Part 4

[41] Aristotle, _fragm._ 519 R. Scholia to Homer’s _Iliad_ xxiii. 130. A similar dancer or armed runner appears in the Tomba Casuccini at Chiusi; both remind us in posture of the Tübingen armed runner (Bulle, _Der schöne Mensch_, pl. 89).

IX

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE SYMPOSIUM]

Similar incongruities, due to Greek artists, or at any rate Greek art, having set a Greek stamp on the wall-painting of Etruria, meet us in the representations of _symposia_. Again we can take the Bighe tomb as our starting-point (fig. 23).[42] Three festive couches are seen with two young men on each. The youths are naked to the waist, and have sumptuous gold necklaces, red or blue mantles, and chaplets on their heads. Some of them hold flat drinking-bowls, some eggs, and others have branches in their hands—all this, however, we only learn from the old copies: they are reclining on metal couches, whereas the tables in front of them are wooden, as is clearly proved by the colours employed. We may wonder that the couches are of metal, for according to the literary tradition the first metal couches came to Rome as late as 187 B.C. Nevertheless, ivory and golden couches are already mentioned by Plautus; this may, however, be due to the Greek text on which he based his comedy (_Stichus_ 377). The Etruscans, at any rate, knew bronze couches at least three hundred years earlier, and this is corroborated by the find of an actual bronze banqueting-couch in a tomb at Corneto.[43] The couches are covered with many-coloured woven or embroidered bolsters and cushions; these also are mentioned in the Roman comedies as ornaments of couches.[44] Ducks appear beneath the couches, and the guests are attended by three naked lads: a flute-player, a boy holding a branch, and another with a ladle, which are wrongly reproduced in the Ny Carlsberg facsimile as a staff.

The symposium has begun, the tables having been cleared. Only young beardless men are seen feasting together, and nothing informs us who they are or why they are drinking. All that is certain is the luxury and pomp which seem to have characterized Etruscan houses and which are especially manifest in the jingling necklaces and the material and appointment of the festive couch.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI—HUNTING LEOPARDS]

New problems arise with the large symposium scene in the Tomba dei Leopardi at Corneto, which was discovered in 1875 and has now been described in an exemplary manner by Weege in the article mentioned above. The pictures are among the best preserved in the whole of Etruria, and date from about the same time as the Bighe tomb, about 500 B.C. The tomb takes its name from the two almost life-sized leopards in the pediment (fig. 24). They have been neatly proved by Weege to be hunting leopards. As early as the days of ancient Egypt leopards were trained for hunting purposes, and hunting leopards appear in Greek vase-paintings and Etruscan wall-paintings, for instance, in the earlier tombs such as the Tomba delle Leonesse and the Tomba del Triclinio, where the animal lies beneath a couch. In the Middle Ages the hunting leopard was still trained in the East, and is therefore depicted in the paintings of the Renaissance—for instance in the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano and Benozzo Gozzoli—as seated on the cruppers of the horses behind the Magi or their servants.[45] In modern India leopards are still trained to hunt.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI]

Beneath the two long-bodied hunting leopards we see the main picture of the back wall (fig. 24) representing a symposium. On the couch to the left two youths are reclining, on each of the two others a youth and a young girl.[46] The young men are attired in mantles, the girls in chitons and mantles; all wear garlands. In their hands they hold either chaplets, drinking-bowls, or round objects usually supposed to be eggs. Similar ‘eggs’ appear in numerous Etruscan banqueting-scenes: in the Tomba del Triclinio, del Letto funebre, della Pulcella, degli Scudi, &c., and as egg-shells are frequently found in the tombs at Corneto, and eggs must therefore have been offered to the dead[47]—as the most nourishing of foods, and one which stimulates in particular the procreative force—it is not improbable that the old interpretation is the correct one. Weege supposes them to be ballot-balls used to decide who should be the master of the symposium (symposiarch), but this was usually decided by throwing dice. A third conceivable interpretation, which I think might be acceptable in certain cases where a man and a woman hand each other these round objects, is that they are rings. In Plautus’s _Asinaria_ (778) it is spoken of as typical of two young lovers reclining on one couch at the symposium that one of them gives the other his or her ring to look at.

