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Etruscan Antiquities

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Such were the leading gods; in addition there was the world of spirits whom we know in Rome as the Manes, Lares and Penates. The latter were of four classes, pertaining to Jove, Neptune, the gods of the lower world, and to men.' The Lares too were of various sorts (familiares, cornpitales, viales ), and with them the souls of the dead, after the performance of due expiatory rites, took their place as dii animales (Serv. ad Aen. iii. 168 and 302). The Manes are the vaguest group of all and were confined almost wholly to the lower world (Festus, s.v. " Mundus "; Apuleius, De deo Socratis). Over all these ruled Mantus and Mania, the counterparts of Pluto and Persephone in Greece. As a result of this complete hierarchy of divine powers the priesthood of Etruria was large, powerful, and of such fame that Etruscan haruspices were sent for from distant places to interpret the sacrifices and the oracles (Livy v. i. 6, xxvii. 37. 6).

Art

The evidence drawn from tradition and custom which we have so far considered in relation to the origin and beliefs of the Etruscans has taken us into the prehistoric times much earlier than those when the handicrafts developed into true fine arts. The contents of the earliest graves 2 show but few traces of any feeling for art either in architecture or in the lesser forms of household and personal decoration. Gradually, however, as one comes down towards the more fixed historic periods, certain objects, obviously imported from the eastern Mediterranean, occur, and these are the first signs of an interest in the beauty or curiosity of things, an interest that local workmen could not yet satisfy, but which stirred them to endeavour. It was probably during the 9th century that this began, not long after the period when foreign trade began to flourish.

The history of Etruscan art has usually been wrongly estimated owing to the widespread delusion that objects found in Etruria were in the true sense products of native artists and indicative of native-grown culture. It is only recently, and not even yet completely, that the term "Etruscan" has been given up as the name for the terra-cotta vases (which were found in the 19th century by the earlier archaeologists of the modern scientific school in great quantities in the Etruscan tombs); these are now known to have been made by Greek potters. There are few books on the subject of Etruscan art. The best known is Jules Martha's L 7 Art etrusque (2nd ed., 1889), a book which, though full of accurate data, shows absolute lack of discrimination between those works that are of Etruscan fabric and those that were brought from other lands, particularly Greece and the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia and Sicily. These latter are too generally forgotten in the study both of Greek and of Etruscan art, and all works which show the Greek spirit are vaguely supposed to have been produced on the Greek mainland. As much of the following must be to some extent controversial in character, a concrete illustration may serve to prevent misconception as to this important distinction. The beautiful throne in the Ludovisi collection representing the birth of Aphrodite is commonly spoken of as though made by some sculptor in Greece. It seems at least as likely that it comes from Sicily. Not only is the character of the modelling similar to what we find on Sicilian sculptures and coins, and not quite so sharp as on most works from Greece, but there is a lyrical feeling for nature in the pose of the figures and in the pebbled soil on which the main group stands, which seems to answer to the Sicilian feeling as we know it in poetry rather than to the Greek.

The houses of the earliest times were, to judge by the burial urns known from their shape as hut-urns, small single-room constructions of rectangular plan similar to certain types of the capanne used by the shepherds to-day.

ture. Probably the walls were wattled and the roofs were certainly thatched, for the urns show plainly the long beams fastened together at the top and hanging from the ridge down each side. Tombs cut in the rock offer other and later models of 1 Nigidius Figulus ap. Arnob. adv. Nat. iii. 40; cf. Nig. Fig. reliquiae, ed. Ant. Swoboda (1888), p. 83.

Montelius. Civ. Prim. en Italie. house construction, but give no suggestion that the Etruscans had any artistic sense in architecture. Such tombs are mostly later than the 5th century B.C., and show the most simple form of wood construction. Posts or columns hold up the walls and the sloping roofs, the latter made of beams with boards laid lengthwise, covered by others from ridge to eave, the intervening space forming a coffer, sometimes decorated. Though the walls of such tombs are often covered with paintings, the relation of the various parts (and, let it be remembered, these tombs represent the houses of the living) shows but the coarsest sense of proportion. The elements of the decoration, such as capitals, mouldings, rosettes, patterns, are borrowed from Greece, Egypt or elsewhere, and are used redundantly and with no refinement.' The temples did not differ from those in Greece in any essential principal of construction except that they were generally square, from the desire to make them answer to the templum or quadripartite division of the heavens elaborated by the priests. In Roman times " Etruscan style " was the term used for colonnades with wide intercolumniations, and this shows how the early builders used wood with its possibility of long architrave beams rather than stone as in Greece. The interior arrangements of the temple also varied from the Grecian models, for owing to the fact that the gods of Etruria were often worshipped in groups of three the cella was divided into three chambers. The decoration - metopes, friezes, acroteria, &c. - was of terra-cotta fastened by nails to the wooden walls.

