The Etruscans

David Randall-MacIver

• Publisher: Muriwai Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787204805
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Égypte antique

In 1921, author David Randall-MacIver moved to Rome in order to focus on Italian archaeology, the result of which is this is this fascinating and detailed study of the history of the Etruscans, first published in 1927.The Etruscan civilization is the modern name given to a powerful, wealthy and refined civilization of ancient Italy in the area corresponding roughly to Tuscany, western Umbria, and northern Lazio. As distinguished by its unique language, this civilization endured from before the time of the earliest Etruscan inscriptions (c. 700 BC) until its assimilation into the Roman Republic, beginning in the late 4th century BC with the Roman-Etruscan Wars.Culture that is identifiably Etruscan developed in Italy after about 800 BC, approximately over the range of the preceding Iron Age Villanovan culture. The latter gave way in the 7th century to a culture that was influenced by ancient Greece, Magna Graecia, and Phoenicia. At its maximum extent, during the foundational period of Rome and the Roman Kingdom, Etruscan civilization flourished in three confederacies of cities: of Etruria, of the Po Valley with the eastern Alps, and of Latium and Campania. The decline was gradual, but by 500 BC the political destiny of Italy had passed out of Etruscan hands. The last Etruscan cities were formally absorbed by Rome around 100 BC.Although the Etruscans developed a system of writing, their language remains only partly understood, and only a handful of texts of any length survive, making modern understanding of their society and culture heavily dependent on much later and generally disapproving Roman sources. The Etruscan elite grew very rich through trade with the Celtic world to the north and the Greeks to the south, and filled their large family tombs with imported luxuries. Archaic Greece had a huge influence on their art and architecture, and Greek mythology was evidently very familiar to them.

CHAPTER 1

Ruskin’s opinion; Why the Etruscans are interesting; Continuity of life and character in Tuscany; Extent of Etruscan domination; Untrustworthiness of literary evidence; Origin according to Herodotus; Untenable theories of other writers as to origin; The Etruscans were immigrants from Asia Minor; Date and manner of their arrival; Derivation of the name; Possible connexion with Tursha.

THERE are few people to whom it would be quite a natural thing to go on the first day after their arrival in Florence to the Museo Archeologico. It seems to have so little to do with all the varied interests and enthusiasms which have brought them to Italy. They have come here to live again in the glorious days of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, to see the works of Giotto and Donatello and Michelangelo, to wander and dream in the streets where Dante trod. Very early in his pilgrimage, therefore, the ardent lover of art will no doubt wend his way to the cloisters of Santa Maria Novella and open the well-known pages of his Mornings in Florence. But there, perhaps, some passages in that classic homily will strike him with sudden force. He may be surprised to realize that Ruskin lays great stress on the Etruscan origin and descent of the great Florentine painters: ‘Central stood Etruscan Florence...Child of her peace and exponent of her passion, her Cimabue...’ Or again: ‘Cimabue, Etruscan-born gave...eager action to holy contemplation.’

This may lead to reflection. Our pioneer teacher in Italian art is declaring that the Etruscans are not a mere phantom of the past, is stating that they have played an important part in the formation of the Italy that we love. It must be worthwhile, then, to know more about them. Ancient history is baffling and contradictory, but out of all the myths and legends and poetic distortions certain facts stand out clearly. It is plain, for instance, that the Etruscans were once the most important people in all Italy, and that they did more than any others to mould its civilization. The Romans themselves owed much of their religion and much of their political, social, and military organization to the Etruscans. Moreover, when they conquered Central and Northern Italy the Romans found it permeated all through with a very advanced civilization, which they themselves could never have produced, though they were fortunate enough to inherit it—and this civilization was the work of the Etruscans.

