(inside front and back covers)

THE
MUTE
STONES
SPEAK

THE STORY
OF
ARCHAEOLOGY
IN
ITALY

PAUL MacKENDRICK

ST MARTIN’S PRESS · NEW YORK

Copyright © 1960 by Paul MacKendrick
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-8767
Manufactured in the United States of America
By H. Wolff, New York

TO MY WIFE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book owes much to many: to the Trustees of the American Academy in Rome, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Research Committee of the University of Wisconsin Graduate School, for giving me the opportunity to spend three years in Italy; to Laurance and Isabel Roberts, for hospitality and moral support; to Axel Boëthius, for friendship and instruction; to Ernest Nash, for photographs and advice; to Mrs. Inez Longobardi, the best and most helpful of librarians and friends; to Ferdinando Castagnoli, for sharing with me his incomparable knowledge of the topography of Rome and Latium; to R. I. W. Westgate and Alston Chase, who taught me Latin at Harvard and have been my friends for thirty years; to the staff of the St. Martin’s Press: Diane Wheeler-Nicholson, and Fred J. Royar, for giving the book so handsome a dress; especially to my colleague J. P. Heironimus, for meticulous proofreading which saved me from much error; and to Frank E. Brown, who introduced me to archaeology and is hereby absolved from responsibility for all untoward results of the introduction. My overarching debt is acknowledged in the dedication.

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

1
Prehistoric Italy

In May of 1945 two young British Army officers, John Bradford and Peter Williams-Hunt, based with the R.A.F. at Foggia in the province of Puglia, near the heel of Italy, found that the World War II armistice left them with time on their hands. Both trained archaeologists, they readily prevailed upon the R.A.F. to combine routine training flights with pushing back the frontiers of science. The result of their air reconnaissance was to change profoundly the archaeological map of Italy.

The value of air-photography for archaeology had long been known; as early as 1909 pictures taken from a balloon had revealed the plan of Ostia, the port of ancient Rome. But the English, especially such pioneers as Major G. W. G. Allen and O. G. S. Crawford, early took the lead in interpreting, on photographs taken usually for military purposes, vegetation-marks showing the presence and plan of ancient sites buried beneath the soil, and invisible to the groundling’s eye. Where the subsoil has been disturbed in antiquity by the digging of a ditch, the increased depth of soil will produce more luxuriant crops or weeds; where soil-depth is decreased by the presence of ancient foundations, walls, floors, or roads, the crop will be thin, stunted, lighter in color. Air-photographs taken in raking light, just after sunrise or just before sunset in a dry season, especially over grassland, will highlight these buried landscapes. The Tavoliere, the great prairie where Foggia lies, thirty by fifty-five miles in extent, suits these conditions admirably; its mean annual rainfall is only 18.6 inches (0.6 in July) or half that of Rome, and Rome is a dry place, at least in summer. So Bradford and Williams-Hunt had high hopes for their project.

In a Fairchild high-wing monoplane, in which the position of struts and nacelles does not interfere with the operation of a hand-held camera, they took oblique shots at 1,000 feet with an air camera of 8-inch focal length. For vertical shots they used, at 10,000 feet, air cameras of 20-inch focal length, mounted tandem to produce overlap for stereoscopic examination, which makes pictures three-dimensional. The thousands of resulting photographs were at a scale of about 1:6000, or ten inches to the mile, over four times as large as the best available ground maps (the 1:25,000 series of the Italian Istituto Geografico Militare.)

Bradford, realizing the archaeological value of the millions of air-photographs taken during the war by the British and American Strategic Air Commands, prevailed upon the authorities to deposit prints, giving complete coverage for Italy, in Rome (with the British and Swedish Schools) and the American Academy. The initiative of Prof. Kirk H. Stone procured a similar set for the University of Wisconsin. The stereoscopic study of these collections will mean great strides in Italian archaeology. The accuracy of the data obtained is amazing: ditches estimated from the photographs with a good micrometer scale to be four feet wide proved when measured on the ground to be precisely that.

What the photographs revealed, scattered over the 1650 square miles of the Tavoliere, were over 2000 settlements, some up to 800 yards across, surrounded by one to eight ditches. Within the ditched area, and approached by in-turned, tunnel-shaped entrances, were smaller, circular patches, which looked like hut-enclosures, or “compounds.” Three examples of the sites photographed will illustrate typical settlements. At a site identified on the map ([Fig. 1.1]) as San Fuoco d’Angelone, eight miles northeast of Foggia, the photographs showed a ditch-enclosed oval measuring 500 × 400 feet, and an inner circle 260 feet across, with what proved to be the characteristic funnel-shaped opening. At Masseria Fongo, four miles south of Foggia, the oval was estimated at 480 yards long, with a 12-foot entrance and 12-foot ditches. At Passo di Corvo ([Fig. 1.2]), eight miles northeast of Foggia, the enclosure measured 800 × 500 yards, and the details were revealed by masses of flowers, yellow wild cabbage, mauve wild mint, white cow-parsley.

So much for results from the study of photographs. The next step for Bradford was to spend a fruitful season in the study. Archaeology is a comparative science: to know one site is to know nothing; to know a thousand is to see some factors unifying all. Thus the settlement-shapes of the Tavoliere are reminiscent of the fortified stronghold of Dimini in Thessaly ([Fig. 1.3]), dated by its excavation in the late neolithic age, which in Greece means about 2650 B.C. They also look like the fortified site of Altheim near Munich ([Fig. 1.4]), also late neolithic, which in Germany means about 1900 B.C. Culture in Europe moved from east to west; in general the farther west the site, the later it reached its successive levels of culture. The Tavoliere sites, lying geographically between Dimini and Altheim, might well be intermediate in date also; by their shape, at any rate, they are almost certainly to be dated sometime in the neolithic period. So much can be guessed before the indispensable next step is taken. The next step is excavation.

Prehistoric Sites in Italy

1. Como
2. Golasecca
3. Padua
4. Este
5. Castellazzo di Fontanellato
6. Parma
7. Campo di Servirola
8. Reggio Emilia
9. Spina
10. Villanova
11. Bologna
12. Arene Candide
13. Rimini
14. Balzi Rossi
15. Vibrata Valley
16. San Giovenale
17. Capestrano
18. Rome
19. Ostia
20. Passo di Corvo
21. San Fuoco d’Angelone
22. Foggia
23. Masseria Fongo
24. Molfetta
25. Matera
26. Su Nuraxi
27. Cagliari
28. Torre Galli
29. Lipari Is.
30. Canale
31. Caltagirone
32. Thapsos
33. Pantalica
34. Cozzo Pantano
35. Milocca
36. Plemmirio
37. Dessueri

Fig. 1.1 Prehistoric sites in Italy.

Fig. 1.2 Passo di Corso, low-oblique air photo (May 1945, by John Bradford) across the Neolithic settlement, 7 miles N.E. of Foggia. Crop-marks revealed the parallel lines of surrounding ditches (in foreground and background), with many enclosures inside.

Fig. 1.3 Dimini, a late Neolithic site in Thessaly.

(H. Bengtson, Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44a)

Fig. 1.4 Altheim, a late Neolithic site near Munich.

(H. Bengtson, Grosser historischer Weltatlas, 44f)

Modern archaeological excavation is neither haphazard nor a treasure hunt. It is a scientific business, preceded by careful survey, conducted with minute attention to levels and strata (the level in which an object is found determines its relative date; comparison with similar objects found elsewhere that can be dated determines its absolute date), and followed by scrupulous recording and publication of the evidence. A dig is not a treasure hunt. Naturally an archaeologist is pleased if he turns up gold or precious stones, but he knows in advance that an old stone age site will produce neither, but rather something infinitely more valuable, an intimate knowledge of man’s past, gained from ordinary humble objects of daily household use. To find these was Bradford’s object when he began to dig. (Williams-Hunt had meanwhile been posted to the Far East.) And he found them. Passo di Corvo, for example, yielded typical neolithic artifacts: stone axes, querns (hand-mills for grinding grain), bone points, stone sickles, pendants, spindle-whorls, and, best of all, vast quantities of potsherds, over 4,000 found in fourteen days. The potsherd is the archaeologist’s best friend. Pots are virtually indestructible, they turn up everywhere, and comparison with pots of similar shape and decoration, found elsewhere, yields precious information about dates, imports, exports, trade-routes, and the aesthetic taste of the pot’s maker and user.

S. Fuoco d’Angelone, for example, yielded typical neolithic pottery: rich brown or glossy black burnished ware, undecorated but thin-walled, symmetrical, and well-made (by hand, not on a potter’s wheel; sooner or later the use of the wheel produces shoddy commercialism). Together with it were found sherds of a fine-textured buff ware, painted with wide bands (fasce larghe) of tomato red. There were also very thin burnished bowls in cream and gray.

After excavation, the archaeologist must return to the study and to the comparative method; an exacting and exciting pursuit of parallels, especially for the pottery, in the hope of dating it and tracking down its origins. The facts are recorded in technical excavation reports, often buried in obscure or local journals. Oftener, the results of excavation are unpublished (it is always more fun to dig than to write.) In that case, the facts are treasured up in the notes or the memories of the excavator, often a local archaeologist. He belongs to a splendid breed, burning with enthusiasm, brimful of knowledge, and eager to share what he knows, in conversation if not in print.

So Bradford read and talked, and found his parallels. The wares he had excavated were familiar; they had been found elsewhere in the heel of Italy, especially opposite or in Matera, in Lucania, and Molfetta, in Puglia, between Barletta and Bari, in contexts dated 2600–2500 B.C. And this pottery proves to have affinities, too, with that of Thessalian Sesklo, a neolithic site not far from Dimini. This same type of pottery can be traced across the Balkans into Illyricum, and thence across the Adriatic to Bradford’s sites, giving in the process a glimpse of neolithic man as a more daring seafarer than had previously been thought.

And so, by patient, detailed work like Bradford’s, the newly-discovered sites are fitted into and enrich the pattern of the neolithic world. The total mapping fills a huge gap in the picture of the findspots of Neolithic sites in Italy. Before 1945, some 170 were known; now the Tavoliere alone makes up more than that number. And Passo di Corvo becomes the largest known neolithic site in Europe.

The things the archaeologists did not find are instructive, too. No weapons were found: the inference is that the Tavoliere folk were unwarlike. There is no evidence that the sites survived into the Bronze Age: it looks as though, like unwarlike peoples all too often elsewhere, they were wiped out in an invasion.

It is clear from the artifacts and the site-plans that neolithic man on the Tavoliere lived like neolithic man elsewhere in Italy, that the culture was on the whole uniform. He lived in a wattle-and-daub hut with a sunken floor, a central hearth, and a smokehole—the remote and primitive predecessor of the atrium-and-impluvium house of historic Roman times, whose central apartment had a hole in the roof with a pool below to catch rain water. Fortunately for us, his wife was a slovenly housekeeper: from her rubbish we can reconstruct her way of life. In his enclosures he penned the animals he had domesticated: other Italian sites have yielded the bones of the sheep, goat, horse, ox, ass, and pig. The dog has not yet become man’s best friend in the neolithic Tavoliere. Primitive man in Italy had a rudimentary religion: the Ligurian cave of Arene Candide has yielded statuettes of big-breasted, pregnant women, which probably had something to do with a fertility cult. In another Ligurian cave, Balzi Rossi, over 200,000 stone implements have been found. Not far up the Adriatic coast from Foggia, in the Vibrata valley, lie the foundations of 336 neolithic huts. We know something, too, of neolithic man’s burial customs, and macabre enough they seem: skulls have been found smeared with red ochre; apparently the flesh was stripped from the corpse—a practice called in Italian scarnitura—and the stain applied to the bared bone. All this suggests a level of culture far below that which the Near East was enjoying at the same time: Passo di Corvo’s mud huts are contemporary with the Great Pyramid of Egypt, with palaces and temples in Mesopotamia (see [Fig. 1.5]). But there is no evidence that neolithic man in Italy was priest-ridden or tyrannized over, as the Egyptians and Akkadians were; he is rather to be thought of as the ancestor of the sturdy peasant stock which was to form the backbone of Roman Italy.

* * * * *

Fig. 1.5 Comparative table of early cultures.

(C. F. C. Hawkes, The Prehistoric Foundations of Europe, Table IV)

Fig. 1.6 Terramara at Castellazzo di Fontanellato, Pigorini’s plan.

(G. Säflund, Le terremare, Pl. 93)

Bradford’s methods are scientific, but archaeology has not always been the exact science it is today. Americans may be proud that the first recorded scientific excavation took place in Indian mounds in Virginia. The date was 1784, and the excavator was Thomas Jefferson. But thereafter archaeological progress was sporadic, and relapse accompanied advance. In the mid-nineteenth century most excavations in Italy were more like rape than science, their aim being to dredge up treasures for the nobility and the art-dealers.

Thus when in 1889 the distinguished Italian anthropologist Luigi Pigorini excavated the site of Castellazzo di Fontanellato, twelve miles northwest of Parma, in the Po Valley, there was no absolute guarantee that the dig would be scientific. Yet Pigorini’s announced results have colored the whole picture of the Bronze Age in Italy, and it is only recently that they have been doubted. The story of his announced results, the growing scepticism, the re-examination of the ground, and the present state of the question is an illuminating if sobering one.

What Pigorini was after was the evidence for the prehistoric settlements which have come to be called terremare. They owe their discovery, their name, and their destruction to the fertilizing quality of the earth of which they are composed. Terra marna is the name in the dialect of Emilia for the compost heaps formed by the decay of organic matter in certain mounds of ancient date, mostly south of the Po. Farmers repeatedly found potsherds and other artifacts, often of bronze, in these mounds, and Pigorini determined to examine them before all the evidence should be dispersed. Castellazzo di Fontanellato is the most famous of his efforts.

He found clear, though meager, evidence in pottery and metal artifacts (axes, daggers, pins, razors) of a Bronze Age culture, but no report of the levels in which he found these objects survives, and indeed in this as in most terremare the farmer’s shovel has completely upset the levels. Roman terracotta, medieval pottery, and prehistoric bronze axe-heads jostle one another in confusion. Besides, the prehistoric site has been continuously inhabited, and, in consequence, the soil continuously turned over, ever since Roman times.

Pigorini apparently dug isolated, random trenches rather than the continuous ones which would have enabled him to trace a ground-plan securely. It is hard to see, without more evidence than he supplies, how the grandiose grid of his ultimate plan ([Fig. 1.6]) could be deduced from the disconnected series of trenches figured on his earliest one. Though he had to contend with the most vexatious swampy conditions, working in the midst of constant seepage and ubiquitous mud, in which a rectangular grid could hardly have survived, he was nevertheless able to persuade himself, at Castellazzo, of the existence of a ditch and a rampart, reinforced by wooden piling. (Post-holes and piles he certainly found, and photographed.)