Though we know that the Etruscans were famous for their games, 4 still there are no remains of circi, and so too, though the satyristae were well known,' no theatres are left. They were obviously a race of no literary taste or culture. The theatre at Fiesole which is often referred to as Etruscan unquestionably dates from Roman times.

Underground tombs have already been mentioned in their relation to house-architecture, but there are the tumuli such as that called la Cucumella at Volci, that of the Curiatii at Albano, or that of Porsena at Clusium, which Pliny describes as one of the wonders of Italy (H.N. xxxvi. 19). These great walled-in mounds with their complex of interior chambers are interesting as reminiscent of tombs in Lydia, but architecturally they are barbaric and show no developed skill.

There remains one monument which has always been supposed to show a real advance made by the Etruscans in the art of architecture - the cloaca maxima in Rome. This round-arched drain was supposed to have been built by Etruscans, and it was only in 1903 that Commendatore Boni in excavating the Forum proved that the drain was originally uncovered, and that the arch was built at the end of the Republic. Thus the honour, not of discovering the arch, for it was known to the East, but of popularizing its use, does not belong to the Etruscans, though they did use it at a comparatively late time for city gates, as at Volterra.' The false arch and dome of the Mycenaeans seems to have been familiar to them, though there are but few cases of its use on a large scale. The best-known instances are the Tullianum or Mamertine prison in Rome, the Regulini-Galassi tomb at Cervetri, 7 one at Sesto Fiorentino near Florence, 8 at Cortona, 9 at Chiusi, and also those in Latium.'° Although there was, therefore, but little development in the greater arts of literature and architecture among the Etruscans, it is evident enough that there was much desire to possess the products of the lesser arts, such as sculpture, jewelry and household ornaments. But here too the study has been made difficult by the failure to distinguish between native and imported products. Before studying the objects themselves it is well to recall the legendary character of Etruscan chronology as For an illustration of the Corneto tomb see Architecture, vol. ii. p. 559.

Appian viii. 66; Tertullian, De spect. 5; Plutarch, Qu. Rom. 107.

5 Dion. Hal. vii. 72.

Montelius, Civ. Prim. ii. pl. 172.

' Ib. pl. 333; cf. 343.8 Ib. p1.166.9 Ib. pl. 173.

to Monum. Ant. xv. p. ' 151;' Bull. d. Com. Arch. di Roma, 1898, p. III reckoned in saecula. Helbig 1 showed that we cannot consider any of the traditional dates as being accurate until about 644 B.C., the beginning, that is, of the fifth saeculum. This is probably about one hundred years after the introduction of the Chalcidian (Ionic) alphabet into the country. One of the earliest examples of the use of it is on a vase found in the Regulini-Galassi tomb. In considering the trade of the country it has been pointed out that its chief political connexions were with Carthage, but the artistic sense of Carthaginians or other Phoenicians was not more developed than that of the Etruscans. They were traders, and doubtless brought the Etruscans some of the Egyptian and Eastern objects which have been found in their tombs, articles that date from the 7th and 6th centuries B.C. But beside the Phoenicians the Ionian Greeks from the 9th century had been trading and colonizing in Sicily and Italy. Herodotus (i. 163) tells how the Phocaeans were the first of the Greeks to take long voyages, and that they discovered the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian seas and Iberia. Thucydides (vi. 3.1) says that it was Chalcidians from Euboea who first settled in Sicily. Pliny ( Hist. Nat. xxxv. 12.43) writes in the same sense, for he tells of Demaratus who came from Corinth with the artists Eucheir, Diopus, Eugrammus, about 650 B.C., and first started sculpture in Italy. These traditions of the coming of Ionian Greeks to Italy are completely borne out by the archaeological remains found in Ionian lands and in Etruria, and it is agreed that a great part of what has hitherto been considered Etruscan is no more Etruscan than the Moorish plates of the 15th century found in Italy are Florentine. The best works in most of the smaller arts are almost without exception Greek, the earlier Ionian, the later Attic; the remainder are made with the distinct intention of imitating Greek models, and so should be considered as Greek, inasmuch as they do not show a natural, original expression of feeling on the part of the Etruscan workman. The Etruscans were dull artists in all lines. They were skilful copyists, nothing more, as is absolutely proved by the simple fact that we know of no Etruscan artist by name. If one takes the articles which are of obviously local manufacture, such as the burial urns 2 or the ordinary bronze mirrors, or the pottery, it would be hard to find a similar quantity of work by any other race so lacking in originality of conception or high excellence of technique.

