the back wall (fig. 24) representing a symposium. On the couch to the
left two youths are reclining, on each of the two others a youth and
a young girl.[46] The young men are attired in mantles, the girls in
chitons and mantles; all wear garlands. In their hands they hold either
chaplets, drinking-bowls, or round objects usually supposed to be eggs.
Similar ‘eggs’ appear in numerous Etruscan banqueting-scenes: in the
Tomba del Triclinio, del Letto funebre, della Pulcella, degli Scudi,
&c., and as egg-shells are frequently found in the tombs at Corneto,
and eggs must therefore have been offered to the dead[47]—as the most
nourishing of foods, and one which stimulates in particular the
procreative force—it is not improbable that the old interpretation is
the correct one. Weege supposes them to be ballot-balls used to decide
who should be the master of the symposium (symposiarch), but this was
usually decided by throwing dice. A third conceivable interpretation,
which I think might be acceptable in certain cases where a man and a
woman hand each other these round objects, is that they are rings. In
Plautus’s _Asinaria_ (778) it is spoken of as typical of two young
lovers reclining on one couch at the symposium that one of them gives
the other his or her ring to look at.
Beneath and above the banqueting-couch we find the previously noted
laurel branches—not laurel trees as Weege calls them—the familiar
adornment of the walls. The guests are served by two naked pages: one
of these, who holds a jug, beckons to the other, who holds a small
jug and a strainer, to make haste. How necessary it was to strain the
wine is seen from the description of the elder Cato. The Latin word
for cleaning the wine-jars of the grape-skins deposited by the wine is
_deacinare_.[48]
FOOTNOTES:
[42] The large frieze with dancing scenes on the left main wall was
already badly damaged in 1827. A copy of it, now in the Vatican, is
mere fiction, and has unfortunately served as basis for the large
facsimile in the Glyptotek. On the other hand, its damaged state is
correctly represented in the small drawing of the tomb in the Glyptotek.
[43] Blümner, _Römische Privataltertümer_, p. 118.
[44] On Etruscan cinerary urns and terracotta sarcophagi the covers
are as a rule strongly scalloped. These are presumably the _tonsilia
tappetia_ referred to by Plautus (_Pseudolus_ 145 ff.). They usually
came from Alexandria and were decorated with pictures of wild beasts,
whereas the bed coverlets proper came from Campania.
[45] These cheetahs were brought alive to Italy, if not actually used
for hunting by the princes of the Renaissance. For among Pisanello’s
drawings in the Codex Vallardi in the Louvre is a fine study of one of
these animals from the life; it wears a collar round its neck, showing
that it was led on a leash. I owe this reference to Mr. G. F. Hill.
[46] Dennis and Stryk are mistaken in speaking of a youth and a girl
on the left couch; the error is due to the damaged condition of the
colouring.
[47] Cp. Juvenal, _Satires_ v. 82, where eggs are referred to as a
common course at funerals.
[48] Cato, _De re rustica_ 26. In the Greek pictures of symposia also
the slave boy carries a strainer, ἡθμός.
X
[Sidenote: THE HETAERAE]
This wall-painting is apparently a faithful copy of a Greek painted
representation of a symposium with hetaerae, and this is also Weege’s
view of the scene. In his opinion, those who take part in the drinking
bouts of the young men are not married or respectable women, but
hetaerae. It seems to me that such a representation in a _tomb_ would
argue a complete dissolution of family relations in ancient Etruria,
whether we choose to interpret the pictures as scenes from life, or
as an expression of the wish that the next life might take the form
of nothing more or less than a revel with hetaerae. Weege maintains,
further, that hetaerae reclined at table, whereas wives sat with their
husbands: but this is contrary to the express literary tradition,
according to which the Greeks were shocked because the Etruscan women
reclined at table with men ‘under the same coverlet’. The earliest
authority for this statement is Aristotle[49] and, according to this
and other accounts of the fourth century B.C., the free intercourse
between men and women gave rise to much immorality, the women
abandoning themselves to the strange men with whom they reclined.[50]
It would have been absurd for the Greeks to take offence at this if it
did not apply to free-born women of good family, but only to hetaerae,
who in Hellas did exactly the same. How things were with the Greeks
in this respect is made sufficiently clear by a passage in the orator
Isaeus[51]: ‘No one would dare to serenade married women, and neither
do the married women attend banquets with their husbands, nor do they
consider it proper to partake of meals with strangers, especially
chance acquaintances’.
