The southern Tyrrhenian was another matter. The Greeks of Kyma were particularly conscious of the proximity of Etruscan power – land as well as sea power – since two Etruscan cities lay in the hinterland (Capua, Nola); and the Etruscans gained control over at least one coastal town, Pompeii.52 Kyma had to rely on help from the Greek colonists in Sicily to triumph over the Etruscans. In 474 Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, secured a victory that would transform not just the political but the commercial face of the western Mediterranean. He was well aware of this: at the time when Xerxes’ Persian hordes had just been repelled by the might of Hellas, this was his contribution to the defeat of the barbarians. Moreover, Hieron’s victory at Kyma followed another victory at Himera in Sicily, where six years earlier the Syracusan fleet under his predecessor Gelon had decisively defeated its other enemy in the western Mediterranean, Carthage; Gelon’s victory was said to have occurred on the same day as one of the great battles against the Persians, the Greek victory at Salamis.53 Writing not long afterwards, the Greek poet Pindar took the defeat of the Etruscans at Kyma as one of the main themes of his ode in praise of Hieron ‘of Etna, winner of the chariot race’:
Grant, I beg, O son of Kronos, that the Phoenician and the Tyrrhenians’ war-cry keep quiet at home: it has seen what woe to its ships came of its pride before Kyma, and all that befell when the lord of Syracuse routed them, who out of their swift sailing ships cast down their youth in the sea – the dragger of Hellas from her weight of slavery.54
Hieron dedicated an Etruscan pot-helmet at Olympia inscribed: ‘Hieron, son of Deinomenes and the Syracusans and Zeus: Tyrsenian from Kyma’; it is now preserved in the British Museum. However, Pindar’s attempt to link the Etruscans and the Carthaginians (‘the Phoenicians’ war-cry’) was anachronistic. For whatever reason, relations between the Carthaginians and the Etruscans had already begun to weaken in the two decades before the battle of Kyma. There is a clear archaeological break in Etruscan imports to Carthage not before 550 and not after 500.55 Anaxilas of Rhegion, a Greek ally of Carthage, built a rampart specifically to prevent an Etruscan attack on his city, perched on the Straits of Messina. On their own and without success Etruscan ships sailed south to attack the Lipari islands, which still functioned, as they had done since prehistoric times, as a centre of exchange linking the western Mediterranean to the eastern Mediterranean.56 During the early fifth century, then, the Etruscans became increasingly isolated within the western Mediterranean.
Even though Etruscan ships appear in action again at the end of the fifth century, the Syracusans had won access to the whole Tyrrhenian Sea. In 453–2, they raided the coast off Caere and installed themselves briefly on iron-bearing Elba, where they captured many slaves; at long last the Tyrsenian pirates were being paid back in their own coin.57 The Etruscans maintained their grudge against Syracuse until the Peloponnesian War, which will be discussed in a later chapter. When they launched their own attacks on Syracuse, the Athenians were well aware of this hostility.58 In 413 BC the Etruscans sent three large warships to Syracuse to help the Athenian fleet. As Thucydides laconically remarked: ‘there were some Tyrrhenians fighting because of their hatred for Syracuse’.59 They were few but they saved the day on at least one occasion. Several centuries later the Spurinna family, a noble clan of Tarquinia, proudly erected a Latin inscription in praise of their ancestors, one of whom was a naval commander in the Sicilian campaign of 413 BC.60
VI
The links between Greece and Etruria were effected by way of a city in southern Italy famed for its inhabitants’ love of luxury. Until its destruction in 510 as a result of local jealousies, Sybaris was the great entrepôt at which products arrived from Corinth, Ionia and Athens, before being transported across country to Poseidonia (Paestum) and embarked on Etruscan ships.61 Sybaris was especially famous, or notorious, for its friendship towards Etruria; according to Athenaios of Naukratis (who lived in the second century AD), its commercial alliances stretched far in two directions, north to Etruria and east to Miletos on the coast of Asia Minor:
The Sybarites wore mantles made of wool from Miletos, and from this sprang the friendship between the states. The Sybarites loved the Etruscans above all 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.62
The western Greeks functioned as intermediaries: it was not their own products but those of their brethren in the Aegean world that interested the Etruscans.