Ruskin, with the insight of a great critic, has divined rightly when he suggests that to appreciate the work of a fourteenth-century painter in Tuscany we must study his history and origins, the soil and the race from which he springs. More than two thousand years of continuous development had gone to the making of Giotto and his school. They did not spring fully armed from the head of any Byzantine; many centuries of thought and observation and study had unconsciously prepared their birth. So it was also with their mightier successors; not only Dante but even Michelangelo owes the possibility of his existence to an Etruscan ancestry, spiritual as well as physical. It was by no mere accident that Niccolò Pisano, the earliest of the great sculptors, found his first models in the old sarcophagi of the Campo Santo at Pisa. He was really discovering his own parentage and returning to the natural inspiration of his race. Often we may think that the earliest work of the Pisani and the drawings of Giotto’s pupils repeat mannerisms peculiar to Etruscan sculpture and painting, but, if so, these are only the superficial expression of a spiritual identity which goes far deeper. The temperament and outlook of any Tuscan artist in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance are directly inherited from a long line of ancestors, whose works are to be seen in such places as the Museo Archeologico. It is, therefore, no dry or dusty study into which I would lure the reader; on the contrary it is a subject which lies at the core of everything which interests him as well as me, in the city of Florence and the work of her greatest men.

The continuity of life and customs in Tuscany is very remarkable, and very important to understand. All the changes and chances of history have left this heart of Central Italy essentially the same that it has been for about three thousand years. Never swamped by any foreign invasion the race has remained unchanged. Just as you may recognize today in the streets of Florence the living replicas of men and women painted by Ghirlandajo, so you must realize that pictures of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries are made by the lineal descendants of those who frescoed the walls of their rock-tombs in Etruria centuries before the birth of Christ.

Even in externals there are many obvious survivals. The loggia of a modern Tuscan house finds its precise equivalent in models carved in stone about 400 B.C. Work in the fields and vineyards is little different from what it was when the Etruscans planted the olives and introduced the vine. The stornelli, those improvised epigrams which the labourers fling at one another or at the bystander as they till the soil, are only modern equivalents of the Fescennine verses mentioned by Horace. Even in the folklore and superstitions of the countryside there may linger faint reminiscences of deities dethroned; the red-capped goblin of the peasant is perhaps an Etruscan god. Sometimes I even think that the rough aspirations of the lingua toscana, which are like the burr of our own north-countrymen compared to the softer accents of other provinces, may be inherited from the pre-Italian language with its notoriously harsh consonants.

The territory of the Etruscans once extended over a far wider range than modern Tuscany. ‘The renown of their name’, says Livy, ‘filled the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian strait.’ Other ancient writers confirm this statement which might otherwise have been discounted as a rhetorical exaggeration. And though there is no evidence that their influence ever really extended as far as Calabria, yet archaeology and history are fully agreed that it can be traced as far south as Naples, and as far north as the borders of Switzerland and Austria. The time of the greatest political power of the Etruscans was just about 500 B.C. In the next century it was undermined and began to collapse, owing to causes which will be detailed in my later chapters. By the time of the early Roman Empire Etruria had come to mean almost the same as modern Tuscany, except that its southern boundary was the Tiber, and that it included a part of Umbria.

Curiously enough there has never been any written history of the Etruscans. It is said that the Emperor Claudius, who was a literary man of the same sort of calibre as our own James the First of England, composed a history in some twenty books; but it may be doubted whether we have lost much real knowledge by its disappearance. For, as it seems that there was no native historian on whom he could build, the voluminous work must have been little more than a farrago of the tales invented by jealous Greeks, who had a strong personal interest in manufacturing propaganda for their own glorification. Most of the Greek pedigrees and stories of early settlement, as well as the slanderous comments on Etruscan life and manners, are deliberate attempts to poison the wells of truth. Nor are the Latin writers of the Augustan period, even Livy and Vergil, to be trusted. They lived centuries later than the great days of Etruria, so that they had no real sources of information; and it was the policy of their time to glorify the Romans at the expense of all others. Vergil is admittedly writing a romance, his Mezentius of Caere is an invention; Livy is interested only in telling the story of Roman achievement to which the Etruscans are a mere background. At most we get some picture of their military strength and tenacity from the narrative of long wars and sieges.

All that we know of the origins, art, or civilization of the Etruscans is due almost entirely to archaeology. It is due to the excavations and studies which have been made for many years in the Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, to quote the apt title of that delightful classic which was written by one of our own countrymen, George Dennis, in the middle of the nineteenth century. What I have to tell, then, in this volume will be based almost wholly on archaeological evidence, not upon any attempt to weave a coherent whole out of the patchwork of fragments embedded in obscure Latin and Greek commentators, or the biased references which occur incidentally in the works of the classical poets and historians.

