Etruscan Tomb Paintings - Their Subjects and Significance

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Title: Etruscan Tomb Paintings - Their Subjects and Significance
Author: Poulsen, Frederik
Language: English
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Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_).

Superscripted characters are enclosed by curly brackets
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ETRUSCAN TOMB PAINTINGS

* * * * * *

Oxford University Press

_London_ _Edinburgh_ _Glasgow_ _Copenhagen_
_New York_ _Toronto_ _Melbourne_ _Cape Town_
_Bombay_ _Calcutta_ _Madras_ _Shanghai_

Humphrey Milford Publisher to the UNIVERSITY

* * * * * *

[Illustration: FIG. 11. ‘LA BELLA BALLERINA’ IN THE TOMBA FRANCESCA
GIUSTINIANI
After the facsimile of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek
_Frontispiece_]

ETRUSCAN TOMB PAINTINGS

Their Subjects and Significance

FREDERIK POULSEN

Keeper of the Classical Department of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek,
Copenhagen
Fellow of the Danish Royal Society

Translated by Ingeborg Andersen, M.A.

[Illustration: Publisher’s Device]

Oxford
At the Clarendon Press
1922

TO MY FRIEND IN STUDIES

AND TRAVELS

OVE JÖRGENSEN, M.A.

PREFACE

The following sketch is based upon investigations made in the Etruscan
Tombs at Corneto and Chiusi, and on comparison of the original
wall-paintings with the facsimiles and drawings made from them and
preserved in the Helbig Museum in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. It was
originally published in Danish, in 1919, as a guide to students in that
Department.

I am greatly indebted to Mr. G. F. Hill, of the British Museum, for his
revision of the translation.

Meanwhile the first volume of the promised work of Fritz Weege
(_Etruskische Malerei_, Halle, 1921) has appeared, copiously and
splendidly illustrated. The text contains general views concerning
Etruscan religion and society rather than descriptions of the paintings
themselves, and I cannot refrain from saying that I find Weege’s
statements and opinions, and the parallels which he adduces, too often
more fanciful than convincing, in spite of the vast erudition displayed
therein. I do not find anything in my own text which I feel inclined to
alter after reading his book.

FREDERIK POULSEN.

COPENHAGEN,
_January_ 1921.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

_Facing page_
1 Wall-painting from the Tomba Campana 7

2 Main picture in the Tomba dei Tori at Corneto 7

3 Back wall in the Tomba degli Auguri 11

4 Right main wall in the Tomba degli Auguri 12

5 Part of the left main wall in the Tomba degli Auguri. (After a
coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum) 12

6 Painting from the Tomba del Pulcinella 12

7 Left main wall of the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 15

8 Back wall of the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 15

9 Picture from the Tomba del Morto at Corneto 16

10 Picture from the Tomba del Triclinio 16

11 ‘La bella ballerina’ in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani
_Frontispiece_

12 Right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni 19

13 Back wall in the Tomba delle Leonesse at Corneto 20

14 Left main wall in the Tomba del Barone 20

15 Right main wall in the Tomba delle Bighe 22

16 Etruscan terracotta head in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 22

17 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 22

18 Wall-painting from the Tomba del Morente: the lassoing of
the horse 24

19 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 24

20 Part of the Tomba della Scimmia at Chiusi 24

21 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 27

22 Part of the small frieze in the Tomba delle Bighe.
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916) 27

23 Symposium in the Tomba delle Bighe 27

24 Back wall in the Tomba dei Leopardi
(After _Arch. Jahrb._ 1916. Pl. 9) 31

25 Married couple on an Etruscan cinerary urn 31

26 Picture from the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto 35

27 Picture from the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto. (After a coloured
drawing in the Helbig Museum) 35

28 Arnth Velchas and wife on couch. Picture in the Tomba dell’ Orco
(After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum) 36

29 Head of Arnth Velchas’ wife. From the Tomba dell’ Orco 37

30 Back wall in the Tomba del Vecchio 37

31 Symposium in the Tomba Golini at Orvieto 38

32 Wall-painting in the Tomba Golini 38

33 Kitchen interior in the Tomba Golini 40

34 Painting in the Tomba del Letto funebre, at Corneto 40

35 Demon in the Tomba dell’ Orco 49

36 Picture in the Tomba dell’ Orco at Corneto 50

37 Hades, Persephone and Geryon in the Tomba dell’ Orco 50

38 Drawing from Michelangelo’s sketch-book 51

39 Wall-painting from the Tomba François at Vulci 54

40 Painting in the Tomba Golini at Orvieto 54

41 Painting from the Tomba della Pulcella 54

42 Relief on a tomb altar from Chiusi. In the Barracco
Collection in Rome 56

43 Cinerary urn from Chiusi 56

44 Roman sarcophagus in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 58

45 Procession of the dead in the Tomba del Tifone 58

46 Painted frieze in the Tomba del Cardinale 58

47 Part of the frieze in the Tomba del Cardinale 58

ETRUSCAN TOMB-PAINTINGS

The tombs and tomb-paintings of Etruria constitute a field of
archaeology in which the investigator is particularly apt to be
reminded of numerous sins of omission and to be haunted by a painfully
uneasy conscience. Indeed, the older archaeologists have less reason to
plead guilty before the bar of science than those of more recent times.
When the discovery and excavation of the Etruscan tombs began to make
headway in the twenties of the nineteenth century, publications in text
and illustrations followed comparatively close upon the discoveries.
The first misfortune, however, took place when three of the most
interesting tombs were published, the Tomba delle Bighe, the Tomba
delle Iscrizioni, and the Tomba del Barone.

[Sidenote: STACKELBERG AND KESTNER]

It was the major-domo of the Bishop of Corneto, Vittorio Masi, who
first opened them together with other tombs in the vicinity of Corneto.
In the spring of 1827 he invited two German barons, Stackelberg, an
able archaeologist, and Kestner, the Hanoverian ambassador in Rome, to
inspect them, and, if they so desired, to survey, draw, and publish the
pictures in the tombs. The two men arrived, accompanied by Thürmer, a
Bavarian architect, to find the tombs themselves despoiled of their
accessories, but the walls covered with wonderful pictures dating
from the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. They set to work immediately,
studying and copying the pictures in the richest of the tombs, the
Tomba delle Bighe. Stackelberg made five charming water-colours in
order to save the colouring for posterity; Thürmer executed eleven
careful drawings. In all, the two men painted and drew two hundred and
twenty-five figures, and the whole of the material is now preserved
in the Archaeological Seminar of the University of Strasburg. In his
diary Stackelberg gives a vivid description of the discomfort which
they experienced, drawing by torchlight in the cold, dank tomb-chamber,
and only emerging now and then into the warm Italian spring sunlight
in order to recuperate or to enjoy a light repast on the top of the
tumulus, commanding a view of the sea. To this were added fatiguing
social duties; local patriotism was aroused in Corneto; the noble
families in the town vied in displaying hospitality to the Germans, and
big banquets were held, at which sonnets were recited to the ‘heroes’
who once slept in the tombs. The drawing and copying of the colours
on the walls in the Tomb of the Chariots, as well as in the Tomb of
the Inscriptions and in the Tomb of the Baron—so called after Baron
Kestner—were rightly considered the chief matter, because in the very
first summer after they were opened, the dampness of the tombs in a
few weeks ruined large portions of them, especially in the Tomba delle
Bighe. After his return to Rome, Baron Stackelberg caught typhoid fever
and did not recover till late in the winter. In the next spring he went
to Germany, where his excavations had created such an immense sensation
that even the aged Goethe asked Stackelberg to dine with him in Weimar
and studied the drawings with the greatest interest. But, in spite of
the national enthusiasm called forth by the excavations, the projected
great work came to nothing; the coloured plates of the paintings,
with the then existing means of reproduction, promised to be so
expensive that the publishers took alarm. Pending these negotiations,
the paintings from the three tombs were published in French and
Italian works in very poor and incorrect reproductions, and no other
reproductions were available till 1916, when the German archaeologist,
Weege, at last managed to bring out an admirable publication of the
Tomba delle Bighe, the most important of the three tombs.[1]

Similar uncoloured, not very reliable drawings continued to be the
method of reproducing the Etruscan tomb-paintings in the following
decades; after these drawings were made the reproductions in handbooks
like Jules Martha’s _L’Art étrusque_ (Paris, 1889). An Englishman,
George Dennis, in his _Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria_ (London,
1878), gives a vivid description of Tuscan scenery and of the ancient
tombs. At times he rises to a lyrical enthusiasm; for instance, in
his description of a dancing figure, ‘la bella ballerina di Corneto’,
in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. But neither Dennis nor any later
visitor procured copies which come up to their enthusiasm; in fact, the
beautiful ballerina has never even been drawn or photographed, and is
not to be found in any work on archaeology or art. Dennis’s book throws
a dreadful light upon contemporary excavation. About Veii, he writes
that the greater part of the district belongs to the Queen of Sardinia,
who in the excavating season positively lets out tracts of land to
Roman dealers, who rifle the tombs of everything convertible into cash
and then cover them in with earth. He describes such an excavation
at Vulci: a tomb being opened, nothing but pottery was found; the
excavators, in their disgust, smashed and destroyed everything, in
spite of the English traveller’s protests and entreaties. This took
place on the estate of the Princess of Canino.[2]

