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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 dead47—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
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 Aristotle49 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 Isaeus51: ‘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 Etruscans52: ‘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
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’s56 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’.
In the pictures of the Scudi tomb the wife, as we have seen, is sitting. But in the Tomba dei Vasi Dipinti, besides a man and a woman, two children are present at the symposium, which would be inconceivable in a hetaera picture; and in a picture in the front chamber of the Tomba dell’Orco at Corneto, discovered in 1868 and dating from the same period as the Scudi tomb, there are traces of a man and a woman reclining together, and the inscription informs us that the woman is a free-born woman named Velia—the family name has unfortunately been destroyed—and that she is married to Arnth Velchas, a descendant of one of the noblest families in Etruria (fig. 28). With this, then, the last and final proof of the untenability of the hetaera theory has been adduced: this woman, whose head is one of the most beautiful in the sepulchral chambers of Etruria (fig. 29), reclines with her husband on the couch in the picture in the tomb, even as she was buried with him in the tomb itself. A failure to appreciate this fact would imply a complete denial of Etruscan family feeling and pride of race.
The dancing women, on the other hand, for instance, the woman in the Tomba delle Leonesse already cited above, and another, still more wanton, who in the Tomba degli Bacchanti foots it with a fat dancer, must be interpreted as hetaerae. They illustrate the phrase of Plautus: ‘prostibile est tandem? stantem stanti savium dare amicum amicae?’ To the same category of hired dancers belongs the man to the left of the one who is dancing with inverted cithara.59
Generally speaking, what has made doubt or error possible in the matter is the fact that the pictures, as we have already said, in form suggest Greek pictures of hetaerae; symposia of any other kind between men and women were unknown in Hellas. And to what extent the influence of Greek art has prevailed is shown by the picture of a momentary phase of emotion in the Tomba Querciola, where a couple reclining on the couch are kissing each other, a motive as suitable to a Greek hetaera picture as it is incongruous in a picture representing family life after death.60 Another source of error is the pronounced sensualism of these pictures; in a sepulchral painting as early as the sixth century, the main picture of the Tomba del Vecchio, we see on a banqueting-couch, under the wreaths and chaplets with bells hanging on the wall, a hoary old roué in vivacious conversation with his beautiful young wife who holds a garland, a hypothymis, under his nose (fig. 30).61 This picture is typically Etruscan in its combination of wine and love. ‘As soon as we had eaten,’ sings the Greek poet Dromon,62 ‘the slave girl removed the tables; one brought us water for washing, and we washed ourselves; then we seized again the wreaths of violets and bound our brows with garlands.’ The Etruscans seem to have followed the Greek rules minutely, but like the Egyptians they let the free-born women partake of the festivity of the symposium itself.
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.
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
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.
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 puffs69: ‘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.
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.
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 front72; 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:
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.
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 Sophocles78 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 Tarchna81—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.