The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  The homeland of democracy? Yes, amid a sea of barbarism it was a homeland of democracy, even if it sometimes imposed its will on others; fixated on its ideal, its mission, its own single right path, onto which it attempted to lead the bickering little world of Greek particularisms.

  It has not been our undertaking to ply the reader with the dubious satisfaction that in history no case is clear-cut, that violence often hides behind slogans of freedom, which for some is a convenient justification for present and future excesses of word and force. Because if even Pericles himself was at times an “imperialist”…

  What use may there be then in recalling this remote affair; what moral emerges from this account of how the island Samos was brought under the yoke? The following, I think: invaders returning from a war carry in the folds of their uniforms, on the soles of their boots, the germ of a disease which will infect their own society, their own freedoms.

  ON THE ETRUSCANS

  THE ETRUSCANS ARE fashionable, as if they had only just been discovered, as if they were the latest revelation of Mediterranean archaeology. Interest in this mysterious civilization extends beyond scientific circles. Names of ruined Etruscan towns appear in the pages of daily papers with exciting but false information on the final deciphering of their script. Writers of many nations produce novels resurrecting the tragic history of these predecessors of the Romans. Guidebooks to Italy praise towns which until recently were off the traditional tourist trails: Volterra, Tarquinia, Veii. It is neither the last nor the first wave of Etruscomania.

  Archaeologists and historians have managed to reconstruct the history of the Etruscans in Italy from the ninth century B.C. Between the rivers Tiber, Arno, and the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea they created the first historical civilization before the Romans. “Such was Etruria’s power that its fame spread across earth and sea from one side of Italy to the other, from the Alps to the coast of Messina1” says Titus Livy. After a period of splendor lasting several centuries, the decline of this shortlived empire—if one may call it that—began around the fourth century B.C. By the second century B.C. Etruria has been completely consumed and digested by the mighty Romans. The conquerors’ historians labor to efface the role of the conquered. We, the heirs of the crime and the cover-up, try to mete out justice to the past; to give back a voice to history’s great mutes, the peoples who had bad luck in history.

  Asked what events or developments in ancient history we consider most important, we would without hesitation name the war of the Greeks with the Persians and the Roman conquests. The great authorities among Greek and Roman historians lend their weight to this. That is surely why the incomparably important process of the colonization of the Mediterranean Sea basin, lasting from the dawn of historical time, is marked so hazily in our consciousness. For the historians themselves this great adventure is like a fresco worn away in many places, a many-layered palimpsest, painted by the hands of the Greeks, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Romans, casting up on the surface of history little-known peoples, who have left only their names and the memory of their defeat.

  At the beginning of the first millenium B.C. the population of Italy lived on the level of prehistoric cultures, having remained with the population of Europe as a whole outside the great centers of Eastern civilization. Its villages thinly scattered on the peninsula, or at most its fortified settlements on hilltops, were inhabited by farmers and shepherds who used primitive instruments made of bronze and copper. In the ninth century B.C., and perhaps not until the eighth B.C., Italy was woken from its long prehistoric slumber by the Etruscans. From the Po River Valley all the way to the Campagna, along the Tyrrhenian Sea coast, populous cities arise, trade develops, metallurgy is born, great art flourishes for the first time on the peninsula. The Etruscans have all the conditions necessary to become a great power of Mediterranean civilization: fertile earth and mines, an army and a fleet. The ancients credited them with an array of important inventions in the sphere of navigation, among them the invention of the anchor—and even if this is not accurate information, it indicates that the Etruscans occupied an honorable position among ancient maritime powers.

  Latium, the cradle of Roman power, is a land of no great significance until the middle of the seventh century B.C., inhabited by forty tribes which maintain pretty loose relations with each other. What was eternal Rome before Clio spoke? A couple of meager villages on the famous Seven Hills and a population of mixed ancestry and customs, living in a state close to barbarism.