With this severe Athenian custom we must compare these scandalized
Greek outbursts, and, at the same time, we must remember that in the
fourth century B.C. Etruscan civilization and morals were already on
the decline, so that an original latitude, which in the beginning
of the fifth century was natural and did not affect the morals of
domestic life, may at this time have been abused. Incidentally, we are
able to ascertain the degree of exaggeration in another Greek account
of the same time concerning the luxuriousness of the Etruscans[52]:
‘They reclined on flowered cushions drinking out of sumptuous silver
bowls and attended by servants in costly dresses, _sometimes by naked
women_.’ In the Etruscan paintings there are numerous naked pages in
attendance, just as in the Greek symposium pictures, but not a single
naked handmaid. As to the question whether respectable women reclined
or sat at table, invariable rules did not exist in Etruria any more
than they existed in ancient Rome, where we know that Jupiter alone
reclined at the lectisternia (the sacred banquets given by the state)
whereas Juno and Minerva sat; furthermore, in the last century of the
republic, respectable women sat with the men at banquets, while brides
reclined.[53] The practice of brides reclining can hardly, however,
be accounted for except as a case of adherence to an ancient and
honourable custom which was superseded by later and severer notions.
Etruscan works of art, however, give sufficient information to confute
the whole of Weege’s hetaera theory. Man and woman are often seen
reclining together on Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns, and on
the face of it it would seem improbable that a man would have himself
pictured on his sarcophagus with a hetaera. Dr. S. P. Cortsen kindly
informs me that this view is confirmed by the fact that two of these
cinerary urns with a pair of figures on the lid have an inscription in
which the word _tusurthi_ or _tusurthir_ occurs—one of the few Etruscan
words the signification of which is certain: it means ‘spouses’.[54]
And if we look at the type of womanhood represented in several of the
recumbent couples on the later urns, when realism prevails in Etruscan
portrait sculpture, the appellation hetaera becomes as preposterous as
that of matrons is certain (fig. 25).[55]
[Illustration: FIG. 26. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI AT CORNETO]
[Illustration: FIG. 27. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI]
But proof is furnished by the tomb-paintings themselves. In the Tomba
degli Scudi at Corneto, discovered in 1870, and, to judge by the style,
dating from the end of the fifth century B. C., the wife (as might be
expected) is pictured sitting with her husband, who is reclining on
the couch with a drinking-bowl in his left hand, his right resting
on the woman’s shoulder (fig. 26). According to the inscription the
man’s name is _Velthur Velcha_, that of the woman _Ravnthu Aprthnai_
(the family name is in the nominative and is a woman’s name, the Latin
_Abortennia_; so the family of the mother was the more distinguished).
The figure and the diadem of the woman recall those of the Hera
Borghese and determine the date of the tomb. On the table in front of
the couch are a bowl, a cake (_pyramis_), and a heap of fruits: or
they may be the ‘ball-cakes’ (_spirae_ or _spaeritae_) referred to by
Cato (_De agricultura_ 82). At the foot of the couch a lyre-player and
a flute-player accompany the meal with music, recalling a statement
of Cicero’s[56] that at banquets in early Rome the sound of stringed
instruments and flutes was deemed indispensable. On the whole, it
might perhaps be as well to abandon all theories of the austere morals
of early Rome. The patrician families of the first centuries of the
republic undoubtedly lived a life which in pomp and luxury vied with
the life of the nobility of the Etruscan towns. Again, in the painting
on the back wall of this tomb, where the recumbent man is a priest
(_cechaneri_), the wife is seated with her husband (fig. 27). As to
the priesthood, it must be borne in mind that the priestly office
was hereditary in the Etruscan noble families. The statue of Juno at
Veii, for instance, might only be touched by a priest of a certain
family.[57] It was especially the art of divination, however, which
was reserved for the noblemen and their wives.[58] Even when the
Romans had conquered Etruria they continued to support the efforts of
the Etruscans to confine initiation into the art of divination to the
nobility. Even Cicero, in his book on the ideal State, maintains that
omens and presages must be submitted to haruspices, and the nobles of
Etruria must teach the ‘disciplina’.
