The Etruscans

020


021

Do you wonder what happened to the ancient Etruscans, those civilized, seemingly mysterious people who revealed so many secrets of life and death to the Romans? Simply journey to the heart of Tuscany, to the bustling train station at Florence. Wait for one of the local trains from Chiusi, a town 90 miles south of Florence, and carefully watch the disembarking passengers. Many of the faces you see might uncannily remind you of those relaxed, confident faces that peer out from Etruscan portrait sculptures more than 2,000 years old. Indeed, recent DNA tests have shown that many modern-day Tuscans possess the same genetic makeup as skeletons unearthed from Etruscan tombs in the countryside surrounding Florence. Clearly, the Etruscans never went away.

022

Though we cannot trace their origins with any certainty, we know that by the eighth century B.C.E., the literate and cultured people we call Etruscans, and whom the Greeks called Tyrrhenoi or Tursenoi, inhabited a land of broken hills and deep canyons, bordered to the north by the Arno River, to the south and east by the Tiber River, and to the west by the Tyrrhenian Sea. The end of this once-glorious confederation of independent city-states is usually dated to the late first century B.C.E. But though Etruscan culture may have ceased to flourish at this time, the Etruscan people never vanished. Instead, like so many other peoples of the Mediterranean, they joined that huge political conglomerate called the Roman Empire—because of pressure from Roman legions and the Etruscans’ own desire to get on with life in peace.

And yet one look at modern-day Tuscans, with their boldly distinctive features, suggests that their Etruscan forebears never assimilated completely into Roman society. Rather, the Etruscans insinuated their own culture into that of a powerful Rome—from food (lasagna), winemaking and fashion (the toga) to architecture, city planning, government, religion, coinage and art. The Etruscans did more, however, than influence the culture of Rome; they helped shape the experience of all of western Europe. Several English words—important words such as “person,” “letter” and “histrionic”—can be traced to the Etruscan language. As ancient Greek and Roman authors noted, writing, music, dance and performance (principal elements of Western culture) were of great importance to Etruscan life.

The Etruscans also cultivated a distinctive sense of self that eventually evolved into our idea of “personality.” The statues that top many Etruscan sarcophagi, which depict the dead buried within, portray people with wrinkled skin, crooked features and well-developed paunches; these Etruscan faces are real faces, warts and all. One Volterran matron, shown on the cover of this issue, twists improbably atop an ash-urn lid to gaze lovingly into the eyes of her grizzled husband. They and many of their fellow citizens seem perfectly willing to commemorate themselves to posterity in all their fallible humanity.

The Roman historian Livy (59–17 B.C.E.) remembered the Etruscans as “a people who above all others were distinguished by their devotion to religious practices, because they excelled in their knowledge and conduct of them.” But the Etruscans were also known as zealous partygoers and avid consumers of luxury goods. Notorious for their indulgence, Etruscan husbands let their fashionable wives dine alongside them on elaborate banqueting couches. One of the most famous works of Etruscan art, now the centerpiece of the Villa Giulia Museum in 023Rome, is the sixth-century B.C.E. Sarcophagus of the Married Couple. Found in a tomb in Cerveteri, this life-size terracotta sarcophagus, depicting a handsome young married couple reclining together, evokes serenity, contentment and marital bliss. Though the vial the wife once held in her right hand is long since lost, we can still imagine her pouring perfumed oil into her husband’s open, expectant palm. His right hand, resting lightly on his wife’s shoulder, once held out an egg, or a pomegranate, or a flower, some object evocative not only of mortality but of evanescent beauty: a trace of some former sensual pleasure. It is hard to look at this couple, or their painted equivalents on tomb walls in nearby Tarquinia, and not think about modern Italian style. From their elaborate shoes to their carefully cocked hats, the ancient Etruscan and modern Tuscan approach both life and death with incomparable flair.

At the same time, however, the Etruscans were notoriously fierce sea traders, who turned to piracy as willingly as did any Elizabethan buccaneer when the pickings were good. According to legend, Etruscan pirates kidnapped none other than the Greek god Dionysus as he sailed across the wine-dark sea; with a god’s sense of humor, Dionysus turned the mast of the pirate ship into a grapevine and his captors into dolphins. The Etruscans themselves seem to have enjoyed the tale immensely: Perhaps its most compelling representation adorns the inside of a wine cup decorated by the sixth-century B.C.E. Athenian vase painter Exekias and found as a grave offering in an Etruscan tomb. Exekias designed his image of Dionysus to sail across a sea of real wine, and no matter how the drinker held the big cup’s handles, the god and his boat would have gone pitching across the winy waters at a crazy angle, three sheets to the wind. A similar cup of Etruscan manufacture tells the same story by catching the pirates in mid-metamorphosis; their heads are those of dolphins, but their legs are still human. They look like frogs mutating back into tadpoles.

