Chapter IV.

The Painted Tombs of Tarquinia

2.

We sit at the tin tables of the café above the gate, watching the peasants coming in this evening from the fields, with their implements and their asses. As they drift in through the gate, the man of the Dazio, the town customs, watches them, asks them questions if they carry bundles, prods the pack on the ass, and when a load of brush-wood rolls up, keeps it halted while he pierces the load with a long steel rod, carefully thrusting to see if he can feel hidden barrels of wine or demijohns of oil, bales of oranges or any other food-stuffs. Because all food-stuffs that come into an Italian town—other things too, besides comestibles—must pay a duty, in some instances a heavy one.

Probably in etruscan days the peasants came in very much the same, at evening, to the town. The Etruscans were instinctively citizens. Even the peasants dwelt within walls. And in those days, no doubt the peasants were serfs very much as they are today in Italy, working the land for no wages, but for a portion of the produce: and working the land intensely, with that careful, almost passionate attention the Italian still gives to the soil: and living in the city, or village, but having straw huts out in the fields, for summer.

But in those days, on a fine evening like this, the men would come in naked, darkly ruddy-coloured from the sun and wind, with strong, insouciant bodies: and the women would drift in, wearing the loose, becoming smock of white or blue linen: and somebody, surely, would be playing on the pipes, and somebody, surely, would be singing, because the Etruscans had a passion for music, and an inner carelessness the modern Italians have lost. The peasants would enter the clear, clean, sacred space inside the gates, and salute the gay-coloured little temple as they passed along the street that rose uphill towards the arx, between rows of low houses with gay-coloured fronts, painted, or hung with bright terra cottas. One can almost hear them still, calling, shouting, piping, singing, driving in the mixed flocks of sheep and goats, that go so silently, and leading the slow, white, ghost-like oxen with the yokes still on their necks.

And surely, in those days, young nobles would come splashing in on horseback, riding with naked limbs on an almost naked horse, carrying probably a spear, and cantering ostentatiously through the throng of red-brown, full-limbed, smooth-skinned peasants. A Lucumo, even, sitting very noble in his chariot driven by an erect charioteer, might be driving in at sundown, halting before the temple, to perform the brief ritual of entry into the city. And the crowding populace would wait; for the Lucumo of the old days, glowing ruddy in flesh, his beard stiffly trimmed, in the oriental style, the torque of gold round his neck, and the rich mantle bordered with scarlet falling in full folds, leaving the breast bare, he was divine, sitting on the chair of his chariot in the stillness of power. And the people drew strength even from looking at him.

The chariot drew forward a little from the temple; the Lucumo, sitting on his chair in his chariot, would drop his mantle from his shoulders and wait, seated with bare breast and shoulders. Then the peasants would shrink back in fear. And perhaps some citizen in a white tunic would lift up his arms in the salute, and come forward to state some difficulty or ask for justice. And the Lucumo, seated silent within another world of power, disciplined to his own responsibility of knowledge and inner wisdom, listened till all was said. Then a few words—and the chariot of gilt bronze swirls off up the hill to the house of the chief, the citizens drift on to their houses, the music sounds in the dark streets, torches flicker, the whole place is eating, feasting, and as far as possible, having a gay time.

It is different now. The drab peasants, muffled in ugly clothing, straggle in across the waste bit of space, and trail home songless and meaningless. We have lost the art of living, and in the most important science of all, the science of daily life, the science of behaviour, we are complete ignoramuses. We have psychology instead. Today, in Italy, in the hot Italian summer, if a navvy working in the street takes off his shirt to work with free, naked torso, a policeman rushes to him and commands him insultingly into his shirt again. One would think the human being was such a foul indecency altogether, that life was only feasible when the indecent thing was as far as possible blotted out. The very exposure of female arms and legs in the street is only done as an insult to the whole human body. “Look at that! it doesn’t matter!”

Neither does it!—But then, why did the torso of the workman matter?

At the hotel, in the dark emptiness of the place, there are three Japanese staying: little yellow men. They have come to inspect the salt works down on the coast below Tarquinia, so we are told, and they have a government permit. The salt works, the extracting of salt from the pools shut off from the low sea, are sort of prisons, worked by convict labour. One wonders why Japanese men should want to inspect such places, officially. But we are told that these salt works are “very important.”

Albertino is having a very good time with the three Japanese, and seems to be very deep in their confidence, bending over their table, his young brown head among the three black ones, absorbed and on the qui vive. He rushes off for their food—then rushes to us to see what we want to eat.

“What is there?”

