Etruscan kings?

Servius Tullius was one of the last three kings of Rome, sandwiched between Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus. Roman scholars believed that they ruled over the city through the sixth century BCE, until Superbus was finally deposed in (according to most accounts) 509 BCE. As we have just seen, parts of the narrative of this period were no less mythologised than the story of Romulus. And there are some chronological impossibilities – or, at least, the usual implausible longevities – in the traditional tale. Even some ancient writers were uncomfortable with the idea that there appeared to be roughly 150 years between the birth of Priscus and the death of his son Superbus, a problem they sometimes tried to solve by suggesting that the second Tarquin was the grandson, not the son, of the first. Yet from this date on, it does become easier to align some aspects of what we read in Livy and other writers with what has been found in the ground. So, for example, traces of a temple (or temples) that appear to go back to the sixth century BCE have been uncovered in more or less the place where later Roman scholars claimed that Servius Tullius established two major shrines. This is still a long way from being able to say ‘We have found the temples of Servius Tullius’ (whatever exactly that would mean); but there is at least increasing convergence in the different strands of evidence.

For Romans, however, two things distinguished this group of kings from their predecessors. First was their particularly bloody story: Priscus was murdered by the sons of his predecessor; Servius Tullius was eased on to the throne in a palace coup masterminded by Tanaquil and was eventually murdered by Superbus. Second was their Etruscan connection. For the two Tarquins, this was a case of direct ancestry. Priscus is supposed to have migrated to Rome from the Etruscan town of Tarquinii, along with his Etruscan wife, Tanaquil, to seek his fortune – because he feared, so the story went, that his foreign blood, from his Greek father, would hold back his career in his home town. For Servius Tullius, it was more a case of being the favoured protégé of the Etruscan Priscus and Tanaquil. Cicero is unusual in insinuating, among all the other versions of this king’s origins, that he was Priscus’ illegitimate son.

The question that has often puzzled modern historians is how to explain this Etruscan connection. Why are these kings of Rome given an Etruscan pedigree? Was there really a period when Etruscan kings controlled the city?

So far we have focused on Rome’s neighbours to the south, those that played a part in the foundation stories of Romulus and Aeneas: the Sabines, for example, or the little town of Alba Longa, founded by Aeneas’ son and the place where Romulus and Remus were born. But just to the north of Rome, stretching up into modern Tuscany, lay the heartlands of the Etruscans, the richest and most powerful people in Italy over the period when the first urban community of Rome was taking shape. The plural (Etruscans) is important. For these people did not form a single state but were a group of independent towns and cities which shared a language and distinctive artistic culture; the extent of their power varied over time, but at its widest, Etruscan settlements and recognisable Etruscan influence could be found as far south in Italy as Pompeii and beyond.

20. Fragments of lifesize terracotta statues from the sixth-century BCE temple often associated with Servius Tullius, depicting Minerva with her protégé Hercules (recognisable from the lion skin around his shoulders). The Etruscans were known for their expertise in terracotta statuary; here the influence of Greek art is also clear – suggesting Rome’s contacts with the wider world.

Modern visitors to the archaeological sites of Etruria have often been entranced by the romance of the place. The eerie cemeteries of the Etruscan towns, with their lavishly painted tombs, have captured the imaginations of generations of writers, artists and tourists, from D. H. Lawrence to the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Indeed, Roman scholars of later periods too – after the Etruscan cities had one by one fallen to Rome – could see Etruria both as an intriguingly exotic subject of study and as the source of some of their own ceremonial, dress and religious practices. But certainly at the period of Rome’s earliest history, these ‘Etruscan places’, to borrow Lawrence’s title, were influential, rich and well connected in a way that far outstripped Rome. They had active trading links across the Mediterranean and beyond, as we can see in archaeological finds of amber, ivory and even an ostrich egg on one site, as well as in all the finely decorated classical Athenian pots that have come from Etruscan tombs – far more of these found in Etruria than in Greece itself. Underpinning this wealth and influence were natural mineral resources. There was so much bronzework in the Etruscan cities that even in 1546 enough was discovered at the site of Tarquinii alone to produce almost 3,000 kilos, once melted down, for decorating the church of St John Lateran in Rome. On a smaller but no less significant scale, recent analysis has shown that a piece of iron ore discovered on the island of Pithecusae (Ischia) in the Bay of Naples originally came from the Etruscan island of Elba; to fall back on a modernisation, it was presumably part of their ‘export’ trade.

21. One particular skill of the Etruscans was reading signs sent by the gods in the entrails of sacrificial animals. This bronze liver (second to third century BCE) was a guide to interpreting the organs of the victim. The liver is carefully mapped, with the gods concerned with each part clearly identified, to help make sense of the particular characteristics or blemishes that might be found there.

Rome’s position at Etruria’s back door helped its rise to wealth and prominence. But was there something more sinister about those Etruscan kings? One suspicious view is that the story of the Etruscan connections of the two Tarquins and Servius Tullius covers up an invasion and takeover of Rome by Etruscans, probably on their way south, as they expanded into Campania. That is to say, the patriotic tradition at Rome rewrote this ignominious period of Roman history as if it revolved not around conquest but around the individual migration of Tarquinius Priscus and his subsequent rise to the kingship. The uncomfortable truth was that Rome had become an Etruscan possession.

