was bigger than that of the living. And Caere was no exception. Many of these tombs have been robbed over time or their materials used for other things. Recently, in order to discover the best places to excavate, archaeologists have devised an ingenious method of prospecting: a periscope lowered into the tumulus allows one to see in advance whether a given tomb contains anything valuable, or perhaps somewall paintings. This is a wise use of inadequate resources, but the pace of work remains slow, alas.
From the eighth to the fifth century, these tombs are our best evidence for Etruria itself and for the complex movements of international art. The objects found in them give a condensed picture of the Mediterranean trade in artefacts: pottery vases and amulets from Egypt, silver gilt drinking vessels and glassware from Phoenicia, countless pieces of proto-Corinthian, Corinthian, Ionian, Attic, and Laconian pottery, perfume phials from many sources. And the general development of Mediterranean styles, from the orientalizing period to that of gradual Hellenization, from the smiling art of archaic Greece to the severe classical style, from black-figure vases to red-figure vases – all these perceptible changes in fashion can be traced in the innumerable objects found in Etruria: weapons, mirrors, tripods, bronze chests, so-called bucchero vases made of black clay to look like metal, imitations of Greek pottery, goldsmiths’ work, sculpture, and architecture, especially that of the temples. The greatest period of Etruscan art, when it was at its most powerful and most original, runs from the early days in the seventh and sixth centuries to about 475. This was the period of the finest jewellery, oriental in style, of the greatest sculpture, the magnificent terracotta statues (late sixth century) which adorned the temple of Apollo at Veii, and of the most charming funerary painting.
‘Charming’ is indeed the word that comes to mind. A visit to the houses of the dead in Tarquinia is a joyful pilgrimage, as one goes from one to the next, constantly meeting the colours and sunshine of springtime in Tuscany. The Etruscans believed in a future life in a quite material sense. The dead person was going to live in the tomb itself, in one or more of these chambers adorned with benches, carved stone friezes, or, from the first half of the sixth century, fresco painting. The whole setting was designed to suggest a private house, to conjure up around the dead person the brightly coloured world of the living.
Let us take as an example the so-called Tomb of the Leopards in Tarquinia; it is not the most beautiful or the biggest, but it is one of the best preserved. A staircase leads to a square underground chamber. On the wall opposite the entrance, three couples are stretched out on couches eating and talking, with servants in attendance. On the side walls, servants and musicians walk towards the triclinium in a setting of flowering tree-branches. Above the diners, on the pediment, the two leopards after which the tomb is named stand face to face. The charm of the ensemble does not depend on the artistic quality of the original. The draughtsmanship is in fact somewhat crude, the gestures clumsy and the hands rather graceless, particularly if one compares them with the astonishingly delicate and confident depiction of dancers in the contemporary Tomb of the Triclinium, or with the extraordinary movement of a half-naked couple dancing a wild dance in the so-called Tomb of the Lionesses, constructed some fifty years earlier. Even so, as one looks at the crudely applied colours, violently contrasting blues, reds, greens, and blacks, the suggestion of a theatrical scene played out between the diners and a servant brandishing an empty jug, the blonde, fair-skinned wom
en, the young men with their dark hair, the whole thing is full of joy, spontaneity and life.
There is nothing conventional about the themes. They vary from tomb to tomb. The dead are surrounded by what gave them pleasure in life: grand banquets, which suggest funeral rites no doubt, but also the revels of the living; music, athletics, attentive servants, wild dancing; a fine ship in harbour, a naked diver plunging from a red and blue reef into the midst of a multicoloured flock of birds, riders on horseback, extremely beautiful and delicate horses with the slim legs of racers, and backgrounds full of plants, animals and fish. All this is done with great freedom of colour and composition. It would be interesting to imagine how the Egyptians would have treated the theme of the paintings in the Etruscan ‘hunting and fishing’ tomb: the sea is alive with fish, a fisherman is hauling his net in to his boat, overhead flies a cloud of birds as a hunter aims at them with his sling. The same subject could be found in Egypt, but this is another world, full of joy and a sense of humour, of the ridiculous even, which one also finds in certain Etruscan sculptures verging on caricature. In all the ancient tombs of Etruria, the descent to the underworld is a hymn to life, however much the Etruscans may have feared the gods whom they saw as tormenting them.
Everything changed mysteriously in the fourth century, or maybe even a little earlier. The style suddenly became dignified, sometimes pompous, borrowing themes from Greek classical mythology, thoughsometimes with lovely details such as the famous portrait of Velia in the Tomb of the Ogre. At the same time, the charming scenes from daily life disappeared, to be replaced by demons who are not the most cheerful figures in the Etruscan pantheon. There is Tuchulcha, for instance, with the beak of a bird of prey, long ears, and two menacing snakes rearing up over his head; or Charun (who is Greek in name only), an even more sinister figure with a horrible bluish face and rotting skin, a hooked nose, horse’s ears, and a mallet which he wields with monstrous joy to batter the mortal whose last hour has come. These malevolent beings belonged to the ancient stock of Etruscan popular beliefs, but this was the first time they had appeared on the walls of tombs. They tormented the dead person during the frightening transit from life to death, a very unpleasant stage before his final arrival at the peace and perpetual delights of the underworld – an underworld represented here for the first time in the Greek manner, with Hades and Persephone presiding over the banquets of the afterlife.
The Mediterranean in the Ancient World Page 30