  We should send Romulus and Remus to the museum of myths along with their wet-nurse and say that the true creators of Rome were the Etruscans. They easily dominated the Latins and founded the capital of the future empire, which between 616 and 510 was governed by the Etruscan dynasty of Tarquin. The fact that during that period Rome was an Etruscan city is not in the least a hypothesis; it is confirmed by the latest archaeological discoveries. Not only did they find Attic ceramics similar to those found in Etruscan cities, but also remains of the oldest walls which tradition attributes to Servius Tullius, the second of the kings in the Tarquin dynasty. The Cloaca Maxima2, which drains the swampy terrain of the Forum, is the work of Etruscan engineers. On the Capitol under what is now a conservationists’ museum, a temple of Jupiter was discovered with the triple cella characteristic of Tuscan building. Two Etruscan inscriptions brought to light a few years ago in Rome prove that Etruscan was also spoken in this city. Perhaps the name Rome doesn’t derive from Romulus but from the Etruscan family Ruma; it is already certain that the oldest Roman symbol—that she-wolf—is an Etruscan bronze from the fifth century B.C.

  The Latins did not immediately constitute either competition or danger for the Etruscans. The real enemies of the Etruscans were the Greeks.

  Traditionally the Etruscans are placed between the Arno and the Tiber. In fact, their real center was what is now Tuscany, but their appetites extended far beyond it. To the North there was Lombardy—the granary of Italy—and to the South, the Campagna. The Etruscans conquer Corsica and Sardinia. If we believe Diodorus of Sicily, they also planned to colonize a fairy tale island that lay in the ocean beyond the column of Hercules (probably Madeira or one of the Canary Islands)—on the far edges of their world.

  The colonizers were preceded by ordinary merchants. For archaeologists the visible sign of the Etruscans’ presence is the characteristic Tuscan black bucchero, which has been dug up in Marseille, on the Iberian peninsula, and in Carthage.

  Very early on the paths of the Etruscans and the Greeks crossed like swords. Already the first Greek colonizers meet the Tuscans in eastern Sicily; the fight for the Liparian islands breaks out. In the Campagna, the Greeks manage to hold on to the port of Cume not far from Etruscan Capua, in the middle of an enemy country. The Etruscans ally themselves with the Carthaginians and defeat the Greek fleet off the coast of Corsica in 540 B.C. The victory is not at all conclusive and the fragile balance of power was barely to last a few decades.

  The 5th century B.C. augurs the beginning of the Etruscans’ long death throes. The loss of Rome would not have been so ominous for them if it had not meant the birth of the future rulers of the world. The Romans, having subjugated Latium, procede almost immediately to attack nearby Veii. The accounts of the battles of those two cities found in Roman historians, and in Titus Livy in particular, are an eloquent testimony to the fact that it was then that the Roman idea of world conquest sent up its first shoots. It is as if the dramatic and epic description of the struggles lasting a hundred years had been modeled on the Trojan War. The city finally falls in 396 B.C. (after a ten-year siege like Troy’s), the population is enslaved or massacred; Juno’s statue will adorn a newly built Roman temple on the Aventine Hill. Etruria’s fate is cast. The fall of the great Etruscan cities: Tarquinia, Caere, Vulci, Volsinia, is only a matter of time.

  That very same day—as Nepos reports—when the cruel Marcus Furius Camillus takes Veii, hordes of Celts break into the Po River Valley. The encirclement
of Etruria is then complete. True, the Celts are immediately satisfied with their conquest of the fertile valley (where they create Cisalpine Gaul) but they plague the country with their predatory raids. Despite its cruelties, war with the Romans is a war between two sides of equal stature, partners drawn together by their level of civilization. They could apply the customary tactical principles and games of diplomacy. These anarchic bands of barbarians came down like hail, drought, and pestilence. They must have awoken the same feeling of terror and helplessness as the Vikings invading medieval Europe.

  When we speak of the Etruscans fighting the Romans we are guilty of a misleading generalization. In fact, Etruria was never a state in the contemporary meaning of the word, but a confederation of cities and the territories subject to them, without a clear political center, just as was the case in ancient Greece. Although the phenomenon of hegemony existed (Tarquinia, Caere, later Chiusi), each city conducted its own politics. This facilitated things immeasurably for the Romans. No united Etruscan armies ever engaged with the Romans. At a time when some cities were in mortal danger, others made pacts with the Romans or watched with indifference as their neighbors suffered a catastrophe. The Etruscans were also unable to use the temporary defeats of their opponents to their own advantage, say, at the time of the Samnite wars. The Romans on the other hand eliminated one point of resistance after another, methodically, with Latin consistency. If they signed a truce, it was to prepare for the next campaign. Peace to the Etruscans meant fatalistically waiting for a blow. Their strategy was a desperate defense.

