Primitive Italy

Leon Homo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136197345
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Originally published between 1920-70, The History of Civilization was a landmark in early twentieth century publishing. It was published at a formative time within the social sciences, and during a period of decisive historical discovery. The aim of the general editor, C.K. Ogden, was to summarize the most up to date findings and theories of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists and sociologists. This reprinted material is available as a set or in the following groupings:
* Prehistory and Historical Ethnography
Set of 12: 0-415-15611-4: £800.00
* Greek Civilization
Set of 7: 0-415-15612-2: £450.00
* Roman Civilization
Set of 6: 0-415-15613-0: £400.00
* Eastern Civilizations
Set of 10: 0-415-15614-9: £650.00
* Judaeo-Christian Civilization
Set of 4: 0-415-15615-7: £250.00
* European Civilization
Set of 11: 0-415-15616-5: £700.00

Book I
The Peoples and Cities of Early Italy

Chapter I
Origins and Invasions

I
The First Civilizations

APART from a respectable list of misdeeds, the Roman annalists bear the responsibility for two false ideas which they have launched in the domain of ancient history, and which modern science has not yet succeeded in altogether eliminating. The first is that we possess the early history of Rome in an authentic and detailed form; a glance at the first books of Livy, or, better still, of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, suffices to reveal this rather bold claim. The second misconception is that Rome played a preponderant part in Latium almost from her infancy, and quite early assumed the role of directing power in Italy. The effect of these naive conceptions, both equally false, is to distort completely the history of early Italy, and it is essential at the outset to relegate both to the kingdom of errors whose frontiers they never should have crossed. In point of fact the first centuries of Rome are very little known; we have said so above, and we shall often have occasion to reiterate it in the sequel.

On the other hand, Rome only very slowly won her place in the limelight of history. Italian palaeoethnology, in reaction against the impenitent nationalism of the annalistic tradition, has emphasized this point, and that is one of its great merits. The formal starting-point of the annalists—the appearance of Rome in an Italy which was already old, populated with various ethnic layers, and exposed to complex civilizing influences—is to-day revealed as a culmination—we might almost say with a touch of paradox, as a conclusion. Till the end of the fourth century B.C. Rome did not guide the destinies of Italy, but the great facts of Italian evolution—the Etruscan conquest, the Sabellian advance, and the Gaulish invasion—explained and conditioned early Roman history. During this long period Rome kept her place—a very modest one—in the general history of Italy until the day when the formation of the first Italian unity reversed their mutual rÔles and entrusted to the city on the Tiber the destiny of all Italy. It took two centuries of furious combat for Rome to become the political centre of Italy. By forgetting that, the Roman annalists are guilty of a monstrous error of perspective which has not only to be entered in the charge-sheet against them, but has to be corrected and readjusted, a far more delicate task.

The history of ancient Italy only begins to be written with the arrival of the Greek colonists and the consequent introduction of the alphabet. On their arrival the Greeks collected and handed down a certain number of oral traditions concerning Italy's past; still the artificial elucubrations of relatively recent origin with which historical writing of the classical age enriched this original kernel are to be regarded with suspicion. The monuments of prehistory and the data of archaeology, on the other hand, provide valuable indications, contemporary and certain, relating to the remote origins and gradual development of Italic civilization. We may also appeal to the ethnological study of the peoples whom we find installed on the soil of Italy at the opening of the historic period and that of their several languages in so far as these sciences have penetrated, only a little way as yet, into their mysteries. And all these diverse and complicated materials will allow us at least to sketch the main outlines of the settlement of primitive Italy and the first stages of its civilization if we cannot fill in the details.

