A History of the Roman World

by Scullard, H. H.

  While Greece was in turmoil during its Dark Ages, groups of Phoenician merchants and colonists from Tyre, Sidon and other coastal towns of Palestine and Syria were adventuring in the western Mediterranean. The conditions of their native land had ever focused their attention on the sea rather than on the soil as a means of livelihood, while their expanding population had been harassed by the Philistines and by pressure from the Hebrews of the desert. Exploration and the establishing of small trading-posts must have preceded the founding of large settlements, but the dating of both is uncertain: several were founded traditionally as early as c. 1100 BC, but there is no archaeological evidence for Phoenician settlements in the west before the eighth century. However, the Phoenicians gradually established themselves at Utica, Carthage and other sites in North Africa, at Gades on the Atlantic coast of Spain, where they soon encountered the kingdom of Tartessus in Andalusia, rich in silver, and also on the Spanish Mediterranean coast at Malaca and Sexi. They also ventured into the Atlantic through the Pillars of Hercules (Gibraltar) with settlements not only at Gades but also on the Moroccan coast at Lixus; from these they sailed down the African coast four hundred miles to the little island of Mogador, while northwards they tapped the tin route to Brittany and Cornwall.19 But as Phoenicia from the seventh century was gradually oppressed by the great Oriental powers, the new settlement at Carthage took the lead in the west and continued the colonizing movement as well as establishing friendly relations with the Etruscans (see pp. 142ff.).

  It is just possible that the Phoenician made some small settlements (as opposed to temporary landings for trade and barter) on the coast of Italy but if so, no remains of them have yet been found. However, Phoenician influences on the development of art during the orientalizing phase in Etruria and Latium were considerable: the princely tombs at Caere and Praeneste (pp. 36f.) contain precious objects which were either imports from Phoenicia or inspired by Phoenician artists. They recall the silver mixing-bowl described by Homer: ‘Sidonians, well skilled in handiwork, had wrought it, and men of the Phoenicians brought it over the misty deep’. An attempt has been made to show that the sanctuary of the Ara Maxima of Hercules in the Cattle Market (Forum Boarium) at Rome was preceded by a temple of the Phoenician god Melqart (= Hercules) dedicated by Phoenician merchants, but this is extremely doubtful; the presupposition of an early Tyrian settlement in this Forum is even more dubious.20 The Phoenicians, however, did give Rome one priceless gift, the alphabet. The legacy was mediated through the Greeks who took over this flexible instrument and adapted it to the needs of an Indo-European language. They then naturally took it with them to their colonies in Italy, whence both Etruscans and Romans received it. Thus it was that Italy became literate and written history eventually became possible.

  The precise order in which Phoenicians and Greeks began to establish themselves in the west is still hotly debated by modern scholars, but there is no question as to their relative importance in Italy. From the second half of the eighth and during the seventh and sixth centuries the Greeks of the Aegean area established a series of colonies on the coast of Sicily, and others in western and southern Italy from the Bay of Naples round to Taranto, so that this latter area became known as Magna Graecia. The earliest and most northerly colony was settled in about 760 BC by Eretrians and Chalcidians from Euboea on the island of Pithecusae (Ischia) just north of the Bay of Naples. The fact that the settlers pressed so far north up the coast when there was good agricultural land available in the south suggests that their motive (unlike that of many later Greek colonists) was not purely agricultural: they wanted to trade with the mainland and obtain copper and iron from Etruria and Elba.21 Soon afterwards some of these colonists crossed over to the mainland and established themselves at Cumae and, supplanting the older Fossa culture settlement (p. 16), became a thriving community, whence both economic and cultural influences radiated outwards in Italy. The claim of Cumae to be the place from which the Greek alphabet spread to Etruria and Rome is illustrated by an inscription on a cup found at Pithecusae, written in the Chalcidian alphabet, which proclaimed that anyone who drank from it would be inflamed by Aphrodite and alleged that the cup was superior to that of Nestor, while another inscription in the same form of lettering on an early seventh-century vase from Cumae states, ‘I am the vessel of Tataei; may anyone who steals me be struck blind’. It is significant that the owner of the first cup knew about Nestor’s cup in the Iliad (further, a scene on a locally made geometric vase showing a shipwreck could perhaps refer to Odysseus): the Greeks were bringing to Italy not only their alphabet but also the Homeric poems. In consequence, whereas at first the wanderings of Odysseus after the fall of Troy were located in the east in the regions of the Black Sea (Pontus), places mentioned in the Odyssey were later located in the west: Scylla and Charybdis were identified with the Straits of Messina, the home of Aeolus with Lipari, the rocks of the Sirens with some rocks off Positano; an entrance to the underworld was placed at Cumae, and the sorceress Circe was commemorated by the headland named Circeii in Latium. Cumae also became the home of a sibyl, the prophetess of Apollo, whose oracles were thought to contain the destinies of Rome.22