[Sidenote: TOMBA DELL’ORCO]
In the pictures of the Scudi tomb the wife, as we have seen, _is
sitting_. But in the Tomba dei Vasi Dipinti, besides a man and a woman,
two children are present at the symposium, which would be inconceivable
in a hetaera picture; and in a picture in the front chamber of the
Tomba dell’Orco at Corneto, discovered in 1868 and dating from the
same period as the Scudi tomb, there are traces of a man and a woman
reclining together, and the inscription informs us that the woman is
a free-born woman named Velia—the family name has unfortunately been
destroyed—and that she is married to Arnth Velchas, a descendant of
one of the noblest families in Etruria (fig. 28). With this, then, the
last and final proof of the untenability of the hetaera theory has been
adduced: this woman, whose head is one of the most beautiful in the
sepulchral chambers of Etruria (fig. 29), reclines with her husband on
the couch in the picture in the tomb, even as she was buried with him
in the tomb itself. A failure to appreciate this fact would imply a
complete denial of Etruscan family feeling and pride of race.
The dancing women, on the other hand, for instance, the woman in the
Tomba delle Leonesse already cited above, and another, still more
wanton, who in the Tomba degli Bacchanti foots it with a fat dancer,
must be interpreted as hetaerae. They illustrate the phrase of Plautus:
‘prostibile est tandem? stantem stanti savium dare amicum amicae?’ To
the same category of hired dancers belongs the man to the left of the
one who is dancing with inverted cithara.[59]
[Illustration: FIG. 28. ARNTH VELCHAS AND WIFE ON COUCH PICTURE IN THE
TOMBA DELL’ ORCO
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]
[Illustration: FIG. 29. HEAD OF ARNTH VELCHAS’ WIFE FROM THE TOMBA
DELL’ ORCO]
[Illustration: FIG. 30. BACK WALL IN THE TOMBA DEL VECCHIO]
Generally speaking, what has made doubt or error possible in the matter
is the fact that the pictures, as we have already said, in form suggest
Greek pictures of hetaerae; symposia of any other kind between men
and women were unknown in Hellas. And to what extent the influence
of Greek art has prevailed is shown by the picture of a momentary
phase of emotion in the Tomba Querciola, where a couple reclining on
the couch are kissing each other, a motive as suitable to a Greek
hetaera picture as it is incongruous in a picture representing family
life after death.[60] Another source of error is the pronounced
sensualism of these pictures; in a sepulchral painting as early as the
sixth century, the main picture of the Tomba del Vecchio, we see on a
banqueting-couch, under the wreaths and chaplets with bells hanging
on the wall, a hoary old _roué_ in vivacious conversation with his
beautiful young wife who holds a garland, a hypothymis, under his nose
(fig. 30).[61] This picture is typically Etruscan in its combination
of wine and love. ‘As soon as we had eaten,’ sings the Greek poet
Dromon,[62] ‘the slave girl removed the tables; one brought us water
for washing, and we washed ourselves; then we seized again the wreaths
of violets and bound our brows with garlands.’ The Etruscans seem to
have followed the Greek rules minutely, but like the Egyptians they let
the free-born women partake of the festivity of the symposium itself.
FOOTNOTES:
[49] Athenaeus i. 23 d. On the Etruscan custom of reclining at table,
like the Greeks, and unlike the men of the Homeric age and later the
Macedonians, who sat, see Athenaeus i. 17 f, 18 a.
[50] Athenaeus xii. 517d. Cp. Dionys. Halic. ix. 16.
[51] Isaeus iii. 14.
[52] Athenaeus iv. 153 d. (= Timaeus, _fragm._ 18 in Müller, _Fragmenta
histor. Graecorum_).
[53] Friedländer, _Sittengeschichte Roms_ i. 472, 478, 493 f.
[54] _Corpus inscriptionum Etruscarum_, 3858, 3860.
[55] The Etruscan character for immorality is chiefly due to Theopompus
(_fragm._ 222 in Müller, _Fragm. hist. Graec._ i. p. 315), but he gives
similar descriptions of the Thessalians, and seems to have specialized
in _chroniques scandaleuses_. Of equal value is his information that
the Sybarites loved the Etruscans because of their luxuriousness
(Athenaeus xii. 519 b). It is regrettable that Theophrastus’ work on
the Etruscans is lost; it would have provided information of quite a
different character. (Cp. the Scholia to Pindar, _Pythia_ ii. 3.)
[56] _De oratore_ iii. 197.
[57] Livy v. 22. 5.
[58] The most famous of all the Etruscan women versed in divination is
the wise but guileful Tanaquil, who played a political part in Rome:
Livy i. 34.
[59] Τὴν κιθαράν στρέψας, like Apollo in the contest with Marsyas
(Apollodorus, _Bibliotheca_ i. 4. 2).