There is, however, one important point upon which literary evidence may be taken into account, though I should not have emphasized the literary tradition if it had not been fully corroborated by archaeology. Herodotus has given us a story of Etruscan origins which has been scoffed at by overingenious writers of the schools of Niebuhr and Mommsen, but has lately won the almost unreserved support of the best scholars in Italy and France and Germany and England. His tale, of which the minor details are unessential, relates how once in a time of famine a number of inhabitants of Lydia in Asia Minor decided to emigrate and followed one of the sons of their king to the country of the Ombrikoi. By Ombrikoi he means, like all Greek writers, the Umbrians, who according to tradition once occupied a much larger part of Italy than the modern province of that name. The Lydians settled among them and called themselves Tyrsenoi after the name of the prince who led them.

This story was almost universally accepted in antiquity and is found in every poet or prose-writer except Dionysius. There are some picturesque illustrations of it. Plutarch, for instance, relates that in memory of the victory over Veii the Romans used to lead round at their official triumphs an old man dressed in the Etruscan toga and bulla, while a herald shouted derisively ‘Sardians to sell’. Again, when a deputation from Sardis was competing with other cities for the honour of dedicating a temple to Tiberius, its members quoted a decree of the Etruscan confederacy rehearsing the genealogy given by Herodotus.

The unanimity of all ancient writers except one is not, of course, really valuable as evidence. They may all have been echoing the same original authority. This is the reason that modern critics have thought that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, though alone in his opinion, is as valuable as the whole mass of other classical authorities who are against him. This Greek, who wrote his Roman Archaeology in the time of Augustus, no doubt supposed himself to be something of an original authority because he was born in Asia Minor. He was piqued by the universal respect shown to Herodotus, and tried to set up against him the authority of a Lydian writer of the fifth century, one Xanthus. But he had not a copy of Xanthus to work from, nothing better than a réchauffé made as late as the third century B.C., regarded by some scholars of the time as an actual forgery. But even if we accept the writings of Xanthus as genuine we shall find that the deductions which Dionysius draws from them are quite unsound. Merely because Xanthus omits to mention the emigration of the Tyrsenoi we are asked to believe that it cannot have taken place. It is the weakest form of argument ex silentio that was ever put forward.

As a corollary of his denial that the Etruscans came from Lydia Dionysius maintains that they must have been autochthonous, that is to say, sprung from the soil of Italy itself. It is a theory which one or two modern historians have tried to revive, but always without success because the obvious and fatal objection to it is that the language, according to Dionysius’ own statement, is wholly peculiar and unlike that of any other people in Italy. Had the Etruscans been related to any of the original inhabitants they must have spoken some one of the languages which were still used in the days of Dionysius by the descendants of the Stone Age and Bronze Age people in Italy. These descendants were surviving all over the country in the time of Augustus, and were speaking many different dialects, but they were all dialects of the same family. The strangeness of their speech shows that the Etruscans were strangers.

A more plausible theory, which was generally held through the nineteenth century, and has only recently been exploded by archaeological research, was that of the great German historian Niebuhr. He supposed that some traces of the Etruscan language still lingered in the valleys of the Eastern Alps, and in spite of Livy’s direct statement that the people of those valleys were degenerate fugitives who had gone wild in their savage surroundings, he maintained that they were the surviving descendants of an original invading army which had come over the Alps in prehistoric days.

There are such numerous objections of every kind to this view, it is so inadequate to explain any of the facts, and rests to begin with on such a flimsy foundation of philological hypothesis, that it is surprising to find that it has been so widely accepted. Fortunately, it has been positively disproved by explorations made in and around Bologna, which was the site of the Etruscan city of Felsina. It has been shown that Felsina, the principal town of the whole region, was not founded until the end of the sixth century B.C., and that nowhere north of the Apennines is there a single Etruscan colony of any earlier date. Consequently, as the most obstinate theorists would hardly dare to maintain that the Etruscans arrived in Italy for the first time as late as 500 B.C., the very date in fact when the Tarquins were being expelled from Rome, it is evident that Niebuhr’s theory must be finally abandoned.

I shall return in a later chapter to the subject of the excavations at Bologna, which were extremely important for many reasons. They showed a perfectly clear-cut division between the settlements of the Etruscan colonists and those of their Italian predecessors.