One way in which the Athenians managed to maintain their superiority over their rivals was by using new channels of communication when the old ones were rendered inaccessible by war and commercial disputes. The battle of Kyma marked the beginning of the end of the Etruscan thalassocracy in the western Mediterranean. The Tyrrhenian Sea was no longer their lake, but had to be shared with the Carthaginians, Greeks of Magna Graecia and new contenders such as the Romans and the Volscians, hill-people from central Italy who proved remarkably versatile and managed to launch their own pirate raids. The Etruscans responded to the loss of maritime opportunities by taking control of towns inland, including Perugia (previously a centre of the Umbrian people, related to the Latins), Bologna (previously inhabited by ‘Villanovans’ culturally similar to the very early Etruscans) and cities in the Po Valley such as Mantua.63 This meant that new routes could open up, carrying goods from the eastern Mediterranean across the peninsula from ports on the shores of the Adriatic. In the seventh and sixth centuries an extraordinary cultural florescence had occurred in what are now the Italian Marches, among the people known as the Picenes, who were open to Greek influences by sea and to Etruscan influences overland.64 But after 500 the Adriatic became the main channel of communication with the Greek lands; the route was convenient for mariners, even if it entailed what must have been a costly overland journey through the Apennines. For ships could set out from the Gulf of Corinth, clearing the Ionian islands and calling in at the Greek colonies of Apollonia and Epidamnos, before working their way up past the lands of the Picenes to Adria and Spina, newly developed ports in the mud-flats and shallows of north-eastern Italy, close to the later cities of Ferrara and Ravenna. Just as the Este dukes of Renaissance Ferrara devoted great energy to the breeding of fine horses, so too in the archaic and classical Greek periods horse-breeding drew the Greeks to this region.65
Spina was either an Etruscan foundation that experienced heavy Greek immigration or a Greek foundation that experienced heavy Etruscan immigration; its population was a mix of Etruscans, Greeks, Veneti from north-eastern Italy and any number of other peoples. It may have been the outport of the inland city of Felsina (Etruscan Bologna): a late fifth-century stele from Bologna portrays a warship that belonged to a member of the Kaikna family of Felsina, and it is hard to see where they could have based their ships except in the Adriatic ports such as Spina. Spina and Adria offered the Greeks and Etruscans large numbers of Italic and Celtic slaves; these numbers could only grow as Etruscan colonizers in the Po Valley and Celtic invaders coming across the Alps collided with one another. Spina was laid out on a grid plan, a design the Etruscans strongly favoured, but the water channels leading to the sea gave it something of the character of an Etrusco-Greek Venice. Over 4,000 tombs have been opened in its necropolis; massive quantities of Greek vases have been recovered, including many from the fifth and early fourth centuries, after which the link to Athens was sundered and the citizens of Spina had to rely on inferior pottery from Etruscan kilns.66 The alluvial agricultural land of the Po delta was highly productive, but the problem with alluvial soils is that they do not stand still, and, as they advanced in the fourth century, the city found itself stranded further and further from the sea. Meanwhile, Celtic raids into Italy, which culminated in an attack on Rome in 390 BC, had severe effects in this region, which was heavily settled by the invaders.67 Thus Spina’s period of efflorescence was relatively short, but brilliant. Its rise to prominence formed part of a wider process which sa
w the entire Adriatic become a marketplace in which Greek wares were widely available.
The emergence of the Etruscan cities was thus much more than a phenomenon of the Tyrrhenian Sea; the Adriatic too was opened to the movement of people and goods. Along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians, the Etruscans refashioned the Mediterranean, helping to create interconnections that spanned the entire sea.