By 1892 he had convinced himself that his site had a trapezoidal plan, surrounded by a ramparted ditch thirty yards wide and ten feet deep. (Some of his dimensions suggest a prehistoric unit of measure in multiples of five; others a foreshadowing of the Roman foot of twenty-nine centimeters.) Running water derived from a tributary of the Po supplied the hypothetical ditch, which was crossed on the south by a wooden drawbridge thirty yards wide and sixty yards long. South of the site Pigorini claimed to have found a cemetery (M) perfectly square in plan, for cremation urn-burials, and westward another, rectangular one.

In 1893 he announced the discovery, within the rampart, halfway along its east side, of a mound in a reserved area or templum (G), surrounded by its own ditch; in 1894 this templum became the arx, or citadel of the settlement, having in its midst a sacrificial trench (mundus) containing in its floor, for the deposit of the sacrificial fruits, five sinkholes each equipped with a wooden cover.

Fig. 1.7 Su Nuraxi, a Sardinian nuraghe. (Illustrated London News)

BURIAL RITES
in the
EARLY IRON AGE

Fig. 1.8 Cremating and inhumating peoples of prehistoric Italy. (D. Randall-MacIver, Italy before the Romans, p. 45)

In 1895 and 1896 he published claims to have found within the rampart a grid of streets (cardines and decumani), which he held to be the ancestor of the grid in Roman camps and Roman colonies. The total plan was alleged to resemble that of primitive Rome (Roma Quadrata), and the wooden bridge was compared to Rome’s early wooden one across the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. At another site one of Pigorini’s pupils claimed to have found traces of a ritual furrow like that with which hundreds of years later the Romans were to mark the line of the future walls of a colony. For Pigorini and his school regarded the terremare folk as the ancestors of an Iron Age people called Villanovans, and ultimately of the Romans of historical times.

Since Pigorini’s death in 1920 other archaeologists have been moved to go over the ground again, revising his findings and his inferences. Having excogitated his grid plan for Castellazzo di Fontanellato, Pigorini seems to have generalized from it rather more widely than the evidence warranted. While rectangular or square plans are not denied for some terremare (modern investigators enumerate ten), many sites are oval, not unlike Bradford’s Tavoliere hut-settlements. In fact the terremare plan varies more than Pigorini was willing to admit. Furthermore, parallel in date to the terremare are unmoated hut villages and true lake dwellings. (The terremare are lake dwellings without the lake, presumably a reminiscence in the minds of immigrants from beyond the Alps of their primordial homes.)

But while we must grant to his critics that Pigorini had, to say the least, a strong imagination, we need not go so far as one of his detractors who argued that the terremare are Bronze Age pigsties. One site has an area of thirty-five acres, which is a bit large for a pigsty.

The terremare are important: they preserve the memory of an immigrant population, distinct in culture from the aborigines. The distinguishing marks of this new culture are knowledge of metal-working, a pottery identifiable by its exaggerated half-moon handles, and the practice of cremation rather than inhumation. On the evidence, we must suppose that this new culture emerged about 1500 B.C. as a fusion of indigenous hut-dwellers and immigrant lakedwellers. Bronze bits found in their settlements show that they had domesticated the horse, and there is some evidence, outside the terremare, for dogs as well, described by Randall-MacIver as “doubtless good woolly animals of a fair size.”

In fact the Bronze Age in Italy of which the terremare are a part represents a considerable cultural development beyond the level of the Neolithic Tavoliere folk. Cave dwellings from Liguria show a people using wagons and ox-drawn plows. Chemical analysis of their copper shows that some of it comes from central Germany, though a copper ingot from Sardinia betrays by its impressed double-ax trade-mark some connection with Minoan Crete. (The terremare are contemporary with Mycenae.) Bronze Age women wore jewelry: jadeite arm rings, necklaces of pierced red coral, bored stones, or clamshells. Curious stamps called pintaderas were used to impress a pattern in color on the body. A horned mannikin, with penis erect, from Campo di Servirola, now in the museum of Reggio Emilia, may be evidence for fertility cult, like the neolithic female idols from the Ligurian caves.

The Po valley in the Bronze Age was a melting pot in which a variety of cultures, indigenous and immigrant, mingled. What is to be read from the excavations is almost a recapitulation in this early period, in terms of creative imitation of imported and native forms and ideas, of the whole cultural history of Rome. To our knowledge of this culture, and to our appreciation of the importance of scrupulous archaeological recording, the curious story of Pigorini’s terremare contributed not a little.

* * * * *

The island of Sardinia to the archaeologist is a fascinating curiosity, isolated, until recently, by its unhealthy climate and its odd dialect. In prehistoric times, however, while Sardinia’s development does not parallel that of the mainland, its level of culture appears from archaeological finds and monuments to have been higher, not lower, than that of Italy proper. This superior level seems to have been due to Sardinia’s richness in metals. To protect the wealth, the prehistoric islanders built enormous watchtowers, called nuraghi, which developed into veritable feudal castles with villages nestling at their feet.

Recent excavations (1951–56) by Professor Giovanni Lilliu of the University of Cagliari have cast clearer light on Sardinia’s culture. He excavated the huge nuraghe of Su Nuraxi, at Barumini, some thirty miles north of Cagliari. When he began, Su Nuraxi was a small hill covered with ruins, earth, and scrub. Now six campaigns have revealed a truncated conical tower ([Fig. 1.7]), built, without mortar, of huge many-sided blocks of basalt. Clustered above the tower he found a small Village; the whole complex—tower plus the village—is surrounded by other nuraghi on neighboring hills. To the original single tower four others, with upper courses of dressed stone, were added in a clover-leaf pattern, linked by a curtain-wall enclosing a court sixty feet deep, with a reservoir fifteen feet deep for drinking water. The central tower is three stories high, with a corbelled or false-vaulted roof built of gradually converging horizontal courses. The upper stories were reached by a spiral stair in the thickness of the wall. Lilliu meticulously observed stratigraphy; for dating, he submitted samples of carbonized matter from the towers to laboratories in Milan, and was told that the Carbon 14 process dates his remains as 1270 B.C. ± 200 years.

The C¹⁴ method of dating, an American device discovered and perfected by Professor W. F. Libby and his associates at the University of Chicago Institute of Nuclear Studies, is sufficiently new to deserve a word of explanation here. All living matter has a uniform radioactivity associated with its carbon content. The supply of the radioactive isotope C¹⁴ ceases when living matter, wood, foliage, etc., dies. Scientists can calculate the time elapsed since death by counting the residual radioactivity of C¹⁴ in the organic specimen, since the rate of decay can be described by specifying how long it takes for half the number of atoms in a given sample to disintegrate. For C¹⁴ this period, called its “half-life,” is 5700 years. If the present assay of a specimen of organic matter, for instance, is 12.5 C¹⁴ explosions per minute per gram of carbon, an ancient organic sample assaying at 6.25 would be 5700 years old (the half-life of C¹⁴). Checking with samples of known date has proved the method accurate within 200 years either way. For most classical objects found in association with organic matter this is valueless, since a trained archaeologist can date a pot, an inscription, or an architectural block by eye within fifty years or less. But the method is invaluable for making more precise the great sweeps of time in prehistory. Thus the lowest C¹⁴ date for Su Nuraxi, 1070 B.C., would take it almost into the Iron Age in Italy; at this date culture on the mainland was much more primitive.

Lilliu calls the period of the four added towers Lower Nuragic I, and dates it 800–750 B.C. These smaller towers contain each a single cell with two rows of loopholes. They are guard-posts, and are equipped with speaking-tubes for the guards use when challenging.

In the next period, Upper Nuragic I, dated by Lilliu 750–500 B.C., the earth having subsided, the four towers and the walls were reinforced. The ground-level entrance was blocked, and replaced by a new entrance twenty-one feet higher, accessible only by ladder. Battlements now replaced the loopholes. Stone balls found in the excavations were apparently the projectiles hurled from these battlements. From a watchtower added to the central nuraghe come conch shells, perhaps intended to be sounded like trumpets.

The surrounding village, of 200 or 300 huts, separated by narrow labyrinthine passages, housed the troops; the chief lived in the tower. The village, hard-hit when the Carthaginians sacked it late in the sixth century B.C., survived in decadence till the late first century B.C. The typical oval or rectangular plan of an early Su Nuraxi village hut resembles that of the Bronze Age in Sicily or Cyprus. One contained a pit for votive offerings. Sixty round huts, with lower courses in stone, have been dated in Upper Nuragic I. They would have been roofed, like shepherd huts in Sardinia to this day, with logs and branches weighted by stones. One larger circle has seats around its inner perimeter. It was equipped with shelves, a niche, a stone basin, and a sacred stone (a model of a nuraghe). Lilliu thinks this must have been the warriors’ council chamber.

Su Nuraxi yielded artifacts in stone, terracotta, bronze, iron, lead, and amber, the latter showing connections with trade routes to the Baltic. Lilliu found axes, millstones, pestles, and bronze votive statuettes. Pottery and fibulae (humble safety-pins, whose shapes, varying from age to age, are a help in dating) suggest connections with Phoenicia—via Carthage—and Etruria, whose rich and, in certain respects, mysterious culture is discussed in the next chapter.

In a later phase, after the Carthaginian invasion, the huts have fan-shaped rooms, each devoted to a specialized occupation, baking, oil-pressing, stone-tool making. A pair of stone boot-trees, or shoe-lasts, presumably from a cobbler’s shop, was one of the more curious finds. Gewgaws in glass paste, poor, decadent, commercialized, but traditional in design, testify to the material and aesthetic poverty of this period. Only the last phase yielded tombs, but a huge stele with a curved top may have marked the entrance to what the peasants call a Giant’s Grave, a Stone Age slab-edged tomb, forming a corridor sometimes as much as twenty yards along, from which two wings branch off to form a semicircular approach.

This scientific dig provides a fixed foundation for future research into earlier ages on Sardinia. Lilliu is understandably excited about the “dynamic spirit” revealed by the creators of this amazingly early massiveness, but like all massiveness, whether of pyramid, ziggurat, or Roman Imperial palace, it undoubtedly justifies the unhappy inference that with all this grandeur went autocracy.

* * * * *

Perhaps the mainland political system in the early Iron Age was less rigid; at any rate it can boast no architectural remains as sophisticated as the Sardinian nuraghi. But the artifacts, especially from graves, are more numerous than for the Bronze or Neolithic Ages, and the graves show that roughly speaking the peninsula was divided in the early Iron Age between two cultures ([Fig. 1.8]): the folk west of a line drawn from Rome to Bimini cremated their dead; those east of that line inhumed them. In and near Rome the two burial rites are mingled: the significant inference from this fact will be explained later. Because the finds are so much more numerous on the mainland, the resulting inferences involve a much more complex subdivision into cultures and periods. We may single out three sets of inferences, based primarily on three major archaeological efforts. The first is Pericle Ducati’s work at Bologna, which distinguished four cultural phases, named from Villanova, the village where a major cemetery was found, and from the Benacci and Arnoaldi estates, whence key finds come. The second centers at Este, near Padua, famous for its bronze situle or buckets finely decorated by punching from the back, in the technique called repoussé. The third is Paolo Orsi’s exemplary work in Sicily and South Italy. The complex chronology is best set out in a tabular view (see facing page).

THE IRON AGE

The cremation cemetery excavated as early as 1853 at Villanova, near Bologna, produced artifacts (ossuary urns, fibulae, razors, hairpins, distaffs, bracelets, fish hooks, tweezers, repoussé bronze belts [see [Fig. 1.9]]) which match objects found later at other sites farther south, in Latium and Etruria; e.g., the village in the process of excavation since 1955 at San Giovenale, near Bieda, by H. M. King Gustav VI of Sweden. Thus the inference is warranted that this whole area was inhabited in the early Iron Age by a people unified in culture. Since the Villanovans, unlike the aborigines, cremated their dead, we infer that they were foreigners, probably invaders; that they descended from the terremare folk is not proven. That they lived in wattle-and-daub huts roofed with carved beams is inferred from the hut-urns ([Fig. 1.10]) in which the Southern Villanovans (in Rome and Latium) placed the ashes of their dead. Though these huts show no great advance over those of the Tavoliere or terremare folk, the people who lived in them were skilled artisans, producing fine bronze work. The finest example, from the late Arnoaldi period in Bologna (ca. 525 B.C.), is the Certosa situla ([Fig. 1.11]), where the scenes portrayed are so vivid that even a funeral comes to life. In one band is a vignette of rustic festival, where a slave drags a pig by the hind leg, a piper plays, and the lord of the manor ladles his wine while he waits for a dinner of venison. The deer is being brought on a pole by two slaves, while a curly-tailed dog marches beneath.

Fig. 1.9 Villanova artifacts.

(D. Randall-MacIver, Villanova and Early Etruscans, Pl. 2)

Fig. 1.10 A hut-urn.

(D. Randall-MacIver, Italy before the Romans, fac. p. 66)

Three other areas of Iron Age digs are worthy of mention. One is Este, whose culture in general resembles Bologna’s, with fine bronze buckets, belts, and pendants. A second is Golasecca, near Lago Maggiore, where, as at Como, the finds reveal a people making a living as transport agents, forwarding artifacts back and forth between the Transalpine country, Etruria and the Balkans. The graves yield safety-pins, bronze buckets, small jewelry of bronze, iron, amber and glass, horse-bits, chariot-parts, helmets, spears, and swords. A third is the territory of Picenum, on the central Adriatic coast; here the tombs are filled ([Fig. 1.12]) with maces, greaves, breastplates, even chariots, as might be expected from the ancestors of those thorns in Rome’s flesh, the warlike Samnites. The unique Warrior of Capestrano ([Fig. 1.13]), found in Picenum, shows how remote Picene culture was, about 500 B.C., from the influences affecting the rest of the peninsula.

* * * * *

Finally, a brief word about Sicily in prehistory. Recent excavations of over 400 graves in the Lipari Islands, and of a Siculan village near Leontini, whose huts have front porches, and otherwise resemble those of Latium, has established closer connections with the mainland than used to be thought possible. But our main knowledge of Siculan culture results from the earlier excavations of Paolo Orsi, near Syracuse, and on either side of the toe of Italy, at Torre Galli and Canale. These provided a model of archaeological method. The following table, resulting from Orsi’s careful observation of the strata in which pots of various fabrics were found in his digs near Syracuse, and of the frequency of their distribution within levels, shows how division into archaeological periods is arrived at. The Geometric ware (the latest) is characteristic of the period he called Siculan III, contemporary with Villanovan of the eighth century B.C.

(= signifies very rare; —, not common; +, not unusual; + +, very common)

Orsi’s sites at Torre Galli and Canale are urn fields, dated by the Geometric pottery (meander and swastika patterns, the latter perhaps to insure good luck) in the eighth century. They show a trade with Greece 150 years before the first Greek colony was founded in South Italy.

Fig. 1.11 The Certosa situla.

(D. Randall-MacIver, The Iron Age in Italy, frontispiece)

Fig. 1.12 Picene tomb-furniture from Fabriano.

