The importance of the Etruscans does not simply lie in the painted tombs whose lively designs captivated D. H. Lawrence, nor in the puzzle of where their distinctive language originated, nor in the heavy imprint they left on early Rome. Theirs was the first civilization to emerge in the western Mediterranean under the impetus of the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Etruscan culture is sometimes derided as derivative, and the Etruscans have been labelled ‘artless barbarians’ by one of the most distinguished experts on Greek art;1 anything they produced that meets Greek standards is classified as the work of Greek artists, and the rest is discarded as proof of their artistic incompetence. Most, though, would find common cause with Lawrence in praising the vitality and expressiveness of their art even when it breaks with classical notions of taste or perfection. But what matters here is precisely the depth of the Greek and oriental imprint on Etruria, the westward spread of a variety of east Mediterranean cultures, and the building of close commercial ties between central Italy, rarely visited by the Mycenaeans, and both the Aegean and the Levant. This was part of a wider movement that also embraced, in different ways, Sardinia and Mediterranean Spain.
With the rise of the Etruscans – the building of the first cities in Italy, apart from the very earliest Greek colonies, the creation of Etruscan sea power, the formation of trading links between central Italy and the Levant – the cultural geography of the Mediterranean underwent a lasting transformation. Highly complex urban societies developed along the shores of the western Mediterranean; there, the products of Phoenicia and the Aegean were in constant demand, and new artistic styles came into existence, marrying native traditions with those of the East. Along the new trade routes linking Etruria to the east came not just Greek and Phoenician merchants but the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and it was the former (along with a full panoply of myths about Olympus, tales of Troy and legends of the heroes) that decisively conquered the minds of the peoples of central Italy. Mass markets were created for the fine vases of Corinth and later of Athens; indeed, the finest Greek vases have mostly been found not in Greece but inside Etruscan tombs. Carthage, too, owed much of its early success to the existence of markets close by in central Italy; it gained privileged access to the cities of Etruria, and this tie was confirmed by a series of treaties (which included one with Rome, in 509 BC). Whereas in North Africa and Sicily the Carthaginians traded with peoples whose culture they saw as relatively backward, in Etruria they found willing partners in trade, who also proved to be powerful allies in the struggle for control of the central Mediterranean between Carthage and the Greeks of Sicily.
The Etruscans have attracted attention because of the two ‘enigmas’ that are said to surround them: the question of their ethnic origins and the connected question of their language, unrelated to the other languages of the ancient world. Ancient historians produced their own confabulations concerning the migration of the Etruscans from the eastern Mediterranean; Herodotos’ version offers a precious account of how an Ionian Greek of the fifth century BC saw the relationships between peoples and places in the Mediterranean, and had great currency.2 He told how the migration took place in the reign of Atys, king of Lydia – in other words, in the very remote past. Herodotos relates that the Lydians invented board games, with the exception of draughts. The reason they did so was that they were afflicted by a severe famine. At first, their solution was to eat one day and spend the next day playing board games in the hope of forgetting their hunger: ‘in this way they persevered for eighteen years’. But conditions simply worsened. So the king divided the hungry population into two parts, and drew lots. One half of the population was to stay in Lydia, and the other was destined to search for a new home, under the leadership of Atys’ son Tyrsenos. The migrants went down to Smyrna, built ships, and sailed past many lands until they arrived in the land of the Umbrians, where they built cities and assumed the name Tyrsenoi after their leader Tyrsenos.3 Tyrsenos (or in the Attic dialect of Athens Tyrrhenos) was the standard Greek term for an Etruscan. Here, then, was another of those tales of travel to distant parts of which Greek writers were so fond. Among those who believed this story that the Etruscans had migrated from the east were the greatest Roman poets – Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus – and the most influential prose-writers – Cicero, Tacitus, Seneca. This was apparently the firm belief of the Etruscans and of the Lydians. In AD 26 Emperor Tiberius decided to erect a grand temple in a city in Asia Minor; in the hope of convincing the Romans that Sardis was the natural home for such a temple, the city reminded the Senate that the Etruscans were their colonists, sent out centuries ago, which proved that Sardis had always possessed intimate ties with Italy.4
