Part 5

[66] The name Pursna or Pursena has, however, never been found in any Etruscan inscription. The Etruscan Lar or Larth has nothing to do with the Roman Las or Lar. Cp. Schulze, _Zur Geschichte latein. Eigennamen_, 85. 1; Pauli, _Altital. Studien_, iv. 64 ff.

[67] With reference to the use of tapers at the bier in antiquity see Rushforth, _Journal of Roman Studies_, v. 1915, p. 149 ff.

[68] Cp. Vilh. Thomsen, _Remarques sur la parenté de la langue étrusque_, _Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Danemark_, 1899, no. 4, p. 391.

XII

Corresponding to the lassoing of the horse in the Tomba del Morente, as a preparation for the chariot race, we find in the Tomba Golini pictures of the preparations for the banquet which is celebrated in the pictures mentioned above. In one of the pictures we see cattle, venison, and poultry hanging in the larder, in another the cooking in the kitchen itself (fig. 33); like everything else in Etruria, it is accompanied by the flute. To the left of the flute-player a woman is struggling with a sideboard piled with food; to the right a naked slave with a loin-cloth is working at a small table, using two small implements rather like plummets. Various interpretations have been advanced: that he is kneading dough, or grinding colours; the latter explanation, however, is improbable in a kitchen scene. Besides these Dennis proposes a third possibility—that he is chopping vegetables, but he dares not commit himself to a decision. The table itself, at which the slave is standing, seems to have a raised edge, and thereby recalls the elder Cato’s recipe for the preparation of cheese cakes and puffs[69]: ‘Take a clean table, a foot broad, surround it with an edge (_balteus_), and then mix honey and cheese on it.’ For puffs, directions are given to belabour the dough with two sticks or staves (_rudes_). After all the procedure here is somewhat similar, only that the dough is kneaded with pieces of metal and not with staves.

[Sidenote: KITCHEN SCENES]

In these scenes from kitchen and wine-cellar, where the wood is being chopped,[70] where the cooks are swinging the saucepans or working at the range,[71] where young slaves are struggling with sideboards covered with drinking-vessels, the inscriptions contain the names of the slaves. Men desired to be served in the after-life by the same skilful slaves as in the present, and it was therefore the custom in later times to add the names. This reminds one of the Egyptian tomb-reliefs, where sometimes the serfs and the slave girls are designated only by the name and mark of the estate, so that in a way each of them represents one of the estates of the deceased lord, whereas in other cases they have their proper names attached and survive as personalities in the after-life.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] _De agricultura_ 76 and 86.

[70] Cp. Plautus, _Pseudolus_ 158 ‘te cum securi caudicali praeficio provinciae.’

[71] Cp. Seneca, _Epist._ 114. 26 ‘adspice culinas nostras et concursantis inter tot ignes coquos.’

XIII

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL LETTO FUNEBRE]

Thus we see a slow transformation taking place in the ideas which inspired the Etruscan tomb-paintings. In the Tomba del Morto and the Tomba degli Auguri, the representation of the death lament showed plainly that the main theme was the festival in honour of the dead; and the memorial feast itself should probably in most cases be recognized in the banquet accompanied by the symposium or—as in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni—the preparations for it. This conception is also clearly expressed in the sepulchral paintings of the fifth century B.C., such as the Tomba del Letto funebre, where the main picture (fig. 34) represents an enormous couch with a footstool in front[72]; on the tall pile of bolsters and coverlets rest two pairs of cushions, each of them supporting a green chaplet encircling a pointed cap (_tutulus_). Green festoons and a long red cord hang on the walls: to the right of the couch are two symposiasts and two slaves; the slaves face the big central couch, and hold one an egg, the other a loaf in their raised hands. To the left of the picture are the flute-player and the sideboard with vases. Here we get an idea how a lectisternium was spread in honour of the dead, in connexion with the symposium at a memorial feast. The dead are represented by their headgear; to that the slaves to the right are offering sacrifice, to that the flute-player to the left sounds his notes. How deeply, in this direction also, tradition influenced the Romans, and how long the practice lingered, is seen from the description which the satirist Persius gives (iii. 103) of a noble Roman lying in state:

Hinc tuba, candelae, tandemque beatulus alto compositus lecto crassisque lutatus amomis in portam rigidas calces extendit: at illum hesterni capite induto subiere Quirites.