In the study of the monuments a division must be made distinguishing between the obviously Greek works, the works done with a desire to copy Greek models and the work of native artists. To separate the objects in the way suggested required a very considerable familiarity with Greek art, and though in many cases the result may be doubtful, still so much must be taken from the Etruscans that they are shown to have little more artistic feeling than the Romans. In the earlier centuries a strong eastern influence appears in the copying of sphinxes and similar eastern motives, but this soon gave way to the stronger Greek influence, as was natural, for the intercourse with the Phoenicians was spasmodic whereas that with the Greeks was constant. But even with the Greeks to kindle their imaginations, the Etruscans produced no school of art; no steady progression is traceable. In various towns there were various fashions of pottery or jewelry, but good, bad and indifferent constantly occur together in a way possible only among a people who possessed no natural artistic capacities and had no widespread standards of cultivated taste. The Ionians have been mentioned as having strongly affected the arts in Etruria, and, though in the later centuries Athens undoubtedly exported heavy consignments to Italy, the taste of the Etruscans seems generally to have preferred the rather heavy loose style of the Ionians, even when direct contact with them was lost and its place taken by direct relations with Athens and her colonies.

Pottery 3 practised enormously by the Etruscans shows as clearly as possible their essential strength and weakness as 1 Annali dell' Inst. Arch., 1876, 230.

2 Gerhard, Etruskische Spiegel; Korte, Rilievi delle urne Etrusche. 3 See Pottier, Catalogue des vases antiques, II. L'Ecole Ionienne, Boehlau, Aus ionischen and italischen Nekropolen; Karo, De arte vascularia antiquissima; Endt, Ionische Vasenmalerei. See further Ceramics, § Etruscan. artists. Even the black ware called bucchero is now known to have been manufactured in other lands and not to be an exclusively Etruscan style. In the earlier tombs this ware is present in greater numbers than any other, and the vases exhibit considerable dexterity of manufacture so far as form goes. But it is evident from comparisons with early Ionian vases that the better proportioned of the shapes are direct copies of the Ionian. The decoration of the bucchero is either engraved, in which case it is almost always extremely rude, or formed by figures modelled or pressed by a mould on to the body of the vase. In these two last cases the figures are often suggestive of the farther East (Egyptian and Mesopotamia), but still more frequently they are taken from Greek originals, and the natural tendency of the Etruscan artist to be a copyist is very marked. Whence the moulds for these vases came is not known, but analogy with other classes of work makes it practically certain that some were imported and some made by the imitating workmen. There are other classes of vases which at first sight look as though they were imported from Greece, but by the nature of their clay are recognized to be Etruscan imitations of Greek originals. The imitation is often very skilful, for the Etruscan artist rivalled his Grecian master in deftness of hand, if not in imagination. Such, for instance, are the large amphoras decorated with bands of animals in the Corinthian style. Besides these native vases the tombs have yielded great quantities of others which used to be called Etruscan, but are now known to have been imported from Greece. Until the 6th century B.C. these vases are mostly Ionian, but at that time the trade of the Phocaeans was waning before that of Athens, and henceforward the Athenian ware is the commonest. Intercourse with Athens, however, came to an end about 480, when the Sicilian Greeks mastered the trade of the western Mediterranean, so that in the Etruscan tombs later than this date we find fewer and fewer imported vases, and more and more native imitations. It is generally taken for granted that these Attic vases were brought to Etruria by Greek traders, but considering how little the Greek historians, even Herodotus, knew of that country, this is unlikely. Then, too, the chief products Etruria had to give Greece were metals, so it is more likely that it was the Etruscan traders who, having carried metal to Greece (where Etruscan bronze was famous 4), brought back the vases.

Though most collections make no distinction between Greek and Etruscan scarabs the differences, though slight, are quite certain, and consist in the greater elaboration of the Scarabs. borders, edges and backs of the Etruscan examples.