Beneath and above the banqueting-couch we find the previously noted laurel branches—not laurel trees as Weege calls them—the familiar adornment of the walls. The guests are served by two naked pages: one of these, who holds a jug, beckons to the other, who holds a small jug and a strainer, to make haste. How necessary it was to strain the wine is seen from the description of the elder Cato. The Latin word for cleaning the wine-jars of the grape-skins deposited by the wine is _deacinare_.[48]

FOOTNOTES:

[42] The large frieze with dancing scenes on the left main wall was already badly damaged in 1827. A copy of it, now in the Vatican, is mere fiction, and has unfortunately served as basis for the large facsimile in the Glyptotek. On the other hand, its damaged state is correctly represented in the small drawing of the tomb in the Glyptotek.

[43] Blümner, _Römische Privataltertümer_, p. 118.

[44] On Etruscan cinerary urns and terracotta sarcophagi the covers are as a rule strongly scalloped. These are presumably the _tonsilia tappetia_ referred to by Plautus (_Pseudolus_ 145 ff.). They usually came from Alexandria and were decorated with pictures of wild beasts, whereas the bed coverlets proper came from Campania.

[45] These cheetahs were brought alive to Italy, if not actually used for hunting by the princes of the Renaissance. For among Pisanello’s drawings in the Codex Vallardi in the Louvre is a fine study of one of these animals from the life; it wears a collar round its neck, showing that it was led on a leash. I owe this reference to Mr. G. F. Hill.

[46] Dennis and Stryk are mistaken in speaking of a youth and a girl on the left couch; the error is due to the damaged condition of the colouring.

[47] Cp. Juvenal, _Satires_ v. 82, where eggs are referred to as a common course at funerals.

[48] Cato, _De re rustica_ 26. In the Greek pictures of symposia also the slave boy carries a strainer, ἡθμός.

X

[Sidenote: THE HETAERAE]

This wall-painting is apparently a faithful copy of a Greek painted representation of a symposium with hetaerae, and this is also Weege’s view of the scene. In his opinion, those who take part in the drinking bouts of the young men are not married or respectable women, but hetaerae. It seems to me that such a representation in a _tomb_ would argue a complete dissolution of family relations in ancient Etruria, whether we choose to interpret the pictures as scenes from life, or as an expression of the wish that the next life might take the form of nothing more or less than a revel with hetaerae. Weege maintains, further, that hetaerae reclined at table, whereas wives sat with their husbands: but this is contrary to the express literary tradition, according to which the Greeks were shocked because the Etruscan women reclined at table with men ‘under the same coverlet’. The earliest authority for this statement is Aristotle[49] and, according to this and other accounts of the fourth century B.C., the free intercourse between men and women gave rise to much immorality, the women abandoning themselves to the strange men with whom they reclined.[50] It would have been absurd for the Greeks to take offence at this if it did not apply to free-born women of good family, but only to hetaerae, who in Hellas did exactly the same. How things were with the Greeks in this respect is made sufficiently clear by a passage in the orator Isaeus[51]: ‘No one would dare to serenade married women, and neither do the married women attend banquets with their husbands, nor do they consider it proper to partake of meals with strangers, especially chance acquaintances’.

With this severe Athenian custom we must compare these scandalized Greek outbursts, and, at the same time, we must remember that in the fourth century B.C. Etruscan civilization and morals were already on the decline, so that an original latitude, which in the beginning of the fifth century was natural and did not affect the morals of domestic life, may at this time have been abused. Incidentally, we are able to ascertain the degree of exaggeration in another Greek account of the same time concerning the luxuriousness of the Etruscans[52]: ‘They reclined on flowered cushions drinking out of sumptuous silver bowls and attended by servants in costly dresses, _sometimes by naked women_.’ In the Etruscan paintings there are numerous naked pages in attendance, just as in the Greek symposium pictures, but not a single naked handmaid. As to the question whether respectable women reclined or sat at table, invariable rules did not exist in Etruria any more than they existed in ancient Rome, where we know that Jupiter alone reclined at the lectisternia (the sacred banquets given by the state) whereas Juno and Minerva sat; furthermore, in the last century of the republic, respectable women sat with the men at banquets, while brides reclined.[53] The practice of brides reclining can hardly, however, be accounted for except as a case of adherence to an ancient and honourable custom which was superseded by later and severer notions.