And then the horns, the candles! and the dead, Smeared with thick balms, lies stiff on lofty bed, Heels pointing doorwards, till he’s borne away By new-capped citizens[73] of yesterday.

But the pictures in the Tomba Golini seem to indicate that the symposium is not only a ceremony on the funeral day or at memorial feasts, but that the purpose is, by means of the painting as well as by the undoubtedly splendid accessories of the tombs, which were rifled and removed long ago, to secure to the dead or the whole of the family, who in course of time were interred in the tomb, a happy and festive existence hereafter; the same idea as in the Egyptian tomb-reliefs, the object of which was to safeguard the deceased against ‘the second death’, that is, annihilation. And just as the Egyptian tomb-reliefs extend to all aspects of life in order that the dead may enjoy without restriction the sight of everything which made his life rich and festive, from the industry of the slaves and artisans occupied in his service to his own boating and hunting expeditions in the papyrus thickets of the Nile, so the Etruscan sepulchral paintings have a further object and treat subjects which are only intelligible if the end in view is to procure for the dead a full enjoyment of the delights of life, and which cannot in any way be associated with funeral or funeral feast. This applies especially to the hunting pictures of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., found respectively in the Tomba della Caccia e della Pesca and in the Tomba Querciola.

FOOTNOTES:

[72] Footstools were also used in Rome for mounting the high couches. Varro, _De lingua Latina_ v. 168.

[73] i. e. slaves made free by his will, and entitled to wear the cap of liberty.

XIV

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN IMPERIALISM]

[Sidenote: THE POWER OF ETRURIA]

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN INFLUENCE IN ROME]

