Etruscan Women—Dignified, Charming, Literate and Free

018

019

Most travelers’ tales from the ancient world have been told by men, so it’s not surprising that their yarns devote special attention to the local women they encounter. The most famous of all those ancient travelers, Homer’s Odysseus, trooped off to Troy in pursuit of Helen of Sparta, lingered nine years on the Maltese island of Gozo with Calypso, touched down on the North African coast with the Lotus-Eaters, sailed past the Sirens of 020Sorrento en route to Circe’s lair, popped out naked from behind a bush to approach Nausicaa of Corfu, and finally settled on the little island of Ithaca with his wife, Penelope—who still bests them all through her irresistible combination of integrity and intelligence.

Later sailors would have said, however, that Odysseus’s 10-year itinerary left one huge gap: Homer makes only one reference to the Etruscans—the literate and sophisticated people who by the eighth century B.C.E. were inhabiting the region of central Italy bounded by the Arno and Tiber rivers and the Tyrrhenian Sea, a region corresponding to modern-day Tuscany. Moreover, in that one reference, Homer transforms the Etruscans into the seven-headed monster Scylla (her name means “the Bitch”), who snatches seven men from Odysseus’s ship as it passes through the Straits of Messina. The Athenian playwright Euripides, in his tragedy Medea (431 B.C.E.), was already claiming that Scylla stood in Homer’s epic for the Etruscan pirates who jealously guarded access to the sea that still bears their name—the Greek word for “Etruscan” was “Tyrrhenian.”

Perhaps only those monstrously fierce Etruscan pirates could have kept such an inveterate swain as Odysseus from working his charms on Etruscan women, those ravishing creatures who had already begun to captivate the Greeks of Homer’s time. Perhaps we see something of their legendary allure in Circe, the witch of Monte Circeo (south of Rome), who serves Odysseus’s men a potion that turns them into pigs before she hops happily into bed with the hero. Etruscan women’s freedom of action, their appetite for wine and their loose morals were the talk of their Greek and, later, their Roman neighbors. In his Histories, the fourth-century B.C.E. Greek historian Theopompus of Chios could hardly contain his leering fascination:

Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom. Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often, sometimes along with the men, and sometimes by themselves. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. They do not share their couches with their husbands but with the other men who happen to be present, and they propose toasts to anyone they choose. They are expert drinkers and very attractive.

Theopompus’s account, which goes on to discuss public displays of affection, spouse-swapping and boy toys, is almost certainly exaggerated. The men and women who recline together in the painted banquet scenes from Tarquinian tombs, in a set of famous sarcophagi from Cerveteri (one in the Louvre and two in Rome’s Villa Giulia Museum), and on sculpted relief decorations from buildings at Murlo and Acquarossa seem overwhelmingly to be married couples, whether they are divine or mortal. Their conviviality comes nowhere near Roman standards of probity—a Roman general was never supposed to laugh. But look at the banquet scenes from the tombs at Tarquinia, for example, and you will see nothing like the ribald parties held by the Greeks, with courtesans and Ganymedes; if anything, they resemble lively family outings in modern Tuscany.

021

The images of banquets begin as early as the sixth century B.C.E., the probable date of the Cerveteri sarcophagi and the architectural ornaments from Murlo and Acquarossa. Wealthy women, their pale skin set off by flushed cheeks and deep red lips, flaunt big earrings and close-fitting rounded caps much like those favored by their contemporaries along the Ionian coast of Asia Minor. Their finely woven dresses crinkle like Venetian silk scarves, and their soft red shoes, with flashy pointed toes, seem only natural on the ancestors of a Tuscan shoemaker named Guccio Gucci. Their names, when we have them, are as sonorous as they are peculiar: Tanchvil, Larthia, Thania. Tanchvil—with its root cvil, or “gift”—must mean something like “Dorothy” (Greek for “God’s gift”).