This is a clever idea, but most unlikely. For a start, although there are clear traces of Etruscan art and other products in Rome and a handful of inscriptions written in the Etruscan language, there is nothing in the archaeological record to suggest a major takeover: close links between the two cultures, yes; conquest, no. But, perhaps more to the point, that model of ‘state takeover’ is inappropriate for the kind of relations we should be envisaging between these neighbouring communities, or at least it is not the only model. As I have already suggested, this was a world of big men and warlords: powerful individuals who were relatively mobile between the various towns of the region, sometimes in a friendly form of mobility, sometimes presumably not. Alongside them there must have been equally mobile members of their militia bands, traders, travelling craftsmen and migrants of any and every sort. Exactly who the Roman ‘Fabius’ was, whose name is inscribed on his tomb in the Etruscan town of Caere, it is impossible to know; nor can we be certain about the ‘Titus Latinus’ at Veii or the hybrid ‘Rutilus Hippokrates’ at Tarquinii, with his Latin first name and Greek second. But they give a clear indication that these places were relatively open communities.

It is, however, the story of Servius Tullius that provides the most vivid evidence of the warlords, the private militias and the different forms of migration, hostile and otherwise, that must have characterised this early society in Rome and its neighbours. It has almost nothing to do with the story of Servius Tullius, the Roman constitutional reformer and inventor of the census. Instead it seems to offer an Etruscan view – and it comes from the lips of the emperor Claudius, in his speech to the senate in 48 CE when he urged its members to allow leading men from Gaul to become senators. One of the arguments he used in support of his case was that even the early kings were a remarkably ‘foreign lot’. When he reached Servius Tullius, things got even more interesting.

Claudius knew a good deal about Etruscan history. Among his many learned researches he had written a twenty-volume study of the Etruscans, in Greek, as well as compiling an Etruscan dictionary. On this occasion he could not resist explaining to the assembled senators, who might have begun to feel they were on the receiving end of a bit of a lecture, that outside Rome there was a different version of the story of Servius Tullius. This was not the story of a man who came to the throne thanks to the favour, or scheming, of his predecessor, Tarquinius Priscus, and Priscus’ wife, Tanaquil. For Claudius, Servius Tullius was an armed adventurer:

If we go along with the Etruscan version, he had once been the faithful follower of Caelius Vivenna and a comrade in his adventures; and later, when he had been driven out by a change of fortune, he left Etruria with all that remained of Caelius’ militia and seized the Caelian Hill [in Rome], which then became called after his leader Caelius. When he had changed his own name (for his Etruscan name was Mastarna), he was given the name I have already mentioned [Servius Tullius] and took over the kingdom, to the very great advantage of the state.

The details that Claudius gives raise all kinds of puzzles. One is the name Mastarna. Is that a proper name or the Etruscan equivalent of the Latin magister, which in this context would mean something like ‘boss’? And who is the Caelius Vivenna who is supposed to have given his name to the Caelian Hill in Rome? He and his brother Aulus Vivenna – usually said to have come from the Etruscan town of Vulci – crop up several times in ancient accounts of early Roman history, though in frustratingly incompatible, and typically mythic, ways: sometimes Caelius is a friend of Romulus’; sometimes this pair of Vivennas are dated to the time of the Tarquins; one late Roman writer imagined Aulus becoming the king of Rome himself (so was he then one of the city’s lost rulers?); in Claudius’ version it looks as if Caelius never made it to Rome at all. But what is clear here is the overall character of what Claudius is describing: rival militias, more or less itinerant warlords, personal loyalty, shifting identities – as different as you could imagine from the formal constitutional arrangements that most Roman writers attributed to Servius Tullius.

We get a similar impression from the set of paintings which once decorated a large tomb outside Vulci. Now known as the François Tomb (from the name of its nineteenth-century excavator – see plate 7), it must have been the crypt of a rich local family, to judge from its size, with ten subsidiary burial chambers opening off an entrance passage and central hall, and from the substantial quantity of gold found there. But for those interested in early Rome, it is the cycle of paintings in the central hallway – which probably date to the mid fourth century BCE – that make it so special. Prominently featured are scenes drawn from the wars of Greek mythology, largely the Trojan War. Balancing these are scenes of much more local fighting. Each character is carefully named, half of them also identified with the name of their home town, half of them not, presumably indicating that they are men from Vulci, so not needing further identification. They include the brothers Vivenna, Mastarna (the only other certain reference to him that survives) and a Gnaeus Tarquinius ‘from Rome’.

No one has managed to work out exactly what is going on in these scenes, but it is not difficult to get the gist. There are five pairs of fighters involved. In four of these pairs, a local, Aulus Vivenna among them, is running his sword through an ‘outsider’; the victims include Lares Papathnas from Volsinii and that Tarquinius from Rome. This man must surely be something to do with the kingly Tarquins, even though in the Roman literary tradition the first name of both those kings is Lucius, not Gnaeus. In the final pair, Mastarna is using his sword to cut through the ropes binding the wrists of Caelius Vivenna. One odd feature (and presumably a clue to the story) is that all but one of the victorious local men are naked, their enemies clothed. The most popular explanation is that the paintings depict some famous local escapade in which the Vivenna brothers and their friends were taken prisoner, stripped and bound by their enemies but managed to escape and turned their swords on their captors.

This is by far the earliest direct evidence to survive for any of the characters in the story of early Rome and their exploits. It also comes from outside, or at least the margins of, the mainstream Roman literary tradition. That does not, of course, necessarily make it true; the mythic tradition of Vulci may have been just as mythic as that of Rome. Nevertheless, what we see here gives a much more plausible vision of the warrior world of these early urban communities than do the aggrandising versions offered by Roman writers, and by some of their modern followers. It was a world of chiefdoms and warrior bands, not of organised armies and foreign policy.