  Another recent discovery which shows how Greek cultural influences began to penetrate into central Italy is a Greek sanctuary of c. 580 BC which was found, together with large quantities of Greek pottery, in the Etruscan town of Gravisca, the port of Tarquinii. This suggests a settlement of resident Greeks; early in the fifth century it was taken over and enlarged by the Etruscans. Among many inscriptions, which include dedications to Hera, Aphrodite and Demeter, is a sixth-century dedication to Apollo in the alphabet and dialect of Aegina: ‘I belong to Aeginetan Apollo; Sostratus son of … had me made’. This Sostratus is almost certainly the Aeginetan Sostratus, son of Laodamus, of whom Herodotus spoke: of all the Greek traders known to the historian he brought back the greatest wealth ‘and none could rival him’. He prospered even more than Colaeus the Samian master-mariner, who was the first Greek to reach Tartessus. It has often wrongly been assumed that Sostratus also made his profit from Tartessus, but Herodotus does not say this; the immensely rich source that Sostratus tapped now appears to have been Etruria.23 In fact, by this date Greek pottery had begun to flood central Italy; long before this another Greek trader, Demaratus, a noble of Corinth, migrated to Etruria when his native city fell into the hands of a tyrant (c. 655 BC). He took with him his workmen, potters and painters, and settled at Tarquinii where he married an Etruscan noblewoman: their son later moved to Rome, where he gained the throne and reigned as Tarquinius the elder. Sceptical historians have been all too ready to dismiss Demaratus as a legendary figure (though recent evidence from Gravisca may now give them some reason to pause). However, even if Demaratus himself was fictitious, his story reflects the historical developments of the years between 750 and 500 BC, when Italy became one of the chief markets for the Greek export trade. Numerous traders arrived on the shores of Etruria, where they were perhaps allowed greater freedom of movement inland in the seventh than in the sixth century. Others sailed from Tarentum up the Adriatic coast to Hadria (near the Po estuary) and advanced inland as far as the Apennines.24

  The further spread of Greek colonization belongs to the history of the Greek rather than of the Roman world, but we may note some stages. Control of the Straits of Messina, which formed a sea link with Greece, was vital to trade and expansion, so some settlers from Cumae and Chalcis colonized Zancle-Messene (modern Messina) and these in turn, reinforced by some Messenians from the Peloponnese, founded Rhegium across the Strait on the toe of Italy. Sybaris was colonized by Achaeans traditionally in 721, to be followed by Locri, Croton, Metapontum, Caulonia and others; Taras (Tarentum) was also occupied (this district had enjoyed links with Mycenaean Greece centuries before). Sybaris, whose growing wealth gained her a reputation for luxury, was cut off from the Straits by the rival Chalcidians, so she established a land route across the toe of Italy, with colonies at Laos and Scidros and su
bsequently at the much more important Poseidonia (Paestum). She could thus act as a middle-man and send to the Tyrrhenian Sea and Etruria the woollens, carpets and other valuable goods of Miletus which her Chalcidian trading rivals excluded from the Straits. All these Greek cities shared in a marvellous flowering of architecture, town-planning, art, sculpture, the plastic arts, coinage, literature, science and philosophy, as is apparent, for example, in the temples of Paestum, the terracottas of Locri, the bronzes of Tarentum, the philosophers of Elia, the Pythagoreans at Croton. In some ways they remained a group of closed communities, cut off from the rest of Italy, often quarrelling among themselves or suffering civil war within a city. Thus they lacked the power or the will to try to extend the area of their dominance, and their bickerings would not have encouraged other Italic peoples to imitate their more advanced institutions. However, through commerce and other contacts many aspects of their culture began to reach central Italy; thus Greek religious ideas and deities spread outwards, so that Apollo, Heracles, and Castor and Polydeukes became known in Latium and Rome and were ‘Italicized’, together with many of the figures of Greek mythology; while Etruscan art, though maintaining its own flavour, owed an infinite debt to the Greeks.