“Er—c’è—” he always begins with wonderful deliberation, as if there was a menu fit for the Tzar. Then he breaks off, suddenly, says: “I’ll ask the mamma!”—darts away—returns, and says exactly what we knew he’d say—in a bright voice, as if announcing the New Jerusalem.—“There are eggs—er—and beefsteak—er—and there are some little potatoes—” We know the eggs and beefsteak well! However, I decide to have beefsteak once more, with the little potatoes—left over by good fortune from lunch—fried. Off darts Albertino—only to dart back and announce that the potatoes and beefsteak are finished (by the Chinese, he whispers)—but there are frogs. There are what? Le rane, the frogs!—What sort of frogs?—I’ll show you!—Off he darts again, returns with a plate containing eight or nine pairs of frogs’ naked hind-legs. B. looks the other way, and I accept frogs—they look quite good. In the joy of getting the frogs safely to port, Albertino skips, and darts off: to return in a moment with a bottle of beer, and whisper to us all the information about the Chinese, as he calls them.—They can’t speak a word of Italian. When they want a word, they take the little book, French and Italian. Bread?—eh? They want bread. Er!—Albertino gives little grunts, like commas and semi-colons, which I write as er!—Bread they want, eh?—er!—they take the little book,—here he takes an imaginary little book, lays it on the table-cloth, wets his finger and turns over the imaginary leaves—bread!—er!—p—you look under ‘p’—er!—ecco! pane!—pane!—si capisce!—bread! they want bread. Then wine! er! take the little book—(he turns over imaginary little leaves with fervour)—er! here you are, vino!—pane, e vino! So they do! Every word! They looked out name! Er! Name! You! Er! I tell him, Albertino!—And so the boy continues, till I ask what about le rane? Ah! Er! Le rane!—Off he darts, and swirls back with a plate of fried frogs’ legs, in pairs.

He is an amusing and vivacious boy, yet underneath, a bit sad and wistful, with all his responsibility. The following day he darted to show us a book of views of Venice, left behind by the Chinese, as he persists in calling them, and asks if I want it. I don’t. Then he shows us two Japanese postage-stamps, and the address of one of the Japanese gentlemen, written on a bit of paper. The Japanese gentleman and Albertino are to exchange picture postcards. I insist that the Japanese are not Chinese.—Er! says Albertino. But the Japanese are also Chinese!—I insist they are not, that they live in a different country. He darts off, and returns with a school atlas.—Er! China is in Asia! Asia! Asia!—he turns the leaves. He is really an intelligent boy, and ought to be going to school instead of running an hotel at the tender age of fourteen.

The guide to the tombs, having had to keep watch at the museum all night, wants to get a sleep after dawn, so we are not to start till ten. The town is already empty, the people gone out to the fields. A few men stand about with nothing doing. The city gates are wide open. At night they are closed, so that the Dazio man can sleep: and you can neither get in nor out of the town. We drink still another coffee—Albertino’s morning dose was a very poor show.

Then we see the guide, talking to a pale young fellow in old corduroy velveteen knee-breeches and an old hat and thick boots: most obviously German. We go over, make proper salutes, nod to the German boy, who looks as if he’d had vinegar for breakfast—and set off. This morning we are going out a couple of miles, to the furthest end of the necropolis. We have still a dozen tombs to look at. In all, there are either twenty-five or twenty-seven painted tombs one can visit.

This morning there is a stiff breeze from the south-west. But it is blowing fresh and clear, not behaving in the ugly way the libeccio can behave. We march briskly along the high-way, the old dog trundling behind. He loves spending a morning among the tombs. The sea gives off a certain clearness, that makes the atmosphere doubly brilliant and exhilarating, as if we were on a mountain top. The omnibus rolls by, from Viterbo. In the fields the peasants are working, and the guide occasionally greets the women, who give him a sally back again. The young German tramps firmly on: but his spirit is not as firm as his tread. One doesn’t know what to say to him, he vouchsafes nothing, seems as if he didn’t want to be spoken to, and yet is probably offended that we don’t talk to him. The guide chatters to him in unfailing cheerfulness, in Italian: but after a while, drops back with evident relief to the milder company of B., leaving me to the young German, who has certainly swallowed vinegar some time or other.

But I feel with him as with most of the young people of today: he has been sinned against more than he sins. The vinegar was given him to drink. Breaking reluctantly into German, since Italian seems foolish, and he won’t come out in English, I find, within the first half mile, that he is twenty-three (he looks nineteen), has finished his university course, is going to be an archaeologist, is travelling doing archaeology, has been in Sicily and Tunis, whence he has just returned; didn’t think much of either place—mehr Schrei wie Wert—he jerks out, speaking as if he were throwing his words away like a cigarette-end he was sick of—; doesn’t think much of any place; doesn’t think much of the Etruscans—nicht viel Wert; doesn’t, apparently, think much of me; knows a professor or two whom I have met; knows the tombs of Tarquinia very well, having been here, and stayed here, twice before; doesn’t think much of them; is going to Greece; doesn’t expect to think much of it; is staying in the other hotel, not Gentile’s, because it is still cheaper: is probably staying a fortnight, going to photograph all the tombs, with a big photographic apparatus—has the government authority, like the Japs—apparently has very little money indeed, marvellously doing everything on nothing—expects to be a famous professor in a science he doesn’t think much of—and I wonder if he always has enough to eat.

