Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900–300 BCE 0197647464, 9780197647462

Table of contents :
Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900–300 BCE
Contents
Maps
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Romans and Italians Writing History
Empire and Historiography in Republican Italy
Monumenta
Archaeology and/as History
Historical Culture
The Structure and Scope of the Book
2 Ancestors
Burial and Social Structure in Early Italy
Burial before History
Spatial Clustering
Spaces for Cult
Visibility
Monumentality
Objects
Writing
Ancestors in the Burial Ground
Conclusions
3 Cities
Continuity
Huts to Temples in Rome
Huts to Temples in Italy
Assessing Huts to Temples
Discontinuity
Foundation
Obliteration
Conclusions
4 Founders
Figures and Events
Founders’ Cults
Founders’ Cults: Poseidonia and Greek Colonial Italy
Founders’ Cults: Veii
Founders’ Cult: Exceptional Burials within Settlement Areas
Founders’ Cults: Tarquinia
Founders’ Cults: Rome
Founders’ Cults in Italy: Some Other Possibilities
Italian Founders’ Cult?
Greek Myth and Italian Founders’ Cults: Aeneas in Latium
Lavinium
Sol Indiges?
Castrum Inui
Evaluating the Archaeology of Aeneas
Conclusions
5 Time
The Annual Nail at Rome
Ritual Nails in Italy
Calendar Time: Early Rome
Time in the Pyrgi Tablets
The Capua Tile
The Magliano Lead Tablet
The Calendar of Oscan Capua
The Linen Book (liber linteus)
Calendrical Time in the Iguvine Tables?
Time in the Agnone Table
The Stele from Aveia
Lydus’ Brontoscopic Calendar and the Etruscan saeculum
Local Influences and Elite Character
Conclusions
6 Images
Beyond Fabius the Painter
Etruscan Historical Imagery: The François Tomb
Contextualizing the Francois Tomb: Historiography
Contextualizing the François Tomb: Iconography
Contextualizing the François Tomb: Style and Epigraphy
Historical Tomb Paintings in Campania
Daunia and Apulia
Hellenization?
Conclusions
7 Conclusions
From Ancestral Time to Civic Time
The Historical Culture of the Italian City
Looking Forward
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and the author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy.

Advance praise for

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy “Deftly navigating between text-driven Romanocentric narratives and the world of memory studies, Bernard offers an original and revealing study of Italian historical culture. We meet ancestors and founders, cities in the making, and innovative descriptions of time. This is a book that rewrites the way the people of Italy in the first millennium bce thought about their past and, in so doing, refreshes our notion of history itself.” —C H R I S TO P H E R S M I T H , University of St Andrews “Far from being peoples without history, early Italians lived among a multitude of textual and material markers that spoke volumes about their own past. For the first time, this book gives a rich and resonant voice to non-Latin speakers throughout the peninsula, emphasizing the role of their historical narratives, typically overshadowed by those of the Romans.” —N I C T E R R E NATO, University of Michigan

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

SETH BERNARD

Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900-300 

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

BERNARD

The prevailing mode of historical culture in Italy develops alongside the wider structures of society, from the Early Iron Age and the early stages of urbanization to the first encounters with Rome. Throughout the period, Italy’s many communities possessed a far more extensive interest in history than scholarship has previously acknowledged. The book’s fresh account of this historical culture also includes accessible presentation of several recent and important archaeological discoveries. Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy will be of wide interest to historians and archaeologists of Early Rome and Italy, as well as all those thinking broadly about modes of historical transmission, and the intersections between archaeology and history.

Cover image: © Emma Engström 2021

ISBN 978-0-19-764746-2

www.oup.com

9780197647462_EST_CVRmech.indd 1

9 780197 647462

L

ong before the emergence of Roman historical writing, the societies of Iron Age Italy were actively engaged in transmitting and using their past. The first account of this early historical interest, this book provides a sort of prehistory of historical thought in Italy leading down to the first encounters with Roman expansion. From the Early Iron Age to the fifth and fourth centuries bce, Italian communities can be seen actively using burial practices, images, special objects, calendars, and various other media to record and transmit history. Drawing from current anthropological and archaeological theory, the book argues for collecting this material together under the broad rubric of “historical culture,” as the socialized mode of engagement with the past.

SETH BERNARD 06-May-23 16:54:29

is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and the author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy.

Advance praise for

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy “Deftly navigating between text-driven Romanocentric narratives and the world of memory studies, Bernard offers an original and revealing study of Italian historical culture. We meet ancestors and founders, cities in the making, and innovative descriptions of time. This is a book that rewrites the way the people of Italy in the first millennium bce thought about their past and, in so doing, refreshes our notion of history itself.” —C H R I S TO P H E R S M I T H , University of St Andrews “Far from being peoples without history, early Italians lived among a multitude of textual and material markers that spoke volumes about their own past. For the first time, this book gives a rich and resonant voice to non-Latin speakers throughout the peninsula, emphasizing the role of their historical narratives, typically overshadowed by those of the Romans.” —N I C T E R R E NATO, University of Michigan

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

SETH BERNARD

Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900-300 

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

BERNARD

The prevailing mode of historical culture in Italy develops alongside the wider structures of society, from the Early Iron Age and the early stages of urbanization to the first encounters with Rome. Throughout the period, Italy’s many communities possessed a far more extensive interest in history than scholarship has previously acknowledged. The book’s fresh account of this historical culture also includes accessible presentation of several recent and important archaeological discoveries. Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy will be of wide interest to historians and archaeologists of Early Rome and Italy, as well as all those thinking broadly about modes of historical transmission, and the intersections between archaeology and history.

Cover image: © Emma Engström 2021

ISBN 978-0-19-764746-2

www.oup.com

9780197647462_EST_CVRmech.indd 1

9 780197 647462

L

ong before the emergence of Roman historical writing, the societies of Iron Age Italy were actively engaged in transmitting and using their past. The first account of this early historical interest, this book provides a sort of prehistory of historical thought in Italy leading down to the first encounters with Roman expansion. From the Early Iron Age to the fifth and fourth centuries bce, Italian communities can be seen actively using burial practices, images, special objects, calendars, and various other media to record and transmit history. Drawing from current anthropological and archaeological theory, the book argues for collecting this material together under the broad rubric of “historical culture,” as the socialized mode of engagement with the past.

SETH BERNARD 06-May-23 16:54:29

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900–​300 BCE SE T H B E R NA R D

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Bernard, Seth (Classicist), author. Title: Historical culture in Iron Age Italy : archaeology, history, and the use of the past, 900–300 BCE / Seth Bernard. Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023019456 (print) | LCCN 2023019457 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197647462 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197647486 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Iron age—Italy. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Italy. | Italy—History—To 476—Historiography. Classification: LCC GN780.22.I8 B47 2023 (print) | LCC GN780.22.I8 (ebook) | DDC 937—dc23/eng/20230512 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019456 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019457 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.001.0001 Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

Contents Maps  List of Illustrations  Preface and Acknowledgments 

1. Introduction 

vii xi xvii

1

2. Ancestors 

32

3. Cities 

87

4. Founders 

121

5. Time 

167

6. Images 

219

7. Conclusions 

258

Works Cited  Index 

265 297

Maps

Map 1.  The Italian Peninsula showing ancient regions and cultural areas. Location of Maps 2–​4 indicated by boxes. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

Map 2.  Northern Italy and the Po Valley showing location of sites mentioned in the book. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

Map 3.  Central Italy and the Tiber Valley. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

Map 4.  Southern Italy and Magna Graecia. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

Illustrations Figures 1.1. The sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas. Tarquinia, late third century BCE. Image adapted from Vianduval on Wikimedia commons, used with the kind permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia.

5

1.2. Reconstruction of the monument of the Spurinnae family with statues and descriptive texts (elogia). Tarquinia, first century CE. Image by Nicola Terrenato based on an original by Mario Torelli, reproduced with permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.

14

2.1. Early phases of burial (tenth–eighth centuries BCE) in northwest area of Iron Age necropolis of Osteria dell’Osa, Latium, showing expansion from initial groupings North and South to other clusters. Drawing by author based on data in Bietti Sestieri 1992.

40

2.2. Cortona, the stepped altar of the Sodo II tumulus, mid sixth century BCE. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons.

47

2.3. Tarquinia (?), conically shaped disc of nenfro with human and animal frieze in low relief, possibly a tomb-marker. Image after Milani 1909, tb. 6.

51

2.4. Vetulonia, the stele of Avele Feluske, 625–​600 BCE. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

52

2.5. Capestrano, monumental statue of a warrior, possibly from a tomb. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

54

2.6. Orvieto, tomb marker in the shape of a helmeted head, identified as Larth Cuperes son of Aaranth by an Etruscan inscription. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

55

2.7. Stele with paleosabellic inscription and relief of human face from Penna Sant’Andrea. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons.

56

2.8. Caere, tumuli in the extensive Banditaccia necropolis. The burial area was laid out in the early seventh century BCE. Photo by author, used with the kind permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia.

58

2.9. Architectural evolution of burial in Etruria from ditch grave to monumental tumulus after Prayon 1975: 14. Adapted from Riva 2010: ­figure 29, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

59

xii Illustrations 2.10. Pisa, the cenotaph on via San Jacopo, early seventh century BCE. Photo adapted from Alecobbe on Wikimedia Commons.

62

2.11. One of four mace-​head-​shaped sceptres of iron and bronze with scene of the lord of horses found in tomb 8 at Spoleto, seventh century BCE. Image © Joachim Weidig.

65

2.12. Ivory writing table with alphabetical inscription in Etruscan from a grave in Marsiliana d’Albegna, ca. 650–​625 BCE, image published by concession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana).

69

2.13. Pithecussae, Rhodian cup with Greek metrical inscription, ca. 740 BCE, found in the burial of a boy about ten years of age. Photo adapted from Marcus Cyron on Wikimedia Commons.

71

2.14. Montescudaio, cinerary urn with figural decoration, early seventh century BCE. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons.

74

2.15. Chiusi, cinerary urn with lid shaped like human head, sixth century BCE, image © Metropolitan Museum of Art object 96.9.50a–​b.