(F. von Duhn and F. Messerschmidt, Italische Gräberkunde, 2, Pl. 31)

Fig. 1.13 Chieti, Museum. The Warrior of Capestrano. (Italian Ministry of Public Instruction)

If the prehistoric folk who lived on the Tavoliere, in the terremare, and around the nuraghi, if the later Villanovans and Siculans have any reality for us, we owe our insights into their culture to the patience, critical spirit, and intelligence of Bradford, Pigorini’s critics, Lilliu, Ducati, Orsi, and other archaeologists. Their work has pushed back the frontiers of Italian history nearly two millennia, and revealed to us how the energy and capacity for creative borrowing of provincial Italians contributed to the ultimate strength and coherence of the Roman state, or how the Italians fought the Romans when they proved high-handed. To Roman culture of historical times another great contribution was made by the Etruscans.

2
The Etruscans

Between Tiber and Arno there flourished, while Rome was still a collection of mud huts above the Tiber ford, a rich, energetic, and mysterious people, the Etruscans, whose civilization was to influence Rome profoundly. Their riches have been known to the modern world ever since the systematic looting of the fabulous wealth of their underground tombs began, as early as 1489. Visitors to the Vatican and Villa Giulia Museums in Rome, and, better still, the Archaeological Museum in Florence, can marvel at the splendid weapons, rich gold-work, and handsome vases with which more or less scientific grave-robbers have enriched the collections in the last hundred years. Travellers to Tarquinia, on the Tuscan seaboard, can wonder at the strange, vivid paintings and seemingly indecipherable inscriptions on the walls of mysterious and intricate underground chambers. Etruscan bronze-work inspired the sculptors of the Renaissance, Etruscan tombs were drawn by the pen of the great engraver Piranesi, Etruscan cities and cemeteries were described by perhaps the most interesting author, certainly the best stylist, who ever wrote on archaeology, the Englishman George Dennis.

Dennis’ Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, though its last edition appeared in 1883, is still the best general introduction to Etruscology. His achievement is the more remarkable in the light of the conditions under which he worked: execrable roads, worse lodging, and malaria stalking the whole countryside. In his day Etruscan tombs were exploited exclusively in the interest of the art dealers, with methods utterly unscientific. Artifacts without commercial value were ruthlessly destroyed: it is heart-rending to read Dennis’ account of the rape of Vulci:

“Our astonishment was only equalled by our indignation when we saw the labourers dash [coarse pottery of unfigured and ... unvarnished ware, and a variety of small articles in black clay] to the ground as they drew them forth, and crush them beneath their feet as things ‘cheaper than seaweed.’ In vain I pleaded to save some from destruction; for though of no remarkable worth, they were often of curious and elegant forms, and valuable as relics of the olden time, not to be replaced; but no, it was all roba di schiocchezza—‘foolish stuff’—the [foreman] was inexorable; his orders were to destroy immediately whatever was of no pecuniary value, and he could not allow me to carry away one of these relics which he so despised.”

Unfortunately, looting of this kind produced much of the material in our museums, whose precise findspots (from the German Fundort, the precise place where an archaeologically significant object was found) are consequently often not known. On the other hand scientific excavation, when it came, in the mid-nineteenth century found still some tombs unplundered.

Our knowledge of Etruscan civilization is almost entirely a triumph of this modern scientific archaeology, since written Etruscan, with no known affinities, is still largely undeciphered, though scientific methods have made large strides possible. In the last three generations archaeologists have attacked and in great measure solved the problem of the origin of the Etruscans, the nature of their cities, their political organization, their religious beliefs and practices, the degree of originality in their creative arts, their life and customs. The result is a composite picture of the greatest people to dominate the Italian peninsula before the Romans.

* * * * *

As to origins, the Etruscans might have been indigenous, or come down over the Alps, or, as most of the ancients believed, have come by sea from Asia Minor. The difference of their burial customs and, probably, their language from those of their neighbors makes it unlikely that their ruling class was native like, for example, the Villanovans; the archaeological evidence for their links with the North is very late, and the Northern theory has tended to fall along with the discrediting of Pigorini’s notions (based, as we saw, on unwarranted reconstruction of the terremare) about a single line of descent for Etruscan and Italic peoples. There remains the theory of Near Eastern origin, first stated in the fifth century B.C. by the Greek historian Herodotus, and recently (in the 1930’s) given some slight support by Italian excavators’ discovery of an inscription dated about 600 B.C. on the island of Lemnos, off the coast of Asia Minor opposite Troy. Though the Lemnian dialect is non-Indo-European, and therefore, like Etruscan, cannot be read, its archaic letters can be transliterated. Beginning with the bottom center line ([Fig. 2.1]), continuing with the line on the far left, and reading boustrophedon (alternately from right to left and from left to right, like an ox plowing), it reads evistho zeronaith zivai/ sialchveiz aviz/ maraz mav/ vanalasial zeronai morinail/ aker tavarzio/ holaiez naphoth ziazi. The resemblance to the alphabet and the art-forms of the Aules Feluskes stele from Etruscan Vetulonia ([Fig. 2.2]) is obvious. The particular letter-form transcribed as th occurs elsewhere only in Phrygia in Asia Minor. The very words and word-endings of the Lemnian stele can be found on Etruscan inscriptions. Thus the inscription shows at the very least that on an island “geographically intermediate between Asia Minor and Italy a language very similar to Etruscan was employed by some persons.” The ancient tradition localizing the original home of the Etruscans somewhere in or near northwest Asia Minor receives here some archaeological support.

Fig. 2.1 Lemnos. Inscription in local dialect, similar to Etruscan.

(M. Pallottino, Etruscologia, Pl. 4)

Fig. 2.2 Vetulonia. Aules Feluskes stele.

(M. Pallottino, Etruscologia, Pl. 21)

But the important thing is not where they came from, but how their culture was formed. The archaeological evidence justifies the hypothesis that they were a small but vigorous military aristocracy from the eastern Mediterranean, established in central Italy, where they built, by borrowing and merging, upon a structure created by the Villanovans. A new approach, the analysis of bones from Etruscan tombs to ascertain the blood types of their ancient occupants, may, by comparison with the persistent blood types of modern Tuscans, enable the archaeologist to determine what proportion of the ancient population was native and what intrusive.

Fig. 2.3 Early Italy, to illustrate Etruscan and other sites. Inset: early Rome. (V. Scramuzza and P. MacKendrick, The Ancient World, Fig. 32a)

REPUBLICAN ROME
ROMAN NUMERALS INDICATE THE FOUR REGIONS (*CITY TRIBES)

I SUCUSANA
II ERSQUILINA
III COLLINA
IV PALATINE
— CITY OF THE FOUR REGIONS
---- SERVIAN CITY
KEY
1 TABULARIUM
2 ARX
3 COMITIUM AND CURIA
4 BASILICA ÆMILIA
5 T. OF VESTA
6 REGIA
7 CLOACA MAXIMA
8 T. OF GREAT MOTHER
9 T. OF JUPITER VICTOR
10 FORUM BOARIUM
11 SUBLICIAN BRIDGE
12 ÆMILIAN BRIDGE
13 Pta. FLUMENTANA
14 Pta. CARMENTALIS
15 CAPITOLIUM
16 FORUM HOLITORIUM
17 T. OF TELLONA
18 CIRCUS OF FLAMINIUS
19 POMPEY’S THEATRE
20 T. OF QUIRINUS
21 T. OF FORTUNE
22 FABRICIAN BRIDGE
23 BRIDGE OF CESTIUS

EARLY ROME AND ITALY

* * * * *

Archaeology tells us, too, that Etruscan civilization is a culture of cities. Ancient literary sources speak of a league of twelve Etruscan places ([Fig. 2.3]), most of which have yielded important archaeological material: from Veii, the great terracotta Apollo; at Cerveteri, Vetulonia, Orvieto, and Perugia, the remarkable rock-cut tombs; at Tarquinia, Vulci, and Chiusi, strikingly vivid tomb-paintings; at Bolsena, Roselle, and Volterra, mighty fortification walls; at Populonia, the slag-heaps from the iron works which made Etruria prosperous. But the most interesting, and some of the latest, evidence for Etruscan city-planning and fortifications comes from three sites, two in the northern Etruscan sphere of influence: Marzabotto on the River Reno, fifteen miles south of Bologna; Spina, near one of the seven mouths of the Po; and one in northern Etruria itself, Bolsena, ancient Volsinii.

Fig. 2.4 Marzabotto: grid plan. (J. B. Ward Perkins, “Early Roman Towns in Italy,” Fig. 5)

The first recorded excavations at Marzabotto date from the 1860’s, but the ruins had been known since 1550. The striking discovery at Marzabotto was that the site (dated by pottery in its necropolis to the late sixth or early fifth centuries B.C.) had a regular, oriented, rectangular grid of streets ([Fig. 2.4]), enclosing house-blocks (insulae) averaging 165 × 35 yards. The main north-south street, or cardo, and the main east-west street, or decumanus, were each over forty-eight feet wide, the minor streets one third as broad. The streets were paved, as they were not in Rome until 350 years later. Drains ran beneath all the streets except the reserved area (the Romans were to call it the pomerium) just inside the circuit-wall. The house-plans resemble closely the fourth-century ones discovered in the 1930’s at Olynthus, on the Chalcidice Peninsula in Greece, by an American expedition. The house-doors had locks and keys. A number of the buildings were recognizable as shops, with back rooms for living quarters.

Bearing in mind the sobering experience of Pigorini’s unwarranted claims about a grid plan for the terremare, we might be tempted to scepticism about Marzabotto, except for two facts: Brizio, the excavator, himself expressed doubts, as early as 1891, about Pigorini’s reconstruction; furthermore, a re-examination of the site in 1953 confirmed the authenticity of Brizio’s findings.

The city is dominated, on the high ground to the northwest, by an arx, bearing the footings, some of considerable size with impressive moldings, of five structures, temples or altars. One of them, facing south, and divided at the back into three cellae, is the prototype of the Roman Capitolium, decorated by an Etruscan artist, and dedicated to the triad Jupiter, Juno, Minerva (in Etruscan, Tin, Uni, Menerva). Until World War II, when they were wantonly destroyed, the finds in terracotta from the arx were preserved in the local museum. There were revetments, plaques forming a thin veneer of fired clay, with nail-holes for affixing them to the wooden frame of a typical Tuscan temple. They included archaic antefixes: ornamental terracotta caps to mask the unsightly ends of half-round roof tiles. Terracotta revetments like these, for wooden construction, continue to be canonical in Roman temples down to the first century B.C.: marble as a building material does not come into use until after the middle of the second century B.C. Under the lee of the arx was a necropolis with contents like those found in Gallic graves, mute evidence of the occupation of Marzabotto by the wave of Gauls that brought terror into Italy early in the fourth century B.C. In sum, Marzabotto is so perfect an example of an Etruscan town-site that it merits the name of the Etruscan Pompeii.

Marzabotto remained for many years the only known Etruscan site with a grid plan. Lying as it does outside Etruria proper, it was clearly the product of Etruscan expansion northward. Since 1922 reclamation by drainage canals has revealed the necropolis of another northern outpost, Spina, near one of the mouths of the Po. Working under the greatest difficulties from mud and seepage, archaeologists had unearthed the contents of no less than 1213 tombs, often finding golden earrings and diadems gleaming in the mud against the skulls in the burials. These precious ornaments, together with necklaces of northern amber, perfume-bottles in glass paste and alabaster from Egypt, and Greek black- and red-figured vases, are now the pride of the Ferrara Museum. Though the vases are Greek, both Etruscans and Greeks lived in the site together, as is proved by graffiti in both languages scratched on the pottery. The spot, commanding the Adriatic, would be the ideal port of entry for foreign luxury goods imported to satisfy the taste for display of wealthy Etruscans. Wealthy as they were, they were all equal in the sight of Charun: the skeletons were regularly found with small change, to pay the infernal ferryman, clutched in the bony fingers of their right hands. Pathetic graves of children contained jointed dolls and game counters.

Fig. 2.5 Spina, plan.

(S. Aurigemma, Il R. Museo di Spina in Ferrara, Pl. 4)

This rich and crowded cemetery was all that was known of Etruscan Spina until further drainage operations in 1953, in the Pega Valley, south of the original site ([Fig. 2.5]), brought to light not only 1195 new tombs, but also further surprises. In October, 1956, an air-photograph in color revealed beneath the modern irrigation canals the grid plan ([Fig. 2.6]), resembling Marzabotto’s, of the port area of the ancient Etruscan city. This time the decumanus is a canal, sixty-six feet wide, and the marshy site is revealed as a sort of Etruscan Venice. Later air-photographs showed evidence of habitation over an area of 741 acres, large enough for a population of half a million. Since the artifacts of this vast city are a little later in style than those of Marzabotto, we assume that Spina flourished a little later. Almost no weapons were found in the graves: Spina apparently felt secure on her landlocked lagoon, but she reckoned without attacks from the landward side. Few vases datable later than the late fifth century are found in the graves: the inference is that Spina fell, about 390 B.C., before the same Gallic invasion that despoiled Marzabotto. The two sites together reinforce each other in giving evidence for the use by Etruscan city-planners of the kind of square or rectangular grid of streets later made famous by Roman colonies and Roman camps; unfortunately the question is still open whether the Etruscans invented the grid used in Italy or whether it was a Greek import.

Archaeology tells us something about Etruscan fortifications, too, not least important being some recent negative evidence: many polygonal walls in Etruria and Latium, formerly believed Etruscan, are now proved to be of Roman date. But excavations conducted since 1947 at Bolsena by the French school in Rome have unearthed walls that are genuinely Etruscan, surrounding an Etruscan site, and with Etruscan letters hacked on the blocks. The marks, concentrated on strategic sections of the wall, were probably apotropaic, intended to work as magic charms against the enemy. One section of the wall was only one block thick. It could not have been self-standing; it must have been intended as the spine of an agger or earthwork. Just such a spine was a part of Rome’s earliest walls, and a similar technique is to be seen in early earthworks at Anzio and Ardea. The discovery of these walls has clinched the identification of Bolsena with Etruscan Volsinii, one of the twelve cities, and the scene of regular meetings of the Etruscan League. On the same site were found some temple foundations, but the district is rich farmland, and it proved impossible to dig over a wide enough area to discover whether Volsinii, like Marzabotto and Spina, had a grid plan.

Grid plans suggest a sophisticated, if rigid, political organization for Etruscan cities. Evidence for the political life of a civilization normally comes from literature and inscriptions, very little from artifacts. Yet the Aules Feluskes stele from Vetulonia, already mentioned, shows a figure carrying a double-headed ax. Later, axes were carried by the consul’s twelve bodyguards whom the Romans called lictors. There seems to be a connection between the number twelve and the twelve cities of the Etruscan confederacy. Vetulonia has yielded another object of great interest to those who would understand Etruscan political organization and Rome’s debt to it. In the Tomb of the Lictor was found, besides a chariot and a metal coffer containing gold objects wrapped in gold leaf, a double-headed iron ax ([Fig. 2.7]) hafted onto a single iron rod surrounded by eight others. This is obviously the prototype of the Roman fasces, and indeed Silius Italicus, a Roman epic poet of the Silver Age, assigns the origin of the fasces to Vetulonia. Such artifacts suggest that the ruler of an Etruscan city, whether king or aristocrat, was surrounded by considerable pomp.