In Italy, as in the rest of Europe, history, or rather prehistory, opens with the Palaeolithic period; man has left the traces of his presence and activity in the diverse regions of the peninsula, especially from the Acheulean and Mousterian epochs.¹ A complete enumeration of the sites would be tedious and useless. Let us confine ourselves to mentioning the great Paleolithic stations and the chief centres of finds: in Liguria, the Ligurian caves explored since 1850, notably those of Balzi Rossi and delle Fate; in the Po Valley, the stations of Rivoli and Breonio (Veronese foothills) and of Traversetolo (Province of Parma); in Emilia, Goccianello, near Imola; in Umbria, S. Egidio, Busco, and Petrignano; in the Abruzzi, Maiella (Chieti); on Mount Gargano; in the Lipari Islands; and, finally, in Sicily (Provinces of Palermo and Trapani).² It was an epoch of ultra-rudimentary culture in which man struggled with the beasts for food and shelter. His livelihood was gained by hunting, fishing, and the collection of wild fruits. He dwelt in caves, like the Ligurian and Sicilian caverns, but probably he was already able to build rough huts. He flaked stone to provide him with the decisive factors in his pre-eminence, tools (knives and chisels) and weapons (handaxes, arrow-heads, lances, stilettos). He worked horn and bone and, no doubt, wood and leather as well, although all trace of these has naturally disappeared. Though his clothing was scanty (furs and skins), he possessed the feeling and the taste for adornment, gratified by shells and animals' teeth, worn as ear-rings or threaded on a string for necklaces. His ideas of social life were presumably still limited by the family. The funeral rite in vogue was inhumation, probably not connected with any precise religious ideas.¹ Let us remember the immense gaps in this nascent civilization; agriculture, the domestication of animals, even the coarsest pottery, were still unknown. Such is the general picture presented by the oldest and longest of the several ages of humanity in Italy as in other European countries.

Many millennia pass away, and the Old Stone Age gives place to the New, and polished replaces chipped stone.² This second era of Italy's prehistory has left abundant and widespread vestiges on the soil of the peninsula: in Piedmont, the great station of Alba (Province of Cuneo); in Liguria, the grottoes of Pollera and Arene Candide in addition to those of Balzi Rossi mentioned above; in the Po Valley, the numerous finds from the Provinces of Plaeentia, Cremona, Brescia, and Mantua; in Tuscany (caves in the Apuan Alps), in Umbria, in Picenum (grottoes of Salomone and St. Angelo), in the Vibrata Valley, on the Island of Pianosa (natural and artificial grottoes), in Basilicata (Matera), in Apulia (Molfetta), and in Sicily [notably the caves of Puleri and Geraci, Villafrati (Province of Palermo), la Seggia, la Scorosa, Molinari, Due Paperi, and Stentinello (Province of Syracuse)]. An already developed civilization is represented by more complex and varied remains: cave-dwellings, flint workshops (for instance, near Imola, at Chianti, in Tuscany, and on the Island of Elba), numerous hut-foundations in the Vibrata Valley (Picenum), weapons (arrow and lance-heads, daggers, and polished sling-stones), and tools (axes, hammers, knives, saws, and fishing tackle). Man's life has grown richer, and new domains have been opened to his activity. Neolithic man is no longer, like his ancestors of the previous epoch, merely a hunter and fisher; he has domesticated animals and breeds them. Sometimes he continues to dwell in caves, but the use of the hut tends to become general. The remains from the Vibrata Valley reveal it in the form of a round or oval hut, excavated deep in the soil with a pit for the hearth in the centre, a type which will remain classical in ancient Italy, and of which the cabin of the Roman Campania appears even to-day as the remote survival. The implements of Palæolithic times have been perfected and the introduction of polishing has endowed them with a hitherto unknown efficiency. Man has now at his disposal a veritable armoury of weapons for striking (axes, lances, stilettos, knives, and daggers) and throwing (sling-stones, arrows, and javelins), and implements (axes, picks, hatchets, saws, shovels, and scrapers); an invention of immense practical import was the sewing-needle with an eyelet. Industry has developed and has put forth new branches; Neolithic men can sew clothes, clay has yielded up its secrets, and dark-faced or black pottery, already adorned with some zigzag incisions, makes its modest début. Inhumation remains the rule; caves are often adapted for use as sepulchres, like those of la Pollera, in Liguria, but often, too, trenches are cut in the bare earth (for instance, at Collecchio, Province of Parma; Alatri, Province of Rome; Corona de' Coppa, Province of Campo Basso; Casone, Province of Caserte, and Taranto).¹ In the inhumation of his dead, man observes definite rites, the skeleton is placed in the trench in a contracted position and accompanied by a funerary furniture, of which arms, objects of apparel, and vases constitute the typical elements. Finally, social life has been materially widened; men live grouped in villages. A large central hut surrounded by smaller ones is the plan of the Neolithic settlement as preserved in the typical hut-foundations of Alba, in Piedmont, and in those of the Yibrata Valley. The pre-Hellenic East is already beginning to exercise its civilizing influence; as a result of her privileged geographical situation at the point of contact between the basins of the Mediterranean, Sicily in the Neolithic Age, Orsi's Sicanian period, takes up that function of mediator which is to become more prominent in the next phase; the pottery gives evidence of this since it indisputably exhibits the influence of the pre-Minoan art of Crete.²

The end of this period, already so fruitful in achievements in all domains, is marked by a step forward of capital importance—the appea...