Writing under Augustus, the antiquary Dionysios, who like Herodotos hailed from Halikarnassos, was determined to prove that the Etruscans were not oriental migrants, but that they were indigenous to Italy – ‘autochthonous’, born from the very soil of the land – as part of a complex argument which would demonstrate the close kinship of Greeks and Romans.5 This view came into fashion among revisionist twentieth-century historians who were aware that Herodotos’ account, still generally accepted, was only superficially satisfactory. On the one hand, Herodotos explained the extraordinary degree of oriental influence over early Etruscan art and culture. On the other hand, this influence was felt most profoundly around the time that the Phoenicians and Greeks began to penetrate into the Tyrrhenian Sea during the eighth and seventh centuries BC, a time far later than that hypothesized by Herodotos for the coming of easterners to Etruria. Nor was there any link between the Lydian language (of Luvian origin) and that of the Etruscans, as Dionysios had already noted.6 Doffing his cap briefly to Dionysios, the modern Italian archaeologist Massimo Pallottino insisted that the real question was not that of ‘race’ but that of how the Etruscan civilization came into being as a composite of many cultural elements: native peoples of many origins and languages, alongside foreign merchants from Phoenicia and Greece.7 At most, a few wandering condottieri from Asia Minor might have established themselves as rulers over communities in central Italy: this would explain the sudden passion of the elite of Tarquinia and Caere for grand tombs in the oriental style, beginning around 650 BC; while the name Tarquin (Tarchna) strongly recalls the name of an Anatolian storm god, Tarḫun, who in earlier centuries had given his name to people and places in Arzawa, near Troy. As for the Etruscan language, this must be a very ancient Mediterranean tongue that had persisted in Italy but was displaced elsewhere by invaders from the north and east speaking Indo-European languages such as Latin. Attempts have been made to solve this problem with the help of blood groups and DNA.8 Claims have been made that the modern population of Murlo in Tuscany, which was once an important Etruscan centre, shares a significant number of genes with Levantine populations, and that cattle in central Tuscany are also more ‘eastern’ than might be expected, leading scientists to postulate the arrival of not just human migrants but their beasts as well.9 However, since Etruscan times there have been plenty of opportunities for easterners to settle in Tuscan towns, as Roman legionaries or as medieval slaves. All this encourages the historian to concentrate on the real problem: not whence the Etruscans came, but how their distinctive culture came into being in Italy.
To say that Etruscan civilization emerged without a mass migration is not to say that the ties between Etruria and the eastern Mediterranean were insignificant. On the contrary, this explanation of the rise of Etruria places a heavy emphasis on the migration not of whole peoples but of objects, standards of taste and religious cults from east to west. Peoples may not have migrated; but there is good evidence from historical sources and from archaeology that individual people did so, for example Demaratos of Corinth, said to be the father of King Tarquin I of Rome (d. 579 BC), or the seventh-century Greek potter Aristonothos, who worked in Etruscan Caere.10 The Greeks and Phoenicians brought not just ceramics and luxury goods but new models of social behaviour. Banquets and funerary feasts (including the custom of reclining on couches at banquets) may have been copied from Syrian models. Sexual behaviour combined Greek and native Etruscan customs: the word katmite was a typically Etruscan compression of the Greek name Ganymede, and it passed into Latin as catamitus, ‘catamite’, along with sharp accusations that the Etruscans enjoyed pederasty, though observers were also puzzled at the prominent role accorded to women at what elsewhere were all-male banquets.11
From an early date, these Etruscans were also accused of being pirates. One of the Homeric Hymns makes the connection plain. It tells how the god Dionysos was standing on a headland by the sea, in the appearance of a handsome young man, with long hair waving in the wind, wearing a fine purple cloak. But
Soon men from a well-trimmed ship, pirates, came
quickly over the wine-dark sea, Tyrsenians. An evil fate brought
them. They saw him, nodded to each other, jumped quickly, seized
him and took him to the ship, rejoicing in their hearts.12
But his bonds fell from his body, and the helmsman realized that he was a god, not a man, saying: ‘Do not lay hands on him in case in his anger he summon fierce winds and heavy storms.’ But the captain replied: ‘I suspect he is going to Egypt or to Cyprus or to the Hyperborean land or even further. In the end he will tell us who are his friends and what is their wealth.’ Dionysos responded by covering the ship with festoons of vines, and wine ran down the middle of the vessel. He summoned a bear into existence; the terrified sailors jumped into the sea and were transformed into dolphins, while the god mercifully spared the helmsman, revealing himself as ‘loud-crying Dionysos’. The story of Dionysos and the pirates was a favourite theme of vase painters, including one of the most skilled Athenian painters, Exekias. A shallow cup from his hand depicts Dionysos lounging in a boat whose mast has become the support for an enormous vine that rises high above the ship’s broad sail, while seven dolphins leap around the ship; the image is painted in black-figure on a red ground and dates from about 530 BC.13 It carries his signature; most remarkably, it was found within the necropolis of one of the great Etruscan cities, Vulci. The inhabitants of Vulci possessed an almost insatiable appetite for the finest Greek pottery. The fact that the Etruscans were presented in such a negative way in the story did not prevent them from taking delight in Exekias’ cup.