Fig. 2.6 Spina: grid plan, air-photograph. (ENIT, Italy’s Life, p. 91)

Fig. 2.7 Vetulonia: fasces from the Tomb of the Lictor.

(M. Pallottino, Etruscologia, Pl. 22)

Etruscan political organization, according to Latin literary sources, at one stage embraced Rome, and an Etruscan inscription on a shiny black dish of the ware called bucchero, in Rome, goes a little way to confirm this. More impressive confirmation comes from a frescoed Etruscan tomb in Vulci, discovered by A. François in 1857. The fresco has a historical subject, a battle scene, portraying two camps, populated with figures labelled in Etruscan letters. The figures in one camp are labelled Aule and Caele Vipina (in Latin, Vibenna), and Macstrna (in Latin, magister); in the other, a figure labelled Cneve Tarchunies Rumach (in Latin, Cn. Tarquinius Romanus), a member of the dynasty of Roman kings which in the historical tradition is alleged to have come from Etruria. Aule Vipina’s name recurs in a votive inscription, from a context dated in the sixth century B.C., found at Veii on a bucchero sherd. The conclusion is inescapable that A. and C. Vibenna were actual historical figures, Etruscan leaders involved in a political struggle for the domination of Rome. Macstrna is identified in Roman tradition with Servius Tullius, a good king whose rule falls, according to the literary tradition, between the tyrannical reigns of the two Tarquins. The fresco may represent an episode in Servius Tullius’ life unknown to the Roman tradition, before he became king in Rome; he is represented rescuing C. Vibenna from the Romans, and killing Tarquin. Thus archaeology here not only confirms the literary tradition of Rome’s Etruscan kings; it suggests something about the internal policy of sixth-century Etruscan cities, the existence in them, perhaps by a constitutional transformation from an archaic kingship, of a strong military authority, like that of the magister populi or dictator of the later Roman Republic. Etruscan tomb inscriptions, with their many personal names, show that official Etruscan nomenclature included—as did the later Roman—the name of the clan. Clan organization is in origin aristocratic. As later in Rome aristocrats with a clan organization overthrew the original monarchy, so too, we may suppose, the clans operated in Etruria.

Fig. 2.8 Etruscan alphabet.

(M. Pallottino, The Etruscans, p. 259)

Fig. 2.9 Tarquinia: Tomb of Orcus, inscription.

(Corpus Inscriptionum Etruscarum, no. 5360)

In the example just cited, light is thrown on Etruscan political organization by the inscriptions on the fresco, and it is in fact to inscriptions in the Etruscan alphabet ([Fig. 2.8]) that we owe most of what we know about Etruscan politics. For, paradoxically, though Etruscan, as a non-Indo-European language, is technically indecipherable (in the sense that the longest inscriptions in it cannot be entirely translated), valid inferences can be made about some of the short ones. For example, one of the inscriptions on the wall of the Tomb of Orcus at Tarquinia, discovered in 1868 ([Fig. 2.9]), reads in part zilath : amce : mechl : rasnal, at first sight a most unlikely combination of letters. Another Tarquinian inscription, this time from a sarcophagus in the local museum (splendidly installed in the fifteenth century Vitelleschi palace) reads in part zilath rasnas. If we extrapolate from the Roman practice of recording on funerary monuments the official career (cursus honorum) of the deceased (beginning with the highest offices held), it appears likely that the term zilath refers to a magistracy. It occurs often, and, when it occurs in a series, it occurs early; this warrants the inference that it refers to an important magistracy. Certain late Latin inscriptions from Etruria refer to a praetor Etruriae. Might not the zilath be the Etruscan official corresponding to the Roman praetor? This is the more likely since the words rasnal, rasnas closely resemble the word Rasenna, which a Greek historian tells us is what the Etruscans called themselves in their own language. There remains the word mechl. A similar word, methlum, occurs next to the word spur in a curious text, the longest we have in Etruscan, written on the cloth of a mummy wrapping now preserved in the museum of Zagreb, in Jugoslavia. The context appears to list the institutions for whose benefit certain religious ceremonies were performed. Several names of offices are accompanied, and probably modified, by the words spureni, spurana. It looks as if the word means “city.” Suppose the other institution, the methlum, mentioned next to the spur, were of larger size. Might it not be the Etruscan for “League”? The Tomb of Orcus inscription, then, might mean, “He was the chief magistrate of the Etruscan League.” It is by inferences like these that we force a language technically indecipherable to tell us something about the political organization of the mysterious people who spoke and wrote it.

Another example comes from a long inscription on a scroll held in the hands of a sculptured figure on another sarcophagus in the Tarquinia museum. It contains the word lucairce. In the text of the Zagreb mummy-wrapping mention is made of ceremonies celebrated lauchumneti, presumably a noun with an ending showing a place relation, and obviously related in root to lucairce. And both seem connected with the word lucumo, used in Latin to refer to Etruscan chiefs or kings. Lucairce contains the ending -ce which we interpreted on the Tomb of Orcus inscription as verbal; it might mean “was king (or chief).” In that case lauchumneti, with its locative ending, might mean “in the (priest)-king’s house” (Latin Regia). Thus by reasoning from the known to the unknown we can find evidence from the Etruscans themselves that at some stage they were ruled by kings. Since the Tarquinia sarcophagus with the scroll is on the evidence of artistic techniques dated late (second century B.C., a date at which the Roman Republic fully controlled Etruria), we must suppose that by that date the lucumo had been reduced to a mere priestly function, much as in Rome itself the priest who in Republican times discharged the sacred duties once performed by Rome’s kings (reges) was still called the rex sacrorum.

A final example. On Etruscan inscriptions occurs a root purth-, with by-forms purthne, purtsvana, eprthne, eprthni, eprthnevc. This looks like the root which occurs in the name of the king of Clusium, transliterated by the Romans Lars Porsenna, he who in the Lays of Ancient Rome swore by the Nine Gods. The same root probably occurs in the Greek prytanis, which means something like “senator.” Clearly another official of importance is referred to here.

In sum, archaeologists looking for evidence of Etruscan political organization have found such outward signs of pomp as fasces, plus evidence for magistrates resembling the later Roman dictator, praetor, priest-king, senator, and for cities probably combined into a league.

* * * * *

If inscriptions can be made to yield this kind of evidence, what can we say about the state of our knowledge about the Etruscan language in general? The same kind of combinatory method applied to other inscriptions yields with patience results justifying the statement that progress, though agonizingly slow, is being made. Many short inscriptions can be read entire: they are usually funerary, and give the names, filiation, and age of the deceased. Here is an example, from yet another sarcophagus in the Tarquinia museum:

partunus vel velthurus satlnal-c ramthas clan
“Partuni Vel of Velthur and of Satlnei Ramtha the son,
avils XXIIX lupu
of years 28, dead.”

Here for translation one assumes that Etruscan, while not Indo-European in its roots, is an inflected language, where an -s or -l ending shows possession, and the enclitic -c, like the Latin -que, means “and.” Another example shows similar case-endings, uses vocabulary we have seen before, and adds a place-name:

Alethnas Arnth Larisal zilath Tarchnalthi amce
“Alethna Arnth (son) of Laris praetor at Tarquinia was.”

Altogether some 10,000 Etruscan inscriptions are known. Of these only three are of any length: the Zagreb mummy-wrapping, a tile from Capua, and the previously mentioned scroll from Tarquinia. The next seven taken together total less than 100 words. Given this material, there is some bitter truth in the statement that if we could unlock the secret of Etruscan, we would have the key to an empty room. But whole cities in Etruria remain to be dug; there is no knowing what new inscriptions excavations now in progress at Vulci, Roselle, or Santa Severa may turn up, including perhaps a bilingual, where identical texts in Etruscan and a known language like Latin may solve the puzzle, as the Greek of the Rosetta Stone made possible the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Etruscan loan-words in Latin tell us something: antemna, “yard-arm”; histrio, “actor”; atrium, “patio”; groma, “plane-table” suggest Etruscan predominance on the sea and the stage, in domestic architecture and surveying. But we know more than loan-words: the known vocabulary in Etruscan amounts now to 122 words, in seven categories, including time-words (e.g., the names of several months), the limited political vocabulary already discussed, names for family relationships, some three dozen verbs and nouns, and the same number of words from the field of religion.

* * * * *

Fig. 2.10 Piacenza, Civic Museum. Bronze model of sheep’s liver, used in foretelling the future. (ENIT, Italy’s Life, p. 37)

Fig. 2.11 Piacenza liver, schematic representation. (M. Pallottino, The Etruscans, p. 165)

It is about Etruscan religion, and especially funerary rites, that we are best informed. The Etruscans had the reputation of being the most addicted to religious ceremonial of any people of antiquity, and we learn much about Etruscans living from Etruscans dead. We know what sort of documentation to expect on religious matters from an Etruscan tomb, by extrapolating back from rites which the Romans believed they had inherited from Etruria, especially in the area of foretelling the future by examining the livers of animals (hepatoscopy) or observing the flights of birds (augury). One of the most curious surviving documents of Etruscan superstition is the bronze model of a sheep’s liver ([Fig. 2.10]) found in 1877 near Piacenza, on the upper Po, and now in the Civic Museum there. The liver is split in two lengthwise. From the plane surface thus provided three lobes project. The plane surface itself is subdivided into sixteen compartments ([Fig. 2.11]); over each compartment a god presides. The same sixteen subdivisions were used in the imaginary partition of the sky for augury, and the same principle governed the layout and orientation of cities like Marzabotto and probably Spina. The same superstition found in Babylonia directs our attention once more to the probable Near Eastern origin of the Etruscan ruling class. The priest would take his position at the cross-point of the intended cardo and decumanus of the city, facing south (we recall that the three-celled temple on the arx at Marzabotto faces south).

The half of the city behind him was called in Latin the pars postica (posterior part), the part in front of him the pars antica (anterior part); on his left was the pars familiaris (the lucky side; hence thunder on the left was a good omen) on his right the pars hostilis (unlucky). To the subdivision of the earth below corresponded a similar subdivision of the sky above; either was called in Latin (using a concept clearly derived from Etruscan practice) a templum, “part cut off,” a sacred precinct, terrestrial or celestial. From the Piacenza liver and the orientation of Marzabotto we can deduce both the orderliness of the Etruscan mind and the ease with which it degenerated into rigidity and superstition. For this deadly heritage the Etruscans apparently found in the Romans willing recipients; often, but not always, for old Cato said, “I cannot see how one liver-diviner can meet another without laughing in his face.”

Fig. 2.12 Potentiometer profile. The high points on the graph show where hollowed tomb-chambers exist under ground. (ENIT, Italy’s Life, p. 106)

The vast number of Etruscan tombs and the richness of their decoration and furnishings tell us much about another aspect of the Etruscans’ religion: their view of the afterlife. About this the fabulous painted tombs of Tarquinia tell us most, and bid fair to tell us more as new methods are applied to their discovery and exploration. The ubiquitous Bradford has been at work in Etruria too; his quick eye has detected on air-photographs over 800 new tomb-mounds at Tarquinia alone, and new methods of ground exploration, worked out by the dedicated Italian engineer C. M. Lerici, have enormously speeded the work of exploration. Electrical-resistivity surveying with a potentiometer, sensitive to the difference between solid earth and empty subterranean space, makes possible the rapid tracing of a profile showing where the hollows of Etruscan tombs exist underground ([Fig. 2.12]). A hole is then drilled large enough to admit a periscope; if the periscope shows painted walls, or pottery, a camera can be attached to make a 360-degree photograph. By this method Lerici reports exploring 450 tombs in 120 days. This work, rapid as it is, is being done none too soon; land redistribution schemes, good for the farmer, bad for the archaeologist, are changing the face of south Etruria day by day; deep plowing and the planting of vines and fruit trees are destroying or obscuring the archaeological picture.

Dennis would hardly lament the passing of the conditions he so graphically describes: “Among the half-destroyed tumuli of the Montarozzi [at Tarquinia] is a pit, six or eight feet deep, overgrown by lentiscus; and at the bottom is a hole, barely large enough for a man to squeeze himself through, and which no one would care to enter unless aware of something within to repay him for the trouble, and the filth unavoidably contracted. Having wormed myself through this aperture, I found myself in a dark, damp chamber, half-choked with the debris of the walls and ceiling. Yet the walls have not wholly fallen in, for when my eyes were somewhat accustomed to the gloom, I perceived them to be painted, and the taper’s light disclosed on the inner wall a banquet in the open air.” Modern gadgetry like Lerici’s has destroyed some of the romance; there is something graphic about descriptions like Mengarelli’s of opening a tomb at Cerveteri in 1910, in the presence of the local and neighboring landlords, the Prince and Princess Ruspoli and the Marchese Guglielmi. As the blocks of the entrance were removed one by one, and sunlight was reflected into the tomb by mirrors, there were to be seen against the black earth objects of gleaming gold, and priceless proto-Corinthian vases resting on shreds of decomposed wood, which were all that was left of the funeral bed, while other vases were to be seen fixed to the wall with nails.

The Tomb of Hunting and Fishing at Tarquinia, discovered in 1873, gives us our most attractive picture ([Fig. 2.13]) of how Etruscans in their palmiest days viewed the next world. The tomb is dated by the black-figured Attic vases it contained in the decade 520–510 B.C., when the Etruscan ruling class was still prosperous. A more charming invitation to the brainless life could hardly be imagined. The most vivid scene is on the walls of the tombs inner room, which are conceived as opening out into a breezy seascape, with a lively population of bright birds in blue, red, and yellow, frisky dolphins, and boys, friskier still, at play. Up a steep rock striped in clay-red and grass-green clambers a sun-burnt boy in a blue tunic, who appears to have just pushed another boy who is diving, with beautiful form, into the hazy, wine-dark sea. On a nearby rock stands another boy firing at the birds with a slingshot. Below him is a boat with an eye painted on the prow (to ward off the evil eye; fishing boats are still so painted in Portugal). Of the boat’s four passengers, one is fishing over the side with a flimsy handline, while beside the boat a fat dolphin turns a mocking somersault. All is life, action, humor, vitality, color; such is the notion of blessed immortality entertained by a people for whom Gods in his heaven, all’s right with the world.

Fig. 2.13 Tarquinia: Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, fresco.