In the older group of tombs of the latter part of the sixth and the earlier part of the fifth centuries B.C. we find a bright and cheerful delight in the material pleasures of life, and a clear confidence in the belief that the race, whose means are sufficient to provide and adorn a sumptuous sepulchral chamber, will also be permitted to enjoy all this—from wine and women to hunting and sanguinary games—in the hereafter. Thus it is not for nothing that these tombs synchronize with the time of Etruscan imperialism. Previous to this, the maritime power of Etruria had made it dreaded and hated by the Greeks, whose ships were exposed to seizure and piracy as often as they ventured across the ‘Tyrrhenian Sea’, so that the Greeks had only one colony on the north coast of Sicily, and had great trouble in keeping up communications with the Campanian Kyme and with Massilia.[74] ‘The savage Etruscan’ already appears in post-Homeric poetry, where Circe bears Odysseus two children, Latinus and Agrius (the savage), who represent the two principal races of Italy, the Latins and the Etruscans. At length, in 474 B.C., the Kymeans, in alliance with Hieron, the ruler of Syracuse, succeeded in gaining a sea victory over the Etruscan fleet, which Pindar has celebrated in the first Pythian Ode (i. 72 ff.), and after which Hieron sent to Olympia a bronze helmet with an inscription recording the victory, now in the British Museum. This defeat was the first warning that the Etruscans had reached the zenith of their power, but as late as the latter part of the fourth century their piracy was still dangerous and troublesome to Greek shipping, as is seen from a passage of Aristotle and an inscription of 325-324 B.C.[75] As a bulwark of their maritime power, as early as the sixth century they had conquered Corsica, and on land they ruled from the plain of the Po, which they likewise conquered in the sixth century, to the southernmost part of Campania, where they made Capua itself submit to their power.[76] Cato was justified in saying that almost the whole of Italy in the days of old had been ‘in the power of the Tuscans’,[77] and when Sophocles[78] would enumerate the districts of Italy he mentions only three: Oinotria (South Italy), the Tyrrhenian, and the Ligurian land. When the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War undertook the desperate campaign against Syracuse, they allied themselves in 415 with the Etruscans, whose auxiliaries were amongst the bravest in the Athenian offensive force.[79] In the period of the wall-paintings in question, Rome herself was also made subject to them and had to pay contributions to the powerful Etruscan confederation, after the king of Clusium, Porsenna, had seized the city in 508 B.C. As is well known, attempts were made by later historians to gloss over this capture of the town, and the honorary decrees of the senate to Porsenna are described as voluntary, but tell quite plainly their own tale of subjection.[80] Against the background of this event the contemporary Tomba della Scimmia at Chiusi acquires a new interest; it was constructed for one of those families which took part in the victory over Rome. But previous to this, the names of the Roman kings: Lucius Tarquinius and Tarquinius Superbus—Tarquinius is the Etruscan Tarchna[81]—bear witness to the dependence of Rome, which is also evident from the permanent Etruscan occupation of the Janiculum. It is quite possible that the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus does not mark the fall of the national monarchy, but was simply an attempt to throw off the foreign yoke, an attempt which led to Porsenna’s occupation of the city two years later and thus did not bring about the emancipation of the Romans.[82] It is in this period of dependence that the Etruscans left their mark on the laws and customs of Rome, that the three oldest Roman tribes, Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres, got their names, which, as stated by Varro,[83] on the evidence of an Etruscan tragedian Volnius, are Etruscan, a view shared by the modern philologist Wilhelm Schulze.[84] The insignia also of the Roman officials, such as the curule chair and the toga praetexta,[85] and the twelve consular lictors with the fasces,[86] are rightly traced back to Etruria. For the Etruscan confederation consisted of twelve towns, and each of these chose a king who appeared at the gatherings followed by a lictor, and only when they chose a common overlord and war-leader could he appear with twelve lictors. It is therefore rather improbable that the Roman kings appeared with twelve lictors in their train; more probably this large retinue only became the privilege of the _consuls_ after the suppression of Etruria. But it was upon the nobility of Rome that those years of Etruscan predominance left their deepest impress, and it has thus been possible for Wilhelm Schulze, through his investigations of Etruscan and Latin proper names, to throw a remarkable light on the earliest history of Rome and to prove that a great number of the oldest patrician families of Rome were descendants of the Etruscan ruling race, and that intermarriage with Etruscans, and Etruscan influence on Rome, persisted down to the end of the Roman republic.[87] It is also beyond doubt that the peculiar Roman system of patron and client, by which clients attached themselves to a nobleman as followers (_cluentes_), added his name to their own, and paid him dues in peace time, though they were originally immune from military service,[88] was of Etruscan origin, nay, was the essential feature in the structure of the Etruscan community. In course of time the Roman clients became liable to military service, obtaining at the same time civic rights, and it is presumably this fact which accounts for Rome’s final victory over the Etruscans, whose proud Lucumones reserved to themselves both civic privileges and military skill, and were therefore doomed to extinction when luxury and effeminacy had sapped their strength.

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN NOBILITY AND CLIENTS]

But at the period of the tombs in question the blood of the nobility is still healthy and is in no need of regeneration. This is the nobility whose long lances controlled Italy, and whose cavalry was so terrible in onset.[89] The pictures of the tombs show them at the death lament, at feasts, and on hunting expeditions, at symposia, where men and women freely indulge in wine and love, and finally in the Tomba delle Bighe as spectators seated on the stands. On the other hand, the horsemen, the dancers, the dancing-women, and the athletes are certainly of lower extraction, hired servants like the corresponding performers in Rome, perhaps, to some extent, clients.

FOOTNOTES:

[74] Strabo vi. p. 410 (= Ephorus, _fragm._ 2 in Müller, _Fragmenta historic. graec._ i. p. 246). The ingenious etymologist Philochorus even derived the word ‘tyrant’ from Tyrrhenians (Philoch. _fragm._ 5 in Müller, _op. cit._).

[75] Dittenberger, _Sylloge inscriptionum Graecarum_,^{3} 305, with note 1.

[76] Polybius ii. 17. Livy v. 33. 7-8.

[77] _Origines_ 62.

[78] Dionys. Halic. i. 12.

[79] Thucydides vi. 88, and vii. 54-5.

[80] Dionys. Halic. v. 26, 35, 39.

[81] Schulze, _Zur Geschichte latein. Eigennamen_, p. 95 f., 262 ff.

[82] Dionys. Halic. iii. 45, 47 ff.

[83] Varro, _De lingua Latina_ v. 5; Livy i. 13. 8.