4
Towards the Garden of the Hesperides,
1000 BC–400 BC
I
The impact of contact with the eastern Mediterranean was felt in very different ways within what we now call Italy. Greek culture seeped more slowly into the everyday life of the native peoples of Sicily – Sikans, Sikels and Elymians – than into the life of the peoples of Tuscany and Latium. In Sicily, both the Greeks and the Carthaginians kept themselves largely apart from the native population. Sardinia, rich in minerals, had for centuries been the seat of a lively civilization characterized by the stone towers known as nuraghi, of which many thousands still dot the island; they were surrounded by what seem to have been prosperous villages, firmly rooted in the rich agricultural resources of the island. They began to be built around 1400 BC, but new nuraghi were still being constructed well into the Iron Age.1 In the Mycenaean era, there had been some contact with the outside world, as eastern Mediterranean traders arrived in search of copper. The wealth of the native elite as far back as the second millennium BC can be measured from the tombs of Anghelu Ruju, near Alghero in north-western Sardinia; these are among the richest to have been unearthed in late Neolithic and early Bronze Age western Europe, and they indicate contact with Spain, southern France and the eastern Mediterranean.2 The Spanish influence can be traced in the bell beaker jars found at this site. Another Spanish connection was linguistic. The Sardinians left no written records, whether because they did not use writing or because they used friable materials that have failed to survive. But place-names, many in current use, provide suggestive evidence, as does the Sard language, a distinctive form of late vulgar Latin that incorporates a number of pre-Latin words within its many dialects. It appears that the nuraghic peoples spoke a language or languages related to the non-Indo-European language Basque. Thus a Sard word for a young lamb, bitti, is very similar to a Basque term for a young goat, bitin.3 Rather than revealing a large migration from Iberia to Sardinia, this is evidence for the existence of a group of western Mediterranean languages whose speakers could be found in Spain, southern France, some of the western Mediterranean islands and parts of North Africa.
As early as the second millennium the Sardinians were burying their dead in impressive rock-cut tombs, carved to resemble the houses of the living, containing several chambers joined by passages, and decorated with door jambs, cornices and other stone-carved imitations of what must have been, in the houses of the living, wooden accoutrements. In modern Sardinia these tombs are called domus de janas, ‘houses of fairies’. But the ancient Sardinians also constructed impressive sacred sites, as at Monte d’Accodi, in the north, near Sassari, where a truncated pyramid accessible along a great ramp was constructed, possibly in the fifteenth century BC, probably as a place of worship.
Most nuraghi stand back from the coast; many stood on the crests of hills, and everything suggests that their main purpose was defensive: to guard against sheep-rustlers, sea-raiders and, above all, troublesome Sardinian neighbours; they were also strongboxes in which copper and bronze, in raw form and manufactured into figurines and armaments, could be stored. A good example is provided by the massive complex at Su Nuraxi at Barumini in southern Sardinia, which flourished in the eighth to the sixth century; as well as its castle, Su Nuraxi contained about sixty huts, with stone foundations, arranged around a central piazza. One large structure is thought to have been a council chamber, equipped with a stone bench and recesses in which lamps were placed. Attacked and destroyed by the Carthaginians, whose base at Cagliari lay not far to the south, Su Nuraxi was rebuilt in the fifth century, and judging from the finds of objects in terracotta, bronze and iron it once again became a prosperous centre.4 This was a highly fragmented society, in which every petty lord possessed his own castle. But influences from Phoenicia, Carthage and Etruria penetrated slowly: this was not a civilization that was rapidly and dazzlingly transformed by contact with the outside world, in the way that the early Etruscans were transformed by contact with the Greeks and the Phoenicians.5 The interplay with Italy, Spain and Africa was more subtle, and Sardinian society leaves an impression of deep conservatism – nuraghi were still being constructed as late as the third century, by which time not just the Carthaginians but the Romans were often the enemy. The profusion of towers, staircases, secret passage-ways and ramparts at such sites as Palmavera, near Alghero, of about 750 BC, as well as the fortified villages clustering around the foot of the nuraghi, speak of a time when Phoenician invaders were installing themselves on Sardinia and more sophisticated constructions were needed to deal with more sophisticated enemies. The religious cults on ancient Sardinia also reveal the conservatism of this society; here, the gods of the Greeks or Phoenicians did not gain control, and the islanders focused their devotion on sacred wells and bull-cults.6
The Sards were not city-dwellers. Their characteristic settlements were villages around castles. The cities of Sardinia were those established by the Phoenicians and Carthaginians. Yet the sometimes difficult relationship between the Carthaginians and the Sardinians did not mean that nuraghic civilization was sealed off from the outside world. One exotic import was amber, which travelled down by some unknown route all the way from the Baltic, finishing its journey at Su Nuraxi. Gold did not greatly interest the Sards, and the full exploitation of the silver mines in southern Sardinia would wait until the fourteenth century AD. The oldest examples of Greek pottery found in Sardinia (setting aside some Mycenaean fragments) date from the eighth century. In the seventh century an Ionian vase reached Su Nuraxi. Some idea of the strength of outside contacts can be gained from the fact that Corinthian pottery has been found only on sites in southern Sardinia, whereas Etruscan pottery (including imitations of Greek pots) has been discovered across the island.7 To the Sards these were evidently attractive, exotic items for which they could easily pay with copper ingots.