[Sidenote: MODERN LITERATURE]

This happened in the sixties. In the seventies such vandalism comes
to an end; but the publications do not improve. For example, in the
excellent article on the Tomba François at Vulci which Körte published
in the _Archäologisches Jahrbuch_ for 1897, the illustrations are
poor: and it was not until 1907 that Körte published, in the second
volume of the _Antike Denkmäler_, beautiful coloured reproductions
of the paintings in three tombs at Corneto, the Tomba dei Tori,
the Tomba delle Leonesse, and the Tomba della Pulcella. A popular
description by Mary Lovett Cameron, _Old Etruria and Modern Tuscany_
(London, 1909), marks no progress as far as the illustrations are
concerned, and the text is amateurish and superficial.[3] Von Stryk’s
dissertation, _Die etruskischen Kammergräber_, published at Dorpat
in 1910, is unillustrated: the text is full of errors, and in the
discursive descriptions no account is taken of the difference between
the present state of the tomb-paintings and that revealed by the
earlier publications. Weege’s above-mentioned article on the Tomba
delle Bighe and the Tomba dei Leopardi only appeared in 1916: here at
last the entire material is utilized—the old drawings and descriptions,
modern photographs, and the author’s own careful notes. According to a
prospectus recently issued, a larger work on Etruscan tomb-paintings,
by the same author, is shortly to appear; it will be awaited with
interest.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Weege’s book will supply a want which is
felt the more acutely when we consider the growing interest in antique
painting displayed in the last decades. In 1904 Furtwängler, with the
assistance of the painter Reichhold, began the publication of the
great work on the masterpieces of Greek vase-painting (_Griechische
Vasenmalerei_), which was continued by Hauser: part of the third
volume is now published. In 1906 appeared the first instalment of
Paul Hermann’s great collection of plates after antique, especially
Pompeian, wall-painting; this work, which is still in progress,
contains beautiful reproductions with and without colours (_Denkmäler
der Malerei des Altertums_). Finally, in 1914, Walther Riezler
published a splendid work on the white Attic lekythoi (_Weissgründige
attische Lekythen_). But during these years nobody thought of bringing
to light the treasures hidden away in the sepulchral chambers of
Corneto, Chiusi, and Orvieto, although these pictures were much more
exposed to destruction than either the vases in the well-guarded rooms
of the Museums or the Pompeian wall-paintings. For after heavy showers
the floors of the deeply sunk tombs of Corneto are under water, and the
damp then loosens the tufa of the walls so that the layer of stucco,
on which the colours are laid _al fresco_, peels off. The heavy iron
doors which the Italian Government has placed before the entrances are
worse than useless, because they shut the moisture in and prevent the
tombs from getting dry. If these doors had been placed at the top of
the stairs leading to the tombs, thus changing place with the lattice
doors which are now there, all would have been well. At Corneto, it
is moisture which demolishes the stucco layer, varying from ¼ to
1 cm. in thickness, and bleaches the colours—red chalk, vermilion,
lime-colour, ochre, cobalt, and copper colours, at Chiusi it is the
drought which most frequently destroys the paintings, the colours here
being laid directly on the stone walls.

[Sidenote: THE NY CARLSBERG FACSIMILES]

We have, therefore, every reason to be deeply grateful to the late
Carl Jacobsen who, at the beginning of the nineties, had the Etruscan
tomb-paintings facsimiled on their actual scale. A somewhat similar
experiment had already been tried, and the result is a number of
facsimiles preserved in the Museo Gregoriano of the Vatican, but
these are more decorative than exact. At first, the Italian painters,
to whom Helbig, at the request of Carl Jacobsen, entrusted the
task—the first was Marozzi—evidently imagined that Carl Jacobsen
wanted these paintings as mural decorations for his museum and had
no artistic or scientific aim in View, and letters from Helbig
show that, as late as 1895, he did not scruple to let Becchi, the
painter, fill in a damaged head from a picture in the Tomba dei Vasi
Dipinti after the reproduction in _Monumenti_, vol. ix (1870). The
first copies sent to the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek were therefore of
the same ‘picture-postcard’ colouring as the earlier ones in the
Museo Gregoriano, but gradually Carl Jacobsen increased the rigour
of his demands for conscientious exactitude, and the facsimiles now
on exhibition in the Helbig Museum of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek are
almost all executed according to the more modern and better principles
of copying. To be sure, these copies still leave a great deal to be
desired in the way of scientific exactitude; I have been able myself
to ascertain this by a careful comparison with notes taken from the
originals in the tombs of Corneto, and Weege more especially has
pointed out rather grave mistakes in the copies of the paintings from
the Tomba delle Bighe. But these may be supplemented by a series of
beautiful coloured drawings dating from the last years of Jacobsen’s
life: they are framed and constitute a whole picture-book open to the
public in the Helbig Collection. A large number of ground plans and
decorative details are included in these drawings, in addition to the
most important of the paintings, and here the copying has been executed
with great accuracy. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, then, thanks to Carl
Jacobsen, is the place where investigators can most easily form an idea
of the development of Etruscan wall-painting, far more easily than in
Florence where the late Director, Milani, ordered new copies which, in
my opinion, are considerably inferior to those of Carl Jacobsen. But
for all that, the facsimiles of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek ought not to
be the last word of science on the subject. Mr. Weege proposes, as the
method of the future, the taking in the tombs themselves of gigantic
photographs on which careful painters might add the colouring; instead
of two there will thus only be one possibility of distortion, namely,
in the colours themselves. But one might perhaps go still further and
take large chromatic photographs which would fix both forms and colours
for all time, so that we might view the gradual destruction of the
originals with less dismay than at present.

[Sidenote: FUTURE REPRODUCTIONS]

A detailed estimate of the _artistic_ significance and properties of
the Etruscan wall-paintings is not yet possible, if only because no
adequate pictures for reproduction exist. What can be done—and what
will be attempted in the following pages—is to give an account of the
content of the pictures and of the main lines of their development.
Even that is not superfluous. Investigators have never really given
themselves time to enter deeply into the spirit and content of these
pictures, or to ask themselves the question which arises, one may say,
with every picture, namely, how far the representation is a loan from
Greek art and civilization, and how far it bears the local Etruscan
stamp.

[Illustration: FIG. 1 WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA CAMPANA]

[Illustration: FIG. 2 MAIN PICTURE IN THE TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts_, xxxi. 1916, p.
106 ff.

[2] _Cities and Cemeteries_, p. 119.

[3] The same is true of the second edition of Luigi Dasti’s _Notizie di
Tarquinia-Corneto_, 1910.

[Sidenote: TOMBA CAMPANA AT VEII]

The first stage of development is represented by the Tomba Campana
at Veii. This tomb was discovered in 1843, and a good description of
it is given by Canina in _Antica Città di Veii_ (1847), but it has
never been published with adequate illustrations. A new and thorough
treatment of the ornamentation and motives of its pictures is given in
a Leipzig dissertation by Andreas Rumpf (_Die Wandmalereien in Veii_,
1915). But this, too, is without illustrations. The central doorway of
the back wall is provided with an ornamental painted border and flanked
by paintings in yellow, grey, and red on a blue ground. The work is
primitive. The ornamentation is akin to that of Greek vase-painting of
the seventh century B.C. The pictures are purely decorative: animals
and fabulous animals such as lion, sphinx, deer, and panther fill the
surface side by side with lotus-flowers and palmettes. There is no
narrative element. To be sure, Weege, like others before him, has tried
to construe one of the pictures (fig. 1) into a mythological scene: the
boy on the horse, which is led by the bridle by a man walking behind,
is thought to be a dead man on his way to Hades, and the man with the
loin-cloth, carrying an axe over his shoulder, to the left in front of
the horse, to be the Etruscan death-god and conductor of souls, Charun,
to whom we shall return later. Weege also thinks that the animal
crouching on the back of the horse is a hunting leopard. But, apart
from the rather puzzling question, what the hunting leopard has to do
with the ride to Hades, the animal is not a hunting leopard at all: it
is a feline animal with a short tail, while the hunting leopard has a
long tail. The animal was only placed there to fill up the space, thus
illustrating the poverty of ideas in these pictures. Moreover, as the
man with the axe is not characterized as Charun, either by colour or
by dress, it seems unnecessary to force a mythological explanation.
The human figures in this picture, as in the Melian vases of the
seventh century B.C., are purely decorative: they ride when the space
above the back of the horse has to be filled in, and they walk when
a long, narrow field makes the human figure more appropriate than a
seated or walking animal as a means of filling the space. The absurd
alternation of colours within the same figure, every single animal
being coloured in compartments of yellow and red and having alternately
red and yellow legs, affords a good instance of purely decorative
conception and suggests the idea of woven tapestry. Hence it is an
all but obvious conclusion to imagine, as prototype of this painting,
some magnificently coloured wall-tapestry imported into Etruria in the
seventh century B.C. from Crete or one of the islands in the Aegean
Sea, to the vase-paintings of which the ornamentation of the tomb shows
close affinity.[4] Thus there is in these pictures neither any action
nor any reference to death or the tomb. They serve as a decorative
ornamentation of the tomb-chamber, like the six painted shields in
the inner chamber of the tomb, which suggest those ‘brass circles’
mentioned by Livy (VIII, 20, 8) as common votive offerings in early
Rome. We can imagine the home of a rich Etruscan in the seventh century
decorated with similar frescoes: painted tapestries and painted shields
as substitutes for real wall-tapestries and metal shields.[5] The Tomba
Campana is the most impressive but not the only representative of this
earliest class of tombs, in the ornamentation of which only decorative
considerations have been kept in view. Tombs at Cosa, Chiusi, Magliano,
and Caere contain still more primitive paintings of the same sort, but
they are badly preserved and still more imperfectly described.[6]

