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 Painting. painted with a large variety of tints. The best of them have been found at Tarquinii, Chiusi, Volci, Caere, Veii.[1] 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 Coins. different standards of weight, due perhaps to different trade-connexions. 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 (q.v.), and Τυρσηνοί (later, e.g. in Strabo’s time, Τυρρηνοί) by the Greeks. Their own name for themselves was Rasénna (or Raséna), 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 locality (see below). Niebuhr attempted on slender grounds (Rom. Hist., ed. 3 [Eng. trans.], i. p. 41) to distinguish between the Τυρρηνοί 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 -ηνοί 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-ēno- as closely parallel Etrusco-Latin 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: Volusēnus (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 Ἕτρουσκοι, 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, -iθa or -ita in Etr. lautniθa (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 śialχveiz
aviz (? = “fifty years old”); cf. Etr. cealχus avils (? “twenty
years old”); and the pair of endings -ezi, -ale in consecutive words;
cf. Etr. larθiale hulχniesi; 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 (↑ = f, but
earlier = the Greek digamma) has demonstrably arisen out of
= 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
- ↑ See Mon. dell’ Inst. i. pl. 32-33, v. 16, 17, 33, 34, vi. 30-32, 79, viii. 36, ix. 13-15; Micali, Mon. Ined. pl. 58. Cf. Helbig, Annali (1863) p. 336, (1870) pp. 5-74; Brunn, ib. (1866), p. 442.
- ↑ Mommsen, Röm. Münzwesen; G.F. Hill, Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins; Deecke, Etruskische Forschungen; also article Numismatics.