  The Celts did not play an important role in Rome’s history until the beginning of the fourth century when they sacked the city, but since they formed an influential part of the early western European ‘barbarian’ scene, they require brief mention here. As we have seen, by 1000 BC bearers of the Urnfield culture had spread widely across central Europe, from the Upper Danube to the Rhine, the Rhône, the Seine and the Low Countries. Their identification with the Celts is maintained by some, and qualified by other, scholars; probably this culture (as at Hallstatt, a typical site in Austria) resulted from gradual infiltrations rather than from a massive invasion. In France it increasingly became marked by the practice of inhumation in mounds; from c. 650 BC chieftains, laid on a wagon with its wheels beside it and accompanied by iron spears and swords, were buried in wooden chambers under great tumuli: iron, inhumation and wagon-burial reinforced older Urnfield practices. Whether the impetus came from foreign settlers or only from foreign influences remains uncertain, but from these wagon-buriers developed the people we call the Celts. From c. 550 they began to import Greek pottery: imports into France came from the Greek city of Massilia (Marseilles) and along the Rhône and Saône valleys. The most famous tomb is at Vix in Burgundy where a princess was buried on a wagon surrounded by Greek and Etruscan ornaments, including the famous bronze crater nearly five and a half feet high. Gradually this Celtic culture merged into that of La Tène (a typical site near Lake Neuchâtel) which imported fewer Greek and more Etruscan goods. Further contacts between Celt and Etruscan and the advance of some Celtic tribes over the Alps into the northern plain of Italy are discussed below.25

  7. THE ETRUSCANS26

  The people that we call Etruscans were named Tyrsenoi or Tyrrhenoi by the Greeks, Etrusci or Tusci by the Romans, and Rasenna by themselves. They were known to the early Greek poet Hesiod c. 700 BC, and archaeology shows that by then a splendid culture was beginning to flower in Etruria. How did this come about? Were the creators of this civilization native Italians or were they immigrants, like the Greeks further south in Italy? In the mid-fifth century BC Herodotus told how during a famine a Lydian king sent his son Tyrsenus with half the population to seek a new home among the Ombriki. All other ancient writers, beguiled perhaps by the charm and authority of the Father of History, accepted the Lydian origin of the Etruscans, except for Dionysius of Halicarnassus who, living in the time of the emperor Augustus, referred to the shadowy Pelasgians who changed their name to Tyrrhenes and were autochthonous in Italy. The controversy has been carried on ever since, with various degrees of passion and interest, but little general agreement. Mommsen dismissed the question as on a par with that of the name of Hecuba’s mother: ‘neither capable of being known, nor worth the knowing’. Others feel strongly that Herodotus can not be dismissed out of hand, and that the value of Etruscan culture and the importance of its role in Italian history, including its great influence on Rome, demand full investigation. Latterly, less emphasis has been laid on origin, and more placed on the formation of the Etruscans on Italian soil and analysis of the contrasting elements in Italy and from overseas which combined to create the culture.27

  The supporters of the theory of autochthonous origin rely on archaeological evidence, which indicates that most Etruscan towns developed on precisely the same sites as former Villanovan settlements. At Veii, for instance, some twelve miles north of Rome, the early Villanovan settlements appear to represent small independent villages, each with its own cemetery, but all grouped on or around the rocky tufa plateau on which the later Etruscan city was built. The types of tombs in Etruscan cemeteries seem to develop in an uninterrupted series, as does the style of their contents. At Tarquinii, for instance, Villanovan cremation burials in urns (a pozzo) were first supplemented and then superseded by inhumation in trenches (a fossa); as the richness of the contents increased and inhumation became the usual practice, chamber-tombs were cut in the rock; tomb-painting, sculpture and ceramics flourished, and imported Greek and oriental objects became more common. Thus, it is argued, Etruscan civilization had arrived without the intervention of any obvious major break: Villanovans had become Etruscans. The Etruscans spoke a non-Indo-European language, and the Villanovans must therefore presumably have done likewise. If so, since there was no obvious influx of a new population, this language presumably derived from a much earlier Bronze (or even Neolithic) Age stratum going back to before the spread of Indo-European tongues from c. 2000 BC.

