Aztec Treasure House. Evan S. Connell
sensuous, artistic, enigmatic Etruscans were the natural children of Villanova peasants. The name Villanova, if anybody asks, comes from a suburb of Bologna where vestiges of a previously unknown culture turned up: hut-shaped urns filled with human ashes, bronze weapons, amber jewelry, pins and combs. Apparently these ancestors of the Etruscans, if that is what they were, drifted south into Tuscany about the eleventh or tenth century before Christ and overwhelmed whatever inhabitants they encountered.
Perhaps 300 years later the Orientalizing began. This was the time of a Dark Age in Greece, between the decay of Mycenaean civilization and the emergence of those wise marble Pericleans against whom we half-consciously measure ourselves. It was a time when that templed colossus, Egypt, was beginning to crumble. Assyrian armor glinted ominously. Phrygian trumpets bellowed. Phoenician traders drove westward, dipping their sails at Carthage and Tartessus. Fresh currents rippled the length of the Mediterranean.
So, inevitably, the rude Villanova culture was affected. Greek vase painters moved to Cerveteri, bringing the alphabet and other such radical concepts. Pallottino believes that these various intellectual and artistic transfusions have given the impression of Etrurian dependence on the East, an impression to which the ancients—notably Herodotus—succumbed, and which still inhibits the thinking of twentieth-century investigators.
D. H. Lawrence, faced with the cool reason of Pallottino, might have been impatient or just disgusted. His own exploration of the subject, Etruscan Places, did not precede the professor’s Etruscologia by much more than ten years, but Lawrence illuminated a region fully ten light-years away. He was a breast-fed romantic, the Italian a most assiduous scholar. Lawrence plunged into Etruria; Pallottino picks and brushes and trowels away at it.
The experience! cried Lawrence. The experience—that was what mattered. Live! Empathize! Feel!
When he visited Tuscany in 1927, three years before he died, he was quite sick; yet the book gives no hint of it, except indirectly. “Ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life,” he wrote. “The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and easy as breathing.” No need to twist the mind or soul. Death was simply a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. Neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment.
“From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature.”
“The goat says: let me breed for ever, till the world is one reeking goat. But then the lion roars from the other blood-stream, which is also in man, and he lifts his paw to strike. . . .”
This sort of thing annoys Pallottino, who has no time for mystics. Painted tombs littered with jewelry and elegant vases have created around his specialty “a peculiar aura of romantic suggestion, which the books of Dennis and Noël des Vergers helped to spread, never to disappear again. Scholarly uncertainties and polemics on the interpretation of Etruscan inscriptions, on the classification of the language, on the problem of Etruscan origins, gave birth to the notion of an ‘Etruscan mystery’; and this notion, rather than describing, more or less aptly, a scientific situation . . .”
On and on he goes in his oddly dry, convincing prose—much less gratifying than the rainbows whipped up by Lawrence. And what he is insisting is that these people twenty-five centuries ago were neither more nor less enigmatic than you and I; which is to say that they are interesting by themselves, never mind the blather.
Physically they were small, judged by skeletal remains. The men averaged five feet, four inches, the women just above five feet. On the basis of tomb information their life expectancy was about forty.
Early historians denounced them as decadent and drunken, promiscuous lovers intoxicated by comfort, a reputation they shared with the Sybarites. Theopompus wrote in the fourth century B.C. that they copulated publicly and did not consider it shameful. “They all do the thing, some watching one another. . . . The men approach the women with great delight, but obtain as much pleasure from young men and adolescents. They grow up, in fact, to be very beautiful, for they live luxuriously and shave their bodies. . . .”
Posidonius, a Stoic author of the second century B.C., after observing that the Etruscans once were valorous, attributes their degeneration to the richness of the land—its minerals, timber, and so on. Later critics explained the decline with equal facility. Victorians, for example, thought they collapsed because of a perverse religion. Our twentieth century is less positive: we aren’t sure just what happened to their world. From our balcony they appear to be at once naive and sophisticated, artistic and materialistic, radical, conservative, industrious, indolent, foolish, clever, ad infinitum. That is to say, a disorganized bellowing parade of contradictory mortals.
Despite meager evidence we do know a little about their activities and concerns.
Etruscan women liked to bleach their hair—a fancy that has been entertained, it seems, from the female prototype to the latest model. And depilatories were popular. Try this: boil a yellow tree frog until it has shrunk to half its natural size, then rub the shriveled frog on the unsightly area. Now, it’s too bad we have no testimonials from satisfied beauties of Vetluna or Caere, but that does not mean the treatment is useless. These people sometimes equaled or surpassed us in the most unexpected ways.
Etruscan hunters understood the compelling power of music far better than we do. Aelian, who wrote in the third century, reveals that after the nets and traps had been set a piper would come forth playing his sweetest tunes. Wild pigs, stags, and other beasts at first would be terrified. But after a while, seduced, they draw closer, bewitched by these dulcet sounds, “until they fall, overpowered, into the snares.” And we have the word of Polybius, five centuries earlier, who asserts that Etruscan swineherds walk their charges up and down the beach, not driving them as we would expect, but leading them by blowing a trumpet.
In dentistry, too, one must salute these creative sons of Villanova. Skulls found at Tarquinia contain teeth neatly bridged and capped with gold.
Insecticides, which we regard as a small miracle of our century, were commonplace. The agronomist Saserna recommends an aromatic vine called serpentaria. Soak the root of this vine in a tub of water, then empty the tub on the infested earth. Or let’s say you become conscious of ravenous little guests in your bed at night. Should that be the case, dampen your bed with a potion of ox gall and vinegar.
Take an ordinary business such as the production of cheese. Here again the Etruscan surprises us. Do you know those great wheels made in Holland and Denmark? Listen, my friend, Etruscans in the village of Luni fashioned wheels of goat cheese weighing 1,000 pounds.
Yet right along with such innovations they clung obstinately to the mindless beliefs of their fathers. Even the Romans, who are not celebrated for a liberal imagination, had begun to grasp the nature of things more clearly. Seneca, commenting on the difference between Romans and Etruscans, offers this example: “Whereas we believe lightning to be released when clouds collide, they believe that clouds collide so as to release lightning.”
Another difference, more curious, which has not yet been explained, is that the Greeks and Romans and everybody else in that part of the world faced north when attempting to determine celestial influences. Only the Etruscans, those perverse, contradictory individuals, faced south. Why? Tomorrow, if the gods so ordain, we’ll dig up the answer.
You can see them as they were, just as they were, on the ragged stone sarcophagus lids. You see the rich and powerful, of course, rather than the poor, because nobody commemorates the poor; but the features of affluent Etruscans have been studiously registered on their coffins. And there can be little doubt that these sculpted effigies are portraits of unique men and women, not blind symbols.
At least so it seems to an impressionable observer. However, one must be cautious. When making little terra-cotta votive heads the Etruscan coroplasts often used molds, then a touch or two with a modeling tool could give an effect of individuality. In other words, a mass-produced standardized face with a few singular characteristics—let’s say a bobbed nose, a couple of warts, and a triple chin—is