The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  This evident cruelty did not put off the ancients and none of the writers known to us held it against the Etruscans. For that matter, many bloody Roman spectacles, if only the gladiatorial fights, have their origin in Etruria. These things were beyond the sphere of moral sensitivity of the people of those times. On the other hand—and this is typical—the Greeks and Romans held the customs of the Etruscans in horror. Their attitude toward women was the object of much bitter criticism. The unusually high position held by Tyrrhenian women in society and as companions, the “femininity” of their civilization, was a source of disproportional irritation particularly to the Romans. It can be said without exaggeration that the descendants of Aeneas made of the Etruscans something in the order of a negative model; a black background against which their own sober virtues were supposed to shine.

  An ancient and reliable way of insulting your neighbor is to question the virtue of his wife or daughter. A hefty anthology of Greek and Roman texts could be assembled on the subject of (what the authors consider) the dreadful conduct of Tyrrhenian women. Herodotus writes that in Lydia (the speculative homeland of the Etruscans) all girls prostituted themselves to earn the money for a dowry. Probably following this example, Plautus does not fail to reprove the promiscuous Tyrrhenian girls:

  …non enim hic, ubi ex Tusco more7

  Tute tibi indigne dotem quaeras corpore.

  Theopompus, a Greek historian of the fourth century B.C., portrays Etruscan life as a perpetual, shameless orgy.

  On the murals in Etruscan tombs representing feasts, games, and festivities, there are always women beside the men. It is probably only in the Creto-Mycenean civilization that they will achieve such a high level of freedom and independence. The connection between these two remote cultures presses itself on the imagination with special force. Even such an exact mind as Ventris8 felt it: in his youthful work he attempted to determine to what degree Etruscan writing is reminiscent of Linear B, despite what was after all a small likelihood of historical links. The high social position of women, exceptional in antiquity, is underlined by the fact that the mother’s name, not the father’s, was added to a male name.

  However matters stood with their morality, it is certain that in the sphere of the art of living the Etruscans were masters. They had a winning childlike levity, a cult of fun, an inclination to refined elegance and luxury. The Renaissance courts of Tuscany are like a distant echo of that civilization.

  The house, which initially had one room and later many rooms surrounding an atrium, constituted the framework for an existence full of intimacy and charm.

  “They had the custom of sitting down twice a day to a feast among ornamental carpets of flowers and a variety of silver dishes. They were waited on at table by a large number of domestic servants, chosen from the most grateful and dressed in more or less costly apparel, depending on the kind of reception it was. Everything—rooms and hosts—was splendid…

  “Now they have lost their former strength and the military glory of their ancestors; they spend their life amid feasts and frivolous effeminate amusements, and this decline may have its origin in the wealth of the country.”

  Their gastronomy had to be excellent. A mural in the tomb of Golini in Orvieto is suffused with an appetizing smell of the kitchen. With striking realism a whole complex gourmet laboratory is represented, with wise kitchen utensils, slabs of meat, and game hung from hooks.

  The feasts were accompanied by music and dancing. If a sound recording of Etruscan life had been preserved, its dominant accent would be the modulating, ever-present voice of the flute. “To the sound of the flute the Tyrrhenians entered into fist fights, kneaded bread dough, and flogged slaves.” An astonishing remark by an ancient observer. An Etruscan legend tells of a rather Orphic method of hunting as well. A flutist hidden in a bush lured wild animals into a net with the sound of his instrument.

  From music and dance it is but a short step to the theater. Its genesis, according to a Roman author, was to have been as follows: young people offering prayers to the gods performed a variety of gestures, awkward at first, later expressing the content of their appeal to the heavens. Etruscan dancers, mimes, and actors quickly made their way to Rome and there became uncommonly popular (the word histrion is of Etruscan origin). Another source of drama were the songs of farmers offering sacrifices to their protectors. The most famous site for this kind of celebration was the town of Fescennium. Horace mentions these folk songs, full of peasant verve and humor; he emphasizes their proverbial freedom of expression and coarse sarcasm. From the whole of the Etruscans’ dramatic literature nothing survived, unless you count the stray name of an author of Tuscan tragedies, Volnius, stripped of his works.