In the hymn Dionysos seems to be standing on a headland somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, because the pirates imagine he may be trying to reach the Levant or the ‘Hyperborean land’ beyond the Black Sea. That Tyrsenians were present in Greek waters is confirmed by archaeological evidence from Lemnos and by the insistence of the ancient historians themselves that there were settlements consisting of these people on the islands and coasts of the Aegean.14 Herodotos and Thucydides spoke of Tyrsenians and Pelasgians who lived on the northern shores of the Aegean, around Mount Athos, and on Lemnos, within sight of Athos, from which they were expelled in 511 following an Athenian invasion.15 Out of this emerges a remarkable revision of the early history of Mediterranean trade and seafaring, in which the Greeks and Phoenicians have early competitors, somehow connected with the Etruscans. (According to an excessively ingenious French scholar, the story of Dionysos and the dolphins is really a tale about how the Etruscans tried to dominate the wine trade in the Mediterranean.)16 All Etruscans were (in Greek) Tyrsenoi; but that is not necessarily to say that all Tyrsenoi were Etruscans. The term was clearly used in a generic sense to mean barbarian pirates.17
These comments might be easily dismissed as another example of ancient historians’ fantasies about mysterious pre-Greek peoples. Yet the myths can be linked to reality. A gravestone discovered at Kaminia on Lemnos, and thought to date from around 515 BC, has a crude portrayal of a warrior carrying a spear and shield, accompanied by an extensive inscription in the Greek alphabet, but in a non-Greek language. Since a few other fragmentary inscriptions have also been found in the same language, the gravestone is evidently a record of the language spoken on Lemnos when the island was still inhabited by Thucydides’ ‘Tyrsenians’. This language was similar to, but not identical with, that of Etruscan inscriptions from far away in central Italy.18 The Kaminia stone was erected in memory of Holaies the Phokaian (Phokiasale), who occupied high office and who died at the age of forty (some argue sixty). Holaies apparently served as a mercenary in Phokaia, on the Ionian coast, and in other lands around the Aegean.19 But the Tyrsenians of the Aegean were in all respects, apart from language and love of piracy, unlike the Etruscans. Lemnos did not imitate Etruria in its art and crafts; but for the comments by classical historians and but for the inscriptions, there would be no suggestion that the inhabitants were linked to the Etruscans. There are no shards of Etruscan pottery, no signs of a direct link between these lands speaking similar tongues.20 A seventh-century temple site outside Myrina (now somewhat oddly incorporated in a holiday hotel) consists of a maze of passages and rooms, and recalls nothing obvious in either Greece or Italy. Thus the Tyrsenians of the Aegean consisted of people who spoke a similar language to Etruscan, and probably shared their love of piracy, but retained a very conservative culture while, as will be seen, the Tyrsenians of Italy transformed Etruria into the seat of a pioneering civilization.
The Greeks might try to pigeon-hole each ethnic group they encountered, drawing sharp lines between them, but the reality was that places like Lemnos and Athos were the points where old and new cultures met. Sometimes ancient customs and even languages lingered in such places. The coasts and islands of the Mediterranean did not foster uniformity. Pockets of different peoples lived scattered around the islands and shores of the Mediterranean then and for millennia afterwards. The rigid compartmentalization of the peoples of the Mediterranean by Greek writers distorted the reality of what was there.