One sixth-century B.C.E. Tanchvil entered Roman legend as Tanaquil, the resourceful wife of Lucumo, the fifth king of Rome. As the Roman historian Livy tells the story, Lucumo, despite his thoroughly Etruscan name (lauchme means “chief”), was in fact the son of a Demaratus of Corinth, one of many Greek men who seem to have settled down along the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea with an Etruscan wife. (The epitaph of another Etruscanized Greek, Larth Hipucrate, is still preserved in Lucumo’s home town of Tarquinia.)

Tanaquil shares some characteristics with Homer’s Circe: She has the gift of oracular vision, and she is a charmer of magical appeal. Her sage advice is what transforms Livy’s Lucumo into a king. Upon ascending to the throne, Lucumo takes a new name, Tarquinius, and is later described as Priscus, meaning “The Early.” Livy credits Tarquinius Priscus with most of the innovations that made Rome a real city—proper drainage, city planning, lavish temples, legal institutions—but he implicitly ascribes the king’s authority to Tanaquil. Livy lived from 59 B.C.E. until 17 C.E., and his account of Tanaquil shows how consistently, half a millennium after Tanaquil and Tarquinius Priscus lived, the Romans continued to view Etruscan women as strong, influential participants in public as well as private life.

Not all the charms of Etruscan women were natural: A fifth-century B.C.E. tomb 022from Tarquinia shows dark-haired men reclining alongside wives as strikingly blonde as the angels in some 15th-century C.E. Tuscan paintings. Tuscan women of the Renaissance bleached their hair with a combination of sunlight and lemon juice. Etruscan women must have used much the same recipe. They perfumed themselves with scented oils, sold in tiny, exquisite Corinthian vases or glass vessels. They applied their cosmetics with ivory sticks and combed their hair with ivory combs, checking the results in the burnished golden glow of their bronze mirrors. The backs of many of these mirrors are incised with mythological scenes, often with written labels—suggesting that Etruscan women were readers. These mirrors now provide important clues to Etruscan myth, Etruscan religion and sometimes even to the Etruscan language: One image of Leda and the swan is labeled “Lata” and “Tusna”—allowing the linguist Jaan Puhvel to add another word to an Etruscan vocabulary that still remains frustratingly small. Other mirrors simply show naked ladies with wings; thus the owners’ charms are given mythological form.

The way the Etruscans—male and female—chose to memorialize themselves tells us much about the way they lived. The repertory of decorations on Etruscan ash urns from Chiusi and Volterra favors active scenes: battles, chariot races, hunting, whether the deceased is a man or a woman. Perhaps Etruscan men had the final say in the kinds of images they wanted associated with themselves and their wives. Or perhaps the unusual freedom Etruscan women enjoyed gave them a taste for action, in this way distinguishing them from their Greek and Roman counterparts.

The second-century B.C.E. sarcophagus of Larthia Seianti, from the Seianti family of Chiusi, was discovered in 1877 and now resides in the Florence Archaeological Museum. That of her relative Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, likewise discovered in the 19th century, traveled as far as the British Museum. (At the time, the city of Chiusi sold Etruscan antiquities without much concern for provenance, or even authenticity; in newspaper advertisements, the city encouraged buyers to order the kinds of artifacts they wanted!) Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa’s sarcophagus, however, was so authentic that it still contained the lady’s mortal remains, which were recently analyzed by a team of curators and a forensic physician. Wealthy and well-connected as Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa must have been, her life could not have been easy, it turns out. At the age of about 18, she was injured in what may have been a riding accident. The mishap crushed her pelvis and left her limping, and probably in constant pain. Nonetheless, she lived into her 50s. (Medicine in Etruria was subject to all the drawbacks of an era before anesthesia and antibiotics, but the Etruscans did 024develop a sophisticated dentistry, which included bridges with prosthetic teeth.)