76

2.16. The facing statues of seated figures from the vestibule of the tomb of the statues of Ceri. After Tuck 1994, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

77

2.17. Reconstruction of the interior of the tomb of the five seats from Caere (left) with figure seated on throne (right). After Tuck 1994, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

79

2.18. Statue B of a male figure from the necropolis of Casa Nocera, Casale Marittimo, early sixth century BCE, image published by concession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana).

81

2.19. Lunigiana, funerary stele found in 1975 at Cavallino di Taponecco. Image reproduced with permission of the Museo Statue Stele delle Lunigianesi.

82

3.1. Rome, cuttings for an Iron Age hut found beneath later structures on the southwest Palatine by the scalae Caci. Photo © John N. Hopkins.

93

3.2. Satricum, phases of the temple-​complex of Mater Matuta, showing the progression from huts to single cella structure to peripteral temple. Photo copyright of the Satricum Project—University of Amsterdam.

95

3.3. Plan of the fifth-century BCE temple at the locality of Colle della Noce, Ardea, in Latium, showing the position of several Iron Age huts below the structure. Drawn by author based on Crescenzi and Tortorici 1984.

96

3.4. Plan of the Etruscan city of Marzabotto. Image © Elisabetta Govi.

105

3.5. Sant’Ilario d’Enza, curved bronze finial of an augural staff or lituus. Reproduced with the permission of the Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia.

109

Illustrations  xiii 3.6. Populonia, modern reconstruction of the “House of the King” on acropolis, ninth century BCE. Photo © author.

113

3.7. Populonia, deposit of drinking cups made in the early seventh century BCE during the destruction of the Casa del Re. Photo © Gilda Bartoloni.

114

3.8. Gabii, the so-​called regia, a tripartite building ritually destroyed and buried ca. 500 BCE. Photo © Marco Fabbri.

117

4.1. Poseidonia/​Paestum, the heroon and its precinct, ca. 500 BCE. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​ Ministero della Cultura.

131

4.2. Veii, reconstruction of the funerary chapel on Piazza D’Armi showing small and larger structures built around an early ninth-century BCE burial. Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni.

135

4.3. Veii, reconstruction of acroterial terracotta sculpture from the roof of the funerary chapel of Piazza d’Armi showing a life-​sized depiction of a standing male figure and a dog. Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni.

137

4.4. Tarquinia, view of the Ara della Regina. Photo © John N. Hopkins, reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale.

141

4.5. Tarquinia, view from above the foundations of Altar Alpha beside the Ara della Regina. The stone chest or sarcophagus is visible beneath the lowest course. Photo © Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni, reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale.

142

4.6. Schematic section of the shrine atop a seventh-century BCE burial on the southwestern Palatine Hill, Rome. Drawing by author, adapted from Smith 1996.

145

4.7. Remains of the Iron Age burial chamber (foreground) and foundations of Middle Republican pronaos of the so-​called heroon of Aeneas outside the walls of Lavinium, Latium. Photo © author.

157

4.8. The two altars in the sanctuary at Castrum Inui (Ardea), Latium, viewed from the cella of Temple B looking west toward Temple A. Observe the oblique orientation, possibly corresponding to the description of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Photo © author.

161

5.1. Pyrgi, the gold tablets on display at the Villa Giulia, late sixth century BCE. On either side are the gilded nails found deposited along with them. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons.

175

5.2. Drawing of the bronze lamina inscribed in Etruscan from the temple of Tinia at Marzabotto. Drawing © Elisabetta Govi.

178

5.3. Umbrian inscription on a bronze tablet, one of the so-​called Iguvine tables. Photo adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

181

xiv Illustrations 5.4. Terracotta tile with calendrical inscription from Capua. Image © Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin –​Preussicher Kulturbesitz (Photograph by Johannes Laurentius, inventory number 30892).

192

5.5. Etruscan inscription on a bronze disc-​like object from Magliano, Tuscany. Image adapted from Wikimedia commons.

195

5.6. Terracotta iuvilas stele with Oscan inscription from the sanctuary at the site of Fondo Patturelli, Capua. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

197

5.7. Bronze tablet from Agnone, Molise, with Oscan inscription on both sides. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

207

6.1. Drawing of painted scene from tomb on the Esquiline, Rome, showing encounter between Samnites and Romans. Image adapted from the Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 17 (1889) tb. 11–​12. 221 6.2. Scene of combat between Italian heroes from the wall of the François tomb, Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia commons.

224

6.3. Plan and cross-​section of François tomb, Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

226

6.4. Detail of Vel Saties from the painting of the frescoes of the François tomb. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

229

6.5. Processional scene from the Tomb of the Conference (tomba del convegno), Tarquinia. Photograph by Gaetano Bellucci, image © by Alessandro Naso.

235

6.6. Drawing of banqueting scene from tomb of the shields, Tarquinia. From Monumenti inediti pubblicati dall’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica. Supplemento (Berlin 1891).

236

6.7. Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 12A. The return of the warrior, 380–​370 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​Ministero della Cultura.

242

6.8. Cumae, painted slab from a tomb, Benassai 2001 no. Cu.13, ca. 300 BCE. Drawing by author modified from Benassai 2001.

243

6.9. Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 114, north wall. Battle scene, 330–​320 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​Ministero della Cultura.

246

6.10. Spinazzo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 1, back wall. Older male individual, ca. 320–​300 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​ Ministero della Cultura.

249

6.11. Terracotta relief probably from a funnel vase, identified as Canosan. Metropolitan Museum of Art 12.232.10, image in the public domain.

252

Illustrations  xv

Maps 1. The Italian Peninsula showing ancient regions and cultural areas. Location of Maps 2–​4 indicated by boxes. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

vii

2. Northern Italy and the Po Valley showing location of sites mentioned in the book. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

viii

3. Central Italy and the Tiber Valley. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

viii

4. Southern Italy and Magna Graecia. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

ix

Preface and Acknowledgments I began the groundwork for this book several years ago when researching a paper on some Campanian tomb paintings. It became clear that not only those paintings, but a rich corpus of archaeological evidence, revealed a deep and abiding interest in history on the part of the peoples of pre-​Roman Italy, and a book-​length study was in order. Recently discovered sites like the “funerary chapel” at Veii or the “house of the king” at Populonia offered spectacular material of this sort but were so far mostly known to prehistorians, while it seemed to me that these discoveries merited a broader audience. My thoughts on the subject came together fairly rapidly in 2020, after the global pandemic ended the possibility of planned archaeological fieldwork. Meanwhile, world events were pointing out with greater urgency some very longstanding issues within the discipline of classical studies, which by tradition in North American universities houses both archaeology and ancient history as they apply to the Greco-​Roman Mediterranean. It seems to me that there is considerable value in telling more ecumenical stories of the many ways in which ancient people engaged with their pasts. In starting the work of building a place for our discipline in a more just world, we are confronted with the traditional centrality to classical studies of the text. There are of course many illuminating ways one can approach texts as sources of historical information about non-​traditional segments of ancient society, and much productive work continues in this direction, but in the end the fact remains that the historiographical tradition with which Roman historians work is largely an artifact of elite Roman imperial culture, and its study is often, whether consciously or not, reproductive of that character. Therefore, a critical discussion of some of the attitudes and ideologies that I feel are implicit in binding ancient history to historiography seems essential and timely. And because there is little point in mere criticism, I also hope this book opens up some new paths forward in our understanding of the non-​textual intellectual and cultural histories of Italy and Republican Rome. Stuck at home like most of us over the last few years, I have been sustained by communications with a community of friends and colleagues. I am grateful for the generosity of those who took time to share work and ideas,

xviii  Preface and Acknowledgments or offer thoughts, disagreements, and encouragement on the manuscript. I thank Jeremy Armstrong, Maria Cristina Biella, Massimiliano Di Fazio, Lisa Fentress, Alison Keith, Lisa Mignone, Sarah C. Murray, Dimitri Nakassis, Dan-​ el Padilla Peralta, Charlotte Potts, Andrew Riggsby, and Angela Trentacoste. A number of scholars generously helped with images: Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni, Gilda Bartoloni, Marco Fabbri, Elisabetta Govi, Alessandro Naso, Silvia Paltineri, Corinna Riva, Nicola Terrenato, Anthony Tuck, and Joachim Weidig. John Hopkins sent me dense, useful notes on the whole text, shared thought-​provoking work of his own, and assisted with images. Emlyn Dodd helped with map-​making. Papers in either manuscript or published form sent to me by Marco Maiuro and Brian Rose provided important sparks for my own thinking at various points. It has once again been a pleasure working with Oxford University Press, and I warmly thank Stefan Vranka. I single out two people in particular for thanks. To Duncan MacRae, I owe my initial awareness of the anthropological literature that forms the project’s critical frame. Duncan was also the first person to look at the project in draft, and his enthusiastic encouragement carried me through the rest of the process. And I am especially grateful to Christopher Smith: attentive readers will see how frequently he is mentioned in the footnotes, as he could have written this book himself. He has been an unstinting supporter, mentor, and friend. I dedicate this book about the social construction of the past, present, and future to my family, who will always form the sturdiest way for me to anchor my own place in time: Alexa, Livia, Jonathan.

1 Introduction The problem now is to explode the concept of history by the anthropological experience of culture. Heretofore obscure histories of remote islands deserve a place alongside the self-​contemplation of the European past—​or the history of “civilizations”—​for their own remarkable contributions to an historical understanding. We thus multiply our conceptions of history by the diversity of structures. Suddenly, there are all kinds of new things to consider. —​Marshall Sahlins (1983: 534)

This book describes the historical culture of Italy from the Early Iron Age to the Roman conquest, covering a period from roughly 900 to 300 BCE. By historical culture, I refer throughout to a broader concept of social engagement with the past than is sometimes meant by the word “history.” But this move permits us, following Sahlins’ suggestion, to consider all kinds of new things. There exists a substantial corpus of material, much of it archaeological, some of it newly discovered, that speaks to us about how local communities in early Italy thought and talked about their history and how they articulated their past and present. This material has yet to have much impact on the typical ways in which we reconstruct the process of “becoming historical” in Italy.1 Instead, the story tends to be told almost exclusively from the Roman perspective and in a teleology that seeks to explain the emergence of written history at Rome around 200 BCE, or slightly earlier in the hands of some Western Greek authors. These are neither unimportant nor uninteresting developments, but this book intends to show that they can be illuminated by expansion. The rise of historiography is by no means the only way that Italians were engaging with their past in this period; and while the one story is by now well studied, Italians’ own historical interests remain far less so, 1 For the phrase, Purcell 2003.