  Scholars who follow the Asiatic flag of Herodotus rather than the Italian flag of Dionysius point out that to transmute small villages into strong cities presupposes technical skills and administrative abilities of a much higher order than that shown by the Villanovans. True, the cemeteries do not indicate any startling break, but the method of disposing of the dead does change, and this is an area of custom in which the feelings of primitive peoples run strong and tend to be conservative. Certainly few scholars today would argue for a mass immigration into Etruria from overseas in one great influx, but if groups of newcomers who practised a different form of burial only gradually asserted themselves in the land they occupied, then any change in burial habits would naturally be somewhat slow. Further, similarities between certain tombs in Etruria and Asia Minor have been found, and Etruscan culture has many aspects which seem more oriental than Italic: the luxury of the Etruscans, their love of feasting, music and dancing, and many of their religious practices such as hepatoscopy have eastern parallels. Then there is the startling fact that an inscription on a warrior’s tombstone is in a language which has connections both with Etruscan and with the tongues of Asia Minor. This was found on the island of Lemnos in the Aegean, where, according to the historian Thucydides, the pre-Greek population was Tyrrhenian. It could be argued that native Italian Etruscans sent out a colony to Lemnos during the early days of Greek colonization, or alternatively that a very old Mediterranean language managed to survive just in these two points amid a sea of Indo-European speakers, but it is much more tempting to see in Lemnos a staging-post in an Etruscan migration from Asia Minor where some of the travellers stayed behind.

  Although skulls and bones have been examined by anthropologists, and blood-groups studied by medical biologists, no clear answer has emerged, and the leading Etruscologist, M. Pallottino, has concentrated rather on the historical reality of the Etruscan nation in Italy, considering it more valuable to discuss the origin of the ethnic, linguistic, political and cultural elements that contributed to the process of ethnic formation that took place on the soil of Etruria itself, than to continue to speculate about provenance. One thing however is clear: whether with or without the introduction of incomers from the Eastern Mediterranean, the varied elements were fused together during the orientalizing phase in the early seventh century. The
basic population of Etruria remained of Villanovan origin; it adopted new ideas of burial and social organization and imported more and more Greek and oriental wares (including some artists and craftsmen) which were gradually imitated by local artists. But some enquirers will still remember Herodotus and continue to speculate whether these changes were only the upsurge of native talent under eastern cultural influences, or were so fundamental as to justify belief in the impact of foreign occupation. The opening up of the countryside and the transformation of villages into cultured cities may well have required the influx of a relatively small number of men with administrative skills and the power to organize large labour forces.

  If on balance we may accept an oriental element in the Etruscan nation, a view to which the Etruscans themselves officially subscribed at the beginning of the Roman Empire (Tacitus, Annals, iv, 55), we can imagine how they came in small bands and settled in strong positions near the coast whence they dominated the surrounding districts, much as the Norsemen descended upon the coasts of Scotland. This movement may even represent the final spasm of disturbances in the eastern Mediterranean that went back to the results of the collapse of the Mycenaean and Hittite empires and sent various groups of Peoples of the Sea roving around from the beginning of the twelfth century in search of plunder and new homes. The Etruscans cannot have arrived in Italy before about 800 BC (Herodotus put their migration before the fall of Troy, late thirteenth century), though some might have arrived in Lemnos earlier. The magnet that drew them to Etruria will have been its mineral wealth. They were presumably groups of warriors, with few womenfolk, who brought their experience in war, administration and the arts of city life, together with their language. Their numbers may not have been large and their arrival may have continued over many years. In Etruria they found a Villanovan population which lived in villages, spoke an Indo-European tongue and cremated its dead. Superior powers of organization enabled the invaders to impose themselves as a conquering aristocracy; they intermarried with the Villanovans, their language and burial habits gradually gained the ascendancy, and they organized the subjugated Villanovans to clear the forests, drain the land, and build cities. By exploiting the copper and iron of the country they were enabled to build up an overseas trade which brought them many of the luxurious artistic products of the East. Thus by the beginning of the seventh century an Etruscan nation was born on Italian soil; the bulk of its people were Iron Age Villanovans whose latent abilities and tastes had been gradually sharpened by pressure from men who shared some of the qualities which later enabled the Normans to subdue the Saxons in England. However, the warning should be sounded once again that many scholars still prefer a theory of ‘continuous creation’ within Etruria itself.28