The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Page 14
The rise of Corinth raises wider issues about the ancient Mediterranean economy. For Moses Finley, the foundations of wealth lay in agriculture and local trade in the necessities of life. He insisted that the volume of luxury trade was simply too small to generate the economic growth visible at Corinth, and later at Athens. Finley seized hold of the insights of anthropologists into gift exchange to assign that relationship priority over the search for profit in this period. Yet the evidence points in the opposite direction.46 For instance, the Corinthians began to use a silver coinage from the middle of the sixth century, and coin hoards discovered in southern Italy reveal that these coins were carried westwards as early as the late sixth century. Coinage in a recognizable form had originated across the Aegean, in Lydia, and it is still uncertain where Corinth acquired its silver, even if it is clear where it acquired the idea of coinage. It is possible, indeed, that the prime motive of the Corinthians in minting coins was to regularize tax payments by merchants using the two harbours and the diolkos slipway.47 In any case, traders were something more than the agents of gift exchange by 600.
Two figures in the early history of Corinth confirm this view. One is Periandros, whose father had led a revolution against the Bacchiad dynasty that had previously ruled the city.48 Periandros ruled Corinth from 627 to 585 BC; this was, in economic terms, a golden age. But Herodotos attributed to him many of the evil qualities of a true tyrant: he was supposed to have murdered his wife Melissa and to have made love to her corpse; enraged by the death of his son on the island, he enslaved 300 boys from Kerkyra and sent them to Lydia to be castrated. For Aristotle, he was a model example of the harsh tyrant. But Aristotle also reported elsewhere that Periandros relied on taxes from markets and harbours for his income, and acted justly; there were those who even included him among the Seven Sages of past time.49 What are, admittedly, much later sources aver that he was an enemy of luxury; he was said to have burned the fine clothes beloved of rich Corinthian women, and to have legislated against the acquisition of slaves, preferring that his own subjects should be put to work.50 He detested idleness. What is important here is the distant memory of someone whose policies were dedicated to wealth-making.
The other figure of note is the Bacchiad aristocrat Demaratos, whose career was reported in detail only much later, in the reign of the Emperor Augustus, by Dionysios of Halikarnassos, not the most reliable author. When his dynasty was overthrown, Demaratos supposedly fled to Tarquinia, in about 655 BC, and married a local noblewoman; she bore him a son named Tarquin, the first Etruscan king of Rome. Demaratos is said to have brought craftsmen with him.51 There certainly was a Corinthian diaspora, and the Bacchiads were active in the foundation of Corinthian colonies overseas. In about 733 they established what became the most powerful Greek city in Sicily, Syracuse; around 709 they also established a colony at Kerkyra with which relations were sometimes difficult.52 One of a group of Corinthian settlements along the coast of Epeiros and Illyria, Kerkyra itself generated a further colony at Epidamnos (modern Durrës in Albania). Kerkyra and Syracuse protected trade towards the Adriatic and across the Ionian Sea. The Adriatic colonies gave access to supplies of silver in the Balkan interior – this would explain where Corinth acquired the silver with which it minted its fine coinage. When, at the start of the fourth century, the tyrant Dionysios of Syracuse was trying to gain hold of the waters of the central Mediterranean he ‘resolved to plant cities on the Adriatic Sea’ and along the shores of the Ionian Sea ‘in order that he might make the route to Epeiros safe and have there his own cities which could give haven to ships’.53 A similar question has been raised in respect of the foundation of Syracuse and Kerkyra: was the aim to protect existing trade routes, or were they founded to absorb an excess population which Corinth could not feed?54 As the colonists consolidated their hold on their new territory, they were able to develop a trade in primary products such as grain, further alleviating pressure on resources back home and, indeed, making it possible for the mother-city to grow without constraint.
In the end it is a chicken and egg question. There were many motives that might send a Greek city-dweller overseas in this period: at the top of the social scale, there were political exiles; lower down, there were merchants and shipowners with an eye on new markets; there were craftsmen who had become aware of surging demand for their products as far away as Italy and southern France; there were others in search of land to cultivate in the territories out to the west. Colonization was not a symptom of poverty at home, but of growing wealth and the wish to build further on the early successes of Corinth and the other cities which created daughter settlements in the Mediterranean. And yet, as the career of Demaratos of Corinth showed, there were also other lands over the horizon where the Greeks could settle only as guests of powerful indigenous peoples. The most important of these peoples were the Etruscans.
3
The Triumph of the Tyrrhenians,
800 BC–400 BC
I
The importance of the Etruscans does not simply lie in the painted tombs whose lively designs captivated D. H. Lawrence, nor in the puzzle of where their distinctive language originated, nor in the heavy imprint they left on early Rome. Theirs was the first civilization to emerge in the western Mediterranean under the impetus of the cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Etruscan culture is sometimes derided as derivative, and the Etruscans have been labelled ‘artless barbarians’ by one of the most distinguished experts on Greek art;1 anything they produced that meets Greek standards is classified as the work of Greek artists, and the rest is discarded as proof of their artistic incompetence. Most, though, would find common cause with Lawrence in praising the vitality and expressiveness of their art even when it breaks with classical notions of taste or perfection. But what matters here is precisely the depth of the Greek and oriental imprint on Etruria, the westward spread of a variety of east Mediterranean cultures, and the building of close commercial ties between central Italy, rarely visited by the Mycenaeans, and both the Aegean and the Levant. This was part of a wider movement that also embraced, in different ways, Sardinia and Mediterranean Spain.