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Cp. Fr. Poulsen, _Der Orient and die frühgriechische Kunst_,
p. 128, where I tried to prove that the pictures of the tomb are
influenced by the art and style of decoration of the island of Cyprus.
Rumpf (_op. cit._ 50) was nearer the mark in perceiving the connexion
with the decorative art of Crete and the Cyclades in the seventh
century B.C. The horsemen, in particular, recall the frieze from Prinia
in Crete, _Bollettino d’Arte_, 1908, p. 457 ff.

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

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

III

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI TORI AT CORNETO]

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

[8] Poulsen, _Orient_, p. 67.

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

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]

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

[Illustration: FIG. 3. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]

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

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]

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

[Illustration: FIG. 4. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI AUGURI]

[Illustration: FIG. 5. PART OF THE LEFT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DEGLI
AUGURI

After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[Illustration: FIG. 6. PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA DEL PULCINELLA]

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

[Sidenote: GLADIATORS IN ETRURIA]

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

[11] Isocrates ix. 1.

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

[13] iv. 153 f.

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

[15] Pauly-Wissowa, iii. 2178.

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

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

[Illustration: FIG. 7. LEFT MAIN WALL OF THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI.
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[Illustration: FIG. 8. BACK WALL OF THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

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

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

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL MORTO]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL TRICLINIO]

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

[Illustration: FIG. 9. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEL MORTO AT CORNETO]

[Illustration: FIG. 10. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEL TRICLINIO]

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

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN DANCE AND SONG]

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

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

[Illustration: FIG. 12. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE ISCRIZIONI]

[Sidenote: LAUREL DECORATIONS]

We pass on to the right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig.
12) where dancers in a row with drinking-bowls in their hands alternate
with servants carrying wine in large bowls. That the funeral dance was
animated by free indulgence in wine is often exemplified in the tombs.
In the Tomba delle Leonesse, named after the beasts of prey in the
pediment, which are really hunting leopards, a red-brown lad to the
right is dancing with a girl; to the left is a woman with castanets,
and in the centre, flanked by a flute-player and a lyre-player, stands
the wine-bowl wreathed with fresh leaves (fig. 13), ‘the wine-bowl
filled with joy,’ in Xenophanes’ words. Evidently the Etruscans drank
heavily to celebrate the memory of their dead, as Xenophon relates of
another barbarian tribe, the Odrysians.[28] To the right of the false
door of the same main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12),
a man in a loin-cloth with a laurel branch in each hand is greeting
another man, who carries chaplets and rests one leg on the cushions
of a couch. Laurel branches constantly recur in the reliefs of the
Etruscan cinerary urns, where the death lament round the bier of the
deceased is reproduced, and it seems probable that laurel branches were
carried round the house and used for wall decoration in the house of
the deceased on the funeral day, for the purpose of purification. This
decoration of the walls, then, would be the subject of our picture,
together with the other preparations for the funeral, as shown by the
paintings.[29] Perhaps it was a general custom of the Etruscans to
decorate their walls on festival days with laurel branches, just as the
Egyptians decorated theirs with lotus, and this would often account
for all the foliage which appears in the backgrounds of the paintings
alternating with suspended chaplets, even where the action—the death
lament (fig. 9) or the symposium—takes place indoors. In other cases,
however, as in the Tomba dei Tori (fig. 2) and in the Tomba del
Triclinio (fig. 10), there is no doubt that real trees and open-air
scenes are represented, but even there the chaplets are often seen
hanging—on the wall. Again a proof of the want of clarity in Etruscan
art! Trees, however, in the background of scenes with figures are also
found on South Italian vases of the same time, and thus seem to be a
common Italic trait.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Kestner, _Annali_ i (1829), p. 101 ff.

[18] Athenaeus iv. 154a.

[19] Livy ix. 30. 5-10. Plutarch, _Aetia Romana_, 55.

[20] Dionys. Halicarn. vii. 72-3.

[21] Livy i. 35. 9.

[22] Hesych. _s. v._ The word is not mentioned in S.P. Cortsen’s
_Vocabulorum Etruscorum interpretatio_ in _Nordisk Tidsskr. for
Filologi_, 1917; no doubt because he considers Hesychius’s statement
insufficiently authoritative. Cp. Skutsch, Pauly-Wissowa, vi. 775.

[23] Helbig’s letters of June 21 and December 10, 1895.

[24] Thus the facsimile at this point gives more than I at any rate
could see: on the other hand, less as far as brow and nose are
concerned.

[25] Plutarch, _Aetia Romana_ 98.

[26] Plautus, _Truculentus_ 290, 294, _Mostellaria_ 259 ff. In Greece
also, women used white lead as paint: Lysias i. 14 and 17.

[27] Quotation from Aeschylus by Theophrastus (who endorses the
opinion): _History of Plants_ ix. 15. 1.

[28] _Hellenica_ iii. 2. 5.

[29] Cp. Tacitus, _Histor._ iv. 53, on the inauguration of the rebuilt
Capitolium: ’spatium omne quod templo dicabatur evinctum vittis
coronisque; ingressi milites, quis fausta nomina, _felicibus ramis_.’

Contemporary with the group of the Tomba degli Auguri and the Tomba
delle Iscrizioni is the Tomba del Barone, discovered at Corneto in
1827 and named, as already mentioned, after Baron Kestner. After the
paintings of this tomb Stackelberg executed a fine water-colour, and
Thürmer a number of drawings, now in the University of Strasburg.
The style—both in the shape of the heads and in the treatment of
the draperies—is still Ionic, but the proportions are more slender,
probably owing to Chian or Attic influence.

Composition and technique are both unique in the paintings of this
tomb. We content ourselves with reproducing one main wall, the left
(fig. 14), where a black horse with light grey hoofs, mane, and tail,
is led by a man wearing red boots and a brown mantle lined with green.
He is speaking with one hand raised to a woman in a long grey
chiton, a brown mantle lined with green, and a brown cap. Then comes a
man with green boots leading a brown horse.

[Illustration: FIG. 13. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DELLE LEONESSE
After a drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[Illustration: FIG. 14. LEFT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DEL BARONE]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL BARONE]

Similar quiet pictures are found on the other two walls of the
tomb; on the back wall a man is standing with his arm round a young
flute-player’s neck, and is greeted by a woman. The dress of the woman
is Etruscan; the subjects also are probably Etruscan—the preparations
for the pompa and the dancing feast. But everything breathes coolness
and calm, and we miss the usual jollity. The technique is equally
remarkable. It is not the usual fresco painting: experiments have been
made with size-paint, that is, an attempt at painting in distemper on
the plaster stucco covering the walls. The attempt has failed; the
colour has run in large blotches.

These two characteristics of the artist of the Tomba del Barone are
of great interest because the German archaeologist, Gustav Körte, has
demonstrated the existence of marks made by Greek artisans on the
walls of this tomb. It was not in Etruscan, but in Greek letters that
the artist indicated the amount of his day’s work, with a view to
his wages. The explanation, then, seems to be the following: a Greek
decorator was charged with the task of ornamenting the walls of the
tomb, and he did it, as far as the dresses are concerned, according
to local tradition; but he experimented boldly with a new technical
process, the success of which was prevented by the dampness of the
rock-wall; and he composed his pictures with a grandeur of line and a
tranquillity in execution which make one think of the pediment of a
Greek temple. In the light of this it is easier to realize how much of
the Etruscan temperament there really is in the other paintings, all
Greek influence on style notwithstanding. It must be noted here that
artisans’ marks are the only written evidence left by the decorative
painters of Etruria; artists’ signatures are unknown, whether in Greek
or in Etruscan. The Etruscan nobles, like the Roman later, evidently
employed Greek artists, but granted them no social position.