Finding copper was no problem for the Sards; but, to transform copper into its harder alloy bronze, tin had to be imported from Spain and southern France. And out of bronze the Sardinians manufactured statuettes whose influence spread in both place and time: the long-legged human figurines attracted the eye of the twentieth-century sculptor Giacometti, having already fascinated Etruscan metalworkers in Vetulonia, where their own long-limbed figurines were produced, often by Sard workmen. Several hundred of these statuettes survive from Sardinia itself, dating from the eighth to the sixth century BC. They seem to portray a real world of warriors, archers, craftsmen and shepherds, though female figures are rarer than male. Sometimes, too, they depict animals; on occasion they probably represent gods, and they were probably used in local cults.8 The figurines provide direct evidence of navigation, for several model boats have been found in Etruscan ports. They are thought to date from the eighth century onwards; one has a prow in the form of a deer’s head, and several animals and birds adorn the gunwales; another round-bottomed boat contains the crouching figure of a monkey, an animal the Carthaginians could have brought across from Africa.9
II
The Greeks in southern Italy acted as a bridge linking those of Ionia, Attika and the Peloponnese to the newly emergent cities of Etruria. In the same way a far-flung Ionian colony, Massalia, on the site of modern Marseilles, acted as a bridge between the metropolitan Greek world and the westernmost coasts of the Mediterranean.10 Once again it was the Phokaians, from the coast of Asia Minor, who were the pioneers, establishing their settlement around 600 BC; about 600 adult settlers arrived, and they soon intermarried with the native population. Early Marseilles grew rapidly, and covered about fifty hectares during the sixth
century.11 Its true age of glory was its first half-century of existence. In the mid-sixth century, the invasion of Ionia by the Persians stimulated the Phokaians to emigrate as far from the Persian enemy as it was possible to go. Herodotos relates that the Persians demanded that one rampart of the city of Phokaia should be demolished and that one building should be symbolically handed over to the Persian satrap. The Phokaians indicated that they were interested in the proposal, and would like a day’s truce during which they could think about it; but they took advantage of the truce to load their ships with all their possessions, sailing off to Chios to the far west – first Corsica, then Massalia. They thus handed the Persian king a ghost city.12
All this did not make Massalia into a hive of Ionian irredentists. Massalia was a special place, whose inhabitants managed to keep their heads down when their compatriots were fighting the Etruscans; and one explanation for this was the intimate relationship the Massaliots enjoyed with the peoples of the western Mediterranean – not just the Etruscans, but the Carthaginians in Africa and Spain and the less sophisticated Ligurians who inhabited north-western Italy and southern France.13 Massalia became a point of contact with the Celtic peoples of western Europe, so that Greek and Etruscan pottery and other goods were funnelled northwards from there into the centre of Gaul. Meanwhile, the Greeks, Etruscans and Carthaginians traded side by side in the region; Pech Maho, which has been mentioned already, was used by Carthaginian merchants as a trading station, and yet was evidently visited by others as well, as the Etruscan inscription scratched on lead found there makes plain. Rather than lead, it was tin that attracted merchants to southern France, for they sought access to the tin supplies of north-western France and possibly even Britain, reached by Phoenician sailors out of Cádiz. Finds of Greek and Etruscan bronzes and pottery along the Seine, notably a massive Greek bronze krater found at Vix, dating from about 530 BC, give some clues to the lengthy routes that goods (though not necessarily individual merchants) followed deep into the interior of Gaul.14 This great mixing bowl for wine serves as a reminder that the wine trade was one of the great strengths of Massalia. It could contain 1,100 litres of liquid, the custom among the Greeks being to mix one part of wine with two of water. Indeed, the sixth century was the golden age of Greek trade in the far west. Although an Ionian colony in Corsica was throttled at birth by the Etruscans and Carthaginians, small settlements came into being for a while at Málaga and elsewhere in southern Spain and, more illustriously, at Emporion, the emporium par excellence, now known as Empúries. Nearby, traders from Rhodes may have founded Rhode, the modern Roses in Catalonia.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 16