The commonest material for these gems is red carnelian, and agate frequently occurs. The beetle shape is undoubtedly due to the Phoenicians, who familiarized the Etruscans with the Egyptian scarab and with its signification as an amulet; while in technique they are more Greek, in use they are more Egyptian, for they were used not only as seals but as ornaments - as in the decoration of necklaces. 5 What we learn from them merely serves to strengthen what we learn from the pottery - that the Etruscans depended on the Greek world for their artistic conceptions. Though many Phoenician gems (in fact, scarcely any other kind) have been found in Sardinia, these are comparatively rare in Etruria, where the earliest gems occur about 650 B.C. Some of these earliest show the Ionian influence, which is also shown in certain gold rings, but most of them represent the Attic style as seen on the black-figured vases of Athens. To understand them one has but to know Attic sculpture, the complete history of which is repeated in these small and beautifully worked stones. At first one finds the single figures, awkward in form and modelling, but full of life in composition - one finds the same mistakes in anatomy (i.e. the muscles of the stomach); and then come the figures beautifully worked and accurately observed, but with the slight hardness and rigidity that belongs to all pre-Raphaelite work; and finally one sees the figures carved with the easy assurance of the master, Athen. i. 28.

5 Martha, L' Art etrusque, pl. I, 4; Bull. dell'Inst. (1837) p. 46.

Pottery. sometimes single, sometimes in groups, but always Attic in their unrivalled representation of the beauties of the human figure, and in the innumerable lovely scenes taken from everyday life. Not infrequently inscriptions are cut in the gem, but these are not as on Greek gems the name of the carver or the owner, but the name of the Greek hero represented. In regard to technique one point is specially noteworthy. Many of the gems are carved with the round drill, and the disks made by this are not modelled into any real semblance of a figure. This is not a sign of the antiquity of the gem, for there are examples in which together with this method will be seen a figure finished with the greatest care; it is thus evident that the gem-cutter left the marks of his round drill because of their decorative value. This they undoubtedly possess, and it is one of the few cases in which the Etruscans showed any art sense.

Bronze was used extensively. Weapons of course were fashioned of it, but these are simple in shape and decoration;. no such examples as those from Mycenae occur.

Objects of large size, as the bronze doors of Veil,' the chariots of Perugia in the New York museum, or large tripods or shields, show that the artisans had large quantities of the material at their disposal. As with the vases or gems, so in these metal objects the distinction must be drawn between pure Etruscan work and the work that was done by Greek workmen or by artisans copying the Greek style. As Etruscan art has been wrongly estimated through forgetfulness of the Greek influence, so Greek bronzes have possibly received credit that does not belong to them. Etruscan candelabra and vases were famous among the Greeks (Ath. i. 28.6; xv. 700 c). The chariots above mentioned and the tripods in the Harvard museum are plainly Greek; the round shields with ornament in bands are native. Antefixes of tombs were of bronze, and in some cases the eyes of the figures were inlaid with glass paste. The best-known articles of bronze are the mirrors,2 which are very dependent on Greece for their models, though the poor style in which the scenes that decorate them are in most cases carved shows that these articles of common use were produced, as was natural, mainly by ordinary workmen. In rare cases the figures are not engraved but are given in low relief. These mirrors seem to have been mainly intended for women, and the scenes on them in large numbers of cases are of such a character as to bear out this idea; for instead of scenes of battle such as occur on the gems, scenes with satyrs and maenads are commoner, or the story of Helen or the labours of Hercules. So far as development goes they pass through the same stages as the gems, though owing to their larger surface they are more generally decorated with groups of figures. 3 Another well-known class of work is the cistae or cylindrical bronze boxes found mostly at Praeneste, where they seem to have been especially popular. The engraved figures on them are of the same character as those on the mirrors, and it is noteworthy that these figures are often better in style than the figures modelled in the round that serve as handles, or than the legs which also are modelled. This, taken together with the fact that the same figures are repeated in several cases on more than one gem or mirror, makes it probable that the workmen, like the later potters of Arezzo, had a stock of models brought from Greece, which they repeated and combined to suit their fancy.

The paintings and contents of the tombs have made it plain that the wealth of the Etruscans was very considerable, and that they spent much on jewelry, gold and silver. 4 Their extravagance in this regard was well known,' and the rings, the necklaces, the diadems, the bracelets and the earrings show that there was a large class of well-to-do people. The eastern and Greek influences are clearly marked in the figures used in decoration, and in certain shapes of rings, but in 1 Plutarch, Camillus, 12. 2 Gerhard, Etr. Spiegel (continued 15y Klugmann and Korte).