He certainly is a fretful and peevish, even if in some ways silent and stoical young man. Nicht viel Wert!—not much worth—doesn’t amount to anything—seems to be his favourite phrase, as it is the favourite phrase of almost all young people today. Nothing amounts to anything, for the young.

Well, I feel it’s not my fault, and try to bear up. But though it is bad enough to have been of the war generation, it must be worse to have grown up just after the war. One can’t blame the young, that they don’t find that anything amounts to anything. The war cancelled most meanings for them.

And my young man is not really so bad: he would even rather like to be made to believe in something. There is a yearning pathos in him somewhere.

We have passed the modern cemetery, with its white marble head-stones, and the arches of the mediaeval aqueduct mysteriously spanning a dip, and left the highroad, following a path along the long hill-crest, through the green wheat that flutters and ripples in the sea-wind like fine feathers, in the wonderful brilliance of morning. Here and there are tassels of mauve anemones, bits of verbena, many daisies, tufts of camomiles. On a rocky mound which was once a tumulus, the asphodels have the advantage, and send up their spikes on the bright, fresh air, like soldiers clustered on the mount. And we go on along this vivid green headland of wheat, which still is rough and uneven, because it was once all tumuli, with our faces to the breeze, the sea-brightness filling the air with exhilaration, and all the country still and silent, and we talk German in the wary way of two dogs sniffing at one another.

Till suddenly we turn off to an almost hidden tomb—the German boy knows the way perfectly. The guide hurries up and lights the acetylene lamp, the dog slowly finds himself a place out of the wind, and flings himself down: and we sink slowly again into the etruscan world, out of the present world, as we descend underground.

One of the most famous tombs at this far-off end of the necropolis is the Tomb of the Bulls. It contains what the guide calls: un po’ di pornografico!—but a very little. The German boy shrugs his shoulders as usual: but he informs me that this is one of the oldest tombs of all, and I believe him, for it looks so to me.

It is a little wider than some tombs, the roof has not much pitch, there is a stone bed for sarcophagi along the side walls, and in the end wall are two doorways, cut out of the rock of the end and opening into a second chamber, which seems darker and more dismal. The German boy says this second chamber was cut out later, from the first one. It has no paintings of any importance.

We return to the first chamber, the old one. It is called the Tomb of the Bulls from the two bulls above the doorways of the end wall, one a man-faced bull charging at the “po’ di pornografico,” the other bull lying down serenely and looking with mysterious eyes into the room, his back turned calmly to the second bit of a picture which the guide says is not “pornografico,”—“because it is a woman.” The young German smiles with his sour-water expression.

Everything in this tomb suggests the old east: Cyprus, or the Hittites, or the culture of Minos of Crete. Between the doorways of the end wall is a charming painting of a naked horseman with a spear, on a naked horse, moving towards a charming little palm-tree and a well-head or fountain head, on which repose two sculptured, black-faced beasts, lions with queer black faces. From the mouth of the one near the palm-tree water pours down into a sort of altar-bowl, while on the far side a warrior advances, wearing a bronze helmet and shin-greaves, and apparently menacing the horseman with a sword which he brandishes in his left hand, as he steps up on to the base of the well-head. Both warrior and horseman wear the long, pointed boots of the east: and the palm-tree is not very Italian.

This picture has a curious charm, and is evidently symbolical. I said to the German: What do you think it means?—Ach, nothing! The man on the horse has come to the drinking trough to water his horse: no more!—And the man with the sword?—Oh, he is perhaps his enemy.—And the black-faced lions?—Ach, nothing! Decorations of the fountain.—Below the picture are trees on which hang a garland and a neck-band. The border pattern, instead of the egg and dart, has the sign of Venus, so-called, between the darts: a ball surmounted by a little cross.—And that, is that a symbol?—I asked the German.—Here no! he replied abruptly.—Merely a decoration!—Which perhaps is true. But that the etruscan artist had no more idea of its being a symbol, than an English house-decorator today would have, we cannot believe.

I gave up for the moment. Above the picture is a sentence lightly written, almost scribbled, in etruscan.—Can you read it? I said to the German boy. He read it off quickly—myself, I should have had to go letter by letter.—Do you know what it means? I asked him. He shrugged his shoulders. Nobody knows.

In the shallow angle of the roof the heraldic beasts are curious. The squat centre-piece, the so-called altar, has four rams’ heads at the corners. On the right a pale-bodied man with a dark face is galloping up with loose rein, on a black horse, followed by a galloping bull. On the left is a bigger figure, a queer galloping lion with his tongue out. But from the lion’s shoulders, instead of wings, rises the second neck of a dark-faced, bearded goat: so that the complex animal has a second, backward-leaning neck and head, of a goat, as well as the first maned neck and menacing head, of a lion. The tail of the lion ends in a serpent’s head. So that this is the proper Chimaera.—And galloping after the end of the lion’s tail comes a winged female sphinx.