For more than two centuries—roughly between 700 and 470 B.C.E., and perhaps far longer than that—Etruscan sailors closely controlled an area of the Mediterranean that still bears their name (in its Greek version): the Tyrrhenian Sea, bordering the west coast of Italy. By the eighth century B.C.E., Etruscan raiders stationed at the roily Strait of Messina, the southern entrance to the Tyrrhenian Sea, had given rise to the Homeric legend of Scylla and Charybdis. If Charybdis, the vortex, symbolized the very real treachery of the channel’s currents, vicious Scylla—who, tucked away in a rocky seaside lair, snapped up seven of Odysseus’s crewmen in the Odyssey—recalled the Etruscan privateers who once picked off commercial rivals intruding into Tyrrhenian waters.

The roving ships and privateers of Etruria also carried wealth of their own. Etruria’s countryside contained rich veins of mineral ore. By the seventh century B.C.E., Etruscan smiths were smelting iron and bronze in sophisticated furnaces and trading the metals for Egyptian gold, which 024they worked with dazzling expertise. A few seventh-century Etruscan tombs have survived to this day with their contents intact. The sheer wealth contained in them suggests that their inhabitants may have deserved their reputation for grossly conspicuous consumption. In Rome’s Villa Giulia Museum and in the collections of the Vatican, bronze chariots, huge clanking bronze brooches and an enormous embossed gold breastplate testify to the extravagant wealth of the Etruscans. But a close look at other objects in these same collections also reveals a fine sense of delicacy: A gold pendant in the Villa Giulia sports row upon row of tiny crouching lions, each with its mane and muscles defined by a dotted tracery of tiny gold beads—a technique known as granulation.

Tombs like these have furnished an enormous amount of archaeological information about Etruria. Just as the Etruscan people never went away, neither did most of their cities. Aside from a few abandoned sites—such as Roselle, whose inhabitants probably fell victim to malaria, or Veii, captured by Rome in 396 B.C.E. and left as a ruined reminder of Rome’s conquest of Etruria—most Etruscan cities still thrive today. Some are even known by their Etruscan names. Cortona (Etruscan Curtun) and Volterra (Etruscan Velathri) sit behind city walls first erected in Etruscan times. Orvieto, a bustling market town, may have lost its Etruscan name (the current Latin-derived name simply means “the old city”), but excavations beneath the church of Sant’Andrea in the center of town have revealed ancient Etruscan streets.

To the people who inhabit Etruria today—people like the train passengers from Chiusi (Etruscan Clevsin) or the Volterran family whose name, Cecina, appears on local Etruscan burial urns—the proverbial mystery of the Etruscans is intensely personal, not so much a question of “Who were they?” as of “Who are 025we?” Although they are proud Italians, many also remain strongly loyal to Etruria—like the Cortonese pastry chef and the Volterran hotel keepers of my acquaintance whose houses sit on Etruscan walls, or a Sienese friend who traces his appetite for liver back to the divination rituals of his Etruscan ancestors (Etruscan priests examined the livers of sacrificed animals for clues to the future). A jeweler from Cortona credits his friendly personality to Etruscan hospitality, to the survivor’s knack for accommodating invaders like the Romans rather than fighting them off. The visitor who drops into a small village in the Tuscan hinterland, one of those places where Etruscan genes still dominate the pool, may feel otherwise as the townspeople’s stares rake him up and down. But the staring will cease soon enough, for throughout the history of Etruria, the Etruscans have been accommodating strangers.

As the great Etruscologist Massimo Pallottino (who died recently at the age of 85) liked to insist, the culture of Etruria may well have been a hybrid of different cultures that flourished in a particular area of central Italy at a particular moment in history. Unfortunately, we cannot positively identify the beginnings of that moment. Central Italy before Roman times was populated with too many disparate tribes and peoples for modern scholars to connect any one of them securely with particular kinds of objects or burial practices—especially in the absence of writing. Even in literate times, surviving epitaphs show that Etruscans regularly intermarried with Greeks, Latins and Umbrians as well as with other Italic tribes, such as the Sabini, Piceni, Aequi and Volsci. To discern which of their nonliterate forebears was which is a task beyond the capabilities of current archaeology. There is no evidence of a dramatic shift in the archaeological record, for example, to indicate a sudden invasion from outside central Italy. We do know, however, that in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.E., Etruria witnessed a sudden explosion of prosperity, as did several other regions around the Mediterranean.