[60] In the same picture we
also find a representation of a true Greek motive, kottabos. Another
momentary motive appears in the Tomba d’Orfeo e d’Euridice at Corneto
(_Monumenti_ v. pl. 17), a slave pulling off his master’s slippers.
[61] Hypothymides were first used ‘by the Aeolians and Ionians who
wore them round their necks, as we learn from the poems of Anacreon
and Alcaeus’ (Athenaeus xv. 678 d); Cp. Plutarch, _Quaest. conviv._
iii. _probl._ 1, 3. In Ionia the women perfumed their bosoms and
wore wreaths of flowers round their ‘delicate necks’, as Sappho says
(Athenaeus xv. 674 c-d).
[62] Athenaeus ix. 409 e.
XI
[Sidenote: SYMPOSIA]
But we can go still further and establish beyond the possibility of
doubt that where men alone are gathered at the symposium of eternity,
the pictures represent the heads of the families who ordered the tombs
and had them decorated. To be sure, the pictures of the sixth and
the beginning of the fifth centuries do not give us any information
as to this—even the symposium in the Tomba delle Bighe is without
inscription; but in this respect also the sepulchral paintings become
more communicative after the middle of the fifth century. In the Tomba
Golini at Orvieto, discovered in 1863 and called after its discoverer,
and, to judge from its style, contemporary with the Tomba degli Scudi
and the front chamber of the Tomba dell’Orco, we see in the symposium
on the back wall (fig. 31) two men on the same couch drinking to the
accompaniment of the two familiar musicians. Beneath the couch we can
make out dimly a servant, and a hunting leopard, probably feeding; both
have their names attached: that of the animal is Kankru. In Egyptian
reliefs also, dating from the Fifth Dynasty, we occasionally find names
attached to the domestic animals depicted, for instance ducks and
pigeons.
Of the two men reclining on the couch the foremost holds a
drinking-bowl and an egg. In the Ny Carlsberg facsimile he is
represented as beardless, but no doubt wrongly. It is an elderly man;
his face is one of the earliest examples of naturalism in Etruscan
portraiture. The other, full-bearded, holds a flat, fluted vessel
without foot, presumably one of the celebrated Etruscan golden vessels
which are more minutely characterized in a symposium in the Tomba della
Pulcella; they were even introduced into Athens, where, side by side
with Corinthian works in bronze, they formed part of the decoration of
a wealthy house, and they are eulogized in a poem by Critias,[63] one
of Athens’ finest _beaux esprits_.
[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]
In this painting in the Tomba Golini the inscriptions give us much
valuable information as to the connexion between the two persons.[64]
Above the first we read: ‘Vel lecates arnthial ruva larthialisa clan
velusum nefs marniu spurana eprthnec tenve mechlum rasneas cleusinsl
zilachnve pulum rumitrine thi ma[l]ce clel lur.’ In translation the
text runs: ‘Vel Lecates, Arnth’s brother,[65] son of Larth, and
descendant of Vel. He held the offices of Maro urbanus (_spur_ means
town) and Eprthne (secular official title) and was Zilach (dictator)
of the Etruscan people in Clusium....’ The rest is unintelligible. It
is interesting in the inscription to come across the name by which the
Etruscans called themselves, _rasneas_; Dionysius of Halicarnassus
(i. 30) was therefore justified in saying that the Etruscans called
themselves Rasenas. The name Larth is common in Etruscan inscriptions.
The Romans knew it and called the well-known Etruscan king by his full
name, Lars Porsenna (in Etruscan, Larth Pursna).[66]
[Illustration: FIG. 31. SYMPOSIUM IN THE TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO]
[Illustration: FIG. 32. WALL-PAINTING IN THE TOMBA GOLINI]
[Sidenote: TOMBA GOLINI]
We now turn to the inscription above the bearded man on the same couch;
his name is Arnth Leinies, son of Larth, and descendant of Vel; his
official titles follow, and the inscription ends: ‘ru[va] l[ecates
velus] amce,’ i. e., was brother of Vel Lecates. Thus we have two
brothers reclining on the same couch, and the inscription makes it
probable that the other symposiasts, too, are not chance revellers, but
members of the same family, united in the picture as they were in life
and in the grave.