What is the meaning of this lion with the second head and neck?—I asked the German. He shrugged his shoulders, and said: Nothing!—It meant nothing to him, because nothing, except the A. B. C. of facts, means anything to him. He is a scientist, and when he doesn’t want a thing to have a meaning, it is ipso facto meaningless.

But the lion with the goat’s head springing backwards from its shoulders must mean something, because there it is, very vivid, in the famous bronze Chimaera of Arezzo, which is in the Florence museum, and which Benvenuto Cellini restored, and which is one of the most fascinating bronzes in the world. There, the bearded goat’s head springs twisting backwards from the lion’s shoulders, while the right horn of the goat is seized in the mouth of the serpent which is the tail of the lion, whipped forward over his back.

Though this is the correct Chimaera, with the wounds of Bellerophon in hip and neck, still it is not merely a big toy. It has, and was intended to have, an exact esoteric meaning. In fact, the Greek myths are only gross representations of certain very clear and very ancient esoteric conceptions, that are much older than the myths: or the Greeks. Myths, and personal gods are only the decadence of a previous cosmic religion.

The strange potency and beauty of these etruscan things arises, it seems to me, from the profundity of the symbolic meaning the artist was more or less aware of. The etruscan religion, surely, was never anthropomorphic: that is, whatever gods it contained were not beings, but symbols of elemental powers, just symbols: as was the case earlier in Egypt. The undivided Godhead, if we can call it such, was symbolised by the mundum, the plasm-cell with its nucleus: that which is the very beginning; instead of, as with us, a personal god, a person being the very end of all creation or evolution. So it is all the way through: the etruscan religion is concerned with all those physical and creative powers and forces which go to the building up and the destroying of the soul: the soul, the personality, being that which gradually is produced out of chaos, like a flower, only to disappear again into chaos, or the underworld.—We, on the contrary, say: In the beginning was the Word!—and deny the physical universe true existence. We exist only in the Word, which is beaten out thin to cover, gild, and hide all things.

The human being, to the Etruscan, was a bull or ram, a lion or a deer, according to his different aspects and potencies. The human being had in his veins the blood of the wings of birds and the venom of serpents. All things emerged from the blood-stream, and the blood-relation, however complex and contradictory it became, was never interrupted or forgotten. There were different currents in the blood stream, and some always clashed: bird and serpent, lion and deer, leopard and lamb. Yet the very clash was a form of unison, as we see in the lion which also has a goat’s head.

But the young German will have nothing of this. He is a modern, and the obvious alone can have true existence for him. A lion with a goat’s head as well as its own head is unthinkable. That which is unthinkable is non-existent, is nothing. So, all the etruscan symbols are to him non-existent and mere crude incapacity to think. He wastes not a thought on them. They are spawn of mental impotence, hence negligible.

But perhaps also he doesn’t want to give himself away, or divulge any secret that is going to make him a famous archaeologist later on. Though I don’t think that was it. He was very nice, showing me details, with his flashlight, that I should have overlooked. The white horse, for example, has had its drawing most plainly altered. You can see the old outline of the horse’s back legs and breast, and of the foot of the rider, and you can see how considerably the artist changed the drawing, sometimes more than once. He seems to have drawn the whole thing complete, each time, then changed the position, changed the direction, to please his feeling. And as there was no india-rubber to rub out the first attempts, there they are, from at least six hundred years before Christ: the delicate mistakes of an Etruscan who had the instinct of a pure artist in him, as well as the blithe insouciance which makes him leave his alterations for anyone to spy out, if they want to.

The etruscan artists either drew with the brush or scratched, perhaps, with a nail, the whole outline of their figures on the soft stucco, and then applied their colour al fresco. So they had to work quickly. Some of the paintings seemed to me tempera, and in one tomb, I think the Francesco Giustiniani, the painting seemed to be done on the naked, creamy rock. In that case, the blue colour of the man’s scarf is marvellously vivid.

The subtlety of etruscan painting, as of Chinese and Hindu, lies in the wonderfully suggestive edge of the figures. It is not outlined. It is not what we call “drawing.” It is the flowing contour where the body suddenly leaves off, upon the atmosphere. The etruscan artist seems to have seen living things surging from their own centre to their own surface. And the curving and contour of the silhouette-edge suggests the whole movement of the modelling within. There is actually no modelling. The figures are painted in the flat. Yet they seem of a full, almost turgid muscularity. It is only when we come to the late Tomb of Typhon that we have the figure modelled, Pompeian style, with light and shade.