VII

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

In the next period the predominant stylistic influence is Attic.
A whole group of tombs dates from about 500 B.C.: they are thus
contemporaneous with the severe red-figured vase-paintings. Very
Attic and, at the same time, like a complete pictorial procession,
representing everything which took place at a great Etruscan funeral,
is the Tomba delle Bighe, previously mentioned and now published by
Weege. As the pictures in this tomb are clearer and more complete than
most Etruscan paintings, we will take some of them as a starting-point
for a closer examination of the facts of Etruscan life.

There are two friezes on the three walls of the tomb: a narrower and
lighter above; and a broader one below, in which the figures are
painted on a deep red ground; the height of the friezes is respectively
36 and 90 cm., and they are separated by a broad, coloured band. The
narrow frieze with the dark figures on light ground still reminds one
of the black-figured Attic vases, whereas the lower purple frieze, in
which the skin of the men is reserved in a somewhat lighter red, that
of the women in white, recalls the red-figured vase-paintings, all
differences notwithstanding.

On the right-hand main wall (fig. 15), in the broad frieze, men and
women are dancing in honour of the dead among laurel branches. There
are the usual ecstasy and the familiar animated gestures with the
big fan-like hands, reminding one of the figures in archaic Greek
vase-painting and plastic art.[30]

[Sidenote: THE TUTULUS—CHARIOT RACE]

Especially splendid is the female flute-player who turns round as she
dances, her light chiton and red cloak fluttering about her; she can
almost compare with ‘la bella ballerina’. The dancing-women all
wear the high Etruscan wreathed cap, the so-called _tutulus_, which in
the Tomba delle Iscrizioni is also worn by a male dancer. We meet with
it again in Etruscan terracotta sculpture. The fashion is of Oriental
origin, and goes back, ultimately, to the pointed ’sugar-loaf hat’ of
the Hittites. It probably reached Etruria by way of Cyprus, where it
is frequently seen in reliefs of the seventh century B. C. In Etruria
the pointed woollen cap became part of the national dress.[31] Rome of
course adopted the headgear and preserved the Etruscan tradition in the
priesthoods; a purple tutulus adorned the Roman Flaminicae, and certain
secondary priests wore a tutulus down to the time of Tertullian.[32]
In early Rome all women wore the tutulus, and under it a head-cloth
such as is shown in Etruscan terracottas (fig. 16); this is clear from
a description of a Roman mourning scene in Dionysius of Halicarnassus
(xi. 39), where the women tear their many and various fillets and
hair-ornaments off their heads.[33]

[Illustration: FIG. 15. RIGHT MAIN WALL IN THE TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

[Illustration: FIG. 16. ETRUSCAN TERRA-COTTA HEAD IN THE NY CARLSBERG
GLYPTOTEK]

[Illustration: FIG. 17. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE
BIGHE]

The dancing scene, in the painted frieze referred to above (fig. 15),
ends at the sideboard on the left, which bears a number of metal bowls:
a cup-bearer, partially obliterated in the original, is just putting
down a vessel. The wine to inspire the dancers is ready.

In the narrow frieze—the most beautiful and most carefully executed
of those in the tomb, but very badly copied in the facsimile of the
Glyptotek—we see the preparations for a chariot race. The horses
are being led out and harnessed to the chariot. We reproduce, after
Stackelberg’s drawing, the most interesting part of the frieze (fig.
17), in which three young men are busy harnessing two horses to the
light, two-wheeled chariot, the Biga. The chariot is represented in
foreshortening, and the shaft is lifted up by a naked boy. The young
men have each one foot strongly foreshortened.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

We find here the same experimentation with this new and difficult
problem, as in the Greek vase-paintings of about 500 B. C., in the
vases of Euthymides and Euphronius. The horse to the right is blue,
that to the left grey, both have red hoofs and red harness, and two
youths, with a sort of shawl round their loins, are busily engaged
with them, striking them on the flanks to get them into place. These
two excellent figures are quite misdrawn and misconstrued in the Ny
Carlsberg facsimile, the draughtsman not having realized that they are
seen from behind.

We have, therefore, preparations for a chariot race; in a wall-painting
in the Tomba del Morente at Corneto we have a still earlier phase
represented, the lassoing of the horse which is to be harnessed (fig.
18); here the horse is red, with blue mane and tail. The disposition of
the colours is no more naturalistic in Etruscan wall-painting than in
the pediments of Greek temples: in applying the colours, the painter’s
object was purely decorative.

[Illustration: FIG. 18. WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA DEL MORENTE
THE LASSOING OF THE HORSE]

[Illustration: FIG. 19. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE
BIGHE
After Arch. Jahrb. 1916]

[Illustration: FIG. 20. PART OF THE TOMBA DELLA SCIMMIA AT CHIUSI]

After the preparations comes the ceremonial parade of the racing
chariots past the stands; three chariots are seen in a row (fig. 15):
the first has not yet begun to move, the horses are pawing the ground
impatiently, and the groom is standing at their heads trying to pacify
them; the second chariot has already started, and the team of the third
chariot is going a little faster, a fine crescendo which reminds one
of good Greek art rather than of Etruscan. To the left are the stands
for the spectators, which are continued on the back wall; similar
stands are seen in the corner where back wall and left main wall
adjoin. We give, after Stackelberg’s drawing, the two parts from the
first-mentioned corner (fig. 19). On elevated platforms, bounded above
by lines evidently meant to indicate curtains which might be drawn
before the ‘box’ against sun or heavy showers, men and women are seated
and show their absorption in the games by their eager gestures. The
foremost woman to the right actually greets the procession of chariots
with her raised hand. She is a matron wearing a shawl (epiblema) over
the arms, and the back of her head, and under that a tutulus. Next
to her sits a young girl with a tutulus, noble in bearing and gesture
like a young goddess. Then follows a varied company of youths, women,
and a bearded man. The young man, who is represented partly frontal
with his chin resting on his hand and the head and left leg frontal,
is of special interest. The problem of foreshortening has been very
neatly solved. Under the wooden floor of the stands the common folk are
disporting themselves, some of them engrossed in anything but the games.

[Sidenote: THE AUDIENCE]

In order to understand the significance of this representation one
has to realize that such detailed pictures of spectators at athletic
games are unknown in Greek art. The nearest parallel is the assembly
of the gods, the Olympian spectators, in the frieze of the Treasury
of the Siphnians at Delphi,[34] and in the Parthenon frieze, between
which the Tomba delle Bighe chronologically occupies an intermediate
position, about twenty-five years later than the former, and about
fifty years earlier than the latter. At the same time we learn that
female spectators were also present; this was not so at the Olympic
games, but seems to have been a common Italic custom. The stands, too,
appear typically Italic; on such ἴκρια the spectators were seated at
those athletic games and contests which in earlier times, according
to Vitruvius (v. 1), were held in the market-places of Italian towns.
Amphitheatres were not known till the first century B.C., but if
one imagines these market-places on festival days with such wooden
stands built up on all four sides, and these stands curved round at
the corners in order that the spectators might see better, one can
understand how the shape of the amphitheatre originated.[35]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLA SCIMMIA AT CHIUSI]

Within the sphere of Etruscan painting also, this is the only large
representation of an audience. Elsewhere the artist limited himself to
the individual figure as representative of the spectators; thus in the
Tomba della Scimmia (the Monkey Tomb) at Chiusi, the only spectator is
a lady dressed in black and sheltered by a sunshade; she is seated on
a high chair without a back (diphros), her feet on a footstool (fig.
20). The tomb was discovered in 1846 by François. The pictures are
executed in a thin colour, probably a sort of water-colour, applied
directly to the stone without an intermediate layer of stucco; a
similar technique is employed in the other and larger tomb at Chiusi,
the Tomba Casuccini. The four walls are decorated with scenes from
the race-course and the palaestra. Behind the lady on the wall which
is reproduced, we see two men in rapid motion and with ample gestures
probably intended to render the bustle and hurry at the funeral, which
is also represented, as we have seen, by one of the figures in the
Augur tomb (cp. fig. 4). The sunshade carried by the ‘widow’ was an
Oriental fashion, but in the fifth century B.C. the women of Greece
had adopted it, as is shown by the _Knights_ of Aristophanes (l. 1348
σκιάδειον). To the left the usual flute-player is standing, and the
round dais in front of him is not an altar, but, as Milani was the
first to point out, the small table on which prizes were placed.[36]
Next comes a girl with a censer on her head. She is generally taken
to be a female juggler, but carrying a tall object on one’s head is
still a common practice with the women of the South, and censers
(thymiateria), as we learn from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, were always
carried at the ‘pompae’ in early Rome; at the high festivals they were
placed in front of the Roman doorways.[37] They were sometimes of
costly material.[38] But our woman seems to be standing on a platform,
and the near presence of the flute-player, and the turning of her
body and position of her arms, seem to indicate some difficult dance
performed with the big object borne on her head in a small, limited
space; hence a kind of old Etruscan dervish-dance of which we have no
other knowledge. The two figures next to her are a big and a small
man who are cooling their bleeding noses with sponges: the artist
gives the atmosphere of the scene after the fight. On one of the other
walls in this tomb the boxers are ready for action, raising their
cestus-bound fists against each other, one hand closed for attack,
the other open for defence, as frequently described in the ancient
authors.[39] Cicero tells us that boxers sighed and groaned, in order
to increase the force of the blow.[40] These cestus fights must have
been terrible. The guard, nowadays less, was then more important than
the blow, for it was too dangerous to take the risk of being hit by
one’s opponent when attacking him, even if one was confident that
one’s own blow would be the harder; one had to play for an opening, at
the same time guarding against the single blow which was sufficient
to knock a man out. Finally, on the extreme left of the picture (fig.
20) we meet with a scene which is repeated in another picture in the
same tomb, as well as in the Tomba del Triclinio: a rider seated
sideways and at the same time leading another horse. The race with a
led horse was an Oriental custom, and appears for the first time on the
Phoenician metal bowls of the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. This
seat, sideways on the horse, is of Scythian origin, and in Greek art
usually characterizes the Amazons. The Etruscans, with their passion
for difficult games, evidently combined the two in order to make the
races as exciting as possible.