(M. Pallottino, Etruscan Painting, p. 51)

Fig. 2.14 Tarquinia: Tomb of Orcus, portrait of the lady Velcha. (MPI)

A quarter of a century or so after the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing was painted, the Etruscans suffered a major naval defeat at the hands of Greeks off Cumae. Rome, expanding, eventually took over the iron mines of Elba and the iron-works of Populonia, and Etruscan prosperity declined agonizingly to its end. Let us look at a Tarquinian tomb of the period of the decadence; e.g., the Tomb of Orcus again. There, beside one of the loveliest faces ever painted by an ancient artist ([Fig. 2.14]), is portrayed one of the most hair-raising demons a depressed imagination could conceive ([Fig. 2.15]). Its flesh is a weird bluish-green, as though it were putrefying. Its nose is the hooked beak of a bird of prey. The fiend has asses’ ears; its hair is a tangled mass of snakes. Beside its monstrous wings rises a huge crested serpent, horribly mottled. In its left hand the demon holds a hammer handle. An inscription identifies him as Charun, the ferryman of the dead; it is to pay this monster that the skeletons of Spina clutch their bronze small change in their right hands. The contrast between the gaiety of the scenes in the Tomb of Hunting and the gloomy prospect of the lovely lady—her name is Velcha—in the clutches of this grisly demon has been held to epitomize the contrast between the views of an after life entertained by a prosperous and by an economically depressed people.

Fig. 2.15 Tarquinia: Tomb of Orcus, the demon Charun. (MPI)

Other finds cast further light. The Capua tile prescribes funerary offerings to the gods of the underworld. An inscribed lead plaque from near Populonia is a curse tablet, in which a woman urges Charun or another infernal deity, Tuchulcha, to bring his gruesome horrors to bear on members of her family whose death she ardently desires. Bronze statuettes give details of priestly dress (conical cap tied under the chin, fringed cloak) or show Hermes, Escorter of Souls, going arm-in-arm with the deceased to the world below. The total picture is one of a deeply religious, even superstitious people, attaching particular importance to the formalities of their ritual relations with their gods, and obsessed with the after life, of which they take a progressively gloomier view as their material prosperity declines.

* * * * *

What can archaeology tell us about Etruscan cultural life? Of art for art’s sake there seems to have been very little, of literature none, except for liturgical texts. The Etruscans excelled in fine large-scale bronze work, like the famous Chimaera of Arezzo or the Capitoline Wolf, but their minor masterpieces in bronze deserve mention also, especially the engraved mirrors, the cylindrical cosmetic boxes called ciste, and the statuettes whose attenuated bodies appeal strongly to modern taste. Their painting at its best shows in its economy of line how intelligently they borrowed from the Greeks, in its realism how sturdily they maintained their own individuality. In architecture, Etruscan temples, having been made of wood, do not survive above their foundation courses, but recent discoveries of terracotta temple-models at Vulci tell us something about their appearance, and masses of their terracotta revetment survive, brightly-painted geometric, vegetable, or mythological motifs, designs to cover beams, mask the ends of half-round roof tiles, or (in pierced patterns called à jour crestings) to follow the slope of a gable roof. Made from molds, the motifs could be infinitely repeated at small expense, an aspect of Etruscan practicality which was to appeal strongly to the Romans.

But the Etruscans’ artistic genius shows at the best in their architectural sculpture in painted terracotta, free-standing or in high relief. Their best-known masterpiece in this genre is the Apollo of Veii ([Fig. 2.16]), designed for the ridgepole of an archaic temple. Discovered in 1916, it is now in the Villa Giulia museum in Rome. The stylized treatment of the ringlets, the almond eyes, the fixed smile are all characteristic of archaic Greek art, and the fine edges of the profile, lips, and eyebrows suggest an original in bronze. But this is no mere copy. It is the work of a great original artist, probably the same Vulca of Veii who was commissioned in the late sixth century B.C. to do the terracottas for the Capitoline temple in Rome. The sculptor is telling the story of the struggle between Apollo and Hercules for the Hind of Ceryneia: the god is shown as he tenses himself to spring upon his opponent; the anatomical knowledge, the expression of mass in motion, and the craftsmanship required to cast a life-size terracotta (a feat which even now presents the greatest technical difficulties) are all alike remarkable.

A set of antefixes (used, as we have seen, to cover the ends of half-round roof-tiles), from the archaic temple at Satricum in Latium, in the same museum, are noteworthy for their humor. They represent a series of nymphs pursued by satyrs. The satyrs are clearly not quite sober, and the nymphs are far from reluctant. In a particularly fine piece ([Fig. 2.17]) the satyr frightens the nymph with a snake which he holds in his left hand, while he slips his right hand over her shoulder to caress her breast. Her gestures are almost certainly not those of a maiden who would repel a man’s advances.

Fig. 2.16 Rome, Villa Giulia Museum. Apollo of Veii, terracotta. (MPI)

Fig. 2.17 Rome, Villa Giulia Museum. Terracotta antefix of satyr and nymph, from Satricum. (MPI)

A third Etruscan masterpiece in terracotta, of later date, but still showing the same striking vitality as the two pieces just described, is the pair of winged horses in high relief ([Fig. 2.18]), first published in 1948, which come probably from the pediment of the temple called the Ara della Regina, on the site of the Etruscan city (as opposed to the necropolis) of Tarquinia, and now in the Tarquinia museum. The proud arching of the horses’ necks, their slim legs, their rippling muscles are rendered to make them the quintessence of the thoroughbred, so that we forget that the delicate wings would scarcely lift their sturdy bodies off the ground. In these three masterpieces art is none the less vibrant for being put at the service of religion. Here is created a new Italic expressionistic style, so admirable that many would hold that Italian art did not reach this level again until the Renaissance.

* * * * *

Fig. 2.18 Tarquinia, Museum. Winged horses, terracotta relief, from Ara della Regina. (MPI)

Fig. 2.19 Cerveteri: Tomb of the Reliefs, interior. (MPI)

Just as archaeology’s finds can convince us of the vitality of Etruscan art, so they can bring to life ancient Etruscan life and customs. Most illuminating in this area are two tombs from Cerveteri, ancient Caere, one of the great cities of the Etruscan dodecapolis, twenty-five miles up the coast-road from Rome, and close, too, in cultural relations. Here again Bradford has been at work, spotting over 600 new tombs, but the one that tells us most about Etruscan everyday life has been known since 1850. It is the fourth-century Tomb of the Reliefs ([Fig. 2.19]), with places for over forty bodies. The front and back walls of this tomb, and two pillars in the middle, are covered with representations in low relief of Etruscan weapons and objects in daily use; here, as elsewhere in Etruscan tombs, but in far more detail, the tomb-chamber reproduces the look of a room in an Etruscan house. Such chambers served again as shelters in modern times—against bombs in World War II. In the central recess in the farthest wall is a bed for a noble couple. It is flanked by pilasters bearing medallions of husband (on the left) and wife (on the right). On the husband’s side appears the end of a locked strongbox, covered with raised studs or bosses, with a garment lying folded on top. On the wife’s side is a sturdy knotted walking-staff, a garland, necklaces, and a feather fan. The couch has lathe-turned legs; it is decorated with a relief of Charun and the three-headed dog Cerberus, with a serpent’s tail. The couch rests on a step on which a pair of wooden clogs awaits their master’s need. Above the couch, and continuing all the way around the room, is a frieze of military millinery: helmets with visors, helmets with cheek-pieces, the felt cap worn under the helmet to keep the metal from chafing, swords, shields, greaves or shin guards, and a pile of round objects variously interpreted as missiles, decorations for valor, or balls of horse-dung. The central pilasters, with typical Etruscan economy, are decorated only on the sides visible from the door. What is represented is the whole contents of an Etruscan kitchen. Identifiable objects include a sieve, a set of spits for roasting, a knife-rack, an inkpot, a dinner gong, a game board (not unlike those provided in English pubs for shove-ha’penny) with a bag for the counters, and folding handles; a ladle, mixing spoons, an egg-beater, pincers, a duck, a tortoise, a cat with a ribbon around its neck, playing with a lizard; a belt, a pitcher, a long thin rolling pin for making macaroni, a pickaxe, a machete, a coil of rope, a pet weasel teasing a black mouse, a lituus (the augur’s curved staff), a wine-flask of the familiar Chianti shape, a knapsack, and a canteen. Over and flanking the door are bucrania (ox-skulls), wide, shallow sacrificial basins, and a curved war-trumpet or hunting-horn. Surely never a household embarked better equipped for the next world. This tomb is as good as a documentary film; nothing ever found by archaeology brings Etruscan daily life more vividly before our eyes.

While the Tomb of the Reliefs is full of homely details of Etruscan life, the Regolini-Galassi tomb, also at Cerveteri, was crammed with objects of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous waste. The tomb is named for its discoverers, General Alessandro Regolini and Fr. Vincenzo Galassi, arch-priest of Cerveteri in 1836. Its contents are datable in the eighth or seventh century B.C. It consists of a long narrow entrance-way or dromos, two oval side-chambers, and a long narrow main tomb-chamber roofed with a false vault, “now,” says Dennis, “containing nothing but slime and serpents.” When it was entered through a hole in the roof on April 21, 1836, an incredible treasure of gold, silver, bronze, and ceramics, over 650 objects in all, burst upon the workmen’s gaze. All was cleared with feverish haste in less than twenty-four hours, and no detailed inventory was compiled until seventy years later. The riches are fabulous; to quote Dennis again, “here the youth, the fop, the warrior, the senator, the priest, the belle, might all suit their taste for decoration—in truth a modern fair one need not disdain to heighten her charms with these relics of a long past world.” In those days, Etruscan objects were not allowed to languish in a museum. A report of 1839 states, “a few winters ago the Princess of Canino [wife of Lucien Bonaparte] appeared at some of the [British] ambassador’s fêtes with a parure of Etruscan jewellery which was the envy of the society, and excelled the chefs-d’oeuvre of Paris or Vienna.” Though the contents of the tomb have been now for many years the pride of the Gregorian Museum in the Vatican, the definitive publication did not appear until 1947.

The tomb contained three burials, including one of a woman of princess’ rank. With one of the males was buried his chariot (which was first dismantled and its wooden parts ceremoniously burned); his funeral car, plated with bronze in a sword-like leaf design; and his bronze bier, with a raised place for the head and a latticework of twenty-nine thin bronze bars. With the woman was buried a priceless treasure of gold, of baroque barbarity: a magnificent golden fibula; a great gold pectoral ([Fig. 2.20]) decorated in repoussé with twelve bands of animal figures (this, one would like to think, was what the Princess of Canino wore to the ambassador’s party); gold and amber necklaces; massive gold bracelets and earrings to match the pectoral; silver bracelets, rings, pins, a spindle, and buckets, the latter decorated with fantastic animals; ivory dice; a bronze wine-bowl, with a beautiful green patina, decorated with six heads of lions and griffins, turned inwards; and (reconstructed) a great bronze-plated chair of state with footstool, the whole ornamented with vegetable and animal motifs; the arms end in horse’s heads, the back legs in cow’s hoofs. To the second male burial belonged a set of splendid bronze parade-shields; a bronze incense-burner on wheels, with a rim of lotus-flowers in bronze; a bronze vase-stand, with a conical base surmounted by two superimposed oblate spheroids, supporting a bronze container for the vase, the whole ornamented in repoussé with bulls and winged and wingless lions; bowls in silver and silver-gilt, decorated with horsemen, footsoldiers, archers, lancers, chariots, lions, dogs, bulls, vultures, and palm trees, in a style that might be Egyptian, Cypriote, or Syrian. Such of the treasure as is imported from the Near East bespeaks the wealth of Etruscan overlords; such as is of local manufacture bespeaks the Skill of Etruscan craftsmen.

Fig. 2.20 Vatican City, Vatican Museum: gold pectoral from the Regolini-Galassi tomb, Cerveteri. (Musei Vaticani)

From other places, other clues to Etruscan life and customs. We may end with two observations, both taken from tombs in Tarquinia: Etruscan women were treated on a par with men; Etruscan sports were sometimes of barbaric cruelty. The Tomb of the Leopards in Tarquinia (fifth century B.C.) shows women (with dyed hair) reclining on the same dining-couch with men; later (Tomb of the Shields, third century B.C.) women sat at meals, while men reclined, but the sexes dined together; there was no Oriental seclusion. The Tomb of the Chariots, also in Tarquinia, shows women along with men in the stands watching athletic events: horse-racing, the pole-vault, boxing, wrestling, discus-throwing, and running. A tomb discovered by Lerici just in time to be restored for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome is called the Tomb of the Olympic Victors, and shows similar events.

But Etruscan spectator sports were not always so innocent. On the right wall of the Tomb of the Augurs in Tarquinia, a masked figure, in a false beard, a blood-red tunic, and a conical cap, is portrayed inciting a fierce hound to attack a hairy-chested figure, nude but for a loin-cloth and carrying a club; his eyes are blinded by a sack tied over his head, and his movements are impeded by a cord held by a bystander. The victim is already bleeding from several savage bites. Unless, handicapped as he is, he can club the dog to death, he will surely be torn to bits. Perhaps this sanguinary and savage scene represents human sacrifice (and, if so, it is none the less forbidding), but it is a tempting hypothesis that what we have pictured here is a predecessor of the kind of spectacle the Romans later enjoyed in their amphitheaters, when gladiators fought to the death. Gladiatorial contests were in fact traditionally of Etruscan origin, first imported from Etruria for certain funeral games in 264 B.C.

We end, then, where we began, with archaeological evidence for Etruscan influence, for good or for ill, upon Rome. As with the story of prehistoric man in Italy, the Etruscan story is one of influences in part originating in the Near East, in part indigenous, creating a civilization with durable elements that could be and were transmitted, playing a predominant rôle in forming the culture of ancient Italy. The Etruscans are important in themselves, of course, but it is a mistake to assume, because their language, unique on the Italian peninsula, is non-Indo-European, that their culture is isolated, too. As a culture of cities, Etruria must have had its effect, not without cross-fertilization from Greek practice, upon Roman town-planning. Etruscan political forms and practice recur in Roman usage. The language claims our attention for the light it throws, however dimly, on Etruscan politics, religion, and family life, and for the challenge it has presented to modern scientific scholarship to penetrate its mystery. Etruscan religion, as illuminated by archaeological finds, has its own fascination, foreshadows Roman formalism, and is noteworthy for changing, under the stress of political and economic decline, from an optimistic to a pessimistic view of the after-life. Etruscan art, especially terracotta sculpture, shows a striking vitality, humor, and independence; Etruscan architecture makes its impact upon Roman. Finally, the evidence of artifacts as to Etruscan daily life shows a standard of material comfort, and even of luxury, not to be achieved again on the peninsula for two hundred years. Etruscan equality of sexes foreshadows the independence of Roman women; the brutality of Etruscan games is to strike an answering chord in sadistic Roman breasts. Etruria has its own intrinsic fascination, yet for the Western world its major interest must lie in its legacy to Home. When Etruscan culture was at its brilliant, golden height, Rome was a primitive village of wattle-and-daub huts. Archaeology has been able to trace the metamorphosis of those huts into palaces, with all the concomitant story of grandeur and barbarity; to that metamorphosis the rest of this book will be devoted.