It must have been a wonderful world, that old world where everything appeared alive and shining in the dusk of contact with all things, not merely as an isolated individual thing played upon by daylight; where each thing had a clear outline, visually, but in its very clarity was related emotionally or vitally to strange other things, one thing springing from another, things mentally contradictory fusing together emotionally, so that a lion could be at the same moment also a goat, and not a goat. In those days, a man riding on a red horse was not just Jack Smith on his brown nag; it was a suave-skinned creature, with death or life in its face, surging along on a surge of animal power that burned with travel, with the passionate movement of the blood, and which was swirling along on a mysterious course, to some unknown goal, swirling with a weight of its own. Then also, a bull was not merely a stud animal worth so much, due to go to the butcher in a little while. It was a vast wonder-beast, a well-head of the great, furnace-like passion that makes the worlds roll and the sun surge up, and makes a man surge with procreative force: the bull, the herd-lord, the father of calves and heifers, of cows: the father of milk: he who has the horns of power on his forehead, symbolising the warlike aspect of the horn of fertility; the bellowing master of force, jealous, horned, charging against opposition. The goat was in the same line, father of milk, but instead of huge force he had cunning, the cunning consciousness and self-consciousness, of the jealous, hard-headed father of procreation. Whereas the lion was most terrible, yellow and roaring with a blood-drinking energy, again like the sun, but the sun asserting himself in drinking up the life of the earth. For the sun can warm the worlds, like a yellow hen sitting on her eggs. Or the sun can lick up the life of the world with a hot tongue. The goat says: let me breed forever, till the world is one reeking goat. But then the lion roars from the other blood-stream, which is also in man, and he lifts his paw to strike, in the passion of the other wisdom.

So all creatures are potential in their own way, a myriad manifold consciousness storming with contradictions and oppositions that are eternal, beyond all mental reconciliation. We can only know the living world symbolically. Yet every consciousness, the rage of the lion and the venom of the snake, is, and therefore is divine. All emerges out of the unbroken circle with its nucleus, the germ, the One, the God, if you like to call it so. And man, with his soul and his personality, emerges in eternal connection with all the rest. The blood-stream is one, and unbroken, yet storming with oppositions and contradictions.

The ancients saw, consciously, as children now see unconsciously: the everlasting wonder in things. In the ancient world, the three compelling emotions must have been emotions of wonder, fear, and admiration: admiration in the Latin sense of the word, as well as our sense; and fear in its largest meaning, including repulsion, dread, and hate: then arose the last, individual emotion of pride. Love is only a subsidiary factor in wonder and admiration.

But it was by seeing all things alert in the throb of inter-related passional significance that the ancients kept the wonder and the delight in life, as well as the dread and the repugnance. They were like children: but they had the force, the power, and the sensual knowledge of true adults. They had a world of valuable knowledge, which is utterly lost to us. Where they were truly adult, we are children; and vice versa.

Even the two bits of “pornografico” in the Tomb of the Bulls are not two little dirty drawings. Far from it. The German boy felt this, as we did. The drawings have the same naïve wonder in them, as the rest, the same archaic adult innocence of complete acceptance, the same seeing things through the eyes of the bull and the eyes of the panther, and the conclusion according to the bull and the panther. The two little pictures have a symbolic meaning, quite distinct from a moral meaning—or an immoral. They are set in heraldic opposition, in relation to the man-faced bull; not, this time, to the panther. There is the peace of the bull, or the charge of the man-faced bull with lowered horns. It is not judgement. It is the sway of passional action and reaction: the action and reaction of the father of milk and procreation.

There are beautiful tombs, in this far off wheat-covered hill. The Tomb of the Augurs is very impressive. On the end wall is painted a doorway-to-a-tomb, and on either side of it is a man making what is probably the mourning gesture, strange and momentous, one hand to the brow. The two men are mourning at the door of the tomb.

No! says the German. The painted door does not represent the door to the tomb, with mourners on either side. It is merely the painted door which later they intended to cut out, to make a second chamber to the tomb. And the men are not mourning—

Then what are they doing?

Shrug!

In the triangle above the painted door two lions, a white-faced one and a dark-faced, have seized a goat or an antelope: the dark-faced lion turns over and bites the side of the goat’s neck, the white-faced bites the haunch. Here we have again the two heraldic beasts: but instead of their roaring at the altar or the tree, they are biting the goat, the father of milk-giving life, in throat and hip.

On the side walls are very fine frescoes of nude wrestlers, and then of a scene which has started a lot of talk about etruscan cruelty. A man with his head in a sack, wearing only a skin girdle, is being bitten in the thigh by a fierce dog which is held, by another man, on a string attached to what is apparently a wooden leash, this wooden handle being fastened to the dog’s collar. The man who holds the string wears a peculiar high conical hat, and he stands, big limbed and excited, striding behind the man with his head in the sack. This victim is by now getting entangled in the string, the long, long cord which holds the dog; but with his left hand he seems to be getting hold of the cord to drag the dog off from his thigh, while in his right hand he holds a huge club, with which to strike the dog when he can get it into striking range.