  However, life in Etruria was not a party without end. It was a country of art and gloomy religion, but also with a conception of life very different from the Roman. Their alloy of mortal fear and refined worldliness seems paradoxical.

  We have said that the Etruscans appeared in Italy in the eighth century B.C. This sounds as if we were talking about some ghost in a Romantic ballad. The problem of origins was of passionate interest to the ancients. Herodotus traces the Etruscans back to Lydia, on the coast of Asia Minor.

  “During the reign of King Atys9, son of Manes, all of Lydia was visited by a great hunger. For a certain time the Lydians bore it patiently, and later, when it did not cease, they looked for means of prevention, one or another of them coming up with something new each time. And so it was that the game of dice was invented, knucklebones, soccer, and all other games with the exception of checkers; that is one invention the Lydians do not claim for themselves. When they had found a new game they faced hunger as follows: for a whole day they played without interruption, so they didn’t feel hunger, and the next day, having stopped playing, they ate. And so they lived for eighteen years. When the evil did not cease but grew more and more severe, the king divided all Lydians into two parts and ordered one part to draw straws—either to stay at home or to emigrate. He appointed himself to be king of the part that fate had told to stay, and his son, whose name was Tyrrhenus, to be king of the émigrés. And so after the lots had been drawn some of them left the country, headed for Smyrna, and built ships for themselves. They loaded all the portable possessions they needed and sailed off to search for a means to live and a piece of land. In the end, having passed by many peoples, they arrived in Umbria, where they founded a city and live to this day. Instead of Lydians they now called themselves Tyrrhenians, after the king’s son who had led them here.”

  Other historians point to the islands of the Aegean Sea as the cradle of the Etruscans. According to Dionysus of Helicarnassus, they are native Greeks. The Greeks called them Tyrsenoi, Tyrrhenoi. The Romans called them Tusci, Etrusci; they called themselves Rasenna, Rasna. Contemporary scholars lean toward the theory that holds the Etruscans came from the east. In one of his works Massimo Pallottino, the dean of Etruscologists, says not without irritation that it is enough for a scholar of an ancient civilization to appear in a salon for him to be bombarded with questions on nothing but the origins of the Tyrrhenians. No one bugs scholars with questions about the origins of the Greeks or Romans, as if those problems had been solved to universal satisfaction and were not, as is the case, just as complicated and mysterious as the genesis of the Etrucans.

  The learned man is right to be irritated, but what to do with a very human curiosity and a need to find origins? Those whose origins we don’t know don’t fully exist for us. Ancient historians understood this need. Their works are full of mostly imaginary genealogies. We see the collective through the prism of an individual and a family with a pure genealogical line, derived from a protoplast hero. Herodotus, speaking of Leonidas, traces his ancestors all the way back to Hercules, lending the historical figure the support of a mythical forefather.

  For the Greeks, the Etruscans were a disturbing enigma. Not only because they constituted the first serious obstacle to colonial conquests, but also because th
ey did not at all fit into the category of barbarians. They had a culture and a political organization very close to the Greek, in many respects equal to it, and in addition they spoke a language reminiscent of the dialect of the inhabitants of Lemnos before the island had been conquered by the Athenians; testimony to this is a tomb headstone carrying an inscription in a language related to Etruscan.

  How to get out of the vicious circle of guesses and hypotheses, the same ones in which the ancients were caught up? Franz Altheim and Massimo Pallotino propose to replace the question about the Etruscans’ origins with a more sensible question, namely how this people formed itself on the Appenine Peninsula. Whether they were native or came from the east, their civilization was born and developed in Italy, and was certainly the product of many factors, an ethnic mix, not a pure tribe. For when we speak of the French (or of any large nation), we know that peoples as diverse as the Celts, Ligurians, Romans, and Franks went to make up that people—to mention only the first on the list. One more stone through the window of the ethnic cleanliness freaks.