[84] Cp. E. Kornemann, _Klio_ xiv. 1914-15, p. 190.

[85] Livy i. 8. 3.

[86] Dionys. Halic. iii. 61-2.

[87] Wilhelm Schulze, _Zur Geschichte lateinischer Eigennamen. Abh. der kgl. Gesellsch. der Wissensch. zu Göttingen, Phil.-hist. Kl._, Neue Folge, Bd. 5, No. 5, p. 62 ff.

[88] Dionys. Halic. ii. 8, 10.

[89] Livy iv. 18. 8. Cp. ix. 29. 2, where the Etruscans are described as the most dangerous enemies of the Romans.

XV

[Sidenote: DECLINE AND FALL OF ETRURIA]

But domestic and foreign enemies destroyed this race of rulers. At the beginning of the fourth century they were attacked simultaneously by the Gauls from the north, by the Samnites[90] from the south-east, and by the Romans from the south. The Gauls inundated for some time the whole of Etruria and presently captured Rome as well, but were driven back again to North Italy. The Samnites seized Capua; but a far heavier blow was the loss of the great city of Veii, the southernmost city of Etruria proper, which was captured by the Romans in 396 B.C.[91] In spite of the alliance with Carthage, the maritime power of the Etruscans also declined in the course of the fourth century, but it was not until the third century that they received the death-blow at the hands of the Romans and Latins. That they were still dangerous antagonists at the beginning of the third century may be seen from Livy’s account, but at the end of the century, during the second Punic war, their rebellious spirit was easily quelled, and even Hannibal could not tempt them to unite in revolt.[92] At that time the country was still rich, as is plainly shown by the requisitions for Scipio’s army.[93] It was not until the following century that Etruria sank into deep poverty; in the time of the Gracchi the country was almost a waste.[94] Plautus describes the Etruscan people as very immoral; in the _Cistellaria_ (562) the poet speaks of those who procure their dowry ignobly, like the Tuscans, by selling their bodies, and in the _Curculio_ (482) the Etruscan quarter of Rome is referred to as ‘inhabited by persons who sell themselves’. Then followed in the first century B.C. the military colonies of Sulla,[95] which gradually Romanized the country. Inscriptions, especially from the borderland of Umbria, which had been partly Etruscan, bear ample witness to the way in which the language changed even within the old Etruscan families. About the middle of the first century parts of the country were ravaged by P. Clodius Pulcher and his bands of soldiers.[96] Then comes the foundation of new military colonies by Caesar and, finally, the complete Romanization of the country under Augustus. Propertius[97] describes, not without pathos, the extermination of the last Etruscan strongholds during the Perusian war in the year 40 B.C.: ‘eversosque focos antiquae gentis Etruscae’.

The knowledge of the Etruscan language was preserved all through antiquity by the Etruscan soothsayers. The emperor Claudius was versed in Etruscan, and delivered a long address in the Senate about the preservation of the old Etruscan ritual against the invasion of new, oriental elements. The other emperors had, as a rule, an Etruscan soothsayer in their suite, whom they consulted before taking any important step, and this custom survived down to the introduction of Christianity. Julian the Apostate was accompanied by hosts of Etruscan soothsayers, who, however, undoubtedly read the sacred books in the Latin translation by Tarquitius Priscus,[98] and, as late as 408, we learn that Tuscan soothsayers and scribes still existed. If any of them at that time could still read the language, then Etruscan, as a dead and sacred language, had survived the disappearance of the people by about half a millennium.[99]

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Livy iv. 37. 1-2.

[91] Livy v. 22. 8.

[92] Livy xxvii. 21. 6; 38. 6.

[93] Livy xxviii. 45. 14-18.

[94] Plutarch, _Tiberius Gracchus_ 8.

[95] As a punishment because the country had joined the party of Marius. Plutarch, _Marius_ 41.

[96] Cicero, _Pro Milone_ 26, 74, 87.

[97] ii. 1. 29. The later authors speak of nothing but the corpulency and imbecility of the Etruscans. Catullus, _Carm._ 39. 21. Virgil, _Georg._ ii. 193; _Aen._ xi. 732. Diodorus v. 40.

[98] Thulin, Pauly-Wissowa, vii. 2434.