[Illustration: FIG. 21. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE
BIGHE
After Arch. Jahrb. 1916]

[Illustration: FIG. 22. PART OF THE SMALL FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DELLE
BIGHE
After Arch. Jahrb. 1916]

[Illustration: FIG. 23. SYMPOSIUM IN THE TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE]

In the small frieze on the back wall of the Tomba delle Bighe we find
a rider with a led horse, dressed in tunic and helmet, and seated
astride; we reproduce part of it after Stackelberg’s water-colour
(fig. 21). To the left of him we see a naked man standing on one leg
and nursing his raised left leg. It was formerly conjectured that he
was playing leap-frog with the young man planting the jumping-pole in
the ground behind him, but it is not usual to play leap-frog on one
leg, and Weege has pointed out the same position in athletic scenes on
Greek vases and supposes it to be a kind of preparatory exercise. His
supposition is correct: any modern acrobat would recognize it as one
of his exercises; the contraction of the muscles by nursing right and
left knee in turn. Acrobats practise this exercise when travelling, to
keep themselves fit when they are unable to train.

FOOTNOTES:

[30] Cp. Fr. Poulsen, _Delphi_, fig. 44.

[31] Daremberg-Saglio, _s. v._ _Tutulus_. Fr. Poulsen, _Der Orient und
die frühgriech. Kunst_, p. 97, fig. 99, and p. 107. Martha, _L’art
étrusque_, p. 306, fig. 206 (Cyprus). _Antike Denkmäler_ iii, pl. 1.

[32] In the same manner the Roman priests used flint knives in
their cult, and their razors had to be of copper, and, as late as
Roman imperial times, they used black vessels (_nigrum catinum_),
corresponding to the Etruscan bucchero vases, at sacrifices. Livy i.
24. 9: Juvenal vi. 343. Cp. Müller-Deecke, _Die Etrusker_ ii. p. 275.

[33] The Latin name of the head-cloth is _struppus_, and from that a
festival at Falerii, _struppearia_, derived its name. It comes from
Ionia, and is mentioned in the poems of Sappho (χειρόμακτρον).

[34] Fr. Poulsen, _Delphi_, fig. 44.

[35] Cp. Daremberg-Saglio and Pauly-Wissowa, _s. v._ _Amphitheatrum_.

[36] _Museo archeol. di Firenze_, p. 303.

[37] Livy xxix. 14. 13.

[38] Cicero, _In Verrem_ iv. 46. See also Karl Wigand, _Thymiateria_.

[39] For instance in Apollonius Rhodius, _Argonautica_ ii. 68.

[40] Cicero, _Tusculanae disputationes_ ii. 56.

VIII

[Sidenote: PALAESTRA LIFE]

We will not dwell on all the forms of wrestling contests and boxing
matches which appear in the small frieze of the Bighe tomb, but only
describe a part of the left main wall, which presents an important and
difficult problem (fig. 22). To the left of a young man in a himation
(not reproduced) we see the lower part of a statue of a deity, who
would seem, from the faint traces in Stackelberg’s water-colour, to
have wings on his ankles. If so, it is Hermes, the protector of the
palaestra, and the black object in front of him is a small altar. On
the other side of the altar a boy, accompanied by one of the caretakers
of the palaestra, clad in a blue mantle and carrying a knotted stick,
is standing with his hand raised. This usually indicates the adorer
praying to the divinity for victory in the contest. An absolutely
Greek palaestra interior! We have now escaped from the sphere of the
customary rude games held at the Etruscan funerals, and the question
arises whether the Etruscan knew real palaestra life of the Greek
type or not. In the Oscan towns of Lucania and Campania the youths
were devoted to Greek sports, and Weege is therefore inclined, in
view especially of this picture, to believe the same of the nobles of
Etruria at the height of their glory in the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C. But this is a dangerous inference. Wherever else we meet with
Etruscan athletic types they are rough and lumbering of build and
evidently professionals. In the Tomba delle Bighe a Greek artist has
been at work; this was already admitted by Stackelberg and Kestner,
and the same view is held in our own times. Although the artist has
complied with the demands of his patron more fully than the Greek
artist in the Tomba del Barone, who only troubled himself to do so
as far as dress was concerned, but for the rest painted entirely in
the spirit of his native country, Greek influence, nevertheless, has
penetrated everywhere. It is seen, for instance, in the incongruities
of the picture: the spectators in the corners, suggesting actual
athletic games; then this interior from a Greek palaestra, which
_might_ be interpreted, however, as part of a public contest; next
comes the prize table, as in the Tomba della Scimmia, but on both sides
himation-clad boys are seen, loitering like typical figures of the
everyday life of the palaestra, who have absolutely nothing to do with
the concentrated excitement of the sports in the arena. To the left
of the low table we see a little armed dancer, with helmet, shield,
and spear, in Greek nudity, not fully dressed like the gladiator in
the Tomba della Scimmia; his lance is bent zigzag-wise, apparently
an Etruscan peculiarity. With the Greeks also, the armed dance—the
pyrrhiche—formed part of the sepulchral festival, especially in Cyprus
and Crete, where it was called prylis;[41] and the custom may very well
have been adopted by the Etruscans.

FOOTNOTES:

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE SYMPOSIUM]

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

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

[Illustration: FIG. 24. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI
After Arch. Jahrb. 1916, pl. 9]

[Illustration: FIG. 25. MARRIED COUPLE ON AN ETRUSCAN CINERARY URN]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI—HUNTING LEOPARDS]

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI]

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: THE HETAERAE]

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

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

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

[Illustration: FIG. 26. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI AT CORNETO]

[Illustration: FIG. 27. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI]

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ORCO]

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

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

[Illustration: FIG. 28. ARNTH VELCHAS AND WIFE ON COUCH PICTURE IN THE
TOMBA DELL’ ORCO
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[Illustration: FIG. 29. HEAD OF ARNTH VELCHAS’ WIFE FROM THE TOMBA
DELL’ ORCO]

[Illustration: FIG. 30. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DEL VECCHIO]

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

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

[51] Isaeus iii. 14.

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

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

[54] _Corpus inscriptionum Etruscarum_, 3858, 3860.

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

[56] _De oratore_ iii. 197.

[57] Livy v. 22. 5.

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

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

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

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

[62] Athenaeus ix. 409 e.

[Sidenote: SYMPOSIA]

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

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

[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]

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

[Illustration: FIG. 31. SYMPOSIUM IN THE TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]

[Illustration: FIG. 32. WALL-PAINTING IN THE TOMBA GOLINI]

[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI]

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

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

FOOTNOTES:

[63] Athenaeus i. 28 b.

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

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

[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.

[Illustration: FIG. 33. KITCHEN INTERIOR IN THE TOMBA GOLINI]

[Illustration: FIG. 34. PAINTING IN THE TOMBA DEL LETTO FUNEBRE
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]

[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.

[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]

[Illustration: FIG. 35. DEMON IN THE TOMBA DELL’ ORCO]

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.

[Illustration: FIG. 36. PICTURE IN THE TOMBA DELL’ ORCO AT CORNETO]

[Illustration: FIG. 37. HADES, PERSEPHONE AND GERYON IN THE TOMBA DELL’
ORCO]

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]

[Illustration: Fig. 38. Head of man surmounted by that of a pig.]

In the other paintings of the Tomba dell’ Orco we meet furthermore with
Agamemnon in the underworld, and in front of him Tiresias (Hinthial
Teriasals it reads, i. e. the shade of Tiresias). But in the second
chamber of this tomb, dating from the fourth century B.C., there
is also a scene from Greek mythology which has nothing to do with
death and the underworld; Odysseus blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus
(inscriptions: Uthuste and Cuclu). We can here speak of a renaissance,
in so far as a scene from a Greek myth formed the subject of the big
picture of the beginning of the sixth century in the Tomba dei Tori
(cp. fig. 2). But the aim of the later school of Etruscan painters is
not so much to adorn the tomb with a beautiful decorative panel after
some Greek prototype; on the contrary, they turn to the Greek myths
for the sake of their subjects and pick out motives which also give
expression to the curious strain of cruelty inherent in the Etruscan
mind.

