Part 2

[5] Shields were also common mural decorations with the early Greeks, cp. Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 77, and Alcaeus, _fragm._ 15 (Bergk).

[6] See the summary account in Rumpf, _op. cit._ 61 ff.

III

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO]

The next stage in the development is represented by the Tomba dei Tori at Corneto, discovered in 1892 and admirably published by G. Körte in _Antike Denkmäler_.[7] The back wall of the main chamber in this tomb has two doors, and it is between these that the one large figure painting is placed, again in such a way as to suggest a tapestry stretched on the wall (fig. 2). But now the picture has a narrative content, inasmuch as a scene from the Greek cycle of myths is depicted: Achilles watches for the Trojan prince Troilus at a well. Achilles, to the left, wears a crested Corinthian helmet, sword, greaves, and red loin-cloth. Troilus is naked and only decorated with armlets and elegant shoes. He wears his hair long, according to Ionic fashion, and in his hand he carries a goad (kentron). This is, as a rule, only used when two horses are ridden, and the drawing shows traces of double contours near the head and the right leg of the horse; it is probable, therefore, that two horses were originally planned. In this picture also, the proportions of man and horse are impossible, but progress is perceptible in the monochromatic treatment of the body and legs of the horse. On the other hand, the old manner of painting in stripes or compartments is still retained in the running chimera in the pediment above; it also lingers for a very long time in the pedimental figures of the following period. The style is Ionic of the first half of the sixth century B.C. A truly Ionian monster, created under Oriental influence, is the human-faced bull in the pediment above the door, one of the two bulls from which the tomb derives its name, and which are omitted here because of the obscene groups on either side of them. Other decorative details point to Cyrene and Egypt, especially the characteristic frieze of lotuses and pomegranates, which corresponds with the Cyrenaic vases of the sixth century B.C., and the stylized flower-bed under the belly of the horse, which has its origin in Egyptian and its parallels in Phoenician and in orientalizing Greek art.[8] In this tomb the painting is not executed _al fresco_ but in a yellowish-white pigment which unfortunately scales off in large flakes.

Thus in the Tomba dei Tori, besides a decorative treatment of the wall surface with friezes, we have a main picture with a mythological subject, painted in the Greek spirit and perhaps actually executed by a Greek mural painter. We do not find even the slightest allusion to death or entombment, or the least trace of any Etruscan characteristics. The inscription in the large frieze is of interest because it shows the Etruscan language in its archaic form, with a rich vocalization which must have made it much more euphonious than the language spoken later, in the fourth or following centuries. The inscription runs: ‘arnth spuriana s[uth]il hece ce fariceka,’ and means, ‘Aruns Spurinna monumentum sepulcrale ... condidit, adornavit,’ or the like.[9]

FOOTNOTES:

[7] II, Tafel 41, and Hilfstafel 1-8.

[8] Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 67.

[9] I am greatly indebted to Professor O. A. Danielsson of Upsala for information about this as well as about other inscriptions, and for numerous linguistic suggestions on the general subject of my treatise.

IV

A considerable group of Etruscan tomb-paintings, dating from the middle of the sixth century, show in their composition close connexion with Ionic vase-painting, especially with the so-called Caeretan hydriae, while their main pictures tell us something about the Etruscans themselves and their conceptions of Life and Death and Eternity. Only in the animal friezes beneath the painted roof-supports does the old decorative conception of the human and animal figure still linger; elsewhere the pictures now have content and meaning.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]

We may take the Tomba degli Auguri in Corneto, discovered in 1878, as our starting-point. There are coloured drawings as well as full-sized facsimiles of its pictures in the Helbig Museum.

The middle of the back wall of this tomb is occupied by a painted door flanked by two men in white chitons and short black cloaks lined with red; on their feet are peaked shoes. They raise both arms in a gesture of lament, ‘beating their foreheads’ as the ancient texts have it.[10] With this scene (fig. 3) the key-note is struck: the living stand at the door of the tomb and moan for the dead, a subject specially appropriate to the decoration of the walls of a tomb.