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0001

2  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy aside from select topics like the existence of Etruscan historiography, or the contribution of Italian precedents to Roman interests in historical imagery.2 I set out here to provide a systematic study that portrays Italians’ historical interests as a much longer-​term and deeper development. In the intellectual and cultural history that follows, Rome plays a part, but not a leading one, and more importance is given to the influence on historical thought of social structure and urbanization. A driving theme of this book is how the emergence of urban society in Iron Age Italy prompted new modes of historical thinking. This is therefore adamantly not a book about Roman history or Roman historiography, but my hope nevertheless is to offer some value for those thinking about historical practices at Rome during the Republican period. Recent research by Denis Feeney among others emphasizes the unusualness of Romans’ turn, starting in the fourth century, to Greek models to create their own literary culture, a turn that includes the initial elaboration of written Roman history.3 There was nothing obvious or predictable about Romans’ decision to develop a Greek-​style literary culture, but the move was highly conscious and deliberate, and also highly contingent upon the particular sociopolitical circumstances of that period. This research has been enormously successful in challenging some longstanding assumptions about cultural developments in Republican Italy. What remains to be done, and what this book sets out to do, is to show the richness and long-​generating characteristics of Italy’s own historical culture on the eve of such developments. In doing so, my intention is not to argue that Italy’s intellectual developments directly influenced the creation of written history in the hands of the first Roman historical authors, Fabius Pictor and his peers. Rather, I seek to cast light upon the extraordinary and dynamic historical culture that existed among the peoples of Italy for centuries beforehand. The resulting implication, I think, will be to emphasize what others studying Roman Republican literary culture now suggest: that Romans’ trajectory of cultural development and their turn towards written history was anything but obvious. Some readers may already be asking the question: what do I mean when I refer in this book to “history”? As I discuss in detail below, Italians never seem to have created a robust tradition of written historical narrative of their own. To insist that Italians also had historical culture thus demands 2 Both these themes are discussed below in Chapter 6; for Etruscan historiography, see Cornell 1976; for Italian influences on Roman artistic style, see Torelli 1997. 3 Feeney 2016; see also Purcell 2003; Goldberg 2005.

Introduction  3 a different understanding of what constitutes history. For thinking about these questions, I turn especially to the work of Marshall Sahlins, who spent considerable effort contemplating one of the cruxes of anthropological theory: the relationship between ahistorical structure and historical events in shaping human experience. In turn, this interest implied Sahlins’ longstanding engagement with history itself, but always from an anthropological perspective, leading him to consider historical production as to some extent culturally specific. In 1983, Sahlins influentially coined the phrase the “anthropology of history” and declared that the “different cultural orders studied by anthropology have their own historicities.” In subsequent studies, Sahlins drew attention, for example, to how features of Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta resembled Fijian accounts of the Polynesian wars of the nineteenth century. Of course, the Greek historian’s written, narrative account is strikingly different in both medium and content from High Fijian Genealogy, an orally transmitted tradition structured around kings and their descendants. Despite their great distance in time and space and despite very different cultures of history, however, both societies used the past to construct their respective social orders in surprisingly overlapping ways.4 As I return to later in this chapter, the basic point is that different cultures have different modes of historical production, and modes that are perhaps at first glance less familiar to us nevertheless remain valid and effective forms of history. These ideas intend to provide some contours to this book’s definition of historical culture: I doubt that many readers will be surprised to discover that early Italians were actively interested in their past, but their modes of historical production studied here can sometimes look different to us. For that reason, Italian historical culture remains comparatively understudied. The other implication of this anthropological perspective is to see this historical culture as closely bound up within the fabric of Italian society. The way Italians went about articulating past and present thus becomes a reflection of their developing social structures. One could turn this around: in many ways this is a book about the history of Italy before Rome, but one told from the particular perspective of developments in Italians’ sense of their past. Of course, this limited lens means that I do not claim here to offer a complete cultural history of Pre-​Roman Italy, but this book does intend to take a 4 Sahlins 1983; see also Sahlins 1981, 1985, 2004. For the influence of his work in this area, see Palmié and Stewart 2016.

4  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy step in that direction. By starting from the recognition that historical culture is contingent, we can approach Italian societies in part by asking how they constructed their history. For the remainder of this introductory chapter, I want to explore in greater detail some of these aspects: what the practice of history in Italy was like, how modern scholarship has understood it, and how a broader and anthropologically inflected concept of historical culture can help challenge in a productive manner some of our assumptions about Iron Age Italy’s cultural development. I have already broached the difference between written and oral history, and this binary will be important throughout this book. However, I want to begin discussion by insisting that this book is not simply about oral modes of historical production; the differences I intend to describe are more cognitive than simply technological. A fundamental challenge this book intends to pose is for modern historians to reassess tendencies to understand ancient historical production primarily as narrative and arranged according to linear, universal time—​these ideas have become very deeply rooted in scholarship about ancient Italy and Rome to the extent that they sometimes color expectations, making otherwise relevant evidence seem less so. Of course, the use of writing is not unrelated to narrative or particular temporal arrangement, but written texts can, I think, be historical without possessing such characteristics. To illustrate this, let us consider an Italian text: the monumental sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas from late third-​century BCE Tarquinia depicts on its lid a reclining portrait of the deceased holding an unrolled scroll filled with a long inscription (Figure 1.1). The sarcophagus and its inscription was found in 1878 along with almost two dozen other sarcophagi in Laris Pulenas’ family’s tomb.5 The nine-​ line text, among the lengthier extant Etruscan funerary inscriptions, begins as follows: (This is the sarcophagus of) Laris Pulenas, son of Larce son of Larth, grandson of Velthur, great-​grandson of Laris Pule the Greek—​who wrote this book on divination. He held the office of creals in this city, Tarquinia . . . 6 5 For the discovery, Helbig 1879: 78–​84. Sordi 1960: 177–​82; Mazzarino 1966: 86–​87; Harris 1971; Cornell 1976; Cornell 1978; Heurgon 1961: 275 discuss this text in relation to Etruscan sacred, not historical, writing; Hadas-​Lebel 2016 connects it to other historical inscriptions from Etruria like the Spurinnae elogia. 6 ET Ta 1.17: l(a)ris. pulenas. larces. clan. larθal. papacs. velθurus. nefts. prums. pules. larisal. creices. ancn. ziχ. neθσrac. acasce. creals. tarχnalθ. spurem. lucairce. ipa. ruθcva. caθas. hermeri. slicaχem. aprinθvale. luθcva. caθas. paχanac. alumnaθe. hermu. Mele. crapisces. puts. χim. culsl. leprnal. pσl.

Introduction  5

Figure 1.1  The sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas. Tarquinia, late third century BCE. Image adapted from Vianduval on Wikimedia commons, used with the kind permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia.

Only the first few lines of Laris Pulenas’ inscription, about to where my translation ends, are easily rendered into English. The specific meaning of the remainder is debated, but by all accounts the text continues with a long list of offices and priesthoods held by the deceased.7 Still, the opening is enough to signal Laris Pulenas’ interest—​or his descendants’ interest—​in his family’s past through its commencement with an extensive family tree, which names four generations of ancestors. The list goes all the way back to a progenitor who, as Jacques Heurgon first argued, emigrated from Greece to Tarquinia around the time of Alexander the Great.8 Laris Pulenas’ dress and appearance, as well as reference in the text to his priestly writings and offices, confirm that he belonged to Tarquinia’s religious varχti. cerine. pulalumnath. pul. hermu. huzrnatre. psl. tenin[e. . . . .]. meθlumt. pul. hermu. θutuiθi. mlusna. ranvis. mlamna[. . . . . .]mnaθuras. parniχ. amce. leσe. h(e)rm(e)ri{er}. 7 Morandi 2004: 390–​94; Belfiore 2011; Hadas-​Lebel 2012; Hadas-​Lebel 2016. 8 Heurgon 1957.

6  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy and political elite. The letters of the inscription still show traces of red coloring or rubrication, which would have made them visible, and from the proud way his statue displays the scroll to the viewer, we see how this genealogical past constituted a particular point of pride and source of authority. Laris Pulenas’ inscription, with its combination of ancestry followed by personal accomplishments, presents some similarities with well-​known Roman epigraphic texts on sarcophagi of around the same date, especially the funerary inscriptions of the Cornelii Scipiones from their family tomb just outside the city of Rome. The earliest two Latin inscriptions (elogia) from the tomb of the Scipios may have been composed around the same time as the Laris Pulenas inscription and reveal a similar textual structure of personal name followed by filiation then civic achievements. Compare the earliest funerary text (elogium) of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus: Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, born to his father Gnaeus, a brave and wise man whose appearance was equal to his virtue, who was consul, censor, aedile among you; he took Taurasia and Cisauna in Samnium, conquered all Lucania, and led away hostages.9

There are important differences of content between this document and that of Laris Pulenas, some of which can be ascribed to local artistic and cultural habits, or to differing historical circumstances. Still, the basic structure of both inscriptions bears noticeable resemblance. Both documents start with names and lineage and then follow with local accomplishments. Both display conscious interest in recording the past as a vehicle for prolonging the memory of the individuals to whom they refer, and both use that past to stake claims about the deceased’s role in the continuing social orders of their communities. In scholarship, the Scipio Barbatus text is regularly cited as background to the emergence of Roman historical writing, while Laris Pulenas’ text receives far less attention as such.10 What might be the cause of this imbalance? I would identify two responsible methodological issues, one broad and one narrow. The first concerns a scholarly opinion, prominent especially among influential thinkers of the last century, that genealogy is not history. In a 1966 9 CIL VI 1284: Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, Gnaivod patre prognatus, fortis vir sapiensque quoius forma virtutei parisuma fuit, consul censor aidilis quei fuit apud vos, Taurasia Cisauna Samnio cepit, subigit omne Loucana, opsidesque abdoucit. 10 But see now Hadas Lebel 2016.