This is seen most clearly in the famous picture from the François
tomb at Vulci, discovered in 1857 by the Italian painter Alessandro
François. The Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek possesses a facsimile, executed by
the painter Mariani after the original in the Palazzo Torlonia, whither
the Prince Torlonia had it removed together with other wall-paintings
from the same tomb: but the copy is too smooth to be trustworthy.
Unfortunately, permission to obtain another copy from the inaccessible
Palazzo is certainly not to be had. The picture (fig. 39) represents
the sacrifice of Trojan captives on the grave of Patroclus. Achilles
(Etruscan Achle) slaughters with his own hands the captured Trojans
(Etruscan Truials); Ajax, son of Oileus (Aivas Vilatas), and Ajax, son
of Telamon (Aivas Tlamunus) stand by, Agamemnon (Achmemrun) is also
present, and the shade of Patroclus, thirsting for the blood (Hinthial
Patrucles), as well as two truly Etruscan figures, a female winged
genius of death, Vanth, and the Etruscan death-god, Charun, coloured
like the blue-bottle fly, with hammer uplifted.

[Sidenote: TOMBA FRANÇOIS] [Sidenote: ETRUSCAN CRUELTY]

This subject was chosen for the sake of the slaughter.[102] Sex and
cruelty are, to use a chemical expression, the ‘basic group’ of the
Etruscan mind. Thus the same subject is found repeatedly on Etruscan
sarcophagi and vases, and in the relief on a cinerary urn, and may be
compared with the most common and popular representation in Etruscan
reliefs: Eteocles and Polynices killing each other. Even a motive like
Ajax falling on his own sword constantly recurs in Etruscan art, as
well as the barbarous subject, maschalismos (maiming of slain enemies),
which is especially common on Etruscan gems.[103] A characteristic
feature of the picture in the François tomb is the deep wounds in the
legs of the Trojan captives; they are meant to prevent attempts to
escape and were evidently in keeping with Etruscan custom. For stress
is laid on the cruelty of the Etruscans towards prisoners of war by
Greek as well as by Latin authors; thus, as early as the fifth century,
the inhabitants of Caere, after a sea victory, stoned to death their
Phocaean captives[104]; and yet Strabo writes of the Caeretans that
they were highly respected for their bravery and love of justice, and
because, powerful as they were, they refrained from piracy. The Romans
knew better when they personified Etruscan cruelty in Mezentius, King
of Caere, who had living and dead tied together to rot side by side;
nor did the Romans ever forget that the inhabitants of Tarquinii once
slaughtered three hundred and seven Roman captives,[105] and they took
bloody revenge on them. The Greeks also knew of the massacring of
prisoners of war, but they always cherished scruples about it and felt
qualms, as when Themistocles was compelled to pay a tribute of slain
captives to ‘Dionysius, the eater of raw flesh’.[106]

Before we leave the François tomb we must remind the reader of the
existence of a remarkable series of pictures with subjects taken
from the conflicts between Etruria and Rome in the time of the Roman
kings.[107]

FOOTNOTES:

[100] Cp. for the well-appointed table Plautus’s description of a
liberal host (_Menaechmi_ 102): ‘tantas struices concinnat patinarias.’

[101] Walther Riezler, _Weissgründige attische Lekythen_, pl. 70.

[102] It is to be observed that the Etruscans thrust with the sword;
this also the Romans inherited; whereas the Gauls cut and the Iberians
thrust as well as cut. Polybius ii. 33. 6, and iii. 114.

[103] Cp. Beazley, _Lewes House Collection of Gems_, p. 38, 74 f.

[104] Herodotus i. 167.

[105] Livy vii. 15. 10; 19. 3.

[106] Plutarch, _Themistocles_ 13.

[107] Körte, _Jahrbuch des archäol. Instit._ xii. 1897, p. 58 ff.

XVII

[Sidenote: CHARUN AND THE LASAS]

The demons of the Underworld who figure in the Etruscan paintings
are almost all sinister. The devils brandishing torches and snakes,
familiar both from the paintings and from the reliefs on the cinerary
urns, remind one of Livy’s[108] description of the fight of the
Tarquinians and the Faliscans against the Romans in 354 B.C., when a
troop of Etruscan priests, armed with flaming torches and live snakes,
threw themselves in ecstatic fury on the Roman armies, who received
them undauntedly and won the day. Charun, also, is a common figure on
the Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns of the fourth and following
centuries, suggesting by his colour the demon of putrefaction,
Eurynomus, whom Polygnotus had painted, in his great picture of the
Underworld in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi, seated snarling on
the skin of a carrion-vulture, his flesh the colour of a blue-bottle
fly.[109] Charun, therefore, is not identical with the old ferryman,
Charon, of the Greeks; he is the messenger of death, the terrible
fetcher of souls, like Charos in the popular Greek belief of our
own day. Only the ‘Charon door’ of the Greek theatre indicates the
existence of similar popular ideas among the ancient Greeks.

The winged Vanth in the François tomb seems to be one of the benevolent
demons of the underworld, the Lasas. Such a one also appears in a door
panel in the Tomba Golini, already frequently cited: here she has
wings, snakes in her girdle, and a scroll in her hand (fig. 40). She
is evidently either receiving or escorting the dead, a young man in a
mantle, who stands in a biga with running horses; in the inscription
above him the word Larth can easily be read, proving that he is not a
professional charioteer, but a young man of high standing. His arrival
in the underworld is greeted by a trumpeter, painted over the door. We
may notice here that the ‘Tyrrhenian trumpet’ was famous far and wide
and was even introduced into Greece; it is mentioned several times in
Greek tragedies.[110] The curved trumpet here seen is also depicted on
a wall in the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto and, like the curved staff
of the augurs, was adopted by the Romans, who designated both of them
by the name of lituus; Cicero maintains that the lituus-trumpet was
the earlier of the two and gave its form and name to the lituus-staff,
the badge of the augurs. The introduction of the lituus-staff was
attributed to Romulus, and his sacred staff was said to have been
rediscovered by a miracle in the time of Camillus.[111]

[Illustration: FIG. 39. WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA FRANÇOIS AT VULCI]

[Illustration: FIG. 40. PAINTING IN THE TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]

[Illustration: FIG. 41. PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA DELLA PULCELLA]

The scroll in the hand of the female demon, referred to above,
presumably contained an account of the good actions of the dead, to be
used when he presented himself before the throne of Hades. The good
genius herself is seen at work in a small panel of the Tomba degli
Scudi, where she is scratching an inscription on a tablet (cp. fig.
27), while another holds a torch upside down. Both these figures are
repeated in the reliefs of the Etruscan cinerary urns and pass directly
into the plastic art of Roman sarcophagi as two allegorical figures:
Fama, who writes the merits of the dead on a tablet, and the genius of
Death with torch inverted.

[Sidenote: CEREMONY OF THE CERECLOTH]

A couple of flying genii appear already in the Tomba della Pulcella,
which belongs to the first half of the fifth century, in the pointed
pediment above the recess in which the ashes of the dead were
deposited. They carry between them a cloth which they seem to be laying
down, probably the cerecloth for the dead (fig. 41).[112] Perhaps
this also explains the mysterious scene, figured on two tomb altars
from Chiusi, one of which is in the Barracco Collection (fig. 42),
the other in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Catalogue No. H. 76). The
motives of the reliefs on these limestone altars from Chiusi and on the
cinerary urns from the same town, all dating from the sixth century,
are taken from the funeral, like the subjects in the contemporary
tomb-paintings, and represent the lament of men and women over the dead
on the bier, the burial feast and the preparations for it, and the
wild dancing-scenes at the funeral. It may thus be that the scene on
the relief illustrated, which seems to give a picture of the women’s
quarters, represents the women of the house in the act of scrutinizing
and choosing the cerecloth for the deceased; meanwhile, the house
was probably draped with cloth, and the dwellers of the house put on
mourning. Presumably the mourning colour of the Etruscans was white,
like that of the Romans at a later date; when in mourning, the women
of Rome, to the wonder of Plutarch, assumed white dresses and white
headgear, at the same time loosening their hair.[113] The hair flowing
down upon the shoulders is also frequently seen in reliefs on cinerary
urns. But there is still something mysterious in this motive, and an
examination of the mutilated ash urn in the Museum of Chiusi (fig.
43) does not make it any clearer. This urn has hitherto been explained
as representing a marriage scene. But as the opposite side of the
urn represents scenes at the door of the tomb, it is more natural to
interpret this relief also as a death scene; the flute-player and
the two men with laurel branches we know from the funeral ceremonies
(cp. p. 19), and the curious scene to the right, where two men draw a
fringed cloth like a baldachin over a veiled centre figure, each of
whose arms is held by two side figures (probably a man and a woman),
might then be conjectured to represent a sort of symbolic interment
where the dead is placed in a sitting posture, supported by the family,
instead of the normal posture, full length on the bier.