  The mystery of the Etruscan language has attracted scholarly minds for the last three centuries. The deciphering of an unknown script is usually a matter of searching for phonetic equivalents and the meaning of signs. That’s how it was with hieroglyphics or cuneiform. The case of the Etruscan language is radically different and even paradoxical. We can quite easily read Etruscan texts, but we don’t understand them, or more precisely—we don’t understand very much of them. In other words, the Etruscan alphabetical system (despite the changes it underwent over a period of centuries) is known to us. We know that the Tyrrhenian alphabet was probably derived from the Greek and that particular signs represent syllables as they do in Greek. On the other hand, the phonetics of the language is decidedly different from the Greek (for example, there is no vowel “o,” which in the Etruscans’ language is replaced by “u”).

  The linguistic material of an unknown script we are trying to decipher must be of sufficient quantity and, most importantly, variety. The number of Etruscan texts transmitted is sizable, running to 10,000, but apart from three valuable finds (of which the largest, preserved in Zagreb, counts 1500 words) they are short and desperately monotonous. Almost all of them are grave inscriptions along the lines of: “Vel Partunus son of Velthur and Ramta Satinei died in the 28th year of life.” Instead of the epic poems and sacred books whose existence we have every right to assume, this rich civilization hands down to us a hopelessly dull collection of obituaries.

  However, the thankless material has not discouraged scholars. Until a happy discovery drops a dreamt-of bilingual text in their laps, they will try to decipher Etruscan without that additional help. Some use a deductive method, putting one of the known ancient languages supposed to be related to Etruscan under the Etruscan text. The list of such experiments is long. Patient linguists have tried to elucidate the obscure texts by means of Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, Assyrian, Hittite, and Italian dialects. But the Tyrrhenian language proved to be exceptionally resistant to these attempts. Others use an inductive method: they abandon the aid of other languages and work as if from within the language they are studying. Equipped with the by now considerable knowledge of the Etruscan religion and civilization, they look for repetitions, similar terms which may refer to the practice of religious rituals, titles in the social hierarchy or otherwise known facts. Both methods, demanding great care and subtlety, have so far led to very modest results.

  The French Etruscologist Raymond Bloch tells the story of how, during archaeological works in Tuscany, the owner of the terrain under investigation confided in him that he had found a column covered with writing. Part of the column was covered with signs from the Latin alphabet, the other part with signs completely incomprehensible to the peasant. Not knowing what to do with the enormous stone, he had simply buried it.

  “You can easily imagine what I felt10. Was this not the hotly desired bilingual Latin-Etruscan text? I requested and received of my informant his immediate permission to search his property. Alas! The dig yielded nothing, in any case not what I expected. We dug up a heap of stone that had certainly belonged to several buildings of the Roman age, but none of the blocks we retrieved carried the slightest trace of any inscription. I widened the area of the search, but in vain. Disappointed and excited at the same time, I wanted to explain the source of this mystery…My informant, a peasant, had probably gone over his land in the hope of finding Etruscan objects, because the whole area boasted a wealth of Tuscan gravesites containing valuable material. And so, as so often, these investigations were carried out at night, to avoid any indiscretion and hide from the sight of curious passers-by and neighbors…At night the treasure hunter’s imagination grows more fervid and bold…Perhaps word had got around of my desire to find a Latin-Etruscan inscription and the imagination produced the object of my desire. It is not impossible. Another explanation also seems plausible: the inscription was indeed found but our treasure hunter, instead of burying it as he said he did, may have destroyed it, breaking it up with a hammer and using it as building material, as often happens in various countries. But he would never admit to this sacrilege.” This excerpt is a good illustration of archaeology’s passionate game with chance.