This picture is supposed to reveal the barbarously cruel sports of the Etruscans. But since the tomb contains an augur with his curved sceptre, tensely lifting his hand to the dark bird that flies by: and the wrestlers are wrestling over a curious pile of three great bowls; and on the other side of the tomb, the man in the conical pointed hat, he who holds the string in the first picture, is now dancing with a peculiar delight, as if rejoicing in victory or liberation: we must surely consider this picture as symbolic, along with all the rest: the fight of the blind-folded man with some raging attacking element. If it were sport, there would be onlookers, as there are at the sports in the Tomb of the Chariots; and here there are none.

However, the scenes portrayed in the tomb are all so real, that it seems they must have taken place in actual life. Perhaps there was some form of test or trial which gave a man a great club, tied his head in a sack, and left him to fight a fierce dog which attacked him, but which was held on a string, and which even had a wooden grip-handle attached to its collar, by which the man might seize it and hold it firm, while he knocked it on the head. The man in the sack has very good chances against the dog. And even granted the thing was done for sport, and not as some sort of trial or test, the cruelty is not excessive, for the man has a very good chance of knocking the dog on the head quite early. Compared with Roman gladiatorial shows, this is almost “fair play.”—But it must be more than sport. The dancing of the man who held the string is too splendid. And the tomb is, somehow, too intense, too meaningful. And the dog—or wolf or lion—that bites the thigh of the man is too old a symbol. We have it very plainly on the top of the Sarcophagus of the painted Amazons, in the Florence museum. This sarcophagus comes from Tarquinia—and the end of the lid has a carved naked man, with legs apart, a dog on each side biting him in the thigh. They are the dogs of disease and death, biting at the great arteries of the thigh, where the elementary life surges in a man.—The motive is common in ancient symbolism. And the esoteric idea of malevolent influences attacking the great arteries of the thighs was turned by the Greeks into the myth of Actaeon and his dogs.

Another very fine tomb is the Tomb of the Baron, with its frieze of single figures, dark on a light background, going around the walls. There are horses and men, all in dark silhouette, and very fascinating in drawing. These archaic horses are so perfectly satisfying as horses: so far more horse-like, to the soul, than those of Rosa Bonheur or Rubens or even Velasquez, though he comes nearer to these; so that one asks oneself, what, after all, is the horsiness of a horse? What is it that man sees, when he looks at a horse? what is it, that will never be put into words? For a man who sees sees not as a camera does when it takes a snapshot, not even as a cinema-camera, taking its succession of instantaneous snaps; but in a curious rolling flood of vision, in which the image itself seethes and rolls; and only the mind picks out certain factors which shall represent the image seen. We have made up our minds to see things as they are: which is camera vision. But the camera can neither feel the heat of the horse, his strange body; nor smell his horsiness; nor hear him neigh. Whereas the eye, seeing him, wakes all our other sensual experience of him: not to speak of our terror of his frenzy, and admiration of his strength. The eye really “sees” all this. It is the complete vision of a child, full and potent. But this potent vision in us is maimed and pruned as we grow up, till as adults we see only one dreary bit of the horse, his static external form.

We go from tomb to tomb, down into the dark, up again into the wind and brilliance; and the day rolls by. But we are moving, tomb by tomb, gradually nearer the city. The new cemetery draws near. We have passed the aqueduct, which crosses the dip, then takes an underground channel towards the town. Near the cemetery we descend into a big tomb, the biggest we have yet seen—a great under-ground cavern with great wide beds for sarcophagi and biers, and in the centre a massive square pillar or shaft on which is painted a Typhon—the sea-man with coiled snake legs, and wings behind his arms, his hands holding up the roof; two Typhons, another on the opposite face of the pillar, almost identical with the first.

In this place, almost at once, the etruscan charm seems to vanish. The tomb is big, crude, somehow ugly, like a cavern. The Typhon, with his reddish flesh and light-and-shade modelling, is clever, and might be modern, done for effect. He is rather Pompeian—and a little like Blake. But he is done from quite a new consciousness, external; the old inwardness has gone. Dennis who saw him eighty years ago thinks him far more marvellous than the archaic dancers. But we do not.

There are some curly-wig dolphins sporting over a curly border which, but for experience, we should not know was the sea. And there is a border of “roses,” really the sacred symbol of the “one” with its central germ, here for the first time vulgarly used. There is also a fragment of a procession to Hades, which must have been rather fine in the Graeco-Roman style. But the true archaic charm is utterly gone. The dancing etruscan spirit is dead.

This is one of the very latest tombs: said to be of the second century B.C. when the Romans had long been masters of Tarquinia. Veii, the first great etruscan city to be captured by Rome, was taken about 388 B.C. and completely destroyed. From then on, Etruria gradually weakened and sank, till the peace of 280 B.C., when we may say the military conquest of Etruria was complete.

