Who are the Etruscans still talking to?
Far from the Mediterranean peninsula where the navel of this Italic civilization was located, the names of those who once populated Lazio, Tuscany and Campania echo in exotic echoes.
For many, Etruria evokes, like Assyria or Byzantium, foreign images and, perhaps also, the distant memory of painted necropolises and the last kings of Rome.
Beneath the veneer of the ages, and despite the harsh accounts of their contemporaries and their successors, the Etruscans were not the least modern of the ancients.
Women, in particular, could long enjoy a latitude unparalleled in Roman Italy.
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Banquet arm in arm with her husband, or go to the shows in the city and attend, under an umbrella, sometimes a chariot race, sometimes the fist fight of vigorous athletes;
these fairly banal activities for our time were already widespread almost 2,500 years ago in central Italy, as the decor of the Etruscan tombs of Tarquinia or Chiusi attests.
This freedom granted to women was not, however, taken for granted in the ancient world, in the middle of the first millennium BC.
Many centuries before the contemporary struggle for equal pay between the sexes or against violence against women, such daring left Etruria's Greek neighbors in disbelief.
Sulphurous reputation
Debauchery with a dissolute life for some, depraved and exhibitionist drunkards for others; Etruscan women have a reputation to say the least sulphurous among ancient authors. In the 4th century BC. J.-C., the Greek historian Theopompe thus evokes in crude terms the license of the Etruscan banquets, where the women,
"big drinkers"
, came to share the drunkenness of the men. Before slipping, naked, under their husbands' cloak, even specifies Aristotle. Scandalous scenes for ancient patriarchal Greece, where only courtesans foreign to the home could be present at these moments of civic sociability, therefore male.
"The Greeks have a very particular conception of the family, in which women must remain in their place, that is to say rather at home, in their house
," explains historian Marie-Laurence Haack, an Etruscologist at the Jules Verne University in Picardy and author of
Discovering
the Etruscans
(ed. La Découverte).
It is a way of maintaining a moral order and of saying to the Greeks: '' hold your women and do not be like the Etruscans ''. And also to mark their difference with barbarian-speaking neighbors ”.
Polychrome terracotta sarcophagus by Larthia Seianti. Dating from the 2nd century BC, this Etruscan sculpture kept in the Archaeological Museum of Florence, was discovered in a necropolis, on the outskirts of the ancient city of Chiusi. It represents an aristocrat leaning on a banquet bed. Luisa Ricciarini / Leemage
This double discourse aimed at discrediting the neighbor, outside, while maintaining order inside, in homes, is perpetuated in the Roman world, between saucy mockery and serious warnings. At the end of the 3rd century BC. J.-C., Plautus thus mocks the trade in the female body practiced in Tuscany, in a passage from
La Cassette,
while the senator Cato the Elder rebels, in 195 before our era, against a possible political organization. women, at a time when the whole of Italy, including the Etruscan cities, began to come under the power of the Roman administration.
“Cato sought to preserve moral order and not let foreign influences pervert Rome,”
observes Marie-Laurence Haack.
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Behind the outrageous caricatures of their Italian or Aegean neighbors, Etruscan women did, however, have certain margins of freedom such as the ancient world did not find before the Roman Empire.
“They had a fairly clear form of legal autonomy
,” emphasizes Marie-Laurence Haack.
In addition to banquets, they could attend games, which was just not possible in most of the Greek world.
Etruscan women also had a first name, not just a surname inherited from their father.
Compared to the Romans or the Greeks of that time, between the 8th and 1st centuries BC, it was exceptional. ”
Family strategies
Beware, however, not to see in these practices a kind of feminism before its time.
In Etruria, as elsewhere, relative feminine freedoms were not granted disinterestedly.
In the same way as in Sparta, the athletic education and the later marriage of the women - around 18 years against around 14 in the rest of Greece - aimed at giving birth to sturdy little Spartans, the visibility Etruscan women and their families allowed the husband to enhance the lineage of his wife and highlight a prestigious alliance.
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The ulterior motive, however, did not rule out affection, as Etruscan art shows more than once, never stingy in representations of the couple.
One of the best-known examples, the sarcophagus of the Spouses in the Louvre Museum, represents a glimpse of conjugal proximity.
The sculpture, a monumental urn, features a man, shirtless, lying beside an elegantly dressed woman around whom he puts his arm.
Dated at the end of the 6th century BC, the two deceased wear the typical smile of the archaic period.
And above all exude the idealized feeling of a happy bond.
The sarcophagus of the Spouses, preserved in the Louvre museum (end of the 6th century BC).
Luisa Ricciarini / Leemage
"Numerous images, frescoes and statuary, show us Etruscan women seated on an equal footing with their husbands"
, points out Marie-Laurence Haack.
The presence, in the aristocracy at least, of the Etruscan woman at banquets transforms the wife into an actor in social and therefore political life, a trait that she will lose under Roman domination.
As for the funeral representations of the couple united in a relationship of equality and affection, this should be seen as a celebration of an almost two-headed marital ideal, in contrast to the central role of the
Roman
pater familias
.
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One of the most beautiful representations of this conjugal tenderness is found on the lid of an Etruscan sarcophagus in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; the spouses stand there stretched out under a tight sheet, eye to eye, arms lost in one another.
"The scene is very astonishing and truly exceptional for this period of Antiquity"
, points out Marie-Laurence Haack. However, as the historian specifies, touch and gestures of conjugal affection are extremely rare in the ancient world, where the overwhelming part of affective vestiges pass through words, in particular in funerary epigraphy.
So many Etruscan specificities which disappeared with the progressive Romanization of central Italy, in the last centuries before our era.
The memory of the spaces of freedom enjoyed by the women of Etruria has however endured.
An eminent figure in 20th century French eruscology, Jacques Heurgon did not fail to raise the astonishment of the Latin historian Livy who, at the end of the 1st century BC.
AD, mentioned the idleness and frequent outings in town of these women.
Criticism of these freedoms did not prevent the Roman matrons from retaining the right to attend performances as well.