  Research so far has been mostly carried out in graveyards, not cities. It is more than probable that Etruscan-Roman documents existed, announcements and decrees concerning administrative or other public affairs. The hope of finding such a document precisely in the little explored cities is all the greater for the fact that the victors did not suppress the customs and language of the defeated, and the Etruscan Roman age lasted until the third century A.D. The digs conducted in the Campagna, on terrain which absorbed Etruscan and Greek influences, as well as in Asia Minor, may well bring a solution to the riddle. Despite their many failures, researchers won’t capitulate. The beautiful battle pitting intelligence against mystery continues.

  The poverty of written traces is compensated to a great degree by rich material in the sphere of art, which allows us to reconstruct the political and private lives of the Etruscans. It is not the first time that art replaces writing, becomes a sign and a testimony of an enduring presence. Instead of a text’s monotonous mumbling we are given this civilization to look over. It is a magnificent opportunity, not only for scholars but also for amateurs. The latter, as D. H. Lawrence writes, look not for objective truth but for contact. “The Etruscans are neither a theory nor a thesis11. If anything they are an experience.”

  For a long time I was blind to Etruscan art. In museums I spurned Etruscan bronzes as if they were second-rate Greek works; their tombstone reliefs seemed to me Roman copies. I went through the history of disgust and delight with the Etruscans in an abbreviated form.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century their art was considered an uninteresting copy of Greek art. At the heart of this judgment lay the positivist and by now defeated theory of the “progress” of art. The naturalistic Greek sculpture of the Hellenic period was supposed to be the crowning achievement of antiquity. Bad academic taste, combined with a theory grafted from the social sciences, annihilated the Etruscans. Jules Martha, in his book Etruscan Art, published in 1889, could blithely declare that it can be reduced to more or less clumsy imitations.

  But from the beginning of the twentieth century, perspectives and sensibilities radically changed. The revolutionary programs and manifestos of modern art contributed to this not a little. The attention of historians, critics, and the public turned to periods and schools which up till then had been scornfully described as primitive, decadent, barbarian in relation to the classical ideal. In the polemic with that ideal, Etruscan art became one of the most important arguments.

  Those polemics and attempts to reevaluate have not, however, explained the main problem, one of the most complex in art history: that of the artistic autonomy and originality of the Etruscan visual arts. It’s true that people speak of such distinguishing features of the Tyrrhenians
’ work as intensity of expression, achieved by the accenting of detail to the detriment of the harmony of the whole, which it seems was little valued; a sense of movement, a fondness for painterly sketches, a free and open structure, and also a tendency toward abstract forms. It is all eloquently put, but contact with Etruscan art was for me an unending see-saw of delight and disappointment, it disarmed my critical sense and my analytical faculties. An adventure worth recommending to the impatient as well as to lovers of classification.

  For many people, contact with a work of art means confirming an accepted model of beauty. For those people, Etruscan art will remain inevitably and hermetically sealed. To feel it fully, one must cultivate an ability to react spontaneously, directly, a joyful curiosity for things unlike any we are accustomed to accepting. The lesson of the Etruscans is a lesson in freeing oneself of aesthetic prejudices in the interest of something hard to define, a disinterested play of the eye on an object.

  In the time I was getting to know new Etruscan necropolises, new bronzes, new sculptures, I was attended by a sense of growing chaos. It is difficult to get hold of any clear line of development in this art, or a meaningful, explanatory division into schools and periods. Certainly, masterpieces without which the museum of our imagination would be poorer—the Apollo of Veii, the conjugal sarcophagus in Caere—are mixed up with objects of art whose rote character and artistic mediocrity offend and repel us. In virtually every Etruscan work three ages are contained: the heritage of a very remote antiquity, a contemporary influence of Greek art, and the anticipation of Roman art. In the artistic sphere, as in life, the Etruscans seem to be in a constant chase after an elusive formula and crystallization.