3 Mirrors of Greek style, Gerhard, III, 112, 116, 240, 3 0 5, 352 Klugmann-Korte, 107, 131, 160.

See plates in Martha and in Monumenti dell' Inst., also Mon. Ant. iv. and Milani's Studie materiali. 5 Juvenal v. 164; Ovid, Am. iii. 13.25 ff.

one technical matter the Etruscans seem to have made a discovery: it was in the use of granulated ornament, that is, ornament made by soldering on to the gold object infinitely small globules of the same metal laid in various designs and patterns, each globule soldered by itself. Though this style of ornament occurs in Egypt, Cyprus, Rhodes and Magna Graecia, nowhere is it accomplished with such extraordinary minuteness as in Etruria. That they should do this was natural. The difficulty of it seems to have pleased them, for it is commoner than the earlier filigree work made of wire soldered on to the gold base. Reference has been made to the scarabs set as ornament in the gold necklaces, and similarly we find amber used and, in the later work, precious stones and pearls.

As in Greece the Etruscans first carved their figures out of wood, 6 but what these figures were like we can only imagine.

The earliest known figures in the round are even less ' Sculpture. successful than the contemporary Greek work. An early attempt at a female bust 7 is made not by casting but by riveting plates of bronze together. A half life size bust in the Tyszkiewicz collection 8 made probably about 600 B.C. is cast solid. Later they learned the art of hollow-casting, but their attempts to reproduce figures in the round are generally lacking in skill. One reason for this was the lack of good marble, the quarries at Carrara not having been used till Roman times. Terra-cotta was the material most commonly used, and their skill in modelling and colouring this was great. The earlier statues of large size have perished; but there are three famous sarcophagi which show the work of Ionian Etruscan artists; 9 one is in the British Museum, one in the Louvre and one in the Villa di Papa Giulio at Rome. The elaborate detail and careful work, the types of the figures and the style of their dress all point to the same Ionic origin as that of the bronze chariots already mentioned. The type of sarcophagus illustrated by these examples became very common, and in the figures that decorate the covers can be traced the various influences that affected the whole of Etruscan art. In an example from Volci 10 the later Attic influence is strongly marked. Such work shows little power of origination, but much of the interest taken by careful workmen by copying carefully, and the tendency that such workmen almost invariably display of overloading the subject with too much ornament and detail. The small ash-urns, either of stone or terra-cotta, are in certain ways more interesting than the more elaborate sarcophagi, for on these urns the heads of the figures reclining on one elbow which form the usual decoration of the covers are often obvious attempts at portraiture. Single busts 11 show this same desire for accurate likeness of the person represented, and in this one line of art the Etruscans showed a new feeling, one that found its finest expression in the hands of the later Roman portraitists. The main difference between such portraits and the Greek ones is that the Greek artist thought of his subject as illustrating character that showed itself in ways of repose and thought - the essential, lasting individuality. The Etruscan and Roman portraitist thought, on the other hand, of his subject as illustrating character in ways of action; hence pure Etruscan and Roman portraits are much more tense in line, and the expression of the eye is not dreamy but distinctly focussed. They are different, but, as art, one is as fine as the other. The scenes on the sides of these urns are, as in the case of the gems and mirrors, very frequently taken from Greek story, and often are scenes of battle. 12 Work in relief for the friezes and the other decorations of temples was very common, and shows remarkable skill in the mere processes of modelling and 'baking the slabs of terra-cotta that were fastened by nails to the beams. So far as the figures themselves are concerned, they seem to have but little meaning in connexion with the building they decorate.

6 Pliny, H.N. xiv. 9; xvi. 216.

From the Polledrara tomb at Vulci, Martha fig. 335.

8 Coll. Tyszkiewicz, pl. 13.

9 Mon. dell' Inst. vi. pl. 59, cf. Annali (1861), p. 402; Mon. Ant. viii. pl. xiii.-xiv.

1° Mon. dell' Inst. viii. pl. 20; Martha p. 347.

11 Martha pp. 333, 348.

12 See Korte, Rilievi delle urne Etrusche. Satyrs and maenads, chariot-races and such scenes taken over from Greek models are perhaps the commonest. In none of the obviously native work is there any more instinctive feeling for the greater qualities of sculpture than in the gems. Little is original, almost everything dependent on earlier masters. There is no absorption of the artist by his work which produces great work, great because the beholder thinks rather of the work produced than of the artist who produces it. For this reason such figures as the bronze chimaera or the bronze Athena in the Florence museum are presumably not Etruscan but Greek.