To move from conservative Lemnos to Tarquinia, in southern Etruria, is to enter a different world, one that was undergoing startling changes, the result of powerful impulses that had arrived from across the Mediterranean. This great transformation began as early as the tenth century; a sophisticated culture spread inland from the coast of western Italy, because the areas closest to the Mediterranean were the first to come into close contact with the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. First of all, a series of village communities staked out land for huts on the top of the hill that would later be occupied by the great city known to the Romans as Tarquinii.21 The plural form of this name, and that of other Etruscan city names (Veii, Volsinii, Vulci, Volaterrae), perhaps suggests a memory of these multiple origins. The pre-urban culture that came into existence in these villages is known as ‘Villanovan’, as entirely modern a name as it sounds: Villanova is a suburb of Bologna where the distinctive features of this culture were first recognized by archaeologists who excavated its rich cremation burials. Villanovan culture emerged simultaneously by the sea in southern Etruria, gradually spreading north into what is now Tuscany, and across the Apennines in Bologna. However, it was in the maritime cities of Etruria that the great leap towards urban civilization first occurred: these were rich cities, well organized, with literate elites, handsome temples and skilled craftsmen. Etruscan civilization spread inland from the coastal cities, and later centres such as Perugia emerged only as the inhabitants of the interior were gradually Etruscanized.22 In that sense the Etruscan ‘nation’ did indeed emerge out of a migration, but it was a migration within Italy, from the Mediterranean coasts towards and over the Apennines, and a migration of styles more than of people.
The most striking examples of Villanovan technology are the impressive crested helmets made of bronze, whose method of production recalls that of bronzework in central Europe at the same period; the helmets are clear testimony to the role of warriors in the stratified village society of the Villanovans.23 The shift among those of high birth from cremation to burial in long, narrow shaft graves was not the result of a great population shift but of a change in customs, influenced by contact with overseas. Eventually these shaft graves would turn into something much grander, the tumuli and painted tombs of Tarquinia and Cerveteri. One of the early warrior princes can be identified, though not by name, for there are no inscriptions in his praise, and there is no evidence the Villanovans used writing. In 1869 news circulated of the discovery of a vast sarcophagus in the necropolis outside Tarquinia; this late eighth-century burial became known as the ‘Warrior’s Tomb’.24 Its contents demonstrate the arrival of goods from the eastern Mediterranean, which became the prized possession of a Tarquinian prince. Fourteen vases in the Greek style were found in the tomb; several were made in Italy by émigré Greek potters, though their design is reminiscent of goods produced in Crete, Rhodes and Cyprus.25 This evidence of wider links with the eastern Mediterranean is confirmed by the discovery in the tomb of a scarab ring made of silver and bronze; engraved on the underside of the scarab is a lion in the Phoenician style.26
These connections to the outside world were made by sea. A number of pottery models of boats survive from the Villanovan period; their prow takes the form of a bird’s head, and it has been surmised that they were placed in the graves of Villanovan pirates and merchants because it was impossible to bury an entire boat with the body or ashes of the deceased.27 In the early seventh century the potter Aristonothos, who lived and worked in Caere, decorated a krater with a lively scene of a sea battle, possibly between Greeks and Etruscans, one group aboard a low-lying oared vessel and the others aboard a heavier merchant ship.28 What the Villanovans brought back with them can be deduced from home-made objects as well as from imports, for there are echoes of the Aegean world in the design of bronze weapons, and nowhere more than in the style of pottery: traditional Villanovan forms were wedded with Greek styles to produce decorated jars that recall the Geometric style of ninth-century Greece. Jewellery began to be decorated with the fine granulation that was later to become the hallmark of Etruscan goldsmiths; this was a method that was learned from (and eventually surpassed) the Levant.29 Some bronzework even has parallels with the fine bronze casting of Urartu, in modern Armenia.30 The trade in base metals was the real foundation of Etruscan prosperity. It was mainly thanks to plentiful local supplies of copper, iron and other metals that the Etruscans could pay for the goods that they imported in increasingly massive quantities from Greece and the Levant, for they had little to offer in the way of finished goods (though they did find a market for their polished black bucchero wares, which turned up in Greece, Sicily and Spain). Elba, and the facing coast around