3
Early Rome

Everyone remembers that Augustus left Rome a city of marble, but too few people recall that he found it a city of brick. The picture of Rome in most people’s minds is of a marble metropolis, proud mistress of a Mediterranean Empire. This to be sure she eventually became, but the archaeological evidence is that until the end of the third century B.C. Rome looked tawdry, with patched temples and winding, unpaved streets. To trace the development is fascinating, and archaeology is our chief guide.

The story that we read from the earth begins not in Rome itself but in the Alban Hills, extinct volcanoes in the Roman Campagna, sixteen miles southeast of Rome, close to Castel Gandolfo, the lovely lakeside spot where nowadays the Pope has his summer palace. Here, in a pastureland called the Pascolare di Castello, some peasants in 1817 were cutting trenches for planting vineyards. Under the topsoil of the Alban Hills is a thick bed of solid lava, called tufa, which seals in a layer of ashes. In digging their trench the peasants cut through the lava seal and revealed large dolia, jars of rough clay, each of which contained, in an urn shaped like a miniature oval hut, the ashes of a cremation burial, together with fibulae, objects in amber and bronze, and numerous vases. It was not until fifty years later that a committee of experts, including the same Pigorini who afterwards overstepped his evidence about the terremare, first connected the burials with the city of Alba Longa, traditionally founded in the mists of prehistory by the son of Aeneas. In 1902, in cremation graves from a necropolis to which we shall return, on the edge of the Roman Forum itself, hut-urns and artifacts were found so similar to those from the Pascolare that the inference of cultural connection was inescapable. Whether Alba Longa was the metropolis and Rome the colony, as stated by the literary sources, or the other way about, was not evident from the artifacts.

A necropolis or graveyard implies an inhabited site. The inhabited site of Alba Longa was destroyed by the Romans about 600 B.C. Where was the inhabited site that used the Forum in Rome as a necropolis? It could hardly have been the Forum itself, which was a swamp not drained and fit for habitation until about 575 B.C., a date which, as we shall see, marks the end of the necropolis. Could it have been the Palatine Hill which rises from the south side of the Forum? At first sight it seemed unlikely that any evidence for prehistoric habitation could be found on the Palatine, since the hill was covered with the substructures of Imperial palaces. But beneath these as early as 1724 were found the remains of the mansions of Republican nabobs (recorded in literature, too, as having lived here), and beneath these in turn why should there not lie the traces of even earlier dwellings? Vergil had pictured Aeneas humbly entertained on the Palatine by Evander, and lodged in a hut with swallows under the eaves. Excavations published in 1906 by the great Italian archaeologist G. Boni (who lived in a villa on the Palatine, and whose memorial bust appropriately adorns the Farnese Gardens there) found under the Flavian Palace traces of huts containing artifacts matching those found in the Forum necropolis.

These artifacts fell into two phases. The first included the rough handmade pottery called impasto, which we have already seen to be characteristic of Villanovan sites; serpentine fibulae (which match those found in the First Benacci period at Bologna); ware incised with a clamshell in dogtooth, meander, and swastika patterns, or with a rope-like clay appliqué; pierced beads, spools, and a curious kind of Dutch oven with a perforated top, examples of which were known from the Forum necropolis and the Alban Hills, but not elsewhere. Artifacts of a different and more developed type, belonging, therefore, to a second phase, included pots with thinner walls, sharper profiles (as seen in elevation drawings), and more complicated handles; they are decorated with spirals and semicircles, apparently compass-drawn. There was even a miniature clay sheepdog, his curly coat represented by circles impressed with a metal tube or a hollow reed. Such artifacts match those found in the evolved Villanovan culture, dated in the first half of the sixth century B.C. This culture is contemporary with a rich, sophisticated one in Etruria, but the techniques in Rome and its vicinity are much more primitive than in Etruria. We conclude that the Palatine village was infinitely less prosperous than, say, the contemporary Etruscan cities of Caere or Tarquinia. But equally primitive artifacts are found in the Alban Hills burials, certain tombs on the Quirinal and Esquiline Hills in Rome (discovered when the city expanded after Italy’s unification in the 1870’s), and in burials in hollowed-out tree-trunks from the Forum necropolis, the latter now on display in the Forum Antiquarium.

In 1907 D. Vaglieri began excavations in the southwest corner of the Palatine which revealed cuttings in the rock. These were actually, though Vaglieri did not recognize them as such, cuttings for early Iron Age huts, the date being an inference from the artifacts, whose stratification Vaglieri did not record. After a sharp controversy with Pigorini (whose prestige, because of public interest in the terremare, was then at its height), the dig was suspended, leaving one but half-excavated. Here, in this intact area, excavations were resumed in 1948 by a younger specialist in the prehistoric archaeology of Italy, S. M. Puglisi. This time, the methods were rigorously scientific, and the cultural strata were observed and recorded with meticulous care. Puglisi recognized that a scientific dig requires the constant presence on the site during working hours of a competent archaeologist; no precise results can ever be obtained by an excavation director who visits his site only a couple of times a week, since unsupervised workmen can hardly be expected to respect levels of stratification, preserve the right artifacts, or keep accurate excavation notebooks, without which, of course, no scientifically valid conclusions can be drawn.

In the area left undug by Vaglieri, Puglisi was able to distinguish five levels, which have been schematically reproduced on the walls of the Palatine Antiquarium. The top level consisted of nine feet of ancient dump. But the four levels beneath the dump amounted to six-and-a-half feet of compact, undisturbed strata, of which the bottom eight inches represented what had collected on the hut floor while it was still in use. Here the sherds were very tiny, for they had been walked on, it being the regular practice of Iron Age man—and woman—to live comfortably in the midst of their own debris. The hearth (one of the Dutch ovens was discovered in fragments in situ) was near the center of the hut, very close to a cutting for a central supporting post—the first evidence ever found for such construction. But there was no danger of setting the central post on fire, since the cooking flame was entirely enclosed within the clay of the oven. Bits of fallen wattle-and-daub revealed the wall-construction. There were animal bones and impasto sherds bearing the marks of fire, but none of the shiny black pottery called bucchero (the best examples of which are rarely found in Rome in contexts earlier than 700 B.C.) and no painted ware. This level, then, belonged to the first phase of the Iron Age, dated, by parallels with the finds from beneath the Flavian Palace, about 800–700 B.C. (The traditional date of Rome’s founding is 753.) The lowest level being so shallow, and the sherds showing the marks of fire, the inference is that the hut had not been occupied very long before it was burned down.

The contents of the next superimposed level, two feet deep, show that the site was next used as a kitchen-midden or refuse-heap. Here the deposits resemble those from a well (dug long ago but never described in a detailed scientific article), in the sanctuary of Vesta in the Forum, which is dated in the second phase of the Iron Age (700–550 B.C.), corresponding in the tradition to the reigns of the five Roman Kings from Numa to Servius Tullius.[A] These finds include polished impasto, with high or twisted handles and out-turned rims; slat-smoothed ware covered with a thin coating or engobe of reddish clay, ornamented with double spirals and palmettes, and of a size to fit on the Dutch ovens; sherds of fine bucchero (the first evidence of imports from Etruria), and of a coarser grey local imitation; painted ware, of the style known as sub-Geometric, imported from south Italy, and also some local imitations identified by their cruder technique.

[A] It will be convenient to record here for future reference the traditional dates (B.C.) of Rome’s seven kings:

The next higher level shows fat-bodied “bloodsucker” fibulae, and flanged tiles, some with horses molded in low relief, betraying a completely different and more sophisticated building technique, like that used in Etruscan temples. The artifacts matched those found in the level under the late Republican House of the Griffins and under the “House of Livia” on the Palatine, and in the upper strata of the shrine of Vesta well; they are associated with the huts built in the Forum after it was drained; that is, with a transitional period after about 575 B.C. The lower date suggested by the archaeological finds for this second phase corresponds to the dates assigned by the literary tradition to Rome’s Etruscan kings, Tarquin I, Servius Tullius, and Tarquin the Proud.

The hut itself ([Fig. 3.1]) was a large one (12 × 16 feet), sunk about a yard into the tufa of the hill, with six cuttings for the perimetral posts, two for a front porch, and one for the central support. The cuttings, averaging fifteen inches in diameter, are wider than is necessary for posts to support so flimsy a structure; the logs were probably held upright by wooden or stone wedges. The hut, reconstructed, represents a historical fact very much like what Vergil had in mind when he described the sleeping quarters assigned by Evander to Aeneas, and such capanne can be found in out-of-the-way places of the countryside near Rome even today. Lucretius, Vergil, and Livy all knew what a Bronze and an Iron Age meant; their generation venerated a replica of the “Hut of Romulus” on the Palatine. It suited Augustus’ propaganda purpose to stress Rome’s rise from humble origins; so, too, to us, archaeology’s picture of Rome’s primitive beginnings may well make the story of her later expansion seem more impressive, and her domination of subject peoples less overbearing.

* * * * *

Fig. 3.1 Rome, Palatine. Prehistoric hut, reconstruction.

(G. Davico, Monumenti Antichi 41 [1951], p. 130)

Fig. 3.2 Rome, Forum necropolis, showing cremation and inhumation graves. (MPI)

Archaeology’s second major contribution to our knowledge of early Rome is provided by Boni’s excavation of the Forum necropolis ([Fig. 3.2]), the results of which are displayed with great clarity in the Forum Antiquarium, installed in the cloister of the church of S. Francesca Romana in the Forum itself. The surviving part of the necropolis stretches between the Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, on the north side of the Forum, and a late Republican structure to the east which was pretty certainly (to judge from the built-in beds, the narrow rooms, and the analogy with a building similar in plan at Pompeii, certainly identified by its erotic pictures) a house of ill-fame. The original extent west and southward was probably much greater. The graves have now been filled in, but their sites are marked by plots of grass, round for cremation graves, oblong for inhumation ones. The two types sometimes cut into each other; what inferences are warranted by this fact are better postponed until we have discussed the grave contents.

The Forum nowadays is an austere, even at first sight a forbidding place. It looks much more attractive in a painting by Claude Lorraine or a print by Piranesi, with a double row of olives planted down the middle, romantic broken columns, oxen and peasants scattered about the flowered greensward in picturesque confusion, and the Arch of Septimius Severus buried up to its middle. But picturesqueness is not everything. The Forum is history, stark history; every stone is soaked in blood. To understand that history, mere picturesqueness had to be sacrificed; Boni’s graves are not picturesque; they are informative. From them the historical imagination can create a picture of Rome’s beginnings which no Piranesi print could rival.

Sixteen feet of picturesqueness had to be cleared before Boni could reach the necropolis level. The cremation tombs are small circular wells, most of them containing, as in the Alban Hills tombs, a dolium or large jar, covered by tufa slabs. In the dolia were found ash-containers, often in the shape of miniatures of huts like the full-sized ones on the Palatine. The oblong graves contained rough sarcophagi of tufa, or coffins made of hollowed-out oak logs. Both types of tomb contained, intact on discovery, tomb furniture not differing much between the types, and not differing much from the finds in the bottom two levels of Puglisi’s Palatine hut; i.e., rough impasto, decorated with incised spirals, parallel lines (done with a comb) or zigzags; bucchero, some fibulae inlaid with amber, glass beads, tiny enamel plaques, remains of funeral offerings of food. It is all very humble, a far cry from the Regolini-Galassi treasure, though some of the tombs are of the same date. The finds show that the necropolis was in use from the ninth to the sixth centuries B.C. The site was, as we saw, on the edge of a swamp; when the swamp was drained, the cemetery went out of use, and huts, of which more later, were built over it.

In the necropolis, sometimes inhumation graves cut into cremation ones, sometimes vice versa. There is thus no ground for assuming that the cremation graves are older, especially as the grave-contents of the two types are so similar. The difference is not one of time but of funeral practice, as today; it suggests two different populations living peacefully together. The cremators were related to the people whose graves were found so long ago in the Alban Hills, and, as we have seen, to the Palatine hut-dwellers. Who were the inhumers? We know that other Roman hills than the Palatine were inhabited from very early times, though the natural features of the Palatine seem to give it priority: plenty of fodder, abundant water within easy reach, a retreat made safe at night by the hill and the river for the people and their livestock.

But habitation of the Esquiline and Quirinal Hills in the sixth century is attested by a number of tombs from a total of 164 found there in the 1870’s. The finds from these were never scientifically recorded, and they have never been published, but it is noteworthy that they include weapons, which are absent from the cremation-graves in the Forum. It looks as though the Esquiline folk were invaders, with a more warlike tradition than the Palatine hut-dwellers. The Esquiline folk might earlier have used the Forum necropolis for inhumation. We know that the Sabines buried their dead. Literary tradition (the Rape of the Sabine Women) records that the early Romans got their wives from among the Sabines. Numa Pompilius, the second of the legendary Roman kings, bears a Sabine name. Might not the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis represent the peaceful fusion of cremating Latins and inhuming Sabines who had laid aside their warlike ways?

* * * * *

On top of the Forum necropolis, when the swamp was drained, huts were built. The archaeological evidence for this phase of early Rome’s history was provided by Boni’s stratigraphic excavation (recently confirmed by the Swede Einar Gjerstad) to the northwest of the site of the equestrian statue of the Emperor Domitian in the middle of the Forum. Gjerstad dug a trench sixteen feet long and eleven feet wide, down to virgin soil, which he found nineteen feet below the present Forum level. On the earth wall of the trench the story of the centuries could be read in the successive levels (Figs. [3.3] and [3.4]). Between levels three and nineteen, six pavements could be counted, but level nineteen takes us, to judge by the pots found in it, only back to about 450 B.C. In layers twenty to twenty-two, Gjerstad found three pebble pavements, which he dates about 575 B.C. If he is right in assigning to this date the beginning of monarchic Rome, he has pushed its date down in our direction over 150 years from the traditional 753 B.C. But there is more history below this. Strata twenty-three to twenty-eight are remains of huts, similar to but (pottery again) later than the ones on the Palatine. Gjerstad dates them in two phases: 650–625 and 625–575 B.C. Rather than push the traditional date down so far, it seems plausible to suppose that these huts represent the period assigned by the literary tradition to the early kings, and to argue that the sophisticated period, symbolized by the Forum’s earliest pebble pavement, was inaugurated by Rome’s earliest Etruscan king, Tarquin I.

Fig. 3.3 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, showing strata. (E. Gjerstad, Early Rome I, p. 37)

Fig. 3.4 Rome, Forum. Excavation at Equus Domitiani, schematic drawing of strata. (E. Gjerstad, Antiquity 26 [1952], p. 61)

These other huts confirm the other archaeological data, which show that what later was unified into urban Rome was originally a group of simple hut-villages clustered on various hills, the Forum huts having spilled down, as it were, from the village on the Palatine. The huts in the level just above the Forum necropolis represent a still earlier stage of this spillover; they antedate the earliest huts in Gjerstad’s twenty-nine levels. By the date of Gjerstad’s earliest pebble pavements, the huts in the necropolis area have been replaced by a more developed domestic architecture, perhaps with rooms opening on a central court. These houses have rectangular plans, mud-brick, wood-braced walls, and tufa foundations. At the spillover stage, the villagers from the various hills formed some kind of confederation symbolized archaeologically by the two types of graves in the Forum necropolis, and in literature by the tradition of the joint religious festival called the Septimontium.

