Tuscan Histories II: The Etruscan Legacy

In the ancient world, there were many powerful peoples who rose to power and prestige only to collapse into insignificance.  The rise and fall of Babylonians and the Assyrians are often invoked to demonstrate the futility of empire.  Shelley captured the impression brilliantly in “Ozymandias”:

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Far less brilliant are the snipings of pop historians and ideologues with their dull axes that they are forever grinding without ever sharpening them.  “Where are the Hittites?” used to be a favorite question posed by Zionists who prove divine favor of their people by denigrating every other nation.  In their belief, Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, and Egyptians all disappeared, while Israel persists.  One wonders what any of the prophets would say of modern Israel. 

There can be no doubt that ancient Israel left its enduring mark on the world, but the same can be said of many great nations.  If Christianity is difficult to conceive without the Old Testament, then Christendom is an impossibility without the legacy of Greeks and Romans, and the Etruscans made no small contribution to the character and culture of Rome, though very little of the Etruscan legacy is obvious.  

Why do men of the West have a first name and a last name?  Some common names are patronymics, and such naming formulas as Robert Son of John or Agamemnon son of Atreus are found in many places and may over time become fixed.  Most Scandinavian immigrants to America had no last name, so their patronymic were set in stone at Ellis Island.  But there are also last names, however they originated, that have endured over many centuries as the identifying badge of clan or family.  Europeans probably got the idea from the Romans who originally had two names, the second to identify the lineage and the first to distinguish and individual.  As time went on and clans grew larger, a third name was added to distinguish a subgroup or sept,  The Romans seem to have got this custom from the Etruscans and passed it onto us.

For Italian history, the Etruscans’ greatest achievement may have lain in their social and political order.  While other peoples in Italy were living on farms or in farming villages, the Etruscans were constructing city-states and forming alliances that would probably serve as inspiration for such developments among the Latins.  Anyone who has breezed through Livy or read a chapter on Roman history is aware that Rome was controlled by an Etruscan family—the Tarquins— for three generations.  Livy wants us to believe that Servius Tullius, regarded by Romans as a good king, was not really a Tarquin, but it is a myth that is fairly easy to see through.  More recently, Etruscologists have tentatively identified Servius with a great Etruscan hero Macstrna.  

The Romans believed that the first Tarquin had a Corinthian Greek father, and true or false, the legend encapsulates that important reality that the initial Roman encounter with the higher civilization of the Greeks was mediated by the Etruscans.  To appreciate the depth of the Etruscans’ Hellenism, go to any museum in Central Italy and look at the vases.

The Etruscan advance to the North seems to have reached the Po, but it was checked both by the warlike Ligurians who dominated the Northwest part of the peninsula and by the Celts invading from across the Alps.  To the South, they had little success in their attempt to dominate the Greek cities or the vigorous Italian tribes, and the rise of Rome pushed them out of Latium and eventually forced their incorporation into the Roman commonwealth in the Third Century B.C.  Scholars debate the time-frame for the extinction of spoken Etruscan, but it was certainly moribund in the First Century A.D, when the antiquarian Emperor Claudius, according to Suetonius, composed a work on Etruscan history in 20 books.  He may have been inspired to write it by his wife, Plautia Urgulanilla, who descended from an Etruscan aristocratic family in Tarquinia.

Their significance, however, was not soon forgotten.  One of Vergil’s most memorable characters is the Etruscan ruler Mezentius, an atheist and a cruel despot but a loving father.  Vergil knew what he was doing in putting the Etruscans into his pre-Trojan Italians who would be part of the Roman future.  

Etruscan sooth-sayers were prized even down into Christian times, and when the Emperor Julian was planning his invasion of Persia, he consulted them, only to be told his expedition would be a disaster. Although he thought of himself as a traditionalist conservative, Julian—like so many conservatives—was actually a revolutionary, a neopagan who tried to construct a new state religion that would incorporate a lot of occult mumbo-jumbo to mimic Christianity.  So when the Etruscans failed to tell him what he wanted, he turned to his new-fangled priests who flattered him.  The result was the death of a great and noble man and a disaster to the Empire.  I have often wondered if there was not some reality, some truths to be found in pre-Christian pagan religions that are entirely absent in neopaganism and Islam. 

The history of Etruria, from before the Punic Wars down to the collapse of the western Empire, the Gothic Kingdom of Theoderic, and the brief reconquest by the generals of Justinian in the Sixth Century, is Roman.

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Thomas Fleming

Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina

2 Responses

  1. Allen Wilson says:

    This is fascinating. I wasn’t aware of the Etruscan influence with regard to surnames.

    I think that Claudius also wrote a dictionary or a grammar of Etruscan as well as his history, but I don’t remember for certain.

    I remember seeing a travel show about Tuscany years ago. Some of the women looked just like the women depicted in the ancient tomb paintings and statues. I think that even some of the hairdos were similar. The Etruscans are still there alright. They just changed their name and went underground. Wasn’t it Russell Kirk who had a similar experience while in Rome when he saw a woman who looked like Julia Domna?

    I think you are right about paganism vs. Neopaganism and Islam. I must have gotten Julian wrong to an extent because I saw him as more of a reactionary, but then, reactionaries are often as you have described conservatives to be. Try to revive something moribund and you can’t help but come up with something new.

  2. Avatar photo Thomas Fleming says:

    I have sharpened the sentence on Claudius’ history to read: the antiquarian Emperor Claudius, according to Suetonius, composed a work on Etruscan history in 20 books. He may have been inspired to write it by his wife, Plautia Urgulanilla, who descended from an Etruscan aristocratic family in Tarquinia.

    The double names of Etruscans I had wondered about and thought perhaps it was a general Italian thing. I think it was Pallotino who concluded, I think correctly, that the Etruscans were the first.