The scenes on the main walls are also associated with the funeral ceremonies. On the right-hand main wall (fig. 4) a boy is seen to the left in a white tunic with black dots, carrying a stool and raising one arm and his face to a man who, dressed in a red and brown cloak and brown shoes, seems to beckon to the boy with his right hand, gesticulating at the same time with his left. Between them a small figure is seated who reminds one of the small boys in the Greek tomb reliefs ‘weeping on their cold knees’. To the right is another man clad in chiton and mantle, gesticulating violently with his left hand, and carrying a crook in his right. Above him, and above the excited man to the right, runs the inscription: ‘Tevarath’, probably meaning umpire (βραβευτής, ἀγωνοθέτης). For now follow representations of athletic contests: two wrestlers engaging in the initial grips, the elder bearded, the younger beardless: between them are seen the prizes—metal bowls; these are supposed to be arranged in the background, but owing to the lack of perspective they seem to be in the way of the combatants. This scene throws light on the preceding one: the man with the crook is evidently not an augur, as originally conjectured because of the staff and the flying birds, but the umpire who has to see that no unfair tricks are used; the other man is the spectator who has not yet seated himself, but beckons to the slave-boy to bring him the stool on which he will sit down like the Roman knights of later times who brought their own stools into the orchestra of the theatre. On the other hand, the mourning, crouching slave-boy seems to repeat the death lament of the back wall. Here already, then, we can observe the curious fragmentariness of the scenes in Etruscan art: they look as if they had been cut out of more comprehensive wholes, and put together without logical sequence. Clarity and unity are wanting. There is not the sustained composition or the pleasure in detailed narrative which are regular in Greek and Egyptian art. The Etruscan artist is content with hints and fragments.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]

To the right of the wrestlers, on the same main wall, is a particularly interesting representation: beneath the inscription Phersu, a man, dressed and masked like a punchinello, is leading a dog in a long leash which is wound round his antagonist and ends in a wooden collar round the neck of the dog. The ferocious blood-hound has inflicted bleeding wounds on the legs and thighs of the antagonist, and the antagonist, whose head is muffled in a sack, is vainly trying to disentangle himself from the leash and to hit the dog with a club. The explanation of this exciting and brutal contest, to which no parallel can be found in Greek art, is evidently that Phersu tries to make his dog bite his antagonist to death before the latter can get his head out of the sack and hit man and dog with his club. If the club-bearer succeeds in freeing himself from the sack and the dog, Phersu has only one chance: to run away. As runner, he has his legs stiffened with thongs, and in the much damaged fresco on the left main wall of the tomb we see the flight of Phersu (fig. 5) and (not reproduced) the club-bearer pursuing him. They are separated by a pair of pugilists who are boxing to the accompaniment of flutes, again an evidence of Etruscan indifference to incongruities in the composition. The escaping Phersu is painted alone in another tomb at Corneto, the Tomba del Pulcinella, the name of which is derived from this figure, but here he is placed beside a horseman (fig. 6), who represents the equestrian processions at funerals, to which we shall turn our attention later. The Tomba del Pulcinella, which was discovered in 1872, also dates from the sixth century B.C., and like the Tomb of the Augur it bears the stamp of Ionic art, especially in the receding contours of the crown of the head and in the plump forms of the body.

In these two sepulchres, then, we are confronted with representations which are associated not only with death and the tomb, but also with Etruscan local customs and national character. It is true that prize-fights and wrestling contests in connexion with obsequies are known in the Greek civilized world as well, for instance from the description in the _Iliad_ of the funeral of Patroclus, and lingered for a long time especially in the outskirts of the Greek world—thus King Nicocles of Cyprus, in the beginning of the fourth century B.C., honoured his deceased father with choral dancing, athletic games, horse-races, trireme races.[11] But we know of no example from Hellas of a fight like that between Phersu, accompanied by his blood-hound, and the muffled club-bearer: a fight the attraction of which, apart from its sanguinary character, evidently depended on the disparity of the weapons, as it did in the combat between gladiator and retiarius, the man armed with net and trident, in the Roman arenas of a later day.[12]

[Sidenote: GLADIATORS IN ETRURIA]

From the Greek author Athenaeus,[13] we learn that the gladiatorial games originated in Campania, where they were introduced as entertainments at banquets, but that the Romans adopted them from the Etruscans. This tradition is confirmed by the facts that the name applied to the leader and trainer of the Roman gladiatorial school, _lanista_, is of Etruscan origin, and that the person, who even in late Rome[14] dragged the corpses from the arena, the so-called _Dispater_, was furnished with satyr-ears and a mask with savage features, and carried a hammer, thus being a faithful copy of the Etruscan death-god, Charun.[15] Moreover, as the Etruscans in the heyday of their glory, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., also ruled over Campania, it is most natural to attribute to them, and not to the Campanian Graeculi, the doubtful honour of being the actual ‘inventors’ of gladiatorial combats. These combats were a piquant and exciting substitute for actual human sacrifices in honour of the deceased noble or the gods, and as one of the parties was given a chance to save his life the practice may even be considered an advance in humanity.