It may be said, then, that all the theories which have been put forward in contradiction to Herodotus have totally failed, and that there is no inherent reason why the tradition which he records should not be accepted, at least in its broad lines. To this it must now be added that the immigration of the Etruscans from Asia Minor, if not actually from Lydia which is a matter of less importance, offers a perfect explanation of all the facts revealed by exploration. For we now know a great deal as to the relative antiquity of the different Etruscan sites in Italy, and the striking thing that appears is that without exception the oldest are on the sea-coast. All the inland cities, though often on sites which had long previously been inhabited by the Italians, are of distinctly later foundation. The original cities are Tarquinia, Caere, and Vetulonia, situated on that strip of sea-coast which is called the Tuscan Maremma.

It is easy to guess the motive which brought these sea wanderers from Asia to the western coasts of Italy, if we remember what were the principal interests and needs of a people living a little after the time of Homer. Copper was the most important of all commodities, necessary above all for weapons, and copper was common in Tuscany, where the natives had already worked it for several centuries. Iron was just coming into use, and iron is particularly abundant in the island of Elba, just opposite the very point which the Etruscans chose for their landing-parties. North of the Apennines iron is quite rare until the period of active intercourse and trade with the western coast. But it is very common all over Etruria from the eighth century downwards, and actually makes its first appearance in any quantity in the earliest years that can be detected as Etruscan.

On a site like Vetulonia, where there is an unbroken continuity of residence beginning with the native Italians and leading on to the Etruscan burials, we can trace the sudden increase in the use of all metals when the Asiatics arrive about 800 B.C. The Italians had worked copper quite freely but their use of iron was very limited. But the newcomers were soon using iron quite prodigally, even for the harness of their horses and the wheels of their chariots. They exploited the mines to the full, and it was their command of all the sources of mineral supply, together with their skill in smelting and forging, which made their military success possible and provided them with the chief sources of their wealth. The Etruscans must have been skilled workers in metal before they left their own homes, as the products of the first generation of immigrants are too fine to have been produced by novices. They were fortunate, however, in finding very apt pupils among the native Italians. These had developed a high standard of work in copper and bronze even without the aid of foreign teachers. They had brought a knowledge of the coppersmith’s art from the far-away valley of the Danube, whence they themselves had emigrated two or three centuries before.

From the evidence of the cemeteries the immigration of the Etruscans may be placed about the end of the ninth century. It must not be supposed that they came as a vast conquering host. Rather it would seem that they arrived in small detachments a few at a time, perhaps just one or two ships every year. Very probably they had been exploring all round the Mediterranean for some generations before they finally decided on the place where it was most profitable to settle. Some writers have argued that they would never have chosen to go so far northward if Campania and the southern coasts had been open to them, and from this proceed to reason that the first Greek colonies must have been earlier. This is quite unnecessary. We might well retort that on the contrary the Greeks would never have failed to choose Tuscany if it had been open to them to go there. Actually, of course, there are no traces of Greek settlement north of Naples, and such stories as those which make Falerii a Greek city are palpable inventions of a later age entirely discredited by archaeology.

The sort of process by which we may suppose that the Etruscans took gradual possession of the new country may be illustrated by the periodical descents of the Northmen on the coasts of Scotland, as told in the Icelandic sagas. In any promising spring season a ship or two might sail from a port in Asia Minor, carrying one or two families with their retainers. These would land and entrench themselves on a commanding hill like that of Vetulonia. With their carefully chosen and finely tempered weapons, as important to them as a Norman’s great sword and perhaps quite as effective, they would maintain their ground against the weaker Italians, and hold their youthful city until the new year, when another band of their friends and relatives might come to join them. The separate cities of Etruria were never united under a single head at any moment in their history, they always formed a rather loose confederation, such as might very naturally exist between independent but related clans. Probably each of the great cities was founded by a separate family or clan, not invariably on perfectly good terms with all the rest. The tie between some cities was much closer than that between others. On occasions of a great emergency, a common danger threatening them all, they might unite. But for the complete gathering of the clans a very great common interest was necessary. I doubt whether Lars Porsenna of Clusium could count on as much allegiance as the head of the house of Argyll, and I am sure that the Macdona...