Etruscan works of art, however, give sufficient information to confute the whole of Weege’s hetaera theory. Man and woman are often seen reclining together on Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns, and on the face of it it would seem improbable that a man would have himself pictured on his sarcophagus with a hetaera. Dr. S. P. Cortsen kindly informs me that this view is confirmed by the fact that two of these cinerary urns with a pair of figures on the lid have an inscription in which the word _tusurthi_ or _tusurthir_ occurs—one of the few Etruscan words the signification of which is certain: it means ‘spouses’.[54] And if we look at the type of womanhood represented in several of the recumbent couples on the later urns, when realism prevails in Etruscan portrait sculpture, the appellation hetaera becomes as preposterous as that of matrons is certain (fig. 25).[55]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI]

But proof is furnished by the tomb-paintings themselves. In the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto, discovered in 1870, and, to judge by the style, dating from the end of the fifth century B. C., the wife (as might be expected) is pictured sitting with her husband, who is reclining on the couch with a drinking-bowl in his left hand, his right resting on the woman’s shoulder (fig. 26). According to the inscription the man’s name is _Velthur Velcha_, that of the woman _Ravnthu Aprthnai_ (the family name is in the nominative and is a woman’s name, the Latin _Abortennia_; so the family of the mother was the more distinguished). The figure and the diadem of the woman recall those of the Hera Borghese and determine the date of the tomb. On the table in front of the couch are a bowl, a cake (_pyramis_), and a heap of fruits: or they may be the ‘ball-cakes’ (_spirae_ or _spaeritae_) referred to by Cato (_De agricultura_ 82). At the foot of the couch a lyre-player and a flute-player accompany the meal with music, recalling a statement of Cicero’s[56] that at banquets in early Rome the sound of stringed instruments and flutes was deemed indispensable. On the whole, it might perhaps be as well to abandon all theories of the austere morals of early Rome. The patrician families of the first centuries of the republic undoubtedly lived a life which in pomp and luxury vied with the life of the nobility of the Etruscan towns. Again, in the painting on the back wall of this tomb, where the recumbent man is a priest (_cechaneri_), the wife is seated with her husband (fig. 27). As to the priesthood, it must be borne in mind that the priestly office was hereditary in the Etruscan noble families. The statue of Juno at Veii, for instance, might only be touched by a priest of a certain family.[57] It was especially the art of divination, however, which was reserved for the noblemen and their wives.[58] Even when the Romans had conquered Etruria they continued to support the efforts of the Etruscans to confine initiation into the art of divination to the nobility. Even Cicero, in his book on the ideal State, maintains that omens and presages must be submitted to haruspices, and the nobles of Etruria must teach the ‘disciplina’.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ORCO]

In the pictures of the Scudi tomb the wife, as we have seen, _is sitting_. But in the Tomba dei Vasi Dipinti, besides a man and a woman, two children are present at the symposium, which would be inconceivable in a hetaera picture; and in a picture in the front chamber of the Tomba dell’Orco at Corneto, discovered in 1868 and dating from the same period as the Scudi tomb, there are traces of a man and a woman reclining together, and the inscription informs us that the woman is a free-born woman named Velia—the family name has unfortunately been destroyed—and that she is married to Arnth Velchas, a descendant of one of the noblest families in Etruria (fig. 28). With this, then, the last and final proof of the untenability of the hetaera theory has been adduced: this woman, whose head is one of the most beautiful in the sepulchral chambers of Etruria (fig. 29), reclines with her husband on the couch in the picture in the tomb, even as she was buried with him in the tomb itself. A failure to appreciate this fact would imply a complete denial of Etruscan family feeling and pride of race.