  It may be that the image of the Etruscans’ fate is a result of our seeing them exclusively in the light of foreign sources. It is as if they are the object of history, not a conscious subject, justifying themselves, explaining their defeats, appealing to their heirs to judge them kindly, to grant them the grace of understanding.

  Even if we assume we know all the essential facts of Etruscan history, how pale and abstract their story seems in comparison with the history of Rome, full of vivid personalities—heroes, senators, and generals. But that lack is made good by a new view of the history of the human race and points to the biological character of civilizational phenomena. The history of the Etruscans is like the history of an extinct animal species. A high, seemingly inhuman point of observation.

  At first the Etruscan city-states were monarchies, headed by a sovereign, the lucumo, who held religious, legislative, military—and thus absolute—power. The crisis of that power, like that of Rome, became visible between the sixth and fifth century B.C. and just as they do throughout the world, the symbols turned out to be more long-lived than their original meanings. The gold crown, sella curulis—a throne adorned with ivory, lictor’s rods and the two-sided ax (similar to the Minoan) were “borrowed” by the Romans and became the attributes of higher officials and victors. In Etruria the original monarchy was transformed into the rule of an oligarchy protecting its privileges against the threat of autocracy and plebeian movements, which despite rebellions—for example, the one in Volsinia in 264—didn’t manage to bring any change to the rigid and complex social system. The gradual elimination of differences between the patriciate and the plebes which we know from the first centuries of the Roman Republic was alien to the aristocratic Etruscan state. Even admired artists, Greek artisans who had settled in Tuscany early on, had the status of metics in that country. And what to say of the slaves? Their fate was no better than it was in any other ancient state; the bloodily suppressed rebellions testify to that. One should not put any faith in tales of the Etruscans’ gentleness told by sentimental novelists or scenes from frescoes (like films of upper-class life), where wine tasters, flutists, and dancers bustle around a feast table. The thousands of little statues of Etruscan warriors you find in Italian museums simultaneously evoke a feeling of delight and mild pity. Their tanned bodies, handsome heads crowned with helmets, spears held lightly as feathers are more reminiscent of ballet dancers than bloodthirsty soldiers. Despite this aesthetic air it seems that the Tyrrhenian army was quite warlike and it was certainly well equipped and organized. A bronze found in the vicinity of Bologna portrays it on the march. At the head is the cavalry, then the infantry, clearly divided into three battle-arrays: first strike and two rows of heavy armor. The procession is closed by lightly armed soldiers. It corresponds exactly to the division of Roman legions into hastati3, principes4, and triarii5. Even in this field the Etruscans became—to their own perdition—tutors to the Romans.

  But what are strategy and armor when faced with the thunder of a god and fates cast on high? The Etruscans were undoubtedly one of the most religious of ancient peoples, but their faith, if it even sent them consolation, surely did not lend them wings, like Arabs or Jews. On the contrary, it seemed to entangle its followers in a thick net of fatalisms.

  In contrast to the Greek and Roman religions, it was a revealed religion. One day a supernatural being appeared from a furrow of earth before the eyes of the astonished farmer Tarchon, the founder of Tarquinia. It was the god Tages. He had the body of a child but the wisdom of an aged man. People came running at Tarchon’s terrified cry. Tages began his teaching.

  What we know of the Etruscan religion we owe to Roman, Greek, and Byzantine commentaries. They derive from a later age when the Tyrrhenians’ civilization had already died out. That is probably what explains the scanty reports about what constitutes the essence of the religion, that is, its metaphysics and morality. The attention of commentators was concentrated on its—if one may use such a phrase—technical side: fortune-telling, in accordance with the ancients’ view of Etruria—genetrix6 et mater superstitionum.