It is to be hoped that future investigation may throw some light
on this point, and may also deal with the question whether the
oft-recurring motive on the Roman sarcophagi of two genii holding a
cloth (parapetasma) between them, as a background either for a scene or
for the portrait of the deceased (fig. 44), can be traced to Etruscan
prototypes or not. Hitherto, we have probably been too one-sided
in attributing the types and symbols of the plastic art of Roman
sarcophagi to Greek pictures, and the investigation of the share of
Etruria therein would be a fine subject for a monograph.

FOOTNOTES:

[108] Livy vii. 17. 3-5. Cp. iv. 33. 2.

[109] Pausanias x. 28. 7-8.

[110] Sophocles, _Ajax_ 17. Aeschylus, _Eumenides_ 567. Euripides,
_Rhesus_ 988.

[111] Cicero, _De divinatione_ i. 30. Plutarch, _Camillus_ 32.

[112] An Etruscan gem shows the dead Ajax and a winged genius in the
act of placing the cerecloth over him. Beazley, _The Lewes House
Collection of Ancient Gems_, p. 34., no. 37.

[113] Plutarch, _Aetia romana_ 26 and 14.

XVIII

[Sidenote: ETRUSCAN DEMONS]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL TIFONE]

But the benevolent genii and Lasas are absolutely in the minority in
the paintings and plastic art of Etruria, and become rarer as time goes
on. The mood rises from sinister gloom to wild terror. Two pictures
will illustrate this climax. In the Tomba del Tifone at Corneto, which
was discovered in 1832 and which is one of the grandest of the family
vaults of Etruria, there is preserved, besides the serpent-legged
demons from which the tomb has derived its name, a large wall-painting
representing the journey of a young man to the realm of the dead
(fig. 45). To the left is seen an altar towards which the procession of
mantle-clad youths moves; they are led by a young demon with snakes in
his hair, and a torch and a snake in his hands. The procession advances
to the sound of a lituus-trumpet, and the young men carry staves and
seem to be the clients of the central figure. The central figure is
made conspicuous by walking without any attributes in the centre of
the procession right in the front, but over his right shoulder we see
Charun’s clawlike hand, and Charun advances behind him like a black
shadow, characterized by pointed asses’ ears, snakes in his hair, and
his terrible hammer. The high rank of the young man is made apparent
by the inscription over his head: ‘Laris Pumpus Arnthal clan cechase,’
i. e. Laris Pumpus, son of Arnth, priest (_sacerdos_). Here, then, we
have another of the priestly aristocrats of Etruria. After him come
two more companions with staffs, and a trumpeter,[114] as well as two
young men without any attributes, and the scene is terminated by some
dim figures, one of which seems to be a woman with a snake in her hair
and another to be of negroid type; possibly these are the rulers of the
underworld according to a later local Etruscan conception. One thing,
at any rate, is plain, that the dead youth, in spite of his splendid
following, goes to meet a sorrowful fate. What can the sound of the
instruments avail when Charun’s claw is laid on his shoulder!

[Illustration: FIG. 42. RELIEF ON A TOMB ALTAR FROM CHIUSI
In the Barracco Collection in Rome]

[Illustration: FIG. 43. CINERARY URN FROM CHIUSI]

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL CARDINALE]

This tomb dates, as far as can be judged by the style of the painting,
from the first half of the fourth century B.C.[115] From the beginning
of the next century dates the Tomba del Cardinale at Corneto, which
was discovered shortly after 1760,[116] then forgotten and filled in
again, and finally reopened in 1786[117] by Cardinal Garambi, bishop
of Corneto. It has suffered much by exposure to wind and weather and
to tourists for more than a hundred and fifty years. It has a narrow
frieze with battle scenes, doubtless mythological, but the interest
is centred in the long narrow frieze of pictures under the ceiling.
The subject of this is the march of the shades towards the other side
(fig. 46). A woman is drawn on a two-wheeled cart by two winged demons,
one light and the other blue-black, both wearing the traditional garb
of the genii of death, familiar from the contemporary sarcophagi
and cinerary urns: a shirt with braces, and high top boots. This is
perhaps the young woman who is mentioned in the inscription of the
tomb: ‘Ramtha, daughter of Vel and Vestrcni, who was wife (_puia_) of
Larth Lartha, and who lived (_valce_ instead of _svalce_) nineteen
years.’ A young man follows in a long cloak: he turns round to a black,
winged demon carrying a hammer (fig. 47). Beyond the gateway of the
underworld behind him a devil of the same type is seated, and then
comes a crowd of young people driven along by two devils, one of whom
threatens them with his hammer.[118] A woman, who looks back moaning,
is being brutally dragged along by two male demons, and at the end of
the procession two winged devils are seen hastening forward, slender of
limb and agile of movement, like poisonous insects. In a fragment of a
frieze, which is now badly damaged, the Charun devil was once more seen
in the act of crushing a skull with his hammer.[119]

[Illustration: FIG. 44. ROMAN SARCOPHAGUS IN THE NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK]

[Illustration: FIG. 47. PART OF THE FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DEL CARDINALE]

[Illustration: FIG. 46. PAINTED FRIEZE IN THE TOMBA DEL CARDINALE]

[Illustration: FIG. 45. PROCESSION OF THE DEAD IN THE TOMBA DEL
TIFONE]

[Sidenote: CONCEPTION OF THE HEREAFTER]

This picture has a quality which reminds one of the frescoes in the
Campo Santo at Pisa, but which is much more terrible because no hope of
paradise atones for the horror. The reliefs on contemporary cinerary
urns tell the same tale. To be sure, the dead reclines fat and finely
bedecked on the lid of these cinerary urns, holding a drinking-bowl,
or, if female, a fan. This is only tradition and has nothing to do with
actual feeling. It is clear enough that the old confident conception
of the hereafter as an eternal symposium has been exploded. To this
the reliefs on the urns bear witness. These reliefs, if they do not
directly evade the problem by choosing neutral scenes from Greek
mythology, reveal a demoniac possession of appalling intensity. We
need no literature in order to realize that the Etruscans under the
pressure of disaster became another people, pessimistic, in terror of
death, and devoid of any resiliency which would allow them to indulge
in the pleasures of life. If this spiritual incubus descended upon the
masses of the Roman people we can better understand how it is that the
poet Lucretius can feel enthusiasm, and can arouse it in others, when
he preaches the gospel of godlessness and the annihilation of the soul
in death.[120] For of the Etruscan people, at any rate, the words of
Lucretius[121] hold good:

Omnia perfunctus vitai praemia marces.

All that life had to give, thou hast enjoyed,
And now thou fadest.

FOOTNOTES:

[114] Trumpets at Roman funeral processions are known from reliefs on
sarcophagi. _Röm. Mitt._ xxxiii. 1908, pl. iv (pp. 18-25), and Cagnat
and Chabot, _Manuel d’Archéol. Romaine_, p. 586, fig. 315. Notice
in the second relief from Amiternum, _Röm. Mitt._ 1908, pl. iv, at
the bottom, how the banquet with the members of the family reclining
on festive couches is also preserved in early Rome (second to first
century B.C.).

[115] Contemporary and akin in subject is the Tomba Bruschi at
Corneto. _Monumenti_, viii, pl. 36. Stryk, _Kammergräber_, p. 101. The
processions here have quite a festive look; a woman finds time to look
at herself in a glass, but the devils, who appear in the crowds or lurk
in the corners, show that the occasion is a serious one.

[116] Caylus, _Recueil d’antiquités_ iv. (Paris, 1761), 112 f.

[117] Tiraboschi, _Storia della lett. ital._, Venezia, 1795, i. 13 ff.
footnote.

[118] Similar motives on tombstones and Etruscan gems. Cp. Grenier,
_Bologna villanovienne et étrusque_, p. 447. Ducati, _Monumenti dei
Lincei_ xx. pp. 607-12. Beazley, _Lewes House Collection of Ancient
Gems_, p. 33, no. 36 (pl. 3).

[119] Badly illustrated in Inghirami, _Monumenti etruschi_ iv. pl.
xxvii.

[120] _De rerum natura_ iii. 912 ff.

[121] iii. 956.

INDEX

The * indicates that the citation is in the notes.

Achilles, 9, 52.

Acrobats, 28.

Aeschylus, 19*, 54*.

Agamemnon, 51, 52.

Ajax, 52.

Altars, 55.

Amphitheatres, 25.

Apollodorus, 36*.

Apollonius Rhodius, 27*.

Appian, 15.

Aristophanes, 26.

Aristotle, 15, 29*, 33, 44.

Athenaeus, 13, 15*, 33*, 34*, 37*.

Attic influence, 20, 22.

Auguri, Tomba degli, 10 f., 41.

Augustus, 48.

Bacchanti, Tomba dei, 36.