Etruscan obscurity and inconsistency lead to curious confusion in the transition from mythological pictures to funereal scenes. Thus we find on the front of an early archaic Etruscan terracotta sarcophagus, now in the British Museum,[16] a representation in relief, manifestly inspired by Greek mythology, of a battle scene with men and women as spectators; at one end of the sarcophagus, the left, leave-taking before marching out to battle; on the back, a banqueting-scene, evidently representing the funeral feast, since the relief on the other end of the sarcophagus shows four mourning women, two of them holding drinking-bowls in their hands.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Παίειν τὰ μέτωπα, Dionys. Halicarn. x. 9; ‘frontem ferire’, Cicero, _Epist. ad Attic._ i. 1; for other instances see Sittl, _Gebärden der Griechen and Römer_, p. 21.

[11] Isocrates ix. 1.

[12] With reference to _phersu_, which is supposed to be synonymous with and the origin of the Latin _persona_, see Pauly-Wissowa, vi. 775, and S.P. Cortsen, _Vocabulorum Etruscorum interpretatio_ in _Nord. Tidsskr. for Filologi_, 1917, p. 174.

[13] iv. 153 f.

[14] Tertullian, _Ad nation._ i. 10.

[15] Pauly-Wissowa, iii. 2178.

[16] B 630. Figured in _Terra-cotta Sarcophagi in British Museum_, pl. ix-xi.

V

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

A good idea of the different sort of athletic contests at the great Etruscan funerals is given by the wall-paintings in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni at Corneto, described and copied by Stackelberg and Kestner in 1827,[17] and represented in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by facsimiles and coloured drawings executed in 1907, after a chemical treatment of the plaster stucco, which brought out a number of details more plainly. The pictures are of the same period as those of the Augur tomb, and of similar style. The numerous inscriptions from which the tomb has derived its title seem to be mostly proper names. Each of the three wall-surfaces of this tomb, which contains only one chamber, has a false painted door in the middle. Of the first figures on the left main wall, two pugilists, only very little is preserved (fig. 7). They are contending, like the two wrestlers to the right of them, one of whom has lifted the other from the ground, to the accompaniment of the flute-player who is standing between the two groups. This and many other Etruscan paintings confirm the statement of Aristotle[18] that the Etruscans made their boxers perform to the sound of the flute. Flute-playing was so popular that masters scourged their slaves and caused their cooks to work in the kitchen to the sound of the flute; and here again the Romans adopted the Etruscan tradition and gave their flute-players a recognized position in the community, as is shown by the amusing story about the strike of the Roman flute-players[19]: the flute-players left Rome in disgust and went in a body to Tibur, and the only device the Romans could think of was to make the excellent fellows drunk and cart them back to Rome, where the citizens made haste to confirm the ancient privileges of the flute-players and to add several new ones in order to make the awakening more pleasant.

On the other side of the false door the equestrian procession begins and is continued on the back wall to the central false door (fig. 8). Four young naked horsemen, some of them with staves in their hands, are received by a naked youth who carries a palm-branch over his shoulder. Apart from the nakedness, which must be attributed to the influence of Greek art, this equestrian procession is genuinely Etruscan. Appian derives the festive processions at triumphs and funerals from Etruscan prototypes, while Dionysius of Halicarnassus finds their prototypes in Hellas. But it cannot be denied that Dionysius’s description of these _pompae_ in early Rome[20] suggests Etruria: first came young horsemen, then foot-soldiers; after these, athletes with their sexual organs covered (in contrast to Greek custom), then the tripartite chorus of dancers in purple cloaks and bronze belts, then the grotesque dancers, flute-players, lyre-players, and thurifers, and finally the procession of chariots with the images of the gods. In the following pages we shall make acquaintance with all these groups in the Etruscan world of art.