Introduction  7 paper on time in ancient historiography, Arnaldo Momigliano dismissed biographical or genealogical time as inappropriate for ancient history. Greek and Roman historians were concerned with events and their reliability, and consequently the ability to test historical schema through synchronization was especially important.11 Based as it was upon the non-​universal units of family generations, in his view, genealogy could not withstand the scrutiny required by proper history. His opinion shares, unconsciously so far as I can tell, a great deal with E. E. Evans-​Pritchard’s classic anthropological exposition of the Nuer people of Sudan, published in 1940, in which he argued that genealogy was not history because it was “less a means of co-​ordinating events than of co-​ordinating relationships.”12 By extension of this sort of logic, we might surmise that the reason that historians remain interested in the epitaphs of the Cornelii Scipiones is not for their inclusion of ancestry, but for their proximity to the first written Roman histories of Fabius Pictor and his successors, who are assumed to have transformed this sort of material into historiography. If there is “no history without archives,”13 then these epigraphic texts might reveal what archival material may have looked like at a key moment in the development of Roman historiography. Following the same logic, in Etruria, where we are less certain how or when written historiography developed, if it ever did, what archival material we possess becomes less interesting. There has recently started to be pushback to the opinion that genealogy is distinct from history as properly conceived, however, and we would do well to join such challenges.14 The view of earlier scholars like that of Momigliano or Evans-​Pritchard reveals a notion of history as something distinct from other ways of engaging with the past because it is constructed upon a specific conception of time that is not measured in terms of human relationships but is instead “statistical . . . oriented and non-​reversible.”15 But why must history always display such qualities?16 For one thing, ancient peoples of the Central Mediterranean do not seem to have prioritized them in their own engagements with the past. Instead, a surplus of material would suggest that genealogy was one of the more common ways in which people 11 Momigliano 1966, esp. 14. 12 Evans-​Pritchard 1940: 108. 13 Goody 1977: 147. 14 For response to Momigliano, see Clarke 2008: 15–​16; for response to Evans-​Pritchard, see Shryock 1997: 21. 15 Lévi-​Strauss 1958/​1972: 286. 16 Provocatively, Tanaka 2015 argues for divorcing the concepts of history and chronology.

8  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy negotiated their places in time. Designations of ancestry are commonplace not only in the inscriptions we have thus far looked at, but more broadly in Etruscan, Roman Republican, and other Central Mediterranean epigraphic documents. We can cite a Punic gravestone from Olbia on Sardinia of third century BCE date, which recounts a lineage going back an astonishing seventeen generations.17 This material has everything to do with the articulation of past and present in these local cases, and we might reflect on what we lose if we draw a hard line between what counts as genealogy and what counts as history. The second methodological issue relates to a specific way in which Laris Pulenas’ text, including its genealogical interest, has been interpreted. By and large, earlier scholarship on the inscription tended to read it for signs of external influence. Because the inscription dated to the period after Tarquinia’s conquest by Rome, Massimo Pallottino suggested that the text reflected Roman cultural influences visible in the slightly earlier inscriptions of the Cornelii Scipiones. That is, he connects the two texts I have cited here, but only in order to identify in the Etruscan document centrifugal cultural pressures accompanying Roman expansion.18 Above all, a dominant approach to the inscription has been to see it as reflective of Greek influences, as emphasized by what is still the most influential treatment in a 1957 paper by Heurgon.19 Heurgon cleverly recognized that Laris Pulenas’ earliest predecessor named in his text, Laris Pule, was a Greek immigrant named Polles, who integrated himself into Tarquinian society by taking an Etruscan praenomen paired with the ethnic nickname “Creice,” Etruscan for “Greek.” Heurgon expanded further on this point, noting that Polles was a name associated with famous divinatory figures in Hellenistic Greece and on this basis suggesting that Laris Pulenas took the time to trace his ancestry back to his great-​grandfather because the name’s association with mantic fame lent prestige to his own authorship of the book of divinatory writings to which his inscription refers. Viewed in this light, the inscription contributes to debates over Hellenization in Italy, but at the same time Laris Pulenas’ interests tend to be sealed off from Tarquinia’s own intellectual history. Instead, Pulenas’ ancestry becomes a sort of particularized claim to external authority. 17 KAI no. 68; Quinn Crawley 2018: 38; Campus 2004 for this and other genealogical inscriptions from Punic Sardinia. 18 Pallottino 1936: 75, even speculating that the Etruscan text was in some Latin meter similar to Saturnians. 19 Heurgon 1957.

Introduction  9

Romans and Italians Writing History Until very recently, the study of ancient interests in history has cleaved to these ideas—​that historical interests were primarily expressed in written form and based upon a particular construction of time, and that they were predominantly Greco-​ Roman—​ not only in the interpretation of Laris Pulenas’ inscription, but in the more general study of the early development of history in Italy, which has focused almost exclusively on Rome. Again, interest in Greco-​Roman written history is neither uninteresting nor irrelevant to Italian historical culture, but my argument is that it forms an incomplete way of understanding ancient interest in the past. Positively, recent scholarship on early Roman historiography starts to expand beyond the boundaries of earlier views. This literature contends with the canonical story of how Romans became historical: in the traditional account, emphasis is placed upon the first generation of authors and especially the primogenitor Fabius Pictor, who around the time of the Second Punic War took the then-​unprecedented step of writing a full-​scale Roman history in Greek.20 His audience was fellow Roman elites but also Western Greeks, who were familiar with history as historiography.21 Pictor’s debt to Greek historiographical models is often noted, although he and successors are thought to have turned for the core of their information to a corpus of Roman para-​historical material like family archives and pontifical annals going back to the earliest years of the Republic.22 Each successive generation of “annalist” historians contributed to expanding this into a sprawling account of Rome’s origins and subsequent history. In this way, the traditional story of early Roman historical interest thus becomes the transposition of information from one type of written document (archival) to another (literary) with the help of Greek models.23 This rendition, in which history at Rome emerged from “documentary origins”24 holds the advantage of ancient pedigree, as it resembles

20 Badian 1966. 21 Cf. SEG 26.1123 from Taormina, an epigraphic record of a library collection containing Fabius Pictor’s work; for Western Greek historiography, see vol. III of Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker; Pearson 1987; Baron 2013. 22 Flower 1996; Oakley 1997–​2005, vol. I; for the pontifical tables, see Rich 2017 with earlier bibliography. 23 Cf. Feeney 2016: 174–​75, however, for a more nuanced view of Fabius’ relationship to his source material. 24 Syme Tacitus 1958: 132.

10  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the potted history of the origins of Roman historiography given to us by Cicero, who also stresses the role of the pontifical annals.25 Significant challenges to this orthodoxy over the last three decades have come especially in accounting for the non-​historiographical or non-​archival background to the efforts of the first Roman historians. Two influential recent theories have championed the role of oral traditions or of popular historical dramas; I will have more to say about these theses momentarily. Another important strand of current research studies the historical dimensions of literary genres not considered primarily historical, such as Latin epic or antiquarian scholarship, and their interaction with historical works more traditionally defined.26 A further productive approach has been to look at how Roman historiographers relied on Rome’s landscape of buildings or important places as transmitters of information in the construction of their written narratives.27 All of this work enriches our understanding of how Roman culture developed to the point of written history. Still, we may note that it has yet to displace an ultimately Rome-​centric view, and the central concern remains that of explaining how we arrive at the point of written Roman history, and this creates the opportunity of some unexplored paths. Thus, consider Nicholas Purcell’s excellent paper of Romans “becoming historical,” in many ways an emblematic study for my own in its intention to expand the limits of what we understand to be historical production.28 Purcell draws attention to signs of historical interest in early Republican Rome well prior to the start of written history. He focuses on chronological interests surrounding the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, founded according to tradition in the first year of the Republican state (509 BCE). The temple’s creation served for constructions of Republican time and history, from the appearance of an era measured out “from the foundation of the Capitolium” to an annual ceremony recorded by the Roman historian Livy of marking the passage of each year by hammering a nail into the temple.29 As Purcell observes, the nail ceremony finds no corollary in the Greek

25 Cic. Orat. 2.51–​52. 26 Especially Ennius and Varro, on whose historicity see now respectively Damon and Farrell 2020; MacRae 2017. 27 A good example is Roller 2010, applying an explicitly “sociocultural” approach; topography as substitute for text: Edwards 1996: 30; on monuments and annalists, Wiseman 1994; several contributions in Sandberg and Smith 2017 are relevant as well. 28 Purcell 2003. 29 For more expansive discussion of these topics, see Chapter 5.

Introduction  11 world, and he argues therefore that it seems more autonomously Roman. However, as he notes, Livy’s description of the ceremony reveals that the ritual did in fact find precedent in an Italian context, in a ritual undertaken at the Etruscan city of Volsinii.30 The topic is not explored by Purcell, but we are led to ask what more can be known about time-​keeping and historical production in Etruscan cities. These and other Italian possibilities appear to us as unexplored paths in a body of scholarship that has otherwise mostly focused on intellectual developments at Rome. And indeed, if we seek simply to pursue these paths without first modifying our expectations for what history is, they do not take us very far. Direct attestation of historical writing among those Italian peoples conquered by Rome are nearly nonexistent. Some oblique references to written works on Etruscan history have attracted notice, but the wholesale loss of Etruscan historiography itself has left some unconvinced that it ever formed a substantial literary tradition.31 Other Italian peoples fare worse: the Oscan-​speaking Samnites are thought to exhibit general lack of interest in literature, not only historiography, while Oscan literary achievements like Atellane farce can be argued away as products of exposure to Greek literary influences.32 Beyond this, when evaluated according to certain conceptions of historical production, many other peoples of Italy simply seem unhistorical, at least if we assess them by their apparent disinterest in historical writing. In a real sense, this unproductive inquiry into Italian historical culture might be seen to inherit some of the Romans’ own views. In a fragment of his grand and groundbreaking, but now mostly lost, Latin historical work on the Origins of Rome and the peoples of Italy, the Roman statesman and cultural figure Cato described the Ligurians who occupied the coastal region of northwest Italy around the area of modern Genoa as follows:33

30 Liv. 7.3.5–​7. 31 Cornell 1976; Briquel 2016; see below pp. 230–​31; for scepticism, see Harris 1971; Poucet 1985: 61–​62. 32 Salmon 1967: 118–​ 19; Scopacasa 2015: 30; however, compare Mommsen 1850: 116–​ 18; Crawford et al. 2011: 1 for more charitable views on Oscan literary culture. Mazzarino 1966: 87 raises the idea in passing of indigenous Sabine history, but this has not to my knowledge found any following. Dench 1995: 211 identifies a certain Alfius as a third-​or second-​century BCE Oscan historian, but see Smith and Cornell in FRH I.488. 33 For this fragment, see Smith 2018: 2.