[99] The best summary view of the Etruscan civilization is still to be found in Ottfried Müller, _Die Etrusker_, in the second edition by Deecke.

XVI

To this long, sad period of national decline the later group of Etruscan tomb-paintings and reliefs on cinerary urns form a remarkable and melancholy accompaniment.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ ORCO]

The continuity is unbroken; the new creeps in, at first, without superseding the old subjects. This is especially clear in the front room of the Tomba dell’ Orco, which dates from the latter part of the fifth century, and from which we reproduced the beautiful married couple at the symposium (figs. 28, 29); in the same sepulchral chamber we see in a corner, beneath a finely stylized vine, a terrible death demon, with large wings and a shock of wildly fluttering reddish hair, which is sharply outlined on a blue background as if it were surrounded by a halo. His beard is pointed, his nose terminates in an eagle’s beak; over his shoulder a snake rears itself, and the latchets of his shoes are snakes. His dress consists of a sleeved chiton with belt and shoulder-straps, and in his hand he carries a torch or a hammer. The eyes roll horribly in the bluish face; the colour of the skin recalls the blue-bottle fly (fig. 35).

[Sidenote: UNDERWORLD SCENES]

This death demon is painted isolated, unconnected with the subjects of the rest of the paintings, and could indeed be explained away as a decorative figure, created, to be sure, by an imagination inflamed with terror. But in the third room of the same tomb, the pictures of which belong to the transition from the fifth to the fourth century, a similar demon of the nether world is already represented in action (fig. 36). The inscription gives his name, Tuchulcha; he has asses’ ears, two snakes rear themselves like horns above his brow, and with a huge snake he threatens a long-haired youth who sits sorrowful on the rock, with a himation round his loins; his name, according to the inscription, is ‘These’. He is the Greek Theseus, and the young man opposite to him is Pirithous; the motive is their sufferings in the Underworld, where they had ventured down in order to abduct Persephone. But there broods over the scene a sinister spirit which is not Greek. Thus we see behind the rock on which Theseus is seated a loathsome snake with winged head, and the remains of a blue demon with staff and chiton, a kinsman of Tuchulcha. The appearance, to the left of this weird phantasmagoria, of the peaceful sideboard with its fine metal bowls[100] and with a handsome naked slave as cup-bearer in front of it, has undeniably a somewhat odd effect. This is a reminiscence of the old joyous symposium scenes, and a remarkable witness to the lack of clearness in the Etruscan mind and to the fragmentary character of Etruscan pictorial art. A similar mixture of everyday life and myth would be inconceivable in Egyptian or in Greek art.

Similarly, in the Tomba Golini, we see the side-table and the slave in immediate continuation of the picture representing the two enthroned rulers of the Underworld—Hades and Persephone (inscriptions: Eita and Phersipnai). Hades has a wolf-helmet and a snake-sceptre and is caressing Persephone, who has a bird-crowned sceptre in her left hand, and rests her right hand on the knee of Hades (see above fig. 32). Her dress, her face, and her yellow hair under the golden diadem are all splendidly painted.

In later Etruscan paintings we come upon two new groups of motives—fantastic pictures of the Underworld, and scenes from Greek mythology. Sometimes they mingle as in the Theseus and Pirithous scene and in the pictures of Hades and Persephone. Hades and Persephone recur in a painting in the third chamber of the Tomba dell’ Orco (inscription: Aita and Phersipnei), where weird mists roll about them, and a figure with three heads, Gerun, is standing before their throne (fig. 37). It is the Geryon of the Greeks, but he is not the cowherd on the far-distant island Erythra, but a warrior in complete armour who seems to be receiving the commands of Hades. Evidently the Etruscans have made him the servant and champion of Hades. Persephone has snakes in her hair and a curious collar which we meet again on the chitons of women in white Attic lekythoi of the fifth century B.C.[101] Hades wears the traditional wolf-helmet. It is remarkable that a head exactly similar to that of Hades is found among Michelangelo’s sketches (fig. 38), which seems to indicate that Michelangelo somewhere in Tuscany saw and sketched an old Etruscan tomb. To be sure, the snout of the animal reminds one of a pig’s, but the long ears and the fur are those of the wolf.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ ORCO]