The period of the first pebble pavement (575 B.C.) is one of major change, from village to urban life, to a city now for the first time boasting a civic center, destined to become the world’s most famous public square, the Roman Forum. Of the same date are the earliest remains on the Capitoline Hill, which was to be the arx or citadel of historic Rome. Of the same date are the earliest artifacts from the Regia, which later generations revered as the palace of the kings. Of the same date is a sophisticated phase of the round shrine of Vesta, which encircled the sacred flame, symbol of the city’s continuity. The literary tradition would date the last two earlier, at least to Numa’s reign. However no architectural remains have so far been discovered which associate them with the earlier date.

In his interpretation of the archaeological evidence about the date of the beginning of the Roman Republic, Gjerstad is just as iconoclastic as about the dating of the kings. His argument, more ingenious than convincing, is that an event as important politically as a change from a monarchy to a republic should be reflected in the artifacts, changing from richer to poorer, whereas no such objective evidence of a cultural break is visible in the levels dated by him (perhaps more closely than the facts warrant) at 509 B.C. Such a cultural break does not come until some fifty years later, when Etruscan imports cease. There are grave difficulties in pushing the date of the Roman Republic’s beginning down so far, of which the chief is a list (the Fasti) of pairs of consuls 509–450 B.C. where many names are too obscure to have been invented. Gjerstad’s excavation, in sum, is important as confirming the accuracy of Boni’s methods, and as telling us much about the village stage of Rome, but the absolute chronology cannot be said to be as yet firmly fixed, nor the traditional one definitely upset.

* * * * *

Apart from absolute chronology, what unequivocal evidence can archaeology provide that early Rome was ruled by kings? The ideal evidence would be an inscription, and one was discovered in 1899 in the Forum near the Comitium, where, in the open air in front of the Senate House, the popular assembly met. The inscription is called the lapis niger stele, because it lies under a later pavement of black marble (lapis niger), now preserved under a deplorable corrugated iron roof. But the stone on which it is carved is not marble but tufa, identified as having come from the quarries of Grotta Oscura in the territory of Veii, some nine miles north of Rome.

On the various kinds of tufa or volcanic stone in use in early Rome there hangs a tale. In 1924 an American, Tenney Frank, published an epoch-making study of Roman building materials in which he put the dating of Roman monuments on a firmer basis by distinguishing several different kinds of tufa used by Roman builders at successive dates. Subsequent studies have blurred the dividing lines and shown the possibility of overlap, but Frank’s nice eye for discriminating tufas has revolutionized the architectural history of the Roman Republic. The following table illustrates Frank’s methods:

Fig. 3.5 Rome, Forum: lapis niger stele. Note the word RECEI, which may be evidence for the historicity of Rome’s kings. (P. Goidanich, Mem. Acc. It. 7.3 [1943], Pl. 9)

Fig. 3.6 Rome, Forum. Rostra, third phase (fourth-third century B.C.). (E. Gjerstad, Skrifter 5 [1944], p. 142)

The lapis niger stele, inscribed on tufa of the second type in this series, could be of the very late sixth century B.C., and this date is borne out by the very archaic letter-styles ([Fig. 3.5]), which resemble those on the Aules Feluskes stele from Etruscan Vetulonia. Interpreting what the stone says is not made easier by the fact that the top is cut off and the lines are inscribed boustrophedon (like the Lemnian stele among other examples), so that in successive lines the beginning and the end are alternately missing. In the left-hand column below is printed the latest text of the letters as they appear on the stele; in the right-hand column, a translation into classical Latin, filling the blanks; below, a translation of this oldest of all Latin inscriptions:

QVOI HOI QVI · HV[nc locum violaverit,
SAKROS ⁝ ESE manibus] SACER · SIT;
ED SORD ET SORD[ibus qui haec contaminet]
OKAFHAS OCA, FAS
RECEI ⁝ IO REGI, IV[dicio ei habito
EVAM adimere rem pr]EVAM ·
QVOS ⁝ RE QVOS · RE[x per hanc senserit
M ⁝ KALATO vehi via]M, KALATOREM,
REM HAB HAB[enis eorum, iubeto
TOD ⁝ IOVXMEN ilic]O · IVMENTA
TA ⁝ KAPAI ⁝ DOTAV · CAPIAT, VT · A V[ia statiM
M ⁝ I ⁝ TER PE · ITER PE[r aversum locum
M ⁝ QVOI HA pergant puru]M · QVI HA[c]
VELOD ⁝ NEQV VOLET, NEQV[e per purum
IOD ⁝ IOVESTOD perget, iudic]IO, IVSTA
LOIVQVIOD QO ⁝ LICITATIONE, CO[ndemnetur].

“Whosoever defiles this spot, let him be forfeit to the shades of the underworld, and whosoever contaminates this spot with refuse, it is right for the king, after due process of law, to confiscate his property. Whatsoever persons the king shall discover passing on this road, let him order the summoner to seize their draft animals by the reins, that they may turn out of the road forthwith and take the proper detour. Whosoever persists in traveling this road, and fails to take the proper detour, by due process of law let him be sold to the highest bidder.”

Obviously the inscription thus restored and interpreted, marks a spot which is taboo, its ill-omened nature being further emphasized by the later black marble pavement, which was fenced off by a balustrade of thin white marble slabs set on edge. Beside the stele is a U-shaped shrine or altar,[B] on a higher level and therefore of a later date than the inscription. Archaeology provides no clue to the purpose of this structure, but learned Romans believed it marked the tomb of Romulus, their first king. This would be a sacred spot indeed, not to be profaned by the feet of men or animals. From one edge of the shrine run the remains of a semicircular platform with steps (Figs. [3.6] and [3.7]), also later in date than the inscription. The platform was the Rostra, so called because of its decoration, after 338 B.C., with the bronze rostra or ramming-beaks of captured enemy war-galleys. The Rostra was in historical times the speakers’ platform; from it in one of its phases resounded the sonorous oratory of Cicero. But it was also the spot from which traditionally funeral orations were delivered, while modern men wearing, according to Roman custom, the death-masks of their ancestors sat behind the orators in curule chairs on the platform. To the logical Roman mind a platform beside the tomb of the first king would seem the appropriate place for funeral speeches.

[B] Professor Ferdinando Castagnoli and Dr. Lucos Cozza reported in 1959 the discovery, at Pratica di Mare, ancient Lavinium, sixteen miles south of Rome, of a series of thirteen such altars, together with an inscription on bronze, with lettering like that of the lapis niger stele. They date their finds in the late sixth century B.C.

Since American excavations at Rome’s Latin colony of Cosa in 1953 identified as a Comitium a circular, step-surrounded space in front of the local Senate House, it appears that the semicircular steps leading to the platform in Rome were Rome’s Comitium, and new excavations to prove or disprove this were started in 1957.

Fig. 3.7 Rome, Forum. Rostra, fifth phase (Sullan).

(E. Gjerstad, op. cit., p. 143)

Careful equations between the fifteen levels in the Comitium and the twenty-nine levels near the equestrian statue of Domitian prove the Comitium a monument of the Roman Republic: the first phase coincides with the Republic’s beginning, and its last with Caesar and Augustus, in the late first century B.C., when the Republic ends. Thereafter freedom of speech, and an arena for it, were but a memory. But the first Rostra rose where it did because the founders of the Roman Republic associated it with the first of Rome’s kings.

The lapis niger inscription, which refers twice to a king, rests on a base which cannot be older than the sack of Rome by the Gauls in 390 B.C. (for the base is on the same level as the second of the Comitium pavements, laid over traces of a major fire, and the Gauls set Rome on fire). But an inscription of course is a movable monument, and the present location of the stele may not be where it was originally set up. Furthermore, letter styles so archaic are probably older than 390 B.C.: the alternatives, then, are either that the stele, of venerable antiquity, was reset, on a new platform, as a part of rearrangements after the fire, or that it is a deliberately archaizing copy of a much older original. The theory that the king (rex) referred to is not the temporal monarch, but the rex sacrorum, a Republican priest of later Republican times who inherited the king’s religious functions, is virtually ruled out by the letter-styles.

The lapis niger stele presents one aspect of primitive Roman religion under the kings: the taboo. Another is the pious tending of the sacred flame on the public hearth, a rite performed in historical times by the Vestal Virgins in Vesta’s shrine at the east end of the Forum. The superstructure of the shrine as now restored there yielded no remains earlier than the Gallic fire, but the round plan must reflect the shape of a primitive straw hut of the Palatine type, with central hearth and smoke-hole, and the earliest artifacts, from the previously mentioned well there, are dated in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. The shrine of Vesta, then, preserves another memory of Rome of the kings.

Fig. 3.8 Rome, Republican Forum. (G. Lugli, Roma Antica, Pl. 3)

Kings, like ordinary mortals, need a dwelling place. Traditionally in Rome, this was the Regia (related in root to rex, “king”), on the trapezoidal plot between the Forum necropolis and Vesta’s shrine (see plan, [Fig. 3.8]). Romans believed its first occupant was the Sabine Numa, the second and most pious of the kings, but no archaeological remains confirm so early a date (traditionally 716–672 B.C.). It seems unlikely that the king could have dwelt there before the necropolis was closed, for the king was a priest, and it was unlucky for a priest to look upon a cadaver, or upon death. The earliest datable masonry remains are a foundation in cappellaccio of about 390 B.C., another evidence of rebuilding after the Gallic fire. But there might well have been, before the fire, a more primitive structure in wood, revetted in terracotta; indeed, fragments of terracotta revetment, some of a late sixth or early fifth century style and some even earlier, were found there, as well as a grey bucchero sherd scratched with the word rex in archaic letters. The Regia, as it stands, is the result of at least three rebuildings, the last in 36 B.C. It still has an old-fashioned air: ancient, straggling, intractable, very holy: the shape of its ground-plan never changing from beginning to end. In keeping with the Etruscan tradition—as at Marzabotto—the building is oriented north and south. Its south side was a dwelling, later the office of the Pontifex Maximus; among the great Romans who worked in this building was Julius Caesar. The rest of the Regia was an area partly unroofed. It was a shrine of Mars, hung with shields and a magic lance that quivered at the threat of war. The Pontifex Maximus recorded yearly, day by day, on a whitened board in the Regia, events in which he and his fellow priests had a professional interest: temple-dedications, religious festivals, triumphs, eclipses, famines, rains of blood, births of two-headed calves, and other prodigies. Fragments of this lost archaeological record, piously kept by the pontiffs, turn up in extant Roman history: Livy often refers to them at the end of his account of a year, particularly an unlucky year.

Orientation like the Regia’s is an Etruscan practice, and it is with domination by the Etruscans that we should expect Rome’s primitive simplicity to evolve into something more like grandeur. The literary tradition ascribed to the Etruscan, Tarquin the Proud, Rome’s last king, a great Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill, built by the forced labor of Roman citizens, and decorated by Etruscan artisans like Vulca of Veii, the sculptor of the Apollo (page 52). It took World War I to confirm this literary tradition archaeologically. The Italians, on the Allied side in that war, ousted the Germans from their Embassy, splendidly situated on the Capitoline Hill in the Palazzo Caffarelli, and remodelled the palace into a museum. In the process was revealed a massive podium, sixteen feet high, built without mortar of blocks of cappellaccio, the oldest of Rome’s building stones. Fortunately, diagonally opposite corners were found, making it possible to establish how impressive were the podium’s dimensions: roughly 120 × 180 feet. Three corners of the podium having been isolated, archaeologists were able to fit into the plan the remains of a substructure which had been found in 1865 under the Palace of the Conservatori. This substructure, now built impressively into a corridor of the Conservatori Museum, proved to be the support for columns. The platform as a whole, then, was the podium of a temple, the largest of its time, over twice the size, for example, of the one at Marzabotto. Traces of the settings for the columns proved them to be placed too wide apart to be connected by architraves in stone; they must instead have been great wooden beams. The wood would have been revetted or faced with terracotta, and in fact enough fragments of terracotta revetments were found on the site to establish this temple as decorated in the typical Etruscan style. If its sculptures were as striking as the Apollo of Veii, they were masterpieces indeed. The temple, repeatedly and ever more grandiosely rebuilt—in one phase it was roofed with gilded bronze, and the cult statue was gold and ivory—was the center and symbol of Rome’s religious life. Here the triumphal processions ended. Here the triumphing general, surrounded by his spoils of victory, descended from his chariot drawn by four white horses, and passed through the open doors and the clouds of incense to give thanks to Jupiter the Best and Greatest for his victory. From the cliff behind the temple, the Tarpeian rock, traitors were thrown to their deaths; here, in 133 B.C., Tiberius Gracchus, the friend of the people, was murdered. Religion, dignity, pride, greed, pomp, tragedy: all are the stuff of Roman history; all are here, and archaeology illumines their story. Horace boasted that his poetry would endure “so long as, with the mute Vestal, the Pontifex climbs up to the Capitoline Temple.” For him as for us Rome was the Eternal City, and the Capitoline was the symbol of its permanence. Through the assaults of riot, fire, earthquake, poverty, popes, barbarians, limekilns, wind, rain, and earth, the foundations have endured.

* * * * *

The literary tradition tells us how Rome’s Etruscan monarchy fell: of Tarquin’s despotism and his son’s rape of Lucrece, daughter of a Roman aristocrat, whose husband avenged her and allegedly became one of Rome’s first pair of consuls. It tells us how the Roman nobles rose, drove out the Tarquins, and founded the Roman Republic. Archaeology cannot confirm the traditional date (indeed the founding of temples, Etruscan style, continues, as we saw, for half a century after 509). But about the middle of the fifth century the contents of the tombs on the Esquiline begin to grow mean and shabby. Contact with Etruria has been cut off, and the Romans make a virtue of necessity, pass sumptuary laws against excessive display, and practice simplicity and frugality. The late fifth century B.C. in Rome, as archaeology reveals it, is a period of isolation, stagnation, and retrenchment.

Hardly had the new Roman Republic rallied to conquer Veii (traditionally in 396 B.C., after a ten-year siege, like Troy’s), when the Gauls descended from the north with fire and sword. Rome bought them off, and, resisting the temptation to move to Veii, fell to rebuilding, mindful of how its ancestors had built their city up out of forest and swamp; in love with their protecting hills, their fruitful open spaces, their busy river. The building was done planlessly; the main concern was to strengthen defenses.