But how long those Etruscans had inhabited Etruria before the eighth century B.C.E. was a vexed question even in antiquity. Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C.E., describes the Etruscans, or Tursenoi, as new arrivals on the Italian peninsula—colonists, led by King Tursenos, who had set out a few centuries earlier from Lydia, in Asia Minor, to escape famine. Certainly the Etruscans maintained close contact with the Near East, especially, it seems, with the Phoenician colony of Carthage in north Africa.

According to another ancient tradition, however, the Etruscans were natives, autochthonous people as rooted to their land as were the cypresses, grapevines, oaks and olive trees they tended with such care. Livy reports that the Etruscans were rulers of the Italian peninsula at the time of the Trojan War, a statement seemingly corroborated by Odysseus’s struggle with Scylla. On the other hand, Livy admits to making up stories when historical evidence deserts him, and Homer’s Odysseus is still more patently a fictional hero. Although stories often tell their own variety of truth, they are treacherous underpinnings for archaeological argument.

026

All the same, Egyptian records dating to the reigns of Merneptah (1213–1203 B.C.E.) and Ramesses II (1184–1153 B.C.E.) speak of foreign mercenaries called “Tursha” and “Shardana.” Many scholars identify the Shardana as Sardinians, and it is tempting to surmise that the Tursha are their Tyrrhenian neighbors fighting for Nubian gold. Again, the evidence is too slim to rely on; furthermore, the massive influx of gold into Etruria came half a millennium after the Egyptian records mentioning the Tursha—once the Etruscans had amassed metals of their own to export.

If we follow the line of reasoning advanced by Massimo Pallottino, then Herodotus and Livy are both correct: The Etruscan people may have derived from a lively mixture of land-loving locals and adventurous Near Eastern outsiders. They were neither natives nor invaders, but something in between—and a distinctive something they were. Although the Greeks called them Tyrrhenoi or Tursenoi, and the Romans called them Etrusci or Tusci, the Etruscans called themselves Rasna or Rasenna. They spoke a language that was unique in vocabulary and grammatical structure, different from any of the languages spoken by their neighbors. Their distinctive language helped demarcate a distinctive territory: The Etruscans marked the borders of Etruria with stones bearing the inscription tular rasnal, or “border of the Rasna.”

Some scholars have suggested that “Rasna” may refer only to a portion of Etruria, but if so, it is a portion that nearly coincides with Etruria’s traditional borders. In northeast Etruria, tular rasnal boundary stones have been found outside two strategically placed border towns: Cortona, in the foothills of the Apennine mountain range, and Fiesole, just northeast of Florence. In Etruria’s southern reaches, at Tarquinia (near Rome), inscriptions on two sarcophagi boast that the well-fed, self-satisfied men contained within once held the office of zilath mechl rasnal, chief magistrate of the Rasna.

As the study of boundary stones and epitaphs demonstrates, the Etruscan language is not entirely a mystery; its Phoenician-derived alphabet can be read without difficulty. Words in Etruscan inscriptions are often handily divided by markers called interpuncts, ancestors of the modern colon (early writing often left no spaces between words). The problem with Etruscan lies in assigning meaning to those words.

The vast majority of Etruscan texts, which now number in the thousands, are preserved on graves. These texts supply a striking repertory of names, prove that Roman numerals were an Etruscan invention and suggest that a certain amount of machismo must have prevailed in a culture otherwise famous for its freewheeling women: The words for every close familial relationship except “husband” can be deduced from context. So far as we know, no Etruscan man has ever been buried in a tomb marked “Larthi’s husband” or “husband of Thanqvil.” Grave inscriptions normally refer to an extremely limited range of activity. We learn that the 027deceased “lived” (svalce), “died” (lupuce), “wrote” (zichuce), “bore children” (acnanasa), “gave” (turce), “dedicated” (muluvanice) and, on occasion, served as zilath mechl rasnal. Such simple words as “ate,” “drank,” “loved” or “traveled,” however, are unknown to us, lost with the nuances of Etruscan life to which they might refer.