In the same tomb, to the left of this scene, we see a table, bearing
several metal vessels, a thymiaterion, and an ivory box for incense,
and flanked by two candelabra with lighted candles stuck into birds’
beaks (fig. 32). The Etruscans were considered inventors of the
art of candlemaking and taught the Romans to manufacture different
kinds of candles, from big wax candles—candelae and cerei—to cheap
dips—sebaceae. The Italic peoples used candles and candlesticks until
Roman Imperial times, though in the last centuries they also had oil
lamps, the manufacture and use of which they had learned from the
Greeks; the oldest clay lamps found in the northern part of Italy date
from about 300 B.C.[67] To the left of the table is seen a naked slave
with a jug and a dish; to the right a young man in a light-coloured,
sleeved chiton, who has been conjectured to be another servant. But
again the inscription affords positive information: ‘Vel leinies
larthial ruva arnthialum clan velusum prumaths avils semphs lupuce’;
i.e. ‘Vel Leinies, Larth’s brother, son of Arnth and descendant of
Vel; he died (_lupuce_) at the age of 7.’[68] So the boy is son of the
hindmost man on the banqueting-couch and belongs to the noble family
interred in the tomb.
FOOTNOTES:
[63] Athenaeus i. 28 b.
[64] _Corpus inscr. Etrusc._ 5093-4. I am indebted to my friend, Dr. S.
P. Cortsen, for help in the interpretation of this and other Etruscan
inscriptions. These are for the greater part incorrectly copied in the
Ny Carlsberg facsimiles.
[65] That _ruva_ means brother seems to be unanimously accepted, though
it only appears in the two inscriptions of this tomb.
[66] The name Pursna or Pursena has, however, never been found in any
Etruscan inscription. The Etruscan Lar or Larth has nothing to do with
the Roman Las or Lar. Cp. Schulze, _Zur Geschichte latein. Eigennamen_,
85. 1; Pauli, _Altital. Studien_, iv. 64 ff.
[67] With reference to the use of tapers at the bier in antiquity see
Rushforth, _Journal of Roman Studies_, v. 1915, p. 149 ff.
[68] Cp. Vilh. Thomsen, _Remarques sur la parenté de la langue
étrusque_, _Bulletin de l’Académie royale de Danemark_, 1899, no. 4, p.
391.
XII
Corresponding to the lassoing of the horse in the Tomba del Morente,
as a preparation for the chariot race, we find in the Tomba Golini
pictures of the preparations for the banquet which is celebrated in
the pictures mentioned above. In one of the pictures we see cattle,
venison, and poultry hanging in the larder, in another the cooking
in the kitchen itself (fig. 33); like everything else in Etruria, it
is accompanied by the flute. To the left of the flute-player a woman
is struggling with a sideboard piled with food; to the right a naked
slave with a loin-cloth is working at a small table, using two small
implements rather like plummets. Various interpretations have been
advanced: that he is kneading dough, or grinding colours; the latter
explanation, however, is improbable in a kitchen scene. Besides these
Dennis proposes a third possibility—that he is chopping vegetables,
but he dares not commit himself to a decision. The table itself, at
which the slave is standing, seems to have a raised edge, and thereby
recalls the elder Cato’s recipe for the preparation of cheese cakes
and puffs[69]: ‘Take a clean table, a foot broad, surround it with an
edge (_balteus_), and then mix honey and cheese on it.’ For puffs,
directions are given to belabour the dough with two sticks or staves
(_rudes_). After all the procedure here is somewhat similar, only that
the dough is kneaded with pieces of metal and not with staves.
[Illustration: FIG. 33. KITCHEN INTERIOR IN THE TOMBA GOLINI]
[Illustration: FIG. 34. PAINTING IN THE TOMBA DEL LETTO FUNEBRE
After a coloured drawing in the Helbig Museum]
[Sidenote: KITCHEN SCENES]
In these scenes from kitchen and wine-cellar, where the wood is
being chopped,[70] where the cooks are swinging the saucepans or
working at the range,[71] where young slaves are struggling with
sideboards covered with drinking-vessels, the inscriptions contain
the names of the slaves. Men desired to be served in the after-life
by the same skilful slaves as in the present, and it was therefore
the custom in later times to add the names. This reminds one of the
Egyptian tomb-reliefs, where sometimes the serfs and the slave girls
are designated only by the name and mark of the estate, so that in a
way each of them represents one of the estates of the deceased lord,
whereas in other cases they have their proper names attached and
survive as personalities in the after-life.
FOOTNOTES:
[69] _De agricultura_ 76 and 86.
[70] Cp. Plautus, _Pseudolus_ 158 ‘te cum securi caudicali praeficio
provinciae.’
[71] Cp. Seneca, _Epist._ 114. 26 ‘adspice culinas nostras et
concursantis inter tot ignes coquos.’
XIII
[Sidenote: TOMBA DEL LETTO FUNEBRE]