Populonia, which was the only major Etruscan city actually situated on the sea, provided plentiful quantities of iron; a little inland, around Volterra and Vetulonia, copper mines were abundant.31 By the seventh century a flourishing new settlement near the mouth of the river Arno came into existence at Pisa, through which much of this traffic flowed.32 Via Pisa, the Etruscans exchanged metals with the inhabitants of Sardinia; Sard potters even settled in Vetulonia.33 They may have arrived as slaves, for slave-raiding and slave-trading were further means to gain profit in the Tyrrhenian Sea as it opened up to commerce. Salt was another asset; the citizens of the Etruscan city of Veii and its very close neighbour Rome competed for control of the salt supplies at the mouth of the Tiber. Wine was a particular favourite of Etruscan traders; it was sent out of the Tyrrhenian Sea towards southern France.34
The exploitation of this material wealth became more intense once the Greeks had installed themselves close by in Ischia. And yet the arrival of the Greeks there follows by several decades the first evidence of close contact between central Italy and the Greek world, in the eighth century BC. Villanovan brooches and safety-pins appear on Greek sites, and there are also a good many fragments of shields and helmets made by Villanovan bronze-masters.35 Perhaps they were carried on the ‘Tyrsenian’ ships mentioned by Greek authors. As links were forged to Ionia and to Corinth, the early Etruscans manufactured their own versions of Proto-Corinthian pottery. The most powerful inhabitants of Tarquinia and its neighbours sought the fine goods of the eastern Mediterranean, which loudly proclaimed their power and status: ostrich eggs brought by Phoenician traders, ivory and gold plaques showing sphinxes, panthers, lotuses and other ‘oriental’ motifs, objects made of faience and glass with Egyptian themes (though these were most often imitations made in Phoenicia).36
There was one import from the East that would transform the face of Italy. The alphabet reached the Etruscans from the Greeks, though it is uncertain whether the source was Greece itself or the first Greek settlements at Pithekoussai and Kyma. The form the Etruscan letters took indicates that they were derived from the Euboian version of the Greek alphabet. The alphabet came along the trade routes; and it came early. One of the most remarkable finds in Etruria is a seventh-century tablet unearthed in 1915 at Marsiliana d’Albegna. Around its edge is scratched an entire alphabet, in the traditional order of letters, the forms of which appear very archaic.37 It was found with a stylus, and there were traces of wax on the tablet, so it was evidently obtained with the express purpose of learning the art of writing.38 Out of the model alphabet a standard Etruscan alphabet developed, written generally from right to left (like Phoenician and some early Greek alphabets); and from this were derived the alphabets of many of the neighbouring peoples, notably the Romans.
Early inscriptions reveal a great deal about contacts across the sea. Greek and Etruscan merchants recorded their transactions, as can be seen on a lead plaque found at Pech Maho in south-western France, dating from the mid-fifth century BC. One side is written in Etruscan, and refers to Mataliai or Marseilles; later, the plaque was re-used, to record in Greek the purchase of some boats from men of Emporion, a Greek base on the coast of Catalonia.39 Three golden plaques found at Pyrgoi, the port of Caere, on the coast north of Rome, reveal the Phoenician (most probably Carthaginian) presence in the maritime cities of Etruria. Two of the tablets are in Etruscan and one is in Phoenician; they record a dedication by Thefarie Velianas, ‘king over Cisra’ (or Caere), around 500 BC; the king dedicated a temple to the Etruscan goddess Uni, generally identified with the Greek Hera and the Roman Juno, but here identified with Astarte, the goddess of the Phoenicians.40 There were Greek visitors too: an inscription, of around 570 BC, appears on a stone made in the shape of half a crescent, representing an anchor, found near Tarquinia: ‘I belong to the Aiginetan Apollo. Sostratos had me made.’ The language is the Greek dialect of the island of Aigina near Athens; this is surely the Sostratos said by Herodotos to be the leading Greek merchant trading towards Tartessos.41 The Etruscans did not try to erect barriers against foreign merchants and settlers, or against their gods; in fact, they welcomed them and sought to learn from them.42