The dancing women, on the other hand, for instance, the woman in the Tomba delle Leonesse already cited above, and another, still more wanton, who in the Tomba degli Bacchanti foots it with a fat dancer, must be interpreted as hetaerae. They illustrate the phrase of Plautus: ‘prostibile est tandem? stantem stanti savium dare amicum amicae?’ To the same category of hired dancers belongs the man to the left of the one who is dancing with inverted cithara.[59]

Generally speaking, what has made doubt or error possible in the matter is the fact that the pictures, as we have already said, in form suggest Greek pictures of hetaerae; symposia of any other kind between men and women were unknown in Hellas. And to what extent the influence of Greek art has prevailed is shown by the picture of a momentary phase of emotion in the Tomba Querciola, where a couple reclining on the couch are kissing each other, a motive as suitable to a Greek hetaera picture as it is incongruous in a picture representing family life after death.[60] Another source of error is the pronounced sensualism of these pictures; in a sepulchral painting as early as the sixth century, the main picture of the Tomba del Vecchio, we see on a banqueting-couch, under the wreaths and chaplets with bells hanging on the wall, a hoary old _roué_ in vivacious conversation with his beautiful young wife who holds a garland, a hypothymis, under his nose (fig. 30).[61] This picture is typically Etruscan in its combination of wine and love. ‘As soon as we had eaten,’ sings the Greek poet Dromon,[62] ‘the slave girl removed the tables; one brought us water for washing, and we washed ourselves; then we seized again the wreaths of violets and bound our brows with garlands.’ The Etruscans seem to have followed the Greek rules minutely, but like the Egyptians they let the free-born women partake of the festivity of the symposium itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[49] Athenaeus i. 23 d. On the Etruscan custom of reclining at table, like the Greeks, and unlike the men of the Homeric age and later the Macedonians, who sat, see Athenaeus i. 17 f, 18 a.

[50] Athenaeus xii. 517d. Cp. Dionys. Halic. ix. 16.

[51] Isaeus iii. 14.

[52] Athenaeus iv. 153 d. (= Timaeus, _fragm._ 18 in Müller, _Fragmenta histor. Graecorum_).

[53] Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte Roms_ i. 472, 478, 493 f.

[54] _Corpus inscriptionum Etruscarum_, 3858, 3860.

[55] The Etruscan character for immorality is chiefly due to Theopompus (_fragm._ 222 in Müller, _Fragm. hist. Graec._ i. p. 315), but he gives similar descriptions of the Thessalians, and seems to have specialized in _chroniques scandaleuses_. Of equal value is his information that the Sybarites loved the Etruscans because of their luxuriousness (Athenaeus xii. 519 b). It is regrettable that Theophrastus’ work on the Etruscans is lost; it would have provided information of quite a different character. (Cp. the Scholia to Pindar, _Pythia_ ii. 3.)

[56] _De oratore_ iii. 197.

[57] Livy v. 22. 5.

[58] The most famous of all the Etruscan women versed in divination is the wise but guileful Tanaquil, who played a political part in Rome: Livy i. 34.

[59] Τὴν κιθαράν στρέψας, like Apollo in the contest with Marsyas (Apollodorus, _Bibliotheca_ i. 4. 2).

[60] In the same picture we also find a representation of a true Greek motive, kottabos. Another momentary motive appears in the Tomba d’Orfeo e d’Euridice at Corneto (_Monumenti_ v. pl. 17), a slave pulling off his master’s slippers.

[61] Hypothymides were first used ‘by the Aeolians and Ionians who wore them round their necks, as we learn from the poems of Anacreon and Alcaeus’ (Athenaeus xv. 678 d); Cp. Plutarch, _Quaest. conviv._ iii. _probl._ 1, 3. In Ionia the women perfumed their bosoms and wore wreaths of flowers round their ‘delicate necks’, as Sappho says (Athenaeus xv. 674 c-d).

[62] Athenaeus ix. 409 e.

XI

[Sidenote: SYMPOSIA]

But we can go still further and establish beyond the possibility of doubt that where men alone are gathered at the symposium of eternity, the pictures represent the heads of the families who ordered the tombs and had them decorated. To be sure, the pictures of the sixth and the beginning of the fifth centuries do not give us any information as to this—even the symposium in the Tomba delle Bighe is without inscription; but in this respect also the sepulchral paintings become more communicative after the middle of the fifth century. In the Tomba Golini at Orvieto, discovered in 1863 and called after its discoverer, and, to judge from its style, contemporary with the Tomba degli Scudi and the front chamber of the Tomba dell’Orco, we see in the symposium on the back wall (fig. 31) two men on the same couch drinking to the accompaniment of the two familiar musicians. Beneath the couch we can make out dimly a servant, and a hunting leopard, probably feeding; both have their names attached: that of the animal is Kankru. In Egyptian reliefs also, dating from the Fifth Dynasty, we occasionally find names attached to the domestic animals depicted, for instance ducks and pigeons.