12  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Cato in the Origins when speaking of Ligurians: but they, having lost all memory of their origins, are illiterate and liars and by no means recall the truth.34

Given the very fragmentary nature of his surviving work, we know little about the specific context in which Cato made this statement.35 However, it is easy to imagine his sentiment functioning within familiar Roman discourses about the barbarian Italian other. Such constructs are well known from Roman descriptions of rustic Sabines and Samnites, whose different cultural practices were ascribed to an uncivilized nature, and elsewhere we see that Ligurians were placed by Roman authors within similar categories of “barbarian” groups.36 The trope that barbarians, who relied on unwritten modes of transmitting information, were therefore dispossessed of history appears elsewhere in Latin literature.37 It seems therefore that Cato considered literacy alongside the ability to recall the past as two connected markers of civilization.

Empire and Historiography in Republican Italy Another important dimension to Cato’s link between writing and civilization is that of empire. As Tim Cornell has observed, Cato’s entire project to write the origins of Italian peoples served the purpose of describing the basis and effects of Roman power: these were conquered Italian communities, now part of Rome’s empire.38 The specific imperialist dimensions of Cato’s unhistorical (because illiterate) Ligurians are further amplified by the fact that Cato was no impartial observer. As the author of the first Latin historical work, Cato was a major early player in elaborating history in written form at Rome. His sentiment may be understood as relating the failure of Ligurian tribes,

34 FRH 5 Cato F34b =​Serv. Aen. 11.715–​17: Cato originum cum de Liguribus loqueretur: sed ipsi, unde oriundi sunt exacta memoria, inliterati mendacesque sunt et vera minus meminere. 35 For Cato in Servius, see Smith 2017; Cornell in FRH I.203 suggests reasonably that this fragment belonged to his larger account of the Gallic wars. 36 Cf. Cic. De leg. Agrarian 2.95 for Ligures duri atque agrestes, the same sort of language applied to Sabines and Samnites, on which see Dench 1995. For literary accounts of Ligurians, see Bourdin 2012: 78–​81. 37 Cf. Tac. Agr. 11.1; Bickerman 1952 suggests two schools of approach, one exemplified by Cato, and the other, perhaps created by Caesar, which reported native traditions in Gaul and Britain, e.g. BG 6.18.1. 38 FRH I 5. M. Porcius Cato p. 212; cf. Chassignet 1987.

Introduction  13 whom he probably met and interacted with during his military career, to conform to his own ideas about what constituted historical culture.39 Unlike the Romans or some other Italians described in his Origins, the Ligurians had not followed a progression of interest in the past, which at Rome had resulted in Cato’s own impulse to write down history in the Roman language. While Cato’s decision to use Latin as a language for historical writing was without precedent, recent research also demonstrates the influence on his work of Greek historiography.40 As this confirms, Cato was fully participatory in the project to create Latin literature from Greek models during the third and second centuries BCE. As I have noted, recent study confirms that there was nothing inevitable about the trajectory of Roman literary culture’s emergence in this period.41 Nothing insists that Rome create a written culture or that it be based upon the translation of Greek models into Latin. Within this reframing of Roman cultural developments, the elaboration of historiography also needs to be seen as exceptional. I would argue that this makes Roman sentiments about literary history all the more inappropriate as a measuring stick for assessing other societies. What Cato blames the Ligurians for lacking, then, was not historical consciousness full stop, but rather historical consciousness as the Romans understood it—​that is a fundamental difference. If we search for this particular brand of historical culture among non-​Romans, we may be unlikely to find it, but this absence does not necessarily make those peoples unhistorical or uninterested in their past. This discussion intends to reinforce the importance of allowing for other forms of history, as Cato’s combination of unhistorical and illiterate should be recognized as intimately connected to his larger imperialist perspective. This same link between empire and written history not only appears in Republican Rome, but also applies to some other, highly exceptional Italian evidence from around the same period. By way of an example, let us return to Tarquinia to consider one of the most remarkable and frequently cited indications of Etruscans’ vernacular historiography consisting of a series of Latin inscriptions recording the accomplishments of the Spurinnae family, known as the elogia Tarquiniensia (Figure 1.2). These texts were inscribed on marble plaques placed on a monument erected in the Early Empire in the precinct of Tarquinia’s largest Archaic



39 For Cato in Liguria, see Smith 2017.

40 Krebs 2006; cf. Cornell in FRH I, esp. p. 191–​95. 41 Feeney 2016.

14  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 1.2  Reconstruction of the monument of the Spurinnae family with statues and descriptive texts (elogia). Tarquinia, first century CE. Image by Nicola Terrenato based on an original by Mario Torelli, reproduced with permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.

temple, the so-​called Ara della Regina or “Queen’s Altar” (cf. Figure 4.4). They record Etruscan versions of much earlier events from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. While their very fragmentary preservation leaves doubt over some details, the events seem to pertain to international military exploits led by Tarquinia, and possibly by members of the local Spurinnae family. Mario Torelli, who favors the idea that these fragmentary inscriptions related a coherent family history of the Spurinnae, argues that the ensemble adorned their victory monument at the culmination of Tarquinia’s triumphal route.42 Whatever the case, the texts’ clear focus on Tarquinian military success confirms their distinctly imperial tone. Because their information is held to 42 Torelli 1975; Torelli 2019; also Cornell 1978; I deal in greater detail with the sanctuary in Chapter 4.

Introduction  15 derive from archival sources going back to some earlier point in the city’s history, these inscriptions frequently feature in debates over the existence of local written archives in Tarquinia and other Etruscan cities. This is a reasonable interpretation; however, it is important to point out that this means that the historical material upon which these inscriptions were based was generated in close relationship to a context of Tarquinian expansion.43 So far as we know, this impulse to commit events to written record in this Etruscan city was evanescent: once Roman power eclipsed Tarquinia’s in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the Etruscan city’s impulse toward written history disappears, or at least it has left no other traces in our evidence. Rather than revealing a more a chronologically and culturally extensive, but lost, interest in archival and written history, then, these Etruscan texts may be seen as exceptional artifacts of Tarquinian imperialism, much like Roman Republican historiography reflects Rome’s own drive to empire. Indeed, the cultural contingency of connections between particular modes of historical production and imperial power has been a focal interest of the anthropology of history. One result of this work has been to demonstrate how written history following linear time, with its academic and “citationary nature,” is characteristic of Western culture as inheritor of the Greco-​Roman tradition.44 This observation is often made about the modern world: Benedict Anderson influentially argued that historiography formed an essential shaping strategy of the Western nation-​state.45 However, it goes without saying that the modern academic discipline of history has been strongly shaped through its engagement with Greek and Roman literature, making these ideas applicable also in the field of ancient history.46 In his dismissal of the unhistorical Ligurians, Cato’s hitching of written history to Rome’s civilizing power reveals a similar nexus of writing, archival practice, and the imperial state. Certainly, there is an undeniable temporal convergence between the extension of Roman rule and Fabius Pictor’s decision to write down Rome’s history, and I am not the first to link the two processes.47

43 For the rise and fall of Tarquinian state formation, see Terrenato 2019: 96–​102. 44 Sahlins 1983; Palmié and Stewart 2016: 209–​10; for linearity, see Rowlands 1993: 149; for the citationary nature of Western history, see Said 1978: 176–​77. For some moves in this direction by Romanists, see Beard 1987; Laurence and Smith 1995–​96. 45 Anderson 1991. 46 Sahlins (1983: 526; 2004) makes a good claim in this regard with respect to the legacy of Thucydides; for Thucydides’ influence on modern historical study, see Harloe and Morley 2012. 47 Badian 1966: 6.

16  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Might we allow ourselves to take these observations even further? It could be argued that, by looking for historical culture in Italy as written, narrative history, or as preliminary stages leading up to historical culture of this sort, we ourselves adhere to a viewpoint that is essentially imperialist. That is, we proceed by expecting the cultural production of the conquered to resemble that of the conquerors. In so doing, we run the risk of overlooking what I hope to show was an abundant and lively indigenous tradition of historical culture among Italians prior to Roman expansion. It is possible that the loss of this richness and its replacement by the narrower evolution of historiography pertains to a process, which Dan-​el Padilla Peralta justly calls “epistemicide,” in reference to empire-​making’s attendant destruction not only of human lives, but also of local systems of knowledge and modes of cultural production.48 Owing to the nature of our evidence, it is enormously difficult to locate positive proof that Rome was actively replacing indigenous modes of historical culture. Still, we have no reason to assume a benign process of acculturation in Italy, and we may certainly point to other global historical examples of conquering powers asserting their own form of historical production upon the conquered.49

Monumenta If we think that Italians possessed a richer historical culture than traditional approaches have been able to capture, the next question becomes how to access it. I want to propose two intersecting ways of widening our perspective to incorporate the fuller range of Italian historical thought. The first involves treating archaeology as a primary and independent means of understanding a community’s engagement with its past, and the second relates to the concept I have called historical culture. Both approaches have much to do with how we understand the ability of objects and material culture (and not just texts) to encode history. That we need to look not only at texts to understand how ancient Romans and Italians understood their past is not a new idea in modern scholarship

48 Padilla Peralta 2020a, developing Santos 2014. 49 Cf. Trouillot 1995; Shryock 1997. There is intense recent debate about the degree and nature of violence involved in the Roman conquest of Italy, inspired by Terrenato 2019 and critics, as see Harris 2021; Maschek 2021.

Introduction  17 nor, in fact, in ancient thought.50 Alongside Cato’s opinion discussed above, another significant strand of Roman intellectual discourse considered history not as exclusively historiography or even textual in nature. Key is the semantic range attached to the Latin word monumentum, which is only partially translated by the narrower English word “monument.” Here is a definition of the term from an Imperial Latin glossary:51 A monimentum52 is anything both built on account of a dead person or anything done on account of their memory such as temples, porticoes, writing and song (scripta et carmina). But though a monimentum is made for the sake of a dead person, the word does not mean that anyone is buried there.