In the middle of the seventh century the culture, politics and even landscape of the Etruscans was transformed, as the intense influence of ‘orientalizing’ styles of art overwhelmed the ancient culture of the Villanovans. Greece had seen a similar process of transformation as its ties to the Levant were strengthened by way of Ionian and Phoenician merchants. Indeed, these Ionians formed part of the wave of influences from the East that crossed the sea to Etruria, so that the Greek and other eastern influences are hard to disentangle: sculpted winged creatures protect the tombs of the deceased, which were built in increasingly lavish styles, no longer as simple graves but as substantial chamber-tombs, often imitating the houses of the living. The earliest monumental tombs in Tarquinia stood above the ground, broad, circular constructions with a peaked roof; tufa slabs above the entrance portrayed the gods and spirits of the next world, but they also proclaimed the wealth of the new princely elite that could afford to build such impressive palaces for the dead. The source of inspiration was very probably similar tombs in the eastern Mediterranean, in regions such as Lydia, Lycia and Cyprus. Painted tombs for elite families became a Tarquinian speciality from the middle of the sixth century onwards, though earlier examples are known from neighbouring cities, and the discovery of a partly painted antechamber to what may be a royal tomb, dating to the middle of the seventh century BC, caused much excitement when it was announced in August 2010 – the closest comparison is with contemporary Greek tombs at Salamis in eastern Cyprus.43 The earliest tombs betray such powerful influence from the art of Greek Ionia that it is legitimate to ask whether the artists themselves were Ionian Greeks; evidently there was no sharp line between foreign and native craftsmen. Sixth-century paintings from tombs in Caere, now preserved in the Louvre and the British Museum, with their strong delineation, formal arrangement and careful organization of space, are not merely Ionian in style but almost certainly portray scenes from Greek mythology: the judgment of Paris, the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. The painted tombs of Tarquinia were often decorated with scenes of family feasting, but there were also tales to be told from Greek mythology: Achilles appears in the Tomb of the Bulls, and the mysterious processions of the Tomb of the Baron are painted in a style that is thoroughly Greek. A painted frieze shows youths leading horses and a meeting between a bearded man with a young companion and a mistress or goddess. Simply coloured, in red, green or black on a grey undercoat, each figure displays profound Ionian influence – in the costume, which includes the Ionian tutulus, a peaked hat, and in the fleshy, rounded limbs. D. H. Lawrence, touring the tombs in the 1920s, was (like most visitors) enchanted by the unusual and very lively scenes in the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, showing birds in flight, a naked man diving into the sea and a fisherman trailing a line; this, at least, seemed to be the expressive voice of Etruscan rather than Greek art. But the discovery of a painted tomb in the Greek colony at Poseidonia (Paestum) in southern Italy, showing a diving scene, suggests that these images were part of the general repertoire of Greek painters.
Much the same can be said for other branches of the arts and, more importantly, for the thought-world that they reveal. Etruscan potters began to imitate the black-figure pottery of Corinth and Athens with varying success. Later, painting in black on the red surface of the pot gave way to a still more delicate red-figure technique, by which the pot was painted black but figures were left largely unpainted on the red ground of the ceramic; and the Etruscans bought prodigious quantities of the new wares from Athens, also making their own imitations.44 But the Etruscans had a strongly conservative outlook too. Their preference was for archaic or ‘archaizing’ styles even when, in Athens, the full classical style invested sculpture and painting with a greater sense of life and ‘harmony’.45 The pottery they bought from the Greeks was not always of the highest quality. At Spina, an Etruscan settlement on the mouth of the Po, virtually all the pottery so far discovered has been Greek, especially Attic Greek; but sometimes it is very poor Greek, as the name given to one Attic artist – ‘the Worst Painter’ – illustrates.46 Most importantly, the subject-matter of the illustrations on these pots was consistently the stories of Greek mythology. The peoples of Italy were beginning to appropriate the myths and religious ideas of the Greek world; old cults of groves and water-sources remained very much alive, but the amorphous gods of the Italian peoples acquired the shape, form and indeed moodiness of the Olympians. The roof beam of a great temple at Veii was decorated around 500 BC with life-size painted figures of Apollo, Hermes and other gods, made of terracotta, the work of a celebrated Etruscan sculptor named Vulca. The fluid style of the sculptures was not simply borrowed wholesale from the Greeks; the practice of decorating the roof beam so dramatically was an Etruscan and not a Greek one. But what Vulca portrayed was Greek legend, not Etruscan. These works were the product of an Italo-Graeco-oriental syncretism, which in a sense is what we call Etruscan art. This syncretism was also expressed in the art of divination: here again Near Eastern practices merged with native Italian ones. No one was better at reading the spots on the liver of a sacrificial beast than an Etruscan soothsayer, or haruspex, and Etruscan soothsayers were still being consulted when the Goths attacked Rome in AD 410.