So that the tombs suddenly change. Those supposed to be of the V century, like the Tomb of the Baron, with the frieze of horses and men, or the Tomb of the Leopards, are still perfectly etruscan, no matter what touch of the Orient they may have, and perfectly charming. Then suddenly we come to the Tomb of Orcus, or Hell, which is given the fourth century as a date, and here the whole thing utterly changes. You get a great, gloomy, clumsy, rambling sort of underworld, damp and horrid, with large but much damaged pictures on the walls.

These paintings, though they are interesting in their way, and have scribbled etruscan inscriptions, have suddenly lost all etruscan charm. They still have a bit of etruscan freedom, but on the whole they are Graeco-Roman, half suggesting Pompei, half suggesting Roman things. They are more free than the paintings of the little old tombs; at the same time, all the motion is gone; the figures are stuck there without any vital flow between them. There is no touch.

Instead of the wonderful old silhouette forms, we have modern “drawing,” often quite good. But to me it is an intense disappointment.

When the Roman took the power from the hands of the etruscan Lucumones—in the fourth century B.C.—and made them merely Roman magistrates, at the best, the mystery of Etruria died almost at once. In the ancient world of king-gods, governing according to a religious conception, the deposition of the chiefs and the leading priests leaves the country at once voiceless and mindless. So it was in Egypt and Babylonia, in Assyria, in the Aztec and Maya lordships of America. The people are governed by the flower of the race. Pluck the flower, and the race is helpless.

The Etruscans were not destroyed. But they lost their being. They had lived, ultimately, by the subjective control of the great natural powers. Their subjective power fell before the objective power of the Romans. And almost at once, the true race-consciousness finished. The etruscan knowledge became mere superstition. The etruscan princes became fat and inert Romans. The etruscan people became expressionless and meaningless. It happened amazingly quickly, in the third and second centuries B.C.

Yet the etruscan blood continued to beat. And Giotto and the early sculptors seem to have been a flowering again of the etruscan blood, which is always putting forth a flower, and always being trodden down again by some superior “force.” It is a struggle between the endless patience of life, and the endless triumph of force.

There is one other huge late tomb—the Tomb of the Shields—said to be of the third century. It contains many fragmentary paintings. There is a banqueting scene, with a man on the banqueting bench taking the egg from the woman, and she is touching his shoulder. But they might as well be two chairs from a “suite.” There is nothing between them. And they have those “important” sorts of faces—all on the outside, nothing inside—that are so boring. Yet they are interesting. They might almost be done today, by an ultra-modern artist bent on being absolutely child-like and naïve and archaic. But after the real archaic paintings, these are empty. The air is empty. The egg is still held up. But it means no more to those men and women than the chocolate Easter egg does to us. It has gone cold.

In the Tomb of Orcus begins that representation of the grisly underworld, hell and its horrors, which surely was reflected on to the Etruscans from the grisly Romans. The lovely little tombs of just one small chamber, or perhaps two chambers, of the earlier centuries give way to these great sinister caverns underground, and hell is fitly introduced.

The old religion of the profound attempt of man to harmonise himself with nature, and hold his own and come to flower in the great seething of life, changed with the Greeks and Romans into a desire to resist nature, to produce a mental cunning and a mechanical force that would outwit Nature and chain her down completely, completely, till at last there should be nothing free in nature at all, all should be controlled, domesticated, put to man’s meaner uses. Curiously enough, with the idea of the triumph over nature arose the idea of a gloomy Hades, a hell and purgatory. To the peoples of the great natural religions, the afterlife was a continuing of the wonder-journey of life. To the peoples of the Idea, the afterlife is hell, or purgatory, or nothingness, and paradise is an inadequate fiction.

But naturally enough, historians seized on these essentially non-etruscan evidences in the etruscan late tombs, to build up a picture of a gloomy, hellish, serpent-writhing, vicious etruscan people who were quite rightly stamped out by the noble Romans. This myth is still not dead. Men never want to believe the evidence of their senses. They would far rather go on elaborating some mean little lie they have read in some “classical” author. The whole science of history seems to be the picking of old fables and old lies into fine threads, and weaving them up again. Theopompus collected some scandalous tales, and that is quite enough for historians. It is written down, so that’s enough. The evidence of fifty million gay little tombs wouldn’t weigh a straw. In the beginning was the Word, indeed! Even the word of a Theopompus is enough.

Perhaps the favourite painting for representing the beauties of the etruscan tombs is the well-known head of a woman, seen in profile with wheat-ears for a head-wreath—or fillet. This head comes from the Tomb of Orcus, and is chosen because it is far more Greek-Roman than it is etruscan. As a matter of fact, it is rather stupid and self-conscious—and modern. But it belongs to the classic convention, and men can only see according to a convention. We haven’t exactly plucked our eyes out, but we’ve plucked out three-fourths of their vision.