There is no evidence that the Etruscans had easel-paintings like the Greeks, but their skill in painting is well illustrated by the pictures with which they frequently covered the inner walls of their tombs. The wall was prepared with a coating of fine white stucco on which the figures were painted with a large variety of tints. The best of them have been found at Tarquinii, Chiusi, Volci, Caere, Veil.' The paintings exhibit the usual Greek influences. They show a certain ponderous realism, but as works of art they are of little value. As pictures of the life and customs of the people they are of great importance.

As works of art their coins 2 are the worst efforts of the Etruscans. Gold, silver and bronze were used, but no examples. can be dated earlier than the beginning of the 5th century B.C. The coins are struck according to four different standards of weight, due perhaps to different tradeconnexions. The bronze coinage shows a distinct scale of reduction in weight due to the increasing use of the precious metals. Many examples show a design only on one side. The designs of the majority of the types are taken from Greek models, but strangely enough the die-cutters show no such skill as that of the makers of gems.

Arms and Armour

In the early periods the chief weapons (besides bows and arrows which bore flint or bronze heads) were few and simple, and were of bronze. Iron ones have been found, and their rarity is doubtless partly due to their having rusted away. Spears of very various weights were common and also swords and daggers. These latter had straight two-edged blades with the handle either of the same piece or of some other material fastened on with rivets. The blades of the daggers are generally engraved with lines and zigzags. Shields were of circular and oval shape. These two were of bronze, the round ones decorated in Homeric fashion with concentric circles of ornament, the motives being geometric patterns or an animal repeated endlessly. Breastplates with overlapping shoulder-straps and belts, broader in front than behind, with decoration of the same kind as the bucchero vases, are not uncommon. Greaves and helmets completed their equipment. The former seem to have been less ornate than those the Greeks wore; the latter were of various shapes, the commonest being round caps with a knob on the top, or a deeper shape with a crest from front to back. Some are shown with side-pieces raised like wings, but these are perhaps merely cheek-pieces raised on hinges. In later times they had trumpets and axes, and their arms became practically the same as the Roman, as one sees from the representations in the tombs. (R. N.) Language 1. By " Etruscan " is meant the language spoken by the people called Etrusci (more commonly Tusci) by the Romans, Turskum numen (i.e. Tuscum nomen ) by their neighbours the Umbrians of Iguvium, and Tvpanvoi (later, e.g. in Strabo's time, Tvpprivoc ) by the Greeks. Their own name for themselves was Rasenna (or Rasena ), according to Dionysius Halic. (i. 30), but it seems now to be fairly probable that this was no more than the name of a leading house (represented later on in Pisa and elsewhere) dominant at some fairly early date in some one 1 See Mon. dell' Inst. i. pl. 32-33, v. 16, 1 7, 33, 34, vi. 3 o -3 2, 79, viii. 36, ix. 13-15; Micali, Mon. Ined. pl. 58. Cf. Helbig, Annali (1863) p. 33 6, (1870) pp. 5-74; Brunn, ib. (1866), p. 442.

Mommsen, Rom. Munzwesen; G. F. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins; Deecke, Etruskische Forschungen; also article Numismatics.

locality (see below). Niebuhr attempted on slender grounds (Rom. Hist., ed. 3 [Eng. trans.], i. p. 41) to distinguish between the Tvpprlvoi. and the Tusci in order to accept the strongly supported tradition of a Lydian origin for the " Tyrrhenes " (see below), while rejecting it for the " Tuscans," but no one has since attempted to maintain the distinction (Dittenberger, Hermes, 1906, p. 85, footnote, regards the form in -nvoi as a " Graecized form of a local name " equivalent to Tusci ), and we now know enough of the morphology of Etruscan names to recognize Tur-s-co- and Tur-s-eno- as closely parallel EtruscoLatin stems, cf. Venu-c-ius: Venu-senus both from Etr. venu (Schulze, Lat. Eigennamen, p. 405) and Ras-ena: Ras-c-anius (ibid. p. 92); or Voluscus; Volscus: Volusenus (where the formative suffixes in each word are Etrusco-Latin whether the root be the same or not). But the analysis of the names cannot be entirely satisfactory until the first syllable of Etrusci - in Greek writers sometimes "ErpovoKot, e.g. in Strabo - ed. Meineke - has been explained.