The relationship between the Greeks and the Etruscans also took a political form, and there relations were much less easy than in the spheres of culture, religion and trade. From at least the eighth century BC there had been sea battles between the peoples of central Italy and the Greeks. Evidence of this has been found on Greek soil at Olympia and at Delphi, where eighth-century Villanovan helmets, seized from defeated enemies, were dedicated to the gods.47 Etruscan navigators often competed and sometimes cooperated with Phokaians from Greek Ionia in the waters off southern France, where the Phokaians founded a colony (the future Marseilles).48 Herodotos reports a great battle between Phokaians and Etruscans, off the Corsican town of Alalia in around 540. Sixty Phokaian ships were ranged against sixty Carthaginian ships and sixty more from Caere. Despite this imbalance, the Phokaian ships won the battle, but their fleet was so crippled that the Phokaians had to evacuate Corsica. Herodotos tells how the Caeretans massacred their Phokaian prisoners by stoning them to death. Soon after, the Caeretans noticed that those who passed the site of the massacre suddenly became lame; this happened not just to human beings, but to their flocks. Perplexed, the Caeretans sent a mission to the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, and they were ordered to hold regular games in memory of the Phokaians, a practice that continued to Herodotos’ time; similar funeral games are often shown on the walls of Etruscan painted tombs.49 The Caeretans maintained their links with the shrine at Delphi, where the foundations of the treasury of the Caeretans have been identified; indeed, they were the first ‘barbarians’ to be admitted to what was primarily a Hellenic cult site.50 Meanwhile the Etruscans were free to exploit Corsica for its iron, wax and honey. More important than its resources, though, was the fact that Etruscan shipping now faced no rivals in the northern Tyrrhenian Sea.51
The southern Tyrrhenian was another matter. The Greeks of Kyma were particularly conscious of the proximity of Etruscan power – land as well as sea power – since two Etruscan cities lay in the hinterland (Capua, Nola); and the Etruscans gained control over at least one coastal town, Pompeii.52 Kyma had to rely on help from the Greek colonists in Sicily to triumph over the Etruscans. In 474 Hieron, tyrant of Syracuse, secured a victory that would transform not just the political but the commercial face of the western Mediterranean. He was well aware of this: at the time when Xerxes’ Persian hordes had just been repelled by the might of Hellas, this was his contribution to the defeat of the barbarians. Moreover, Hieron’s victory at Kyma followed another victory at Himera in Sicily, where six years earlier the Syracusan fleet under his predecessor Gelon had decisively defeated its other enemy in the western Mediterranean, Carthage; Gelon’s victory was said to have occurred on the same day as one of the great battles against the Persians, the Greek victory at Salamis.53 Writing not long afterwards, the Greek poet Pindar took the defeat of the Etruscans at Kyma as one of the main themes of his ode in praise of Hieron ‘of Etna, winner of the chariot race’:
Grant, I beg, O son of Kronos, that the Phoenician and the Tyrrhenians’ war-cry keep quiet at home: it has seen what woe to its ships came of its pride before Kyma, and all that befell when the lord of Syracuse routed them, who out of their swift sailing ships cast down their youth in the sea – the dragger of Hellas from her weight of slavery.54
Hieron dedicated an Etruscan pot-helmet at Olympia inscribed: ‘Hieron, son of Deinomenes and the Syracusans and Zeus: Tyrsenian from Kyma’; it is now preserved in the British Museum. However, Pindar’s attempt to link the Etruscans and the Carthaginians (‘the Phoenicians’ war-cry’) was anachronistic. For whatever reason, relations between the Carthaginians and the Etruscans had already begun to weaken in the two decades before the battle of Kyma. There is a clear archaeological break in Etruscan imports to Carthage not before 550 and not after 500.55 Anaxilas of Rhegion, a Greek ally of Carthage, built a rampart specifically to prevent an Etruscan attack on his city, perched on the Straits of Messina. On their own and without success Etruscan ships sailed south to attack the Lipari islands, which still functioned, as they had done since prehistoric times, as a centre of exchange linking the western Mediterranean to the eastern Mediterranean.56 During the early fifth century, then, the Etruscans became increasingly isolated within the western Mediterranean.
Even though Etruscan ships appear in action again at the end of the fifth century, the Syracusans had won access to the whole Tyrrhenian Sea. In 453–2, they raided the coast off Caere and installed themselves briefly on iron-bearing Elba, where they captured many slaves; at long last the Tyrsenian pirates were being paid back in their own coin.57 The Etruscans maintained their grudge against Syracuse until the Peloponnesian War, which will be discussed in a later chapter. When they launched their own attacks on Syracuse, the Athenians were well aware of this hostility.58 In 413 BC the Etruscans sent three large warships to Syracuse to help the Athenian fleet. As Thucydides laconically remarked: ‘there were some Tyrrhenians fighting because of their hatred for Syracuse’.59 They were few but they saved the day on at least one occasion. Several centuries later the Spurinna family, a noble clan of Tarquinia, proudly erected a Latin inscription in praise of their ancestors, one of whom was a naval commander in the Sicilian campaign of 413 BC.60
The links between Greece and Etruria were effected by way of a city in southern Italy famed for its inhabitants’ love of luxury. Until its destruction in 510 as a result of local jealousies, Sybaris was the great entrepôt at which products arrived from Corinth, Ionia and Athens, before being transported across country to Poseidonia (Paestum) and embarked on Etruscan ships.61 Sybaris was especially famous, or notorious, for its friendship towards Etruria; according to Athenaios of Naukratis (who lived in the second century AD), its commercial alliances stretched far in two directions, north to Etruria and east to Miletos on the coast of Asia Minor:
The Sybarites wore mantles made of wool from Miletos, and from this sprang the friendship between the states. The Sybarites loved the Etruscans above all other peoples of Italy and among those of the Orient had a special preference for the Ionians, because these, like themselves, were fond of luxury.62
The western Greeks functioned as intermediaries: it was not their own products but those of their brethren in the Aegean world that interested the Etruscans.