Both Larthia Seianti and Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa recline on what could either be a banqueting couch or a bed; a sarcophagus of comparable size in the Chiusi museum shows another wealthy woman lying in bed with the covers up to her chin. More modest urns show the deceased wrapped in a blanket and curled up in a deep, comforting sleep. Quite a different picture of death, and of bereaved parenthood, is provided by an urn at Volterra, which has an extraordinary image of a skinny baby staring with huge eyes into the unknown, hearbreakingly lonely on its narrow blanket.

Two fourth-century B.C.E. Etruscan sarcophagi from Vulci, now side-by-side in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, show two couples from two generations of the same family reclining on their marriage-beds. The older pair, Larth Tetnies and Tanchvil Tarnai, wear the elaborate clothes in which most Etruscans dress up to face the afterlife, but Arnth and his wife, Visnai, despite their stylish Greek-inspired coiffures, lie daringly naked, looking deeply into each other’s eyes for all eternity, as devoted, and with the same kind of attractive maturity, as Odysseus and Penelope.

Attractive maturity is less evident in an elderly, homely Etruscan couple from Volterra, stretched out on a banqueting couch, their wrinkled skin and piercingly 025shrewd expressions shown without compromise—though so, too, is the solidity of their bond to each other. In order to look into her husband’s face while reclining beside him, the wife must twist her body around with all the agility of a contortionist. It is typical of Etruscan artistry to emphasize a powerful emotional tie at the expense of a strictly accurate depiction of physical reality. The director of Volterra’s Guarnacci Museum, Gabriele Cateni, suggests that the couple may have commissioned this traditional Etruscan sarcophagus as late as the first century B.C.E., making it a touching document not only of two individuals but also of their entire culture, gradually disappearing under the steady pressure of Roman domination.

Conquest by the Romans eventually destroyed whatever was left of Etruscan literature, except for the ritual books whose use continued, remarkably, into the sixth century of the Common Era. It is doubly frustrating, therefore, to see how many of the little alabaster sarcophagi in which the Etruscans of Volterra buried their dead show women with wax writing tablets or folded linen books. What were they reading and writing? Pliny the Elder (23–79 C.E.) mentions an Etruscan writer of tragedies, Volnius (whom the Etruscans themselves would have called Velnie), and we see ample evidence of the singers and dancers who must have helped to transmit the Greek and local myths we see depicted on temples, tombs, furniture, clothing, utensils and dishes. But most of what we know about Etruscan life is strictly material, as concrete as the spindles and loom weights from which Etruscan women produced their luxurious robes, the luxuries great and small for which Etruria was famous throughout the Mediterranean world.

How could the women of Etruria not have been the envy of their Greek and Roman counterparts? Look at Greek painted vases from the sixth century B.C.E., those colorful depictions of banquets and symposia, and the only women you will find are the prostitutes called hetairai, dancing and playing their pipes, posing no threat at all to the men gathered for an evening of heady intellectual debate. The banquet hall was certainly no place for a proper Athenian lady. Roman women led similarly restricted lives, sober and silent in the presence of men.

What a contrast, then, were the freedoms enjoyed by Etruscan women, who dined alongside Etruscan men, partaking of their wine without reservation. And in death, too, Etruscan women were not shortchanged, their burials rivaling those of their husbands, brothers and uncles, filled with great quantities of luxurious goods. The Larthias and Tanchvils and Thanias we encounter on sarcophagi and wall paintings were unusual in the ancient world. Powerful, dignified, elegant and aristocratic, they not only inhabited the world of men, they seem to have been every bit their equals.

Most travelers’ tales from the ancient world have been told by men, so it’s not surprising that their yarns devote special attention to the local women they encounter. The most famous of all those ancient travelers, Homer’s Odysseus, trooped off to Troy in pursuit of Helen of Sparta, lingered nine years on the Maltese island of Gozo with Calypso, touched down on the North African coast with the Lotus-Eaters, sailed past the Sirens of 020Sorrento en route to Circe’s lair, popped out naked from behind a bush to approach Nausicaa of Corfu, and finally settled on the little […]