2. The extent of territory over which this language was spoken varied considerably at different epochs, but we have only a few fixed points of chronology. From two separate sources, both traditional and probably sound (Dion. Hal. i. 26, and Plutarch, Sulla, 7; cf. Varro, quoted by Censorinus c. 17.6), we should ascribe the first appearance of the Etruscans in Italy to the 12th century B.C. The intimate connexion in form between the names Roma, Romulus and the Etruscan gentes rumate, rumulna ( Romatia, Romilia, &c. ), and the fact that many of the early names in Rome (e.g. Ratumenna, Capena, Tities, Luceres, Ramnes) are characteristically Etruscan, justifies the conclusion that the foundation of the city, in the sense at least of its earliest fortification, was due to Etruscans (Schulze, p. 580). The most likely interpretation of Cato's date for the Etruscan " foundation " of Capua is 598 B.C. (Conway, Italic Dialects, pp. 99 and 83). In 524 B.C. (Dion. Hal. vii. 2) the Etruscans were defeated by Aristodemus of Cumae, and in 474 by Hiero of Syracuse in a great naval battle off Cumae. Between 445 and 425 ( It. Dial. l.c.) they were driven out of Capua by the Samnites, but they lingered in parts of Campania (as far south as Salernum) till at least the next century, as inscriptions show ( ib. pp. 94 ff., 53), as at Praeneste and Tusculum ( ib. p. 310 ff.) till the 3rd century or later. In Etruria itself the oldest inscriptions (on the stelae of Faesulae and Volaterrae) can hardly be later than the 6th century B.C. (C. Pauli, Altital. Forsch. ii. part 2, 24 ff.); the Romans had become dominant early in the 3rd century (C.I.L. xi. 1 passim ), but the bulk of the Etruscan inscriptions show later forms than those found in the old town of Volsinii destroyed by the Romans in 280 B.C. (C. Pauli, ib. i. 127). In the north of Italy we find Etruscan written in two alphabets (of Sondrio and Bozen) between 300 and 150 B.C. ( id. ib. pp. 63 and 126). The evidence of an Etruscan linen book wrapped round a mummy (see below) seems to suggest that there was some Etruscan colony at Alexandria in the period of the Ptolemies. At least one Etruscan suffix has passed into the Romance languages, -iBa or -ita in Etr. lautniBa (from lautni " familiaris," or "libertus "), and Etr.-Lat. Iulitta, which became Ital. -etta, Fr.-Eng. -ette. 3. Finally must be mentioned the remarkable pre-Hellenic epitaph discovered on the island of Lemnos in 1885 (Pauli, Altital. Forsch. ii. 1 and 2), the language of which offers remarkable resemblances to Etruscan, especially in the phrase siai vein aviz (? _ "fifty years old "); cf. Etr. ceallus avils (? " twenty years old "); and the pair of endings -ezi, -ale in consecutive words; cf. Etr. larOiale hulxniesi; the style of the sculptural figure has also parallels in the oldest type of Etruscan monuments. The alphabet of this inscription is identical (Kirchhoff, Stud. Griech. Alphab., 4th ed., p. 54) with that of the older group of Phrygian inscriptions, which mention King Midas and are therefore older than 620 B.C. With this should be combined the fact that a marked peculiarity of the South-Etruscan alphabet ('j`=f, but earlier = the Greek digamma ) has demonstrably arisen out of 4=q ) on Phrygian soil, see Class. Rev. xii., 1898, p. 462. Despite the reasonable but not unanswerable difficulty of Kretschmer ( Einleitung in d. Geschichte d. griech. Sprache, 1896, p. 240), the E¦11MIMI¦V weight of the evidence appears to be distinctly in favour of the Etruscan character of the language, and Pauli's view is now generally accepted by students of Etruscan; hence the inclusion of the inscription in the Corpus Inscc. Etruscarum. 4. The first attempt to interpret Etruscan inscriptions was made by Phil. Buonarroti ( Explic. et conject. ad monism. &c., Florence, 1726), who, as was almost inevitable at that epoch, tried to explain the language as a dialect of Latin. But no real study was possible before the determination of the alphabet by Lepsius ( Inscc. Umbr. et Oscae, Leipzig, 184r), and his discovery that five of the Tables of Iguvium, though written in Etruscan alphabet, contained a language akin to Latin but totally different from Etruscan, though some of the non-Italic peculiarities of Etruscan had been already pointed out by Ottfried Muller ( Die Etrusker, Breslau, 1828). The earliest inscriptions, e.g. the terra-cotta stele of Capua of the 5th century B.C., are written in "serpentine boustrophedon," but in its common form of the 3rd century B.C. the alphabet is retrograde, and has the following nineteen letters: 4 1 JI'H I/I 1 Mg2tvt8 ' 'a, c, e, v, z, h, 0, i, 1, m, n, p, s', r, s, t, u, x, f On older monuments)1=k occurs as an archaic form of c; 9=q; a sibilant of some kind; and G = d, this last mostly in foreign words. In the earlier monuments the cross-bars of e and v and h have a more decidedly oblique inclination, and s is often angular (Z). The mediae b, g, d, though they often occur in words handed down by writers as Etruscan, are never found in the Etruscan inscriptions, though the presence of the mediae in the Umbrian and Oscan alphabets and in the abecedaria shows that they existed in the earliest form of the Etruscan alphabet, 0 is very rare. The form t (earlier iiiT)= / in south Etruscan and Faliscan inscriptions should also be mentioned. Its combination with El h shows that it had once served to denote the sound of digamma just as Latin F. The varieties of the alphabet in use between the Apennines and the Alps were first examined by Mommsen ( Inschriften nord-etruskischen Alphabets, 1853), and have since been discussed by Pauli ( Altitalische Forschungen, 1885-1894, esp. vol. iii., Die Veneter, p. 218, where other references will be found, see also Veneti).