Four centuries of scholarly attention have defined about 500 Etruscan words, including names, with reasonable certainty; this total varies with the optimism or pessimism of individual scholars, but it never constitutes a large enough sample to unlock the thoughts of the Rasna or even to make statistically meaningful arguments about what kind of language Etruscan might be. Certainly the language differs strikingly in its vocabulary and its grammar from Latin and the other Italic languages (such as Umbrian or Oscan) spoken by Etruria’s neighbors. However, the repertory of known Etruscan words and grammatical forms is too restricted to make more than tantalizing comparisons with the languages of Asia Minor (Lydian, for example) or with languages spoken in other parts of the Mediterranean.

Furthermore, because of its legible alphabet, its limited corpus of texts and its connection with a people who fascinated the ancient Greeks and Romans, study of the Etruscan language has attracted more than its share of forgers and charlatans. The late-15th-century Dominican friar Giovanni Nanni, for example, proved to the satisfaction of Michelangelo and at least four Renaissance popes that Etruscan, which is usually written right to left, was an evolved version of Hebrew, brought to Italian soil by none other than Noah.

More recent attempts to demystify the mystery of Etruscan script often have revealed as much about the would-be translator’s own psychic preoccupations as they have about ancient Etruria. What rudiments of grammar and vocabulary we do know have emerged from a painstaking, centuries-long process of analyzing the internal workings of Etruscan texts and carefully comparing these texts with those of other languages. Etruscologists still dream of finding the Etruscan equivalent of the Rosetta Stone; they hope to find a text that will put songs into the mouths of those dancing Etruscans on the walls of Tarquinia’s painted tombs and meaning into the sole surviving Etruscan book—a long inscribed bolt of linen, now in Zagreb, Croatia, which has survived into the 20th century because it was reused in antiquity to wrap an Egyptian mummy.

Etruscan linen books like the one that swathes the Zagreb mummy once guided the ancient Romans in their own religious rites. Indeed, much of Roman religion and temple architecture can be traced to Etruscan times. Etruscan priests assessed present and future by scanning the heavens for the movements of birds or interpreting the lightning produced by the region’s dramatic thunderstorms. A bronze model of a sheep’s liver, carefully labeled with the names of the Etruscan gods, is now one of the signal delights of the civic museum in the town of Piacenza, in the 029Po River Valley. It is small enough to tuck comfortably into the palm of a priest’s hand, but its pantheon extends well beyond the 12 gods of Greco-Roman Olympus: The names of 28 deities are inscribed on the liver. (Aldous Huxley, who wrote insightfully about the Etruscans, was particularly taken with the name of the Etruscan wine god, Fufluns.)

Etruria’s political fortunes peaked at the end of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth century B.C.E., when Etruscan commercial settlements flourished as far north as the Po Valley and as far south as Salerno. This period of expansion also gave rise to Etruria’s legendary hero, the warlord Lars Porsenna, of whom the 19th-century British historian Macaulay would write so vividly in his poem “Horatius at the Bridge”:

East and west and north and south
The messengers ride fast,
And tower and town and cottage
Have heard the trumpet’s blast.
Shame on the false Etruscan
Who lingers in his home
When Porsena of Clusium
Is on the march for Rome.

According to Livy and most other Roman historians, Porsenna mounted an assault against Rome in 509 B.C.E. and struck a truce after three indelible displays of Roman courage: A young girl, Cloelia, and some Roman maidens escaped the Etruscans by swimming across the Tiber; Horatius Cocles stood alone against the entire Etruscan army on the Sublician Bridge and then swam to safety across the Tiber; and Mucius Scaevola mutilated himself (he thrust his right hand in fire) after he failed to assassinate Porsenna—the frugal Roman had mistaken the elaborate dress of Porsenna’s secretary for kingly garb! But another, more likely tradition holds that Porsenna succeeded in his conquest, for the first time uniting most of Etruria’s independent city-states under a single dynasty’s rule.

By 472 B.C.E., however, the floruit of Etruscan political power was over: A Greek fleet defeated the Etruscan navy off Cumae in the Bay of Naples, and Porsenna’s son Arnth (Latinized as Arruns) was killed in the conflict. The next four centuries would wear away at Etruscan power, and then at Etruscan independence, until the establishment of Emperor Augustus’s principate in the last decades of the first century B.C.E. spelled the end of Etruscan culture as an entity separate from Rome.