One way in which the Athenians managed to maintain their superiority over their rivals was by using new channels of communication when the old ones were rendered inaccessible by war and commercial disputes. The battle of Kyma marked the beginning of the end of the Etruscan thalassocracy in the western Mediterranean. The Tyrrhenian Sea was no longer their lake, but had to be shared with the Carthaginians, Greeks of Magna Graecia and new contenders such as the Romans and the Volscians, hill-people from central Italy who proved remarkably versatile and managed to launch their own pirate raids. The Etruscans responded to the loss of maritime opportunities by taking control of towns inland, including Perugia (previously a centre of the Umbrian people, related to the Latins), Bologna (previously inhabited by ‘Villanovans’ culturally similar to the very early Etruscans) and cities in the Po Valley such as Mantua.63 This meant that new routes could open up, carrying goods from the eastern Mediterranean across the peninsula from ports on the shores of the Adriatic. In the seventh and sixth centuries an extraordinary cultural florescence had occurred in what are now the Italian Marches, among the people known as the Picenes, who were open to Greek influences by sea and to Etruscan influences overland.64 But after 500 the Adriatic became the main channel of communication with the Greek lands; the route was convenient for mariners, even if it entailed what must have been a costly overland journey through the Apennines. For ships could set out from the Gulf of Corinth, clearing the Ionian islands and calling in at the Greek colonies of Apollonia and Epidamnos, before working their way up past the lands of the Picenes to Adria and Spina, newly developed ports in the mud-flats and shallows of north-eastern Italy, close to the later cities of Ferrara and Ravenna. Just as the Este dukes of Renaissance Ferrara devoted great energy to the breeding of fine horses, so too in the archaic and classical Greek periods horse-breeding drew the Greeks to this region.65
Spina was either an Etruscan foundation that experienced heavy Greek immigration or a Greek foundation that experienced heavy Etruscan immigration; its population was a mix of Etruscans, Greeks, Veneti from north-eastern Italy and any number of other peoples. It may have been the outport of the inland city of Felsina (Etruscan Bologna): a late fifth-century stele from Bologna portrays a warship that belonged to a member of the Kaikna family of Felsina, and it is hard to see where they could have based their ships except in the Adriatic ports such as Spina. Spina and Adria offered the Greeks and Etruscans large numbers of Italic and Celtic slaves; these numbers could only grow as Etruscan colonizers in the Po Valley and Celtic invaders coming across the Alps collided with one another. Spina was laid out on a grid plan, a design the Etruscans strongly favoured, but the water channels leading to the sea gave it something of the character of an Etrusco-Greek Venice. Over 4,000 tombs have been opened in its necropolis; massive quantities of Greek vases have been recovered, including many from the fifth and early fourth centuries, after which the link to Athens was sundered and the citizens of Spina had to rely on inferior pottery from Etruscan kilns.66 The alluvial agricultural land of the Po delta was highly productive, but the problem with alluvial soils is that they do not stand still, and, as they advanced in the fourth century, the city found itself stranded further and further from the sea. Meanwhile, Celtic raids into Italy, which culminated in an attack on Rome in 390 BC, had severe effects in this region, which was heavily settled by the invaders.67 Thus Spina’s period of efflorescence was relatively short, but brilliant. Its rise to prominence formed part of a wider process which saw the entire Adriatic become a marketplace in which Greek wares were widely available.
The emergence of the Etruscan cities was thus much more than a phenomenon of the Tyrrhenian Sea; the Adriatic too was opened to the movement of people and goods. Along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians, the Etruscans refashioned the Mediterranean, helping to create interconnections that spanned the entire sea.