Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler
presupposes that the words here must have changed massively over three centuries to become part of a language that Naevius would have recognized. Here is a reconstruction into classical Latin, with the necessary changes underlined:
iurat diuos qui per me mitigat.ni in te_comis virgo sietast [cibis] [fututioni] ei pacari vis.bonus me fecit in manum munus. bono_ne e me_malum stato
Virtually every word had changed its form, pronunciation, or at least its spelling between the sixth and the third centuries BC. This shows what rapid change for Latin occurred in these three centuries, comparable to what happened to English between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD, when Anglo-Saxon (typified by the Beowulf poem), totally unintelligible to modern speakers, gave way to Middle English (typified by Chaucer’s writings), on the threshold of the modern language.
The inscription that circles the Duenos ceramic. Written in a highly archaic form of Latin, it appears to offer a love potion.
Yet (again like English), as reading and writing became more widespread, the pace of change in the language was to slow dramatically. Naevius’ poetry of the third century remained comprehensible to Cicero in the first, and indeed Plautus’ comedies, written in the early second century BC, were still being performed in the first century AD. Those plays are in fact written in a Latin close to the classical standard, canonized by Cicero and the Golden Age literature that followed him, a literary language that was simply not allowed to change after the first century BC, since every subsequent generation was taught not only to read it but to imitate it.
But why did this language, which only came to a painful self-awareness in the third century BC, go on to supplant not only all the other languages of Italy but almost all the other languages of western Europe as well? In the sixth century BC, a neutral observer could only have assumed that if Italy was destined to be unified, it would be under the Etruscans; and in the third century BC, Latin was still far less widely spoken than Oscan. Where did it all go right for Latin, and for Rome?
Sub rosa—Latin’s Etruscan Stepmother
thesan tins, thesan eiseras seus, unus mlakh nunthen thesviti favitic fasei, cishum thesane ushlanec mlakhe luri zeric, zec athelis sacnicla cilthl spural methlumesc
Dawn of the Day-god, Dawn of All the Gods, you in your goodness I invoke in the east and in the west with a libation, and three times, at dawn, at high noon, and by the serene brightness (of the stars), as written by the ancestors, for the citizens of the tribe, the city, and the nation.
Etruscan prayer1
THE ETRUSCANS ARE FAMOUS for their attendant mystery. The puzzle of their origins goes back three thousand years; but when we first have evidence of which named people lived where in Italy, the Etruscans were already firmly ensconced in the northwest, richer and more powerful than any of the other residents. The identity of their language is at the heart of the mystery, since it was clearly unrelated to all the Indo-European languages, most of them Italic languages, that surrounded it on every side. Unlike them, it was an agglutinative language—which means that it was structurally more like Central Asian Turkish or Peruvian Quechua than Latin or Gaulish, or indeed other neighbouring languages such as Greek (in Sicily) or Punic (in Sardinia). Any words that it shared with its neighbours are seen as individual cultural borrowings; they are not the kind of similarities, more distant yet more systematic, that could stand as evidence of a common origin.
Rome was to establish itself as the successor to the Etruscans, but before it could do so, it first had to extricate itself from their dominance. More permanently, this political transition would lead to the linguistic spread of Latin, as the successor language in Etruria.
The Etruscans were clearly the dominant power in Italy in the period when the Greeks, farther east, were establishing their classical culture. This raises the question why they were so much more outgoing and culturally influential than their local neighbours, who spoke Italic languages: for the Etruscans in their heyday were challenged only by the two seafaring powers, the Carthaginians (who were largely their allies), and the Greeks (who largely opposed them).
This period was largely documented through Greek sources: Greeks were literate and well-travelled in the middle of the first millennium BC. But it was also revealed through the discovery of inscriptions, and the Etruscans’ distinctive black bucchero pottery. In it we can see evidence of the Etruscans expanding their power and commercial reach around what became known as the Tyrrhenian (i.e., Etruscan) Sea, as well as eastward overland from their famed “Twelve Cities.” In the eighth century BC they were colonizing Campania in the southwest, but also northern Italy across to the Adriatic. With Greeks from Euboea they established a trading presence in Ischia. In 540 BC, in alliance with Carthage, they defeated the Phocaean Greeks at the Battle of the Sardinian Sea and established a foothold in Corsica.
Etruscan “forward policy,” 750–475 BC. Etruscan influence extended beyond the “Twelve Cities” of Etruria north into the valley of the Po and south along the Campanian coast.
They suffered a major reverse in 511 at Aricia, just south of Rome, when they lost to an alliance of Cumaean Greeks and Latins; two generations later in 474, they were defeated at Cumae itself by the combined naval forces of Cumae and Syracuse. Thereafter they rapidly lost their southern Italian bases and dependencies. It was the end of the Etruscan “forward policy,” which had lasted for three hundred years. The next two centuries of Etruscan history were taken up with a long, drawn-out series of unsuccessful defences, as one by one each of their cities yielded to the encroaching new power, Rome. The first city to engage Rome, in 477, was Veii, Rome’s close neighbour north of the Tiber; but the struggle continued for eighty-one years, until Veii’s annihilation in 396. The last one, Volsinii, fell in 264, 132 years later.
One clue to Etruscan identity lies in their various names for their nation. Their name for themselves was rasna or rasenna, but this turns out (like so many accepted ethnonyms all over the world) to be just their word for ‘people’. The Greeks, however, were introduced to them as tursānoi.2 In the Ionian Greek accent (which was characteristic of the Euboean and Phocaean colonists active in the area), this comes out as tursēnoi; and in Attic Greek (which, being Athenian, became the standard) as turrēnoi. (This was Romanized as ‘Tyrrheni’, still seen in the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, modern Italian Mare Tirreno, which had once been the Etruscan lake.) Some Greeks knew them as turranoi, perhaps a compromise pronunciation; their own dedication plaque left at Delphi is marked in Greek TURRANO; and Hiero of Syracuse, on helmets taken at the battle of Cumae and dedicated at Olympia, wrote the name TURAN.3 By contrast, the Latin name for them was Etrusci or Tusci. If the final consonant here is an adjectival ending (compare Graii vs. Graeci for Greeks, Poeni vs. Punici for Carthaginians), then the root looks like TRUS or TURS, also seen in tursanoi.4
Now, it is a remarkable fact that apparently this same root underlies the Greek words for Troy (troia) and Trojans (trōes), namely TRŌS.5 So Troia and Etrūria would have the same origin: they are Greek and Etruscan-Latin developments, respectively, of the root TRŌS-IA.6