This textual information comes to us here through a complex route, from a Carolingian-​period abridgment of an Imperial lexicon by an author named Festus, about whom little else is known, who in turn abridged an even earlier etymological work by the Late Republican scholar Verrius Flaccus. However, the abridged version I cite above represents the fullest of several very similar etymologies of the same word found in other Latin authors, from Varro in the Late Republic to Isidore of Sevilla in the seventh century CE.53 The word monumentum is especially significant because Roman historians sometimes use it to describe their written works. Considering Cato’s opinion of the illiterate and therefore history-​less Ligurians, it is striking to find the same Roman author using monumentum to refer to written as well as non-​written modes of transmitting history elsewhere in his Origines, in a well-​known fragment relating the Greeks’ broadcasting of the fame of the Spartan king Leonidas with “monuments to his exceptional glory: portraits, statues, inscriptions, histories, and other media.”54 This usage confirms that

50 Fundamental for the interaction between material and history in Republican Roman thought is Wiseman 1994; for Greece, see Clarke 2008: 12–​13; generally, one might compare Assmann’s concept of “material memory,” although see my criticism of this sort of approach below. 51 Paul. Fest. 123L: monimentum est, quod est mortui causa aedificatum est et quicquid ob memoriam alicuius factum est, ut fana, porticus, scripta et carmina. Sed monimentum quamvis mortui causa sit factum, non tamen significat ibi sepultum. I thank Andrew Riggsby for help with this translation. 52 Monumentum is more common orthography than monimentum, which appears in Festus and Varro. 53 Varr. Ling. 6.49; Isid. Etym. 15.11; Varro may ultimately be Festus’ source, although the use of Varro as a source by Verrius Flaccus is debated, as see Glinister 2007; for monumentum in Roman authors, see Häusle 1980: 29–​40; Baroin 2010: 33–​37; Miano 2011. 54 FRH 5 F76; it is likely Cato has Herodotus in mind, as see Krebs 2006. Cato’s references to the relationship between writing and history should not be taken as contradictory, but likely reveal the Roman views of the different civilized statuses of Ligurians and Greeks.

18  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the definition of the term goes back to the earliest Latin historical prose. The word’s application to historiography is also apparent in later historians such as Livy, who refers to his own written work in his preface as an “illustrious monument,” and later describes his predecessors’ works collectively as a “monument of all the annals” (omnium monumentum annalium).55 Elsewhere, he uses the word to refer to physical traces that stand as proof of historical claims.56 Thus, the word monumentum encompasses a wide semantic range pertaining really to anything done with the memory of a dead individual in mind, including but not limited to written histories. That is, Festus’ definition suggests that any human-​made structure or action referring to the deceased could be understood as historical. What matters was not medium, but message, and especially the mnemonic or sepulchral character of that message, functioning to extend remembrance of an individual’s life beyond death. No doubt drawing on these antiquarian definitions, Pomponius Porphyrio, the later imperial commentator on the poet Horace, puts it especially well: “monumentum does not only mean the tomb, but everything about it that bears witness to memory.”57 This idea that the transmission of the past could be achieved by material objects is not particular to Romans. Greeks had a similar and probably cognate word μνῆμα, which applied both to abstract qualities of remembrance as well as to physical monuments, especially tombs. While we can be less certain, it would appear that Italian peoples used similar words, too. Etruscans appear to have had an equivalent term, manim, which appears on some gravestones.58 Italic languages have several words for tomb or memorial, but perhaps the closest in meaning to Roman monumentum is the word múfqlúm, which appears in the early Sabellic text of one of the Penna Sant’Andrea stelai, where it seems to stand both for the object of dedication and in self-​reference to the stele’s status as a memorial to the deceased.59 In sum, there seems to be nothing particularly Roman about a complex understanding of monumenta and cognate words, which describe the encoding and transmitting of the past. 55 Praef. 10; 7.21.6; see also 6.1.2 and 38.57.8: monumenta litterarum; Livy’s possible reference to his work as a monumentum has attracted considerable attention, as see Jaeger 1997: 15–​29; Feldherr 1998: 31. 56 E.g., 1.13.6. 57 Porphyr. ad Hor. Od. 1.2.15: monumentum non sepulcrum tantum dicitur, sed omne quicquid memoriam testatur. 58 Colonna 2015a: 13 n. 37, following the suggestion of Pfiffig 1969: 273–​75. The word occurs as such in CIE 216, 304, 3326. 59 Imag.Ital. Praetuttii/​INTERAMNIA PRAETVTTIORVM 1; see further p. 53.

Introduction  19 The conceptual range of monumentum and cognate words encourages us to look at how various media, including but by no means limited to texts, could independently generate historical thought. To be fair, scholars looking at the development of historical thought in Roman antiquity have often confronted the ways in which material objects served to transmit the past. But this work often tends, even if implicitly, to envision a developmental hierarchy in which such material forms of historical transmission form background material for written histories. The aim is rarely to demonstrate how monuments communicate historical meaning in their own right, but rather to show how they could function in relation to written history, and especially how physical monuments might have informed historical writing. However, Festus’ definition of monumentum presents no sign of any hierarchical relationship between material and text in terms of their functional ability to transmit the past.60 His list of things that work as monuments seems broad and unstructured, with the possible exception of the final scripta et carmina, writing and song, perhaps relaying a basic distinction between textuality and orality. Overall, the point seems to be that all these media form independent ways of extending a person’s achievements beyond the span of a human life. In his study of historical transmission in modern Jordanian society, the anthropologist Andrew Shryock critiques academic approaches to history that are too closely predetermined by existing notions of what history should look like: if we presume a template before we start our analysis, we tend to authorize only histories that conform to this type. Shryock concentrates on how, in his field of anthropology and ethnography, an assumption that history is documentary and linear has tended to admit oral histories as “codes to be broken,” requiring translation into written form before being analyzed and understood.61 We might say similarly that ancient historians of the Roman world have often treated non-​textual historical practices primarily as codes to be broken for what information they might shed upon texts. What I hope this discussion of monumenta shows, by contrast, is that the primacy of written vis-​à-​vis other modes of constructing historical knowledge is

60 There has been considerable debate about the ability of objects in the Roman world to transmit information unmediated by texts, while I believe Verrius Flaccus suggests at least that Romans considered it possible; for contrasting opinion, see Hölkeskamp 2014; Wiseman 2014; amid a very large corpus of art historical research into this question, see Smith 2002. 61 Shryock 1997: 28; I am grateful to Duncan MacRae for pointing me to Shryock’s work.

20  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy incongruous with ancient thought, which instead encourages us to take seriously the idea that objects worked autonomously to encode and transmit the past.

Archaeology and/​as History Meanwhile, archaeological theory has for some time recognized that materials uncovered through excavation can convey how communities understood and interacted with their past. Generally, like many fields in the humanities and social sciences, archaeology has experienced a memory-​ turn; I will have more to say about the concept of memory below, but its relationship to history seems clear enough.62 While ancient historians have also readily embraced memory studies, they have less often employed archaeological approaches that treat objects as bearers of mnemonic meaning truly independent from texts or textuality. Thus, the historian Karl-​Joachim Hölkeskamp, whose work has made crucial inroads against a narrow philological focus to the history of Republican Rome, recently develops a highly flexible concept of “intersignification” for understanding the varied media of Roman storytelling. However, Hölkeskamp admits that mnemonic messages carried by statues, monuments, and tombs mostly remain legible to us when they intersect with the written tradition either literally in the sense of tituli and inscriptions placed beside objects, or in terms of our reading of them based upon textual sources, and he tellingly compares the method to intertextuality.63 Otherwise, ancient history has often employed archaeological material in two ways, either teleologically as a means to understand the pre-​written background to the emergence of written history, or as a means to verify or falsify facts found in ancient sources.64 In relating ancient history and archaeology to each other in these ways, as two approaches to the past that are distinct but sometimes useful in combination, we might see ourselves as inheritors of disciplinary boundaries that developed during the formative 62 Alcock 2002; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2003. 63 Hölkeskamp 2014: 196; Hölkeskamp 2017; his use of the term “intersignification” follows Roller 2013: 119, whose aims are primarily concerned with literary analysis; note Hölkeskamp (2010; 125–​ 26) explicitly sets his work against the field’s traditional “methodological fixation upon a comparative classical philology”; cf. similarly Wiseman 2014: 48. 64 Exceptionally, see Gabba 1993: 23; for excellent study showing the limitations of using objects to affirm textual information, see Di Fazio 2017a; on the topic, see Padilla Peralta and Bernard 2022.

Introduction  21 years of these disciplines. Fundamental to the separation of the two fields of archaeology and history was the nineteenth-​century “discovery” of deep time.65 The late 1850s saw a number of critical developments in the understanding of the human past, perhaps most of all the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), while Darwin’s ideas also influenced contemporary advances in geology and stratigraphic archaeological method. Around the same time, archaeologists in France and England confirmed the existence of Paleolithic artefacts in excavated layers also containing the skeletons of extinct animal species. These discoveries revealed the longer history of the human past and periods then referred to as “pre-​Adamite” time along a continuum extending well before ancient history, biblical origins, or the existence of written records of any sort. The result of these advances had remarkable effects on the disciplines then engaged in looking at the past, and foremost among them was the move to separate historical time from earlier periods of human existence only accessible through material remains. Subsequently, the field of “pre-​history” was invented—​the name was used for the first time simultaneously in the title of works published in 1865 by John Lubbock and David Wilson—​to encompass the study of the human past before texts. Archaeology became the main tool of the new “prehistorian” and situated itself in between history and geology, an adjacent field bridging the two disciplines but equivalent to neither. We may emphasize how the presence or absence of texts served from this moment onward to draw the boundary between history and archaeology as separate disciplines. In their influential and popular 1898 manual, Introduction aux études historiques, Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos declare succinctly, “Nothing can take the place of documents. No documents means no history.”66 Around the same time, historians of early Rome and Italy were working to move philology and text-​based methodologies to the center of their own analyses. Major debate on the intellectual history of early Rome centered, for example, on whether a lost ballad tradition underpinned our extant source accounts of early Rome, as Barthold Niebuhr thought, or whether they derived from a stable core of early constitutional and legal material extractable through careful source-​critical analysis, as was the view of Theodor Mommsen.67 Pioneering historical works covering the history of 65 For the following, see Shryock and Smail 2011; Smail and Shryock 2013. 66 Langlois and Seignobos 1898: 2, “Car rien ne supplée aux documents: pas de documents, pas d’histoire.” 67 This debate is deftly recounted by Momigliano 1957; part of the issue was that these historians predated the pioneering work of Giacomo Boni in the Roman Forum, which exposed for the first