  Etruscan discipline—as it was called by Roman interpreters—was a gathering of prescriptions regulating relations between gods and people, and it was mainly based on the interpretation of signs. Between the human microcosmos and the macrocosmos of the gods there were precise, formal connections codified in that discipline. Priests were charged with telling the fortunes of people and of the people.

  The Etruscans’ sacred books—even if their tradition was initially oral, like the tradition of Celtic druids—were divided into three fundamental works: the Libri haruspicini, which treated of the art of auguring from the innards (mainly the liver) of animals, the Libri fulgurales, which contained interpretations of thunder, and finally the Libri rituales, the most volumnious collection of prescriptions, concerning both the lives of individuals and of society, containing ways to found cities and build temples, a constitution and an index of dreams and miracles.

  IN A SMALL MUNICIPAL museum in the town of Piacenza there is a bronze in the shape of a liver, covered with inscriptions. The ancients considered the liver the seat of life; for the Etruscans it was also a miniature of the cosmos. This bronze, discovered in the 1870s, was a kind of textbook for priests examining the innards of animals. Its surface is divided into meticulously drawn geometrical figures inside of which are inscribed the names of deities. It is therefore both a small atlas of the heavens and a topography of gods in the living body. In all probability the priest examined the liver of a sacrificial animal in detail and any anomaly he noticed was for him a sign, the voice of a specific god.

  Gods also spoke in thunderbolts. Nine gods had command of eleven kinds of thunder. Only Tinia (the equivalent of the Roman Jupiter) disposed of three thunderbolts. The first he could hurl of his own volition—that was a warning thunder. The second, dangerous kind could fall if Tinia’s twelve divine companions gave their consent. The third—a murderous, destroying fire of the heavens—could only be sent to earth under the condition of acceptance by all the gods called higher gods. This curious collegiality indicates a far-reaching complexity in the heavenly hierarchy and demanded of priests subtle methods of observation. The Tyrrhenians’ heavens were divided into sixteen parts. Establishing the point of origin of a lightning flash and the point of earth where a thunderbolt struck permitted Etruscan priests to identify the god speaking.

 
The description of a religion should not be reduced to an inventory of gods. Making a register of gods and their attributes doesn’t tell us very much about what is essential. In the case of the Etruscan religion this is an extraordinarily delicate affair, if one bears in mind the fragmentary documentation and the strong influence of other beliefs, especially from the Greek, Babylonian, and Chaldean religions. In addition, one must take into consideration the profound historical changes to which the Etruscan faith was subject as well as the fact that the individual gods did not have a universal character but were associated with a particular place, a city, a temple.

  The chief position in the Etruscan pantheon is occupied by the heavenly trinity Tinia, Uni, and Menerva (its Roman counterparts were the manly triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus). From Volsinia there was Vertumnus—the youthful god of vegetation, strong and dashing, changing like nature into a thousand different shapes. The caretaker of the grapevine, honored first in Populonia and later throughout Etruria, went by the sonorous name of Fufluns. His orgiastic cult, extremely popular among the Tyrrhenians, formed a threat to Roman customs, as we learn from a reference in one of their historians. The most prominent female divinity was Turan—the Etruscan embodiment of the mediterranean Mother Goddess—the protectress of women and love.

  This sample listing of gods may suggest that the religion of the Etruscans was full of a joyous acceptance of the world. In fact, there was probably no other ancient people—with the possible exception of the Egyptians—so much turned with its face toward a murky other world. Fear, pessimism (constantly deepened by political defeats), the constant presence of death—these are the most characteristic marks of the religion.

  Early Etruscan tombs are still filled with scenes of hunting, feasts, dancing, and music. The shades seem to lead a joyful, carefree life. But from the fourth century B.C. on, nocturnal demons, terrifying as birds, crawl across the painted walls of death—Charun and Tuchulcha. The augurs’ sepulcher at Tarquinia is a shocking document of cruel funeral games in honor of the deceased. The wall painting portrays two figures fighting (probably slaves), whose blood was supposed to bring relief to the souls of the dead. One of the figures holds a huge dog on a leash and attacks a man with his head tied up in a sack defending himself with a club.