The equestrian procession is presumably the preliminary to a horse-race. The nobles of Etruria were celebrated for their race-horses and often sent their chariot-teams to the games in early Rome.[21] It is a characteristic fact that one of the few Etruscan words given by the Greek lexicographer Hesychius is no other than the word for horse, δάμνος according to the Greek version.[22]

To the right of the false door in the back wall three jolly dancers are seen: the first has his brow wreathed, carries a drinking-bowl in hand, and wears boots, red skirt, and blue neckerchief. The figure is shown by the flesh tint to be male, not female as stated in Carl Jacobsen’s catalogue. After him dances the flute-player, with red boots, blue loin-cloth, and red chaplet, and last comes a naked dancing youth with boots, necklace, and chaplet.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL MORTO]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL TRICLINIO]

Dancers appear in a number of Etruscan tomb-paintings, and abandon themselves to their gambols with a frenzy which might seem incompatible with death and entombment. In the Tomba del Morto at Corneto, dating from the same period, we find traces of a pirouetting dancer close to the couch of the dead and the lamenting mourners; the dance was thus as important as the funeral lament (fig. 9). The finest representations of Etruscan mourning dancers are found in the Tomba del Triclinio, which dates from the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek contains several earlier, inferior facsimiles, made from the copies in the Museo Gregoriano and only touched up at Corneto by the painter Mariani;[23] and some more recent ones carefully executed on the spot (fig. 10). On each wall three female and two male dancers are seen among trees; fillets and singing-birds appear in the foliage. The male dancers play on lyre and flute; the dancing-girls have castanets and the foremost a strap or chaplet with bells over her shoulder. Similar chaplets with bells are often seen hanging on the walls in pictures representing the symposia in honour of the dead (see below), and bear witness to the childish predilection of the Etruscans for gipsy-like noise and merry-making. The most beautiful dancing-girl, however, in any Etruscan tomb is the already mentioned ‘bella ballerina di Corneto’, discovered on a wall in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. We give this figure, which has never been reproduced, after the facsimile in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek which arrived there shortly before the death of Carl Jacobsen and gave him one of the last pleasures in his life (fig. 11).

When I examined the original in the tomb at Corneto I made the following notes: the drapery (chiton), which is ornamented with a pattern of dotted rosettes, is distinctly preserved from the hips down to the elegant fluttering edge. Much of the middle part of the body has been destroyed; the fluttering ends of the red scarf across the shoulders are visible to right and left. The upper part of the body and the shoulders are also well preserved. The right arm is raised, and visible from shoulder to elbow; a faint outline of the left arm is also visible.[24] Of the head, the brow, the beginning of the nose, the ear, the green fluttering head-dress, the red hair with a loosened tress in front of the ear have been preserved. To the spectator the picture still conveys an impression of joy, of graceful movement, and of filmy fluttering draperies.

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN DANCE AND SONG]

Here also we find Etruscan tradition continued on Roman soil, not only in the dancers of the festival processions, but in the tradition that Etruscan dancers, _ludii_ or _ludiones_, were imported to Rome to dance at the great festivals. The Greeks compared the Roman reel to the Dionysiac ‘cancan’, σίκιννις, while its Roman name is _tripudium_; it was danced at every period of Roman history by the Salii, the ancient priesthood of the Roman war-god, on the chief festival of the god, March 19. According to Livy (vii. 2. 4-7) the earliest Roman poetry, the coarse Fescennines, originated in the text which accompanied the dance of the _ludiones_, and the fact that the dancers during the Fescennines daubed their faces with minium supports the theory of Etruscan influence, which also makes itself felt in the custom observed by the Roman triumphators, who in the earliest times daubed their whole bodies with minium. For we know that the Etruscans coated the images of their gods with minium at their festivals, and that the Romans gave the ancient terracotta statue of the Capitoline Jupiter a similar coat of ‘war paint’ at the high festivals, a task which it fell to the censors to superintend.[25] The red minium was meant to heighten the natural red-brown hue of the men; it produced an artificial virile complexion, just as white lead and chalk served to emphasize the pale feminine hue.[26]

The primitive nature of the verses connected with these dances is shown by the song of the Salii, the burden of which is the five times repeated ‘triumpe’ (jump!) and the text of which runs: ‘Help us, lares, let not the evil disease fall upon any more of us, Mars! Be satisfied, cruel Mars! Jump on to the threshold. Cease jumping. Help us, Mars!’ At the triumphs also, ‘carmina incondita’, as Livy tells us, were sung (iv. 20. 2), and we venture to think that Etruscan poetry was no better than this, and that the disappearance of the texts, which accompanied the dances, is no great loss. Varro mentions tragedies in the Etruscan language, but they were undoubtedly versions of the Greek ones, even worse than those made for the Romans by Livius Andronicus. Apart from some religious and a little historical literature, and a number of recipes for the gathering of simples, capable of rousing the admiration of the Greeks for ‘the descendants of the Tyrrhenians, the people skilled in medical lore’,[27] no tradition of any Etruscan intellectual life in writing or poetry has been handed down to posterity.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

[Sidenote: LAUREL DECORATIONS]