The primitive Rome of separate villages on the hills had been defended, at most, by separate palisades and ditches. It is with King Servius that literature associated the Rome of impressive buildings and a beetling wall, of squared stone, sturdy enough to repel all invaders. With how much justification Roman historians called the wall “Servian,” we are now to learn. The tradition associates Rome’s earliest wall with Servius Tullius, who falls between the two Tarquins, and certain surviving traces of earthwork and masonry, plus the Cloaca Maxima, or Great Drain through the Forum, are assigned by some archaeologists to the sixth century. Indeed until 1932 most scholars accepted the sixth-century date for the whole early circuit. But in that year the Swedish archaeologist Gösta Säflund (who seven years later was to explode Pigorini’s myth about the terremare) published the results of some painstaking fieldwork which radically changed the picture.

Beginning with the Palatine and working counter-clockwise, Säflund examined every inch of the surviving circuit ascribed to Servius (see [Fig. 2.3]), and for stretches which had been torn down during Rome’s great expansion (after she became the capital of a united Italy in the 1870’s) he had access to unpublished notes and sketches by Boni and another great nineteenth-century Italian archaeologist, Rodolfo Lanciani. Everywhere he paid careful attention to materials, techniques, dimensions, mason’s marks, the relation of the wall to terrain, neighboring tombs, and ancient artifacts found in its context. It was chiefly from the building material that Säflund drew his conclusions.

The stone was in the main Grotta Oscura tufa, which he knew from Tenney Frank’s studies to have been in use in the year (378 B.C.) in which Livy says the censors contracted to have a wall built of squared stone. Furthermore, some of the Esquiline tombs already mentioned, containing mid-fourth century artifacts, were outside the line of the Grotta Oscura wall, while some of the tombs containing archaic artifacts were inside. The Romans rarely buried their dead within a city wall: the inference is that at the date of the earlier tombs, Rome had no proper ring-wall, while by the date of the later (fourth-century) tombs a circuit wall had been built. The Great Drain through the Forum is also of Grotta Oscura, and is therefore probably to be dated in 378, like the wall, though some feeder lines are in cappellaccio, which, as we have seen, was the earliest volcanic stone the Romans used, and we know—because we know the Forum swamp was drained by 575 B.C.—that there must have been some sort of drainage system—possibly open ditches—earlier than 378.

But Säflund found Fidenae tufa also. This he knew, again from Frank’s study, to have been in use from about 338 B.C. down into the second century. It had been used to patch the wall in places. What more appropriate time for such repairs than when Hannibal was threatening the city, in 217 B.C.? Thereafter, Roman and Latin colonies, advanced bases, served her in the office of a wall, and her own fortifications were allowed to fall into disrepair.

But there are places in Rome’s wall where Monteverde stone has been used for arches, rising from footings set in concrete; in other places the wall has a concrete core faced with Anio tufa. Säflund knew that concrete was little in use in Roman building before 150 B.C., and that it had become a favorite material by Sulla’s time (see p. [129]). Sulla had marched on Rome in 88 B.C. and taken it; he must have reinforced the wall to keep his enemy Marius from duplicating his own feat. And Sulla included the bridgehead on the far side of the Tiber in his circuit, reinforced the Aventine Hill, and added ballistae (great catapults for shooting stones) in arched casemates flanking the main gates.

Fig. 3.9 Rome, “Servian” Wall of 378 B.C., surviving stretch beside Termini railway station. (Photo Paul MacKendrick)

Thus Säflund distinguished three building periods for the so-called “Servian” Wall, though none as early as King Servius Tullius. One section of earth work or agger, on the Quirinal Hill, faced in part with small blocks of cappellaccio, looked older than 378 B.C., and Säflund knew from observations at Ardea, Cerveteri (and, as we now know, Anzio) that the use of the earthwork was standard in the sixth century to reinforce weak places on hilly sites. Some early sixth-century sherds, but none later, were found under the agger. This helps to confirm that the agger was a part of Rome’s sixth-century, genuinely Servian defenses, never a complete ring-wall, but an adjustment and reinforcement of natural defenses, later incorporated into the circuit wall of 378 B.C. A splendid stretch of the facing of this reinforced agger, 100 yards, survives today by the Termini railroad station ([Fig. 3.9]).

But Säflund’s careful observations did more than redate the wall in its several phases. By comparison of the mason’s marks, hacked in Greek letters on the heads of the Grotta Oscura blocks only, with similar marks found on the blocks of the fortifications of the Euryalus above Syracuse, in Sicily (built in the late fifth century B.C. by Dionysius I), Säflund was able to demonstrate that Rome’s wall was built by Sicilian workmen, Rome not having the manpower or the skill at the time. (Dionysius for his wall had employed 6000 men and 500 yoke of oxen.)

The wall of 378 B.C. is evidence that Rome had emerged from the doldrums into which the Republic had begun to sink. Before 390 B.C. she had depended on men, not walls. The Gallic sack had proved her not invincible, and had also, as war emergencies will, produced a new sense of solidarity. The wall symbolizes it, and so does the bill passed in 367 B.C. (while the wall was still under construction), opening the highest office in the Republic to plebeians. Thus a reinforced oligarchy was formed, which by 338 B.C. could beat its once powerful enemies, the neighboring settlements linked in the Latin League; proudly (even arrogantly) mount the beaks of enemy ships on the new Rostra; and embark upon a career of Manifest Destiny in Italy. The Republic had reached adulthood.

Fig. 3.10 Rome, Largo Argentina, temples. (G. Lugli, Monumenti Antichi, 3, fac. p. 32)

There were other outward and visible signs of the Republic’s new maturity and prosperity. The gods deserve their reward for fighting on the side of the biggest battalions, and so the expanding Republic built temples. In another age of arrogant expansion, in 1926, not long before Säflund began his work on the walls, slum clearance in front of the Argentina theater (on the site of the portico of Pompey’s theater, where Caesar was murdered) revealed the foundations of four Republican temples ([Fig. 3.10]), nowadays the haunt of countless tomcats. The gods to whom the temples were dedicated being unknown, they were named, with proper archaeological sobriety, Temples A, B, C, and D. The foundations of Temple C, the third from the north, are the deepest; it is therefore the oldest. It is set in the Italic manner at the back of a high podium, built of Grotta Oscura tufa; its mason’s marks match those on the “Servian” wall. Clearly it was built by the same masons or in the same tradition. The podium carries the distinction of being the oldest surviving datable public building in Rome. Terracotta revetments found in excavating are of fourth century type. Besides meanders, the so-called “Greek frets” or “key” design, an angular pattern of lines winding in and out, their decorative motifs include strigil patterns: parallel troughs, made by the workman’s thumbs in the wet clay, and then painted in contrasting colors. The strong curve of the profile resembles that of the strigil or scraper used by athletes in the gymnasium to remove caked oil and dirt from their bodies; hence the name. The roof’s peak and corner ornaments, called acroteria, have spikes set in the clay to discourage birds from perching and committing nuisances. This temple and its three later fellows are still a long way from the grandiose marble and gold of the Augustan Age, but they are an equally long way from the primitive wattle-and-daub huts of the Palatine village. They mark a stage in the painstakingly unravelled archaeological story of Rome’s expansion, which we shall follow at various newly-excavated sites in Italy.

4
Roman Colonies in Italy

Rome’s wall begun in 378 B.C. took twenty-five years to build. However secure she might feel behind it, immediately beyond the gates lurked enemies. To the north the Gauls, to the east and south, Italic tribes (whom Rome successively feared, rivalled, dominated, and invited to partnership; of these the Samnites were the most fearsome), on the seas the Syracusan and Carthaginian navies—all represented a clear and present danger. Rome’s population being inadequate to keep legions in the field, much less a fleet at sea, against all these threats at once, she evolved a system of advanced bases, called Latin colonies ([Fig. 4.1]), manned partly with trustworthy local non-Romans, though with a hard core of Roman legionaries. This avoided undue drain on the Roman manpower, and placed the responsibility for frontier defense upon frontiersmen who had the greatest interest in their own security.

During the last thirty years the efforts of archaeologists of several nations; for example, Italians at Ostia, Belgians at Alba Fucens, Americans at Cosa have added much to the sum of our knowledge of these frontier outposts: their fortifications, street plan, public buildings, housing arrangements, and the surveyed (“centuriated”) quarter-sections of land (allotments) stretching away from the walls into the countryside round about. From these brute facts inferences can be drawn, about what prompted the founding of these outposts (was the motive always military?), about relations with neighbors and with Rome, about communications, about economic, social, and cultural life.

Fig. 4.1 Roman colonization. (P. MacKendrick, Archaeology 9 [1955], p. 127)

At Ostia, at the Tiber’s mouth, historical tradition said that there had been Romans settled since the days of King Ancus Marcius, and that, even earlier, Aeneas had landed there and built a camp. In 1938 the great Italian archaeologist Guido Calza began soundings to ascertain the date of the oldest surviving stratum. The area he chose was beneath Ostia’s Imperial Forum, where the two main streets, the cardo and the decumanus, crossed. (The Via Ostiensis, from Rome to the river mouth, determined the line of the decumanus.) What he found ([Fig. 4.2]) was a set of walls enclosing a rectangle 627 feet long and 406 feet wide. The wall was built of roughly squared blocks of tufa in a technique not unlike that of Rome’s wall of 378 B.C., but since there was Fidenae stone in it, Calza dated the wall somewhat later than 378. The wall was pierced by four gates of two rooms each, with portcullis. The south gate was demolished in the early Empire to provide space for a temple of Rome and Augustus; the north gate gave way under Hadrian to the massive podium of a Capitolium, but the footings of the east and west gates survive, well below the level of the Imperial pavement. Calza found drains within the walls, and traces of four other streets (unpaved) besides the cardo and decumanus, but no identifiable buildings. Some terracotta revetments found in the area suggest an unidentified temple of the third century B.C. No traces earlier than the late fourth-century wall have been found in the excavated area of Ostia. Either Ancus Marcius’ foundation is a myth, or it was planted in some thus far undiscovered spot, of which all the plowing and digging in the neighborhood has left no trace.

Fig. 4.2 Ostia, castrum, plan. (G. Calza, Scavi di Ostia, 1, fac. p. 68)

What Calza found at Ostia was a coastguard station, or castrum, planted by the Romans at the river’s mouth once their control of the sea was established by their victory over Antium’s navy (which produced the bronze beaks on the Rostra). The normal complement of such a station was 300 men. A contingent of that size could have manned Ostia’s castrum wall with one soldier every six feet. Thus the prime motive of the founding was military, and the castrum plan is like the familiar and standard plan of a Roman army camp. But the civilian plan antedated the military: Polybius in his description of the Roman camp of about 150 B.C. says that it was planned like a town (i.e., with a rectangular grid like Marzabotto). And Ostia’s function must from the beginning, or soon after, have been commercial as well as military. Its site at the river mouth was as ideal for collecting the customs as for guarding the coast. Grain from Egypt and Sicily to feed Rome may from the earliest days have been landed here and stored in warehouses for later shipment upriver by barge. At all events history records the appointment as early as 267 B.C. of a special finance officer or quaestor for Ostia, and Calza found the footings of warehouses of Republican date. The terracotta revetments mentioned above date from this period. The houses and shops remained humble for seven generations, but those generations saw the departure of many a fleet, and the arrival of many a consignment of grain. An inscription dated in 171 B.C. marking the limits of public land in Ostia shows that by then it had expanded far beyond the castrum walls. But the story of Ostia’s development, her new wall under Sulla, new theater under Augustus, new port under Claudius, new garden apartment houses under Trajan, and the rest, belong to later chapters.

* * * * *

In the last half of the fourth century Rome fought two wars against the Samnites. Alba Fucens ([Fig. 4.3]) in the Abruzzi, one of her advanced bases in the Second Samnite War, has been explored since 1949 by the Belgians. It lies 3315 feet above sea level, on the Via Valeria sixty-eight miles east-northeast of Rome. (The sixty-eighth milestone of the Valeria was found in situ inside the colony wall.) Alba’s site dominates five valleys. The Latin colony of 6000 families planted here in 303 B.C. assured Rome’s communications on two sides of Samnium, eastward to the Adriatic and southeastward through the Liris valley.

Fig. 4.3 Alba Fucens, plan. (J. B. Ward Perkins, “Early Roman Towns in Italy,” Fig. 9)

The pride of Alba is its walls, nearly two miles of them, surrounding the three hills on which the colony lies. The material is limestone, which breaks at the quarry into irregular, polygonal blocks. These are set without mortar. The excavators distinguished four different building techniques in the wall. They assumed that the roughest sectors, built of enormous blocks, were the oldest, coeval with the foundation of the colony. These polygonal walls, common all over central Italy, used to be called Pelasgian or Cyclopean, and were formerly assumed to be of immemorial antiquity, but recent archaeological work has pushed the dates of most of them down into the late fourth century or later. At Alba the techniques involve the use of smaller blocks and more careful workmanship in successive phases, until finally with the use of cement we reach the 80’s B.C. and the age of Sulla. On the northwest, where the hill has the gentlest slope, the circuit is triple, and the outermost is the latest. The loop to the north was the arx; it was destroyed by an earthquake in 1915. The wall is pierced by four gates, some with portcullis and bastions. The Via Valeria entered at the northwest, made a right-angled turn, passed the civic center, and emerged at the southeast; that is, it was made to conform to a grid plan within the colony, a grid plan laid down despite the hilly terrain, which made terracing necessary.

Excavating Alba’s civic center, the Belgians found a Forum, with altar and miniature temple, buried under many feet of earth. They also found a basilica (a rectangular roofed hall with nave and two side aisles, used as a law court and commercial center), presenting its long side, with three entrances, to a portico facing the Forum. Beside the basilica, a market, with baths on one side and a temple on the other, with early revetments, repeatedly restored. An adjoining street, parallel to the Valeria, was lined with shops, including a fuller’s drycleaning establishment and at least one wine shop. The doorsills still show slots for the shutters. In front of the shops ran a portico supported on high pilasters. In the curb were holes where customers might tie their mules. At the corner of the decumanus, the excavators found charming statuettes of elephants, used as street signs. Under the market were revealed subterranean chambers accessible only by manholes; the excavators suggest that these are the very dungeons, dark underground oubliettes, where prisoners of state like King Syphax of Numidia in 203 B.C., King Perseus of Macedonia in 167, the Gallic chief Bituitus in 121 were incarcerated, for the Romans often used their colonies as detention points.

Levels, construction techniques, and artifacts assigned various dates to these buildings, but their earliest phases fall in the Republican period, in the age of Sulla or earlier. To the age of Sulla belongs also a handsome rock-cut theater. There is an amphitheater of the early Empire; as we know from a new inscription, its donor was Macro, the notorious informer under the Emperor Tiberius, who brought about the fall of the Emperor’s ambitious and scheming favorite, Sejanus.

Walls, grid, civic center, public buildings: these made of Alba a smaller and more orderly replica of Rome. The general layout is repeated so often in so many places that it suggests a master plan made in the censors’ office in Rome. By the time Cosa was founded, in 273 B.C., the Romans already could draw on the experience of founding at least eighteen colonies.

* * * * *