22  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy early Rome by Niebuhr (1812), Albert Schwegler (1853–​58), or Mommsen (1854), or on Pre-​Roman Italy by Giuseppe Micali (1810) and Karl Ottfried Müller (1828), paid little attention to archaeology except where it furnished epigraphic documents. Early Etruscan archaeology also reveals the influence of the pioneering analyses of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who denigrated Etruscan art as exotic and derivative of the higher-​quality arts of Greece.68 As a result of this background, even as archaeological material began to accumulate rapidly starting in the early twentieth century, historians confronted an already existing framework for understanding the early Italian and Roman past based upon textual source-​criticism and philological inquiry. Material that did not fit this framework could be relegated to the field of prehistory as distinct and apart, as was the case following Giovanni Gozzadini’s discovery of Villanovan culture near Bologna, or the spectacular discoveries of Isidoro Falchi and Antonio Minto in North Etruria. Instead, the aim was chiefly to integrate newly discovered material into existing accounts. Giacomo Boni’s uncovering of Early Iron Age layers in the forum starting in 1898 represented the most significant gains up to that date for our understanding of early Roman society. However, attempts to depart from texts entirely and tell Roman history starting first from this material record were often quickly dismissed by historians, as was the case with Einar Gjerstad’s monumental archaeological study of Early Rome (1953–​73). In his justly classic critique of Gjerstad’s work, Arnaldo Momigliano suggested that early Roman history formed an ideal laboratory for generating a historical method that combined text with archaeology. On the surface, this forms a welcome attempt to reconcile a disciplinary split that was by then over a century old. However, in its finer details, Momigliano’s proposal reveals a clear hierarchy, and the same desire to limit the meaning of history we have scrutinized above in his other writings: The pure archaeologist cannot rely on the living memory: he has to guess and to infer, very often by analogy. He has to deduce the thoughts from the objects, the individuals from the collective products. This procedure is ultimately far more open to arbitrary suggestions than the analysis of a literary tradition. Where there is a literary tradition, it is a safer guide to a past time important Iron Age material; for the impact of Boni’s work on the historical study of early Rome, see Ammerman 2016; the topic would repay further study.

68 De Francesco 2013; see chapters by M. Harari and G. Della Fine in Naso, ed. 2018.

Introduction  23 civilization than archaeology alone. But of course archaeology can act as an excellent control of a literary tradition. The archaeologists can check the truth of many stories by a direct approach which by definition is denied to the critic of literary texts.69

One might reply that language is also in its essence an analogous system of knowledge, although I take Momigliano’s point here to do with the different densities of linguistic and archaeological evidence with which to pursue analogical reasoning. Nonetheless, history built upon the literary tradition comes out on top, while archaeology is ancillary and possesses little autonomous ability to communicate historical information. Certainly many current scholars have moved on from this position; however, Momigliano’s judgment on the roles of archaeology and history continues to have profound influence, and over the last decades, as one recent discussion puts it, the relationship between historians and archaeologists of early Rome has been at times adversarial.70 Over the same period, owing probably to the simple fact that we possess far less textual evidence, the study of early Italy has shown a certain progressive interest in drawing history from archaeology, although some of the better recent syntheses remain works of prehistory.71 As I hope this discussion has shown, the disciplinary division between archaeology and history is a longstanding artifact of an intellectual history that begins in the mid-​nineteenth century. That being the case, we might ask if the division remains useful today. My impression is that outside the study of early Rome and Italy this disciplinary siloing between (textual) history and (archaeological) prehistory matters less and less.72 Both disciplines aim to reconstruct the past, and, especially as history’s interests become more egalitarian, they increasingly overlapped with those of archaeology and vice versa. One of the most durable contributions of processual archaeology of the last 69 Momigliano 1963: 108. Momigliano was, of course, first and foremost a historian of historiography, so his view cannot be entirely surprising, but he knew the archaeology well; for Momigliano’s influence, see Bickerman 1969: 400; the exact passage I have cited remains a touchstone for Wiseman 2020: 527. 70 Maiuro 2016: 175–​76; the best synthesis of early Rome remains that of Momigliano’s student, Cornell 1995, although his effort to argue for the veracity of elements of the historical sources on the basis of archaeology drew its own criticism. 71 For an exceptional work of early Italian history from archaeology, see Terrenato 2019, frequently employed here. Historical overviews feature commonly in recent handbooks, as see Bradley, Isayev, and Riva 2007; Bradley and Farney 2017; Naso 2018; there remains no synthetic historical treatment of all Italy in English since Pallottino 1991, although there have been several specfically on the Etruscans: Smith 2014; Shipley 2017; Riva 2020. 72 Feinman 1997; cf. Morris 1991; Sauer 2004.

24  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy century was its interest in socioeconomic structures.73 The two disciplines may employ their own methodologies, but perhaps we might allow that the biggest differences between history and archaeology as currently practiced are ultimately temporal resolution and scale, with archaeology offering a sort of “long-​term history,” and the two disciplines being more complementary than oppositional.74 Seeing archaeological inquiry as similar, at least in its goals, to ancient history can open up new avenues for understanding the development of human behaviors and practices in deep time.75 While for obvious reasons it lies beyond the scope of the present book, one could go so far as to consider how conscious engagement with the past has distinguished humans for almost the entire timespan of their existence. Here we can take a step very far backward in time to consider the spectacular archaeological discoveries at the Spanish site of Sima de los Heusos, which suggest something resembling symbolic or commemorative practices among humans living in the Middle Pleistocene, around 400,000 years before present. This is a cave site that shows no sign of long-​term habitation but contained over two dozen articulated human skeletons suggesting repeated and deliberate deposition of dead individuals. The demographic profile of these individuals suggests they did not die in a single event, but rather those responsible for depositing them here returned over a period of time to this same place for this same function—​somehow, meanings specifically associated with the site were transmitted through time. The further possibility of symbolic activity has been proposed on the basis of an Acheulean hand-​axe associated with the bodies.76 Archaeology in this case presents an expedient way to recover traces of what might be recognized as historical culture in deep time, in a context far removed from the presence of writing, but in which remembering and transmitting information about the past was clearly important. This discussion takes us a long way away from early Italy, but we might locate the evidence of Sima de los Heusos upon an enormously long spectrum of human behavior interested in articulating past and present, a spectrum upon which we might also place Italian monumenta (and, one should add, Roman written history).

73 For processual archaeology’s debts to Braudelian concepts of history, see Johnson 2009: 78. 74 Hodder 1987; cf. Roth 2019: 12. 75 For the idea of “deep history” pursued through the dissolution of the disciplinary barriers between archaeology and history, see Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011; Smail and Shryock 2013. 76 Carbonell and Mosquera 2006.

Introduction  25

Historical Culture We come now to give some further definition to this book’s theoretical apparatus for the concept of historical culture.77 As noted, the intended definition is very broad: I use historical culture to stand as convenient shorthand for those various modes of cultural production that facilitated a society’s engagement with its past. This concept of historical culture has a pedigree in modern historical sciences. To the extent that the phrase has been used by historians, historical culture is employed as an umbrella term to refer to popular, as opposed to academic, often written history.78 The phrase has been more rigorously theorized in the fields of the philosophy and the history of education in Germany, where historical culture (Geschichtskultur) designates the social, as opposed to personal, means of constructing historical knowledge.79 This is a very wide rubric comprising all the ways societies construct historical consciousness. Importantly, this concept of historical culture includes both academic history taught in schools, which are seen to reflect societal attitudes toward history, as well as historically inclined cultural outputs, commemorations, mass media, and other institutions. This concept of Geschichtskultur thus brings together on the same spectrum both professional and popular institutions, which contributed to the circulation of historical knowledge, and it also extends across medium and cultural genre.80 It is not just, as Sahlin’s anthropology of history begins by observing, that different societies have their own modes of historical consciousness, but it is that they often possess multiple ways of engaging with the past at once, and we can profitably see these as subspecies of the same genus of historical culture.81 For the purposes of this study, what is most useful is the implication that historiographical products, which have thus far received the most attention from scholars, belong to the same genre as other forms of historical culture, and not in a way that reveals hierarchy or domination of one over the other. In this way, we find something resembling the Roman monumentum in the sense that medium does not constrain the ways 77 Cf. Lanieri 2011: 3 n. 3 on “historical thought.” 78 Guenée 1980; Woolf 1997; id. 2003: 8–​10. 79 Rüsen 1991; Rüsen 1997; Schönemann 2000; Grever and Adriaansen 2017. 80 Grever and Adriaansen 2017: 75. Cf. Woolf 2003: 9, “A historical culture gives rise to, nurtures, and is itself ultimately influenced by the formal historical writing of an era.” His historical culture is closely bound to written history, but remains different from it, whereas the concept I employ encompasses all forms of historical production, including textual. 81 Sahlins 1983: 518.