As Roman power began to make itself felt throughout the Italian peninsula and the rest of the Mediterranean, the Etruscans seemingly knew that their end was near, for by the fourth century B.C.E., the iconography of their funerary art had turned from joyous banqueting scenes to bleak depictions of the underworld. 030Etruscan artists unleashed a new population of demons on tomb walls—sinister creatures like the blue-skinned, hook-nosed Vanths, Charuns and Tuchulchas, who escorted the dead to the underworld. (Charun is the Etruscan counterpart of Charon, the Greek boatman who ferried dead souls across the River Styx to the realm of Hades.) Some winged, some outfitted only in traveler’s garb, these demons wield large mallets with which to strike dying Etruscans a definitive deathblow, ensuring that souls escorted to the underworld were truly dead and not likely to return as troublesome ghosts. The Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (1444–1510), a native of Florence, must have seen one of these blue Etruscan demons painted on the wall of an Etruscan tomb: The zephyr at the right-hand margin of his Primavera has the same hook nose, angel wings and cyanotic hue. (Renaissance Florence was acutely aware of its Etruscan heritage; to capitalize on that awareness, Botticelli’s patron Lorenzo de’ Medici opened the very first museum devoted to Etruscan antiquities.)

Not every Etruscan demon was so terrifying. The winged females called Lasas, stark naked or clad in elaborate cross-your-heart suspenders, seem to embody erotic charm. Frequently they appear etched on the backs of Etruscan bronze mirrors, complementing the fashionably clad, elaborately shod, richly bejeweled women looking expectantly into the polished surfaces on the other side. Still, this relatively sudden proliferation of spirits in the later centuries of Etruscan history suggests that there may have been increasing unease among the Rasna.

Like the married couple of the Villa Giulia sarcophagus, the elegant banqueters, dancers, athletes and acrobats who grace the walls of Tarquinia’s sixth- and fifth-century B.C.E. tombs tempt us to connect them with a period of commerical expansion and political independence. Or perhaps we should connect them, as a dying D.H. Lawrence did in the late 1920s, with the life force itself. However, the heavyset burghers whose sculpted images recline atop Tarquinian sarcophagi of the third and second centuries seem to exude a different air; Rome was evidently breathing down their necks. Rather than dance, feast and play like their lithe and lively ancestors, they lie on ponderous beds, while furious battles rage in sculpted relief below them. The banquets of their afterlife look infinitely less delightful than the picnic tents, the races, the fishing expeditions, the parties with jugglers of olden days. Death has 031become a moment of reckoning, administered by hook-nosed, winged phantoms bearing hammers.

Etruscan art, like Etruscan political life, seems to turn relentlessly back to the individual, the regional, the particular. The Romans described Etruria as a league of independent city-states, and archaeologically we can see this independence manifested in stubbornly local tomb types that vary from city to city, and sometimes from clan to clan, as well as from century to century. Etruscan cities were surrounded by their graveyards, which necessarily served some of the same purposes as do modern city-limits signs; travelers knew where they were by the kinds of tombs they passed. Seventh-century Caere (present-day Cerveteri) nested among huge round tumuli of volcanic stone. Nearby Tarquinia, which gradually supplanted Caere in importance, favored painted underground tombs. Residents of Sveana (present-day Sovana) hewed the sheer local cliffs of volcanic stone into elaborate facades, even colonnaded buildings. And third-century Volterrans cremated their dead and placed them in little ash urns carved of local alabaster, topped by portraits of the deceased; these were assembled en famille in spacious underground chambers.

Life-sized terracotta sarcophagi, again with reclining full-length portraits, preserve the unburned mortal remains of two elegant women from the same clan in Chiusi: One, Larthia Seianti, can now be seen in the Archaeological Museum in Florence; the other, Seianti Hanunia Tlesnasa, holds court in the British Museum, where her skeleton has been recently subjected to scientific analysis. It is hard to believe that these fashionable matrons could ever belong to the same family as did ruthless Romans like emperor Tiberius’s vicious associate Sejanus (memorably played by Patrick Stewart in the BBC production of Robert Graves’s novel I, Claudius). The sheer profusion of Etruscan faces captured in Etruscan funerary art serves as a continual reminder that the very word for personality was invented here, among these people. If they failed at the Roman art of large-scale government, they excelled in other arts, including, if their legacy to modern Tuscany is any indication, the delicate art of living.

Do you wonder what happened to the ancient Etruscans, those civilized, seemingly mysterious people who revealed so many secrets of life and death to the Romans? Simply journey to the heart of Tuscany, to the bustling train station at Florence. Wait for one of the local trains from Chiusi, a town 90 miles south of Florence, and carefully watch the disembarking passengers. Many of the faces you see might uncannily remind you of those relaxed, confident faces that peer out from Etruscan portrait sculptures more than 2,000 years old. Indeed, recent DNA tests have shown that many modern-day […]