With the rise of the Etruscans – the building of the first cities in Italy, apart from the very earliest Greek colonies, the creation of Etruscan sea power, the formation of trading links between central Italy and the Levant – the cultural geography of the Mediterranean underwent a lasting transformation. Highly complex urban societies developed along the shores of the western Mediterranean; there, the products of Phoenicia and the Aegean were in constant demand, and new artistic styles came into existence, marrying native traditions with those of the East. Along the new trade routes linking Etruria to the east came not just Greek and Phoenician merchants but the gods and goddesses of the Greeks and the Phoenicians, and it was the former (along with a full panoply of myths about Olympus, tales of Troy and legends of the heroes) that decisively conquered the minds of the peoples of central Italy. Mass markets were created for the fine vases of Corinth and later of Athens; indeed, the finest Greek vases have mostly been found not in Greece but inside Etruscan tombs. Carthage, too, owed much of its early success to the existence of markets close by in central Italy; it gained privileged access to the cities of Etruria, and this tie was confirmed by a series of treaties (which included one with Rome, in 509 BC). Whereas in North Africa and Sicily the Carthaginians traded with peoples whose culture they saw as relatively backward, in Etruria they found willing partners in trade, who also proved to be powerful allies in the struggle for control of the central Mediterranean between Carthage and the Greeks of Sicily.
The Etruscans have attracted attention because of the two ‘enigmas’ that are said to surround them: the question of their ethnic origins and the connected question of their language, unrelated to the other languages of the ancient world. Ancient historians produced their own confabulations concerning the migration of the Etruscans from the eastern Mediterranean; Herodotos’ version offers a precious account
of how an Ionian Greek of the fifth century BC saw the relationships between peoples and places in the Mediterranean, and had great currency.2 He told how the migration took place in the reign of Atys, king of Lydia – in other words, in the very remote past. Herodotos relates that the Lydians invented board games, with the exception of draughts. The reason they did so was that they were afflicted by a severe famine. At first, their solution was to eat one day and spend the next day playing board games in the hope of forgetting their hunger: ‘in this way they persevered for eighteen years’. But conditions simply worsened. So the king divided the hungry population into two parts, and drew lots. One half of the population was to stay in Lydia, and the other was destined to search for a new home, under the leadership of Atys’ son Tyrsenos. The migrants went down to Smyrna, built ships, and sailed past many lands until they arrived in the land of the Umbrians, where they built cities and assumed the name Tyrsenoi after their leader Tyrsenos.3 Tyrsenos (or in the Attic dialect of Athens Tyrrhenos) was the standard Greek term for an Etruscan. Here, then, was another of those tales of travel to distant parts of which Greek writers were so fond. Among those who believed this story that the Etruscans had migrated from the east were the greatest Roman poets – Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Catullus – and the most influential prose-writers – Cicero, Tacitus, Seneca. This was apparently the firm belief of the Etruscans and of the Lydians. In AD 26 Emperor Tiberius decided to erect a grand temple in a city in Asia Minor; in the hope of convincing the Romans that Sardis was the natural home for such a temple, the city reminded the Senate that the Etruscans were their colonists, sent out centuries ago, which proved that Sardis had always possessed intimate ties with Italy.4
Writing under Augustus, the antiquary Dionysios, who like Herodotos hailed from Halikarnassos, was determined to prove that the Etruscans were not oriental migrants, but that they were indigenous to Italy – ‘autochthonous’, born from the very soil of the land – as part of a complex argument which would demonstrate the close kinship of Greeks and Romans.5 This view came into fashion among revisionist twentieth-century historians who were aware that Herodotos’ account, still generally accepted, was only superficially satisfactory. On the one hand, Herodotos explained the extraordinary degree of oriental influence over early Etruscan art and culture. On the other hand, this influence was felt most profoundly around the time that the Phoenicians and Greeks began to penetrate into the Tyrrhenian Sea during the eighth and seventh centuries BC, a time far later than that hypothesized by Herodotos for the coming of easterners to Etruria. Nor was there any link between the Lydian language (of Luvian origin) and that of the Etruscans, as Dionysios had already noted.6 Doffing his cap briefly to Dionysios, the modern Italian archaeologist Massimo Pallottino insisted that the real question was not that of ‘race’ but that of how the Etruscan civilization came into being as a composite of many cultural elements: native peoples of many origins and languages, alongside foreign merchants from Phoenicia and Greece.7 At most, a few wandering condottieri from Asia Minor might have established themselves as rulers over communities in central Italy: this would explain the sudden passion of the elite of Tarquinia and Caere for grand tombs in the oriental style, beginning around 650 BC; while the name Tarquin (Tarchna) strongly recalls the name of an Anatolian storm god, Tarḫun, who in earlier centuries had given his name to people and places in Arzawa, near Troy. As for the Etruscan language, this must be a very ancient Mediterranean tongue that had persisted in Italy but was displaced elsewhere by invaders from the north and east speaking Indo-European languages such as Latin. Attempts have been made to solve this problem with the help of blood groups and DNA.8 Claims have been made that the modern population of Murlo in Tuscany, which was once an important Etruscan centre, shares a significant number of genes with Levantine populations, and that cattle in central Tuscany are also more ‘eastern’ than might be expected, leading scientists to postulate the arrival of not just human migrants but their beasts as well.9 However, since Etruscan times there have been plenty of opportunities for easterners to settle in Tuscan towns, as Roman legionaries or as medieval slaves. All this encourages the historian to concentrate on the real problem: not whence the Etruscans came, but how their distinctive culture came into being in Italy.