Ballerina, la bella, 3, 17.

Ballot-balls, 32.

Barone, Tomba del, 1, 2, 20 f., 29.

Barracco Collection, 55.

Bells, 17, 37.

Bighe, Tomba delle, 1, 2, 22 ff., 28 ff., 46.

Black vessels, 23*.

Bolsters, 30.

Boxers, _see_ Pugilists.

Brass circles, 8.

British Museum, 14, 44.

Bruschi, Tomba, 57*.

Caccia, Tomba della, 43.

Caere, 8, 52 f.

Caeretan hydriae, 10.

Cakes, 35, 40.

Cameron, Mary Lovett, 3.

Campana, Tomba, 7 f.

Campania, 13 f., 28, 44.

Candelabra, candles, 39.

Cardinale, Tomba del, 58 f.

Casuccini, Tomba, 26, 29*.

Cato, 32, 35, 40, 44.

Catullus, 48*.

Cerecloth, 55 f.

Chaplets, 17, 20, 37, 42.

Chariot race, 23.

Charun, 7, 14, 52 ff., 57 ff.

Chiusi, 5, 8, 26, 29*, 38, 44, 55.

Cicero, 11*, 26*, 27, 35, 48*, 54.

Clients, 46.

Cloth, 55 f.

Clusium, _see_ Chiusi.

Copenhagen, _see_ Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.

Corneto, 1-2 _and passim_.

Cortsen, 13*, 16*, 34, 38*.

Cosa, 8.

Couches, 30, 41 f.

Crete, 8, 29.

Critias, 38.

Cyprus, 8*, 23, 29.

Cyrene, 9.

Dancers, 16 ff., 19, 22, 26, 29, 36.

Danielsson, 10*.

Dasti, 3*.

Deacinare, 32.

Demons, 49 ff., 53 ff., 56 ff.

Dennis, 3, 40.

Diodorus, 48*.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 11*, 15, 16*, 23, 26, 33*, 44*, 45*, 46*.

Dispater, 13.

Door, painted, 11, 15.

Dromon, 37.

Eggs, 31, 38, 42.

Egypt 9 f., 20, 31, 38, 41, 42.

Equestrian procession, 13, 15 f., 23, 24.

Eteocles and Polynices, 52.

Etruria, 43 ff. _and passim_.

Euphronius, 24.

Euripides, 54*.

Euthymides, 24.

Exercises, preparatory, 27 f.

Fama, 55.

Fescennines, 18.

Flaminicae, 23.

Flute-players, 15, 16, 22, 26, 35, 40, 56.

Footstools, 41.

François, Tomba, 3, 51 ff.

Gauls, 47.

Geryon, 50.

Giustiniani, Tomba Francesca, 3.

Gladiators, 13.

Goethe, 2.

Golden vessels, 38.

Golini, Tomba, 37 ff., 40 f., 42, 50, 54.

Gregoriano, Museo, 5, 17.

Hades, 50.

Helbig, 5, 6.

Hermes, 28.

Herodotus, 52*.

Hesychius, 16.

Hetaerae, 32 ff.

Hieron, 44.

Hittites, 23.

Horses, 16.

Hunting leopards, 31, 38.

Hypothymis, 37.

Iliad, 13, 29*.

India, 31.

Inscriptions, 10, 11, 15, 21, 34, 35, 38 f., 47 f., 50 f., 57, 58.

Ionian style, 9, 10 f.

Isaeus, 33.

Iscrizioni, Tomba delle, 1, 2, 14 ff., 19 ff., 41.

Isocrates, 13*.

Jacobsen, Carl, 5, 17.

Juvenal, 23*, 31*.

Kestner, 1, 14, 20, 28.

Kitchen-scenes, 40 f.

Kneading, 40 f.

Körte, 3, 9, 21, 53*.

Kyme, 44 f.

Lanista, 13.

Larth, 39, 54.

Lasas, 54 f.

Lassoing of the horse, 24.

Laurels, 19 f., 32, 56.

Lectisternia, 34, 42.

Lecythi, 51.

Leonesse, Tomba delle, 3, 19, 31.

Leopardi, Tomba dei, 30 f.

Lesche, 53 f.

Letto funebre, Tomba del, 41 f.

Lituus, 54, 57.

Livy, 8, 15*, 16*, 18, 23*, 26*, 35*, 44*, 46*, 47, 53.

Lucretius, 59.

Ludii, ludiones, 18.

Lysias, 18*.

Magliano, 8.

Martha, Jules, 3, 23*.

Medical lore, 19.

Melian vases, 7 f.

Mezentius, 53.

Michelangelo, 51.

Milani, 6, 26.

Minium, 18.

Morente, Tomba del, 24, 40.

Morto, Tomba del, 16, 41.

Müller-Deecke, 23*, 48*.

Naked pages, 33.

Nicocles, 13.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, 5 _and passim_.

Odrysians, 19.

Odysseus, 51.

Olympic Games, 25.

Orco, Tomba dell’, 36, 49 ff.

Orfeo e d’Eurydice, Tomba d’, 37*.

Orvieto, 37.

Palaestra, scenes of the, 28 f.

Parapetasma, 56.

Parthenon, 25.

Patroclus, 52.

Pausanias, 54*.

Persephone, 50.

Persius, 42.

Persona, 13*.

Phersu, 12.

Philochorus, 43*.

Phoenicians, 10, 27.

Pindar, 44.

Plautus, 18*, 30, 32, 36, 41*, 47, 50*.

Plutarch, 15*, 18*, 47*, 53*, 54*, 55.

Polybius, 44*, 59*.

Polygnotus, 53 f.

Pompae, 15 f.

Porsenna, 39, 44, 45.

Priesthood, 35, 57.

Prinia, 8*.

Prisoners of war, 52 f.

Propertius, 48.

Prylis, 29.

Pugilists, 15, 27, 28.

Pulcella, Tomba della, 3, 38, 55.

Pulcinella, Tomba del, 12 f.

Pyrrhiche, 29.

Querciola, Tomba, 36, 43.

Rasenas, 39.

Reclining at table, 34, 36, 57*.

Riding sideways, 27.

Rings, 32.

Rome, 45 f. _and passim_.

Rumpf, Andreas, 7 f.

Rushforth, 39*.

Ruva, 38*.

Salii, 18.

Samnites, 47.

Sappho 23*, 37*.

Sarcophagi, 14, 34, 53, 55 f., 57*.

Schulze, Wilh., 39*, 45, 46*.

Scimmia, Tomba della, 25 f., 29, 45.

Scudi, Tomba degli, 34 ff., 54.

Seneca, 41*.

Shields, 8.

Skutsch, 16*.

Slaves, 41.

Soothsayers, 48.

Sophocles, 44, 54*.

Spectators, 24 f.

Stackelberg, 1, 2, 14, 20, 23, 24, 27, 28.

Stands, 24 f.

Strabo, 43*.

Struppus, 23*.

Stryk, von, 3 f.

Sunshade, 26.

Symposia, 29 ff., 37 ff., 42.

Tacitus, 20*.

Tapestries, 8 f.

Tarquinius, 45.

Tarquitius Priscus, 48.

Technique, 21.

Tertullian, 13*, 23.

Tevarath, 11.

Theophrastus, 19*, 34*.

Theopompus, 34*.

Theseus, 49 f.

Thomsen, Vilh., 40*.

Thucydides, 44*.

Thulin, 48*.

Thürmer, 1, 20.

Thymiaterion, 26, 39.

Tifone, Tomba del, 56 f.

Timaeus, 33*.

Tiresias, 51.

Tomba, _see the different names_.

Tonsilia tappetia, 30*.

Tori, Tomba dei, 3, 9 f., 20, 51.

Torlonia, 51.

Treasury of the Siphnians, 25.

Triclinio, Tomba del, 16 f., 20, 27, 31.

Tripudium, 18.

Triumphators, 18.

Troilus, 9.

Trumpets 54, 57*.

Tuchulcha, 49 f.

Tusurthi, 34.

Tutulus, 22 f., 42.

Tyrrhenians, 43.

Urns, cinerary, 19, 30*, 34, 53, 55, 56.

Vanth, 52, 54.

Varro, 19, 41*, 45.

Vases, 4, 20, 22 ff.

Vasi: Tomba dei V. Dipinti, 5, 36.

Vecchio, Tomba del, 37.

Veii 3, 7, 35, 47.

Virgil, 48*.

Vitruvius, 25.

Volnius, 45.

Vulci, 3, 51.

Weege, 2, 4, 6, 7, 22 ff., 27, 28, 31 f., 34.

Wigand, 26*.

Women, Etruscan, 33.

Wrestlers, 11, 15, 28.

Xenophanes, 19.

Xenophon, 19.

PRINTED IN ENGLAND

AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

* * * * * *

Transcriber’s note:

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

Variations in hyphenation has been standardised but all other spelling and
punctuation remains unchanged.

*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Etruscan Tomb Paintings - Their Subjects and Significance" ***

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