5. The determination of the alphabet was followed by a large number of different attempts to explain the Etruscan forms from words in some other language to which it was supposed that Etruscan might be akin; Scandinavian and Basque and Semitic have been tried among the rest. These attempts, however ingenious, have all proved fruitless; even the latest and least fanciful (Remarques sur le parente de la langue etrusque, Copenhagen, 1899; Bulletin de l'Academie Royale des Sciences et des Lettres de Danemark, 1899, p. 373 ), in which features of some living dialects of the Caucasus are cautiously compared by Prof.

V. Thomsen (as independently by Pauli, see § 12), is at the best premature, and as to the numerals probably misleading. Worst of all was the effort of W. Corssen (Die Sprache der Etrusker, 1875), in whom learning and enthusiasm were combined with loose methods of both epigraphy and grammar, to revive the view of Buonarroti. The only solid achievement in the period of Corssen's influence (1860-1880) was the description of the works of art (tombs, vases, mirrors and the like) from the different centres of Etruscan population; Dennis's Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1st ed., 1848; 2nd, 1878) contributes something even to the study of the language, because many of the figures in the scenes sculptured or engraved bear names in Etruscan form (e.g. usils, " sun "; or " of the sun," on the templum of Placentia; fufluns, " Bacchus"; tuxulxa, a demon or fury; see Dennis, Cities, 2nd ed., frontispiece, and p. 354).

6. The reaction against Corssen's method was led first by W. Deecke, Corssen and die Sprache der Etrusker (1876), Etruskische Forschungen (1875-1880), and continued by Carl Pauli at first jointly with Deecke and afterwards singly with greater power ( Etruskische Studien, 1873), Etr. Forschungen u. Studien (Göttingen-Stuttgart, 1881-1884), Altitalische Studien (Hanover, 1883-1887); Altitalische Forschungen (Leipzig, 1885-1894). Of the work achieved during the last generation by him and the few but distinguished scholars associated with him (Danielsson, Schaefer, Skutsch and Torp) it may perhaps be said that, though the positive knowledge yet reaped is scanty, so much has been done in other ways that the prospect is full of promise. In the first place, the only sound method of dealing with an unknown language, that of interpreting the records of the language by their own internal evidence in the first instance (not by the use of imaginary parallels in better known languages whose kinship with the problematic language is merely assumed), has been finally established and is now followed even by scholars like Elia Lattes, who still retain some affection for the older point of view. By this means enough certainty has been obtained on many characteristic features of the language to bring about a general recognition of the fact that Etruscan, if we put aside its borrowings from the neighbouring dialects of Italy, is in no sense an Indo-European language. In the second place, the great undertaking of the Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum, founded by Carl Pauli, with the support of the Berlin Academy, conducted by him from 1893 till his death in 1 9 01, and continued by Danielsson, Herbig and Torp, for the first time provided a sound basis for the study in a text of the inscriptions, edited with care and arranged according to their provenance. The first volume contains over four thousand inscriptions from the northern half of Etruria. Thirdly, the discoveries of recent years have richly increased the available material, especially by two documents each of some length. (1) The 5th-century stele of terra-cotta from S. Maria di Capua already cited, published by Buecheler in Rhein. Museum, lv., 1900, p. 1) and now in the Royal Museum at Berlin, is the longest Etruscan inscription yet found. Its best preserved part contai

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