To say that Etruscan civilization emerged without a mass migration is not to say that the ties between Etruria and the eastern Mediterranean were insignificant. On the contrary, this explanation of the rise of Etruria places a heavy emphasis on the migration not of whole peoples but of objects, standards of taste and religious cults from east to west. Peoples may not have migrated; but there is good evidence from historical sources and from archaeology that individual people did so, for example Demaratos of Corinth, said to be the father of King Tarquin I of Rome (d. 579 BC), or the seventh-century Greek potter Aristonothos, who worked in Etruscan Caere.10 The Greeks and Phoenicians brought not just ceramics and luxury goods but new models of social behaviour. Banquets and funerary feasts (including the custom of reclining on couches at banquets) may have been copied from Syrian models. Sexual behaviour combined Greek and native Etruscan customs: the word katmite was a typically Etruscan compression of the Greek name Ganymede, and it passed into Latin as catamitus, ‘catamite’, along with sharp accusations that the Etruscans enjoyed pederasty, though observers were also puzzled at the prominent role accorded to women at what elsewhere were all-male banquets.11
II
From an early date, these Etruscans were also accused of being pirates. One of the Homeric Hymns makes the connection plain. It tells how the god Dionysos was standing on a headland by the sea, in the appearance of a handsome young man, with long hair waving in the wind, wearing a fine purple cloak. But
Soon men from a well-trimmed ship, pirates, came
quickly over the wine-dark sea, Tyrsenians. An evil fate brought
them. They saw him, nodded to each other, jumped quickly, seized
him and took him to the ship, rejoicing in their hearts.12
But his bonds fell from his body, and the helmsman realized that he was a god, not a man, saying: ‘Do not lay hands on him in case in his anger he summon fierce winds and heavy storms.’ But the captain replied: ‘I suspect he is going to Egypt or to Cyprus or to the Hyperborean land or even further. In the end he will tell us who are his friends and what is their wealth.’ Dionysos responded by covering the ship with festoons of vines, and wine ran down the middle of the vessel. He summoned a bear into existence; the terrified sailors jumped into the sea and were transformed into dolphins, while the god mercifully spared the helmsman, revealing himself as ‘loud-crying Dionysos’. The story of Dionysos and the pirates was a favourite theme of vase painters, including one of the most skilled Athenian painters, Exekias. A shallow cup from his hand depicts Dionysos lounging in a boat whose mast has become the support for an enormous vine that rises high above the ship’s broad sail, while seven dolphins leap around the ship; the image is painted in black-figure on a red ground and dates from about 530 BC.13 It carries his signature; most remarkably, it was found within the necropolis of one of the great Etruscan cities, Vulci. The inhabitants of Vulci possessed an almost insatiable appetite for the finest Greek pottery. The fact that the Etruscans were presented in such a negative way in the story did not prevent them from taking delight in Exekias’ cup.
In the hymn Dionysos seems to be standing on a headland somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean, because the pirates imagine he may be trying to reach the Levant or the ‘Hyperborean land’ beyond the Black Sea. That Tyrsenians were present in Greek waters is confirmed by archaeological evidence from Lemnos and by the insistence of the ancient historians themselves that there were settlements consisting of these people on the islands and coasts of the Aegean.14 Herodotos and Thucydides spoke of Tyrsenians and Pelasgians who lived on the northern shores of the Aegean, around Mount Athos, and on Lemnos, within sight of Athos, from which they were expelled in 511 following an Athenian invasion.15 Out of this emerge
s a remarkable revision of the early history of Mediterranean trade and seafaring, in which the Greeks and Phoenicians have early competitors, somehow connected with the Etruscans. (According to an excessively ingenious French scholar, the story of Dionysos and the dolphins is really a tale about how the Etruscans tried to dominate the wine trade in the Mediterranean.)16 All Etruscans were (in Greek) Tyrsenoi; but that is not necessarily to say that all Tyrsenoi were Etruscans. The term was clearly used in a generic sense to mean barbarian pirates.17