After the Tomb of the Typhon, one has had enough. There is nothing really etruscan left. It is better to abandon the necropolis altogether: and to remember that almost everything we know of the Etruscans from classic authors is comparable to the paintings in the late tombs. It refers to the fallen, Romanised Etruscans of the decadence.

It is very pleasant to go down from the hill on which the present Tarquinia stands, down into the valley and up to the opposite hill, on which the etruscan Tarquinii surely stood. There are many flowers, the blue grape-hyacinth and the white, the mauve tassel anemone, and in a corner of a field of wheat, the big purple anemone, then a patch of the big, pale-pink anemone with the red, sore centre—the big-petalled sort. It is curious how the anemone varies. Only in this one place in Tarquinia have I found the whitey-pink kind, with the dark, sore-red centre. But probably that is just chance.

The town ends really with the wall. At the foot of the wall is wild hillside, and down the slope there is only one little farm, with another little house made of straw. The country is clean of houses. The peasants live in the city.

Probably in etruscan days it was much the same, but there must have been far more people on the land, and probably there were many little straw huts, little temporary houses, among the green corn: and fine roads, such as the Etruscans taught the Romans to build, went between the hills: and the high black walls, with towers, wound along the hill-crest.

The Etruscans, though they grew rich as traders and metalworkers, seem to have lived chiefly by the land. The intense culture of the land by the Italian peasant of today seems like the remains of the etruscan system. On the other hand, it was Roman, and not etruscan, to have large villas in the country, with the great compound or “factory” for the slaves, who were shut in at night, and in gangs taken out to labour during the day. The huge farms of Sicily and Lombardy and other parts of Italy must be a remains of this Roman system: the big “fattorie.” But one imagines the Etruscans had a different system: that the peasants were serfs rather than slaves: that they had their own small portions of land, which they worked to full pitch, from father to son, giving a portion of the produce to the masters, keeping a portion for themselves. So they were half-free, at least, and had a true life of their own, stimulated by the religious life of their masters.

The Romans changed it all. They did not like the country. In palmy days they built great villas, with barracks for slaves, out in the country. But even so, it was easier to get rich by commerce or conquest. So the Romans gradually abandoned the land, which fell into neglect and prepared the way for the Dark Ages.

The wind blows stiffer and stiffer from the south-west. There are no trees: but even the bushes bend away from it. And when we get to the crown of the long, lonely hill on which stood the etruscan Tarquinii, we are almost blown from our feet, and have to sit down behind a thicket of bushes, for a moment’s shelter: to watch the great black-and-white cattle stepping slowly down to the drinking place, the young bulls curving and playing. All along the hill-top, the green wheat ruffles like soft hair. Away inland, the green land looks empty, save for a far off town perched on a hill-top, like a vision. On the next hill towards the sea, Tarquinia holds up her square towers, in vain.

And we are sitting on the high place, where was once the arx of Tarquinii. Somewhere here the augurs held up their curved staffs, and watched the birds moving across the quarters of the sky. We can do as much today. But of the city of Tarquinii I cannot find two stones left together. Only openness and loneliness.

One can go back up a different road, and in through another gate of the present town across there. We drop quickly down, in the fierce wind, down to calm. The road winds up slowly from the little valley, but we are in shelter from the wind. So, we pass the first wall, through the first mediaeval gateway. The road winds inside the wall, past the Dazio, but there are no houses. A bunch of men are excitedly playing morra, and the shouts of the numbers come like explosions, with wild excitement. The men glance at us apprehensively, but laugh as we laugh.

So we pass on through a second frowning gateway, inside the second circle of walls. And still we are not in the town. There is still a third wall, and a third massive gate. And then we are in the old part of the town, where the graceful little palazzos of the Middle Ages are turned into stables and barns, and into houses for poor peasants. In front of the lower storey of one little old palace, now a blacksmith’s shop, the smith is shoeing a refractory mule, which kicks and plunges, and brings loud shouts from the inevitable little group of onlookers.

Queer and lonely and slummy the waste corners and narrow streets stem, forlorn, as if belonging to another age. On a beautiful stone balcony a bit of poor washing is drying. The houses seem dark and furtive, people lurking like rats. And then again rises another tall, sharp-edged tower, blank and blind. They have a queer effect on a town, these sharp, rigid, blind, meaningless towers, soaring away with their sharp edges into the sky, for no reason, beyond the house-roofs; and from the far distance, when one sees the little city from far-off, suggesting the factory chimneys of a modern town.

They are the towers which in the first place were built for retreat and defense, when this coast was ravaged by sea-rovers, Norman adventurers, or Barbary pirates that were such a scourge to the Mediterranean. Later, however, the mediaeval nobles built towers just for pure swank, to see who should have the tallest, till a town like Bologna must have bristled like a porcupine in a rage, or like Pittsburgh with chimney-stacks—but square ones. Then the law forbade towers—and towers, after having scraped the heavens, began to come down. There are some still, however, in Tarquinia, where age overlaps age.