Of the two men reclining on the couch the foremost holds a drinking-bowl and an egg. In the Ny Carlsberg facsimile he is represented as beardless, but no doubt wrongly. It is an elderly man; his face is one of the earliest examples of naturalism in Etruscan portraiture. The other, full-bearded, holds a flat, fluted vessel without foot, presumably one of the celebrated Etruscan golden vessels which are more minutely characterized in a symposium in the Tomba della Pulcella; they were even introduced into Athens, where, side by side with Corinthian works in bronze, they formed part of the decoration of a wealthy house, and they are eulogized in a poem by Critias,[63] one of Athens’ finest _beaux esprits_.

[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]

In this painting in the Tomba Golini the inscriptions give us much valuable information as to the connexion between the two persons.[64] Above the first we read: ‘Vel lecates arnthial ruva larthialisa clan velusum nefs marniu spurana eprthnec tenve mechlum rasneas cleusinsl zilachnve pulum rumitrine thi ma[l]ce clel lur.’ In translation the text runs: ‘Vel Lecates, Arnth’s brother,[65] son of Larth, and descendant of Vel. He held the offices of Maro urbanus (_spur_ means town) and Eprthne (secular official title) and was Zilach (dictator) of the Etruscan people in Clusium....’ The rest is unintelligible. It is interesting in the inscription to come across the name by which the Etruscans called themselves, _rasneas_; Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i. 30) was therefore justified in saying that the Etruscans called themselves Rasenas. The name Larth is common in Etruscan inscriptions. The Romans knew it and called the well-known Etruscan king by his full name, Lars Porsenna (in Etruscan, Larth Pursna).[66]

[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI]

We now turn to the inscription above the bearded man on the same couch; his name is Arnth Leinies, son of Larth, and descendant of Vel; his official titles follow, and the inscription ends: ‘ru[va] l[ecates velus] amce,’ i. e., was brother of Vel Lecates. Thus we have two brothers reclining on the same couch, and the inscription makes it probable that the other symposiasts, too, are not chance revellers, but members of the same family, united in the picture as they were in life and in the grave.

In the same tomb, to the left of this scene, we see a table, bearing several metal vessels, a thymiaterion, and an ivory box for incense, and flanked by two candelabra with lighted candles stuck into birds’ beaks (fig. 32). The Etruscans were considered inventors of the art of candlemaking and taught the Romans to manufacture different kinds of candles, from big wax candles—candelae and cerei—to cheap dips—sebaceae. The Italic peoples used candles and candlesticks until Roman Imperial times, though in the last centuries they also had oil lamps, the manufacture and use of which they had learned from the Greeks; the oldest clay lamps found in the northern part of Italy date from about 300 B.C.[67] To the left of the table is seen a naked slave with a jug and a dish; to the right a young man in a light-coloured, sleeved chiton, who has been conjectured to be another servant. But again the inscription affords positive information: ‘Vel leinies larthial ruva arnthialum clan velusum prumaths avils semphs lupuce’; i.e. ‘Vel Leinies, Larth’s brother, son of Arnth and descendant of Vel; he died (_lupuce_) at the age of 7.’[68] So the boy is son of the hindmost man on the banqueting-couch and belongs to the noble family interred in the tomb.

FOOTNOTES:

[63] Athenaeus i. 28 b.

[64] _Corpus inscr. Etrusc._ 5093-4. I am indebted to my friend, Dr. S. P. Cortsen, for help in the interpretation of this and other Etruscan inscriptions. These are for the greater part incorrectly copied in the Ny Carlsberg facsimiles.

[65] That _ruva_ means brother seems to be unanimously accepted, though it only appears in the two inscriptions of this tomb.