26  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy in which a society engages with its past. The concept therefore can help build a more egalitarian approach to historical interest not only in the sense of revealing subaltern historical interests, but in linking historiography to other forms of historical culture in a way that does not make one subsidiary to the other. A second important aspect of this concept of historical culture for my purposes is that it concentrates attention upon history as a social concern. To return to Evans-​Pritchard’s differentiation between genealogy’s coordination of relationships and history’s coordination of events, viewed as historical culture his distinction becomes artificial, as the interpretation and arrangement of past events is itself a social and socially constitutive practice. Throughout this book, there is a close relationship between historical culture and memory, particularly concepts of social or collective memory. Memory is often held up as an important way of analyzing Italian as well as Roman thinking about the past in less formal or exclusively elite ways, particularly in a situation of low or socially specific literacy.82 However, it is important to distinguish between historical culture and concepts of cultural or collective memory, which I find less helpful for two reasons. First, it is not clear that Maurice Halbwach’s theory of collective memory is fully applicable to ancient Rome and Italy, not to mention the debate over its usefulness for modernity.83 One of the greatest issues with memory studies is the hinge between remembering as an individual action and the assertion of collective or social practice. All of these aspects and their interaction seem to some degree contingent.84 Thus, the distinction between individual and collective, and the way individual remembrance might have fed into or been shaped by broader social action, often seems different in antiquity. It is worth bearing in mind the degree to which those pioneering interests of Pierre Nora and others in collective memory have been generated as means of understanding modern collectives and especially nation-​states. Wiseman argues that literary evidence sometimes taken as proof of cultural and collective memory in Republican Rome more often recalls the memories of individual Roman aristocrats.85 Perhaps this critique understates the fluid 82 Di Fazio 2012; Di Fazio 2019; for preliminary critique of memory as applicable to the period studied here, see Smith 2015. 83 For general critique, see Confino 1997; Kansteiner 2002; for critique of its applicability to Rome, see Walter 2004: 18–​26. One issue is that, while memories may be shaped by social collectives, the act of remembering is more often than not individual; for this reason, if I can be so bold, I might venture to think that historical culture is more readily understood as a social or collective exercise than memory. 84 Thus, see Fentress and Wickham 1992 on “social memory.” 85 Wiseman 2014: 48.

Introduction  27 interplay between private and public concerns in Republican political culture, but I fully agree that we cannot uncritically apply concepts of collective memory to the Roman or Italian past.86 Second, the universality of memory presents problems. In practical terms, it may now be acknowledged that the enormity of memory studies itself by this point weakens its ability to characterize commemorative practice in particular period or societies. Already by the 1990s, scholars were lamenting that the concept had become “depreciated by surplus use.”87 Once acknowledged to be everywhere, memory becomes a sort of cultural version of Newtonian gravity, a largely undifferentiated force, whose existence is unnecessary to demonstrate. It is not only that such universality weakens memory as an interesting concept. The ubiquity of memory also, I feel, conceals some of the same problems I have already touched on in terms of a restrictive view of historical culture. One longstanding and still unresolved problem in memory studies is the relationship between history and memory.88 I take it as granted that memory operates in the construction of history; this is something that Roman authors also realized.89 However, some work on collective memory promotes it as something different from a component of history, and rather as a livelier alternative to it, less bound to formal rules, more instrumental and subjective, and therefore less reliable as a transmitter of the historical past.90 But this division between memory and history can form a back door into those exclusionary assumptions we have examined above about what history is and is not. In many memory studies, the memory of the past becomes history through some act of distillation or transformation, as historical knowledge possesses a distinct chronological structure, which requires a reduction of “the lived experience of memory.”91 Thus, history in this view forms an exclusive substance refined from the abundant resource of memory with particular temporal traits that livelier memory does not possess; but this exclusive understanding of what history is should by now be a familiar trope. We risk sliding back into ideas where history emerges through the distillation 86 For the highly dynamic relationship of public and private in Republican Rome, see Russell 2016; germane to this are also Smith 2006; Terrenato 2019 on the enduring role of families and the balance between aristocratic power and citizenship within the Republican state. 87 Confino 1997: 1387; cf. Galinsky 2016: 6. 88 Klein 1999. 89 Baroin 2010; Galinsky 2016: 4. 90 For Halbwachs’ division between history and memory and its reception, see Llobera 1995. 91 Ricoeur 2004: 153–​61; cf. Hölkeskamp 2020: 135.

28  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy of memory and thus forms a sort of appropriative technology employed by civilizations and empires. In applying ideas of historical culture, some further implications more specific to ancient history need to be addressed, as I am not the first to suggest incorporating into our discussion more popular and less formal or temporally linear modes of transmitting history in ancient culture. The two most well-​known examples of this are Nevio Zorzetti and Andrea Carandini’s revival of the idea that ballads and sagas helped pass down real information about early Rome, and alternatively Peter Wiseman’s championing of popular historical dramas as a means of historical transmission in “unwritten Rome.”92 Both theses encounter some problems of evidence, although I am less interested in confronting them along those lines.93 Rather, I want to point out that these inquiries continue to be guided by the broader attempt to assess the reliability of our extant literary histories, something that is secondary to this book’s goal of extending awareness of Italian historical culture in terms of both time and medium—​I leave to others the thorny question of what this study means for those more optimistic or more pessimistic opinions regarding the possibility of detailed reconstructions of Rome’s origins. By the same token, I am less certain than others that it is appropriate to differentiate between ancient commemorations of historical and mythological pasts.94 The prominence of legendary or mythological genealogies in Central Italy is suggestive, and in a later chapter I will consider “historical” city founders alongside Greek mythological city-​founders such as Aeneas.95 Elsewhere in this book, for example, we will see that assumptions about a division between myth and history have colored modern interpretations of the François tomb frescoes from Vulci in ways that are hard to support on the basis of the ancient evidence.96 In general, I would suggest that to set the boundaries of historical culture based on ideas of rationality and accuracy is to risk anachronism. One might go so far as to question how useful such a procedure is in any period. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s frequently cited concept of 92 Both authors have published their ideas extensively, but representative are Carandini 1997; Wiseman 1994; otherwise, Zorzetti 1991. 93 For problems with Carandini’s approach, see Wiseman 2008 (and much else by the same author); meanwhile, Flower 1995 points out issues with the cultural significance of historical drama. 94 Malkin 1987: 204; recently, ancient historians are perhaps softening on drawing a distinction between myth and history, as e.g. Ando 2015. On the subject generally, see the classic discussion of McNeill 1986. 95 Wiseman 1974; Farney 2007; for city founders, see Chapter 4. 96 Below pp. 228–​29.

Introduction  29 “invented tradition,” whereby social groups order themselves through the use of created, fictional versions of their past, is enough to tell us that recent and modern history is not itself devoid of factitiousness.97 In Roman terms, the word historia itself does not seem to have been bound by any insistence on a single or true narrative. Consider a remarkable passage in Varro work on the Latin language, in which he provides a “three-​headed history” (triceps historia) of the Lacus Curtius, a small shrine in the central area of the Roman Forum. It is quite certain, Varro says, that the monument was named for some historical figure named Curtius, but beyond that point there is disagreement. Citing several historical sources, he gives three mutually exclusive accounts revolving around a figure who either threw himself into a crevasse in response to an oracle, fell into a swamp during a battle, or took charge of commemorating the place of a lightning strike. Varro demurs from giving any opinion on which story is the correct or accurate one; there is no truth value implied to his use of the word historia. As a result, while the monument stands as a monumentum for conveying the past, the actual circumstances of the monument’s origins are for us as for him irrecoverable. Instead, we might understand this ensemble of material and related information under the rubric of historical culture, and we can extend this sort of thinking from Rome to other societies in Italy.98 Once again, I think we will find ourselves faced with a destabilization of some of our expectations about what history was and is.

The Structure and Scope of the Book Before embarking on an analysis of early Italy’s historical culture through this period, I offer some final preliminaries by way of guiding the reader. When I initially conceived of this project, I envisioned a series of regional surveys examining the trajectory of historical culture in different parts of Italy. The evidence quickly made clear that another approach was needed, as important commonalities emerged at certain times between cultural groups across different regions. We will see similarly timed trends in the spatial 97 Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983. 98 Ling. 5.148; for the archaeology of the monument itself, see now Coarelli 2020: 195–​98; I am sympathetic with Hölkeskamp 2014: 64, although where he sees memory I see history following Varro’s explicit use of the word historia; another way to dismiss this evidence might be to link it with Varronian antiquarianism, rather than historiography, but Varro draws from annalist authors; cf. MacRae 2016 on the artificiality of the distinction between the two ways of approaching the past.

30  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy repetition of family burial, for example, from Latium to Liguria, or in the appearance of historical narrative in tomb painting from Oscan Campania to South Etruria. While we must remain sensitive to regional variations, this raises the idea of a sort of Italian cultural area in which ideas about historical culture circulated, a situation that ancient historians often refer to as a cultural koine. This idea of circulating ideologies and modes of knowledge is itself in keeping with current thinking, which acknowledges considerable fluidity at the boundaries of ethnic groups in first millennium BCE Italy, as well as high personal mobility.99 Even as its cultural development is better known and better studied, Rome belongs firmly in the context of this Italian koine, although not necessarily because of its political priority in this period. I will frequently offer a glance at Rome’s early historical culture especially as it serves to illuminate developments also seen in other Italian communities. Nevertheless, I also admit that taking Italy as a bounded unit of inquiry is in some ways more of a modern than ancient convention for the period under study. As the Early Imperial geographer Strabo informs us, the idea of a unified geographical area called Italy was a novelty in the third century BCE, when the toponym was progressively extended from a small zone in the south to encompass the whole subalpine peninsula.100 In archaeological terms, Cyprian Broodbank points out how, as far as forging material cultural or other connections, maritime connectivity often mattered more than pure geographical proximity because of the significant differential implied in moving over sea and land.101 The ease of seaborne communication allowed, for example, Etruscan Campanians to exhibit greater cultural affinity with coastal Etruscan cities north of the Tiber than with indigenous settlements in the Campanian interior. Certainly, we will contend frequently in this book with ideas of Hellenization and the influence of cultural forms and ideas from the Aegean world. I say this not to undermine the following analysis, in which the peninsula shows sufficient coherency to form a unit of study. Rather, my suspicion is that some trends outlined here may have had wider geographical import in the Central Mediterranean, and other communities’ historical culture represents a promising topic for subsequent investigation. Here, each chapter takes up a thematic approach from an Italian-​wide perspective, at least as far as evidence permits. For a book about historical thought, I hope the reader will forgive me if I am perhaps cavalier about

99

Bourdin 2012; Isayev 2017. Strabo 5.1; see Harris 2007. 101 Broodbank 2000. 100

Introduction  31 absolute dates, largely because many of the trends I describe are seen to be very long term in their development.102 What is more important is to recognize that the chapters not only divide into themes but also follow a roughly chronological progression. Chapter 2 treats the burial of ancestors as an important site of engagement with the past in the Early Iron Age, starting in roughly the ninth century BCE. The next chapters introduce the theme of urbanization, which unfolded in Central Tyrrhenian Italy from the eight to the sixth century BCE. The early Italian city required a series of new technologies, including conceptual and historical ones—​it is my feeling that the cognitive work of urbanization has been somewhat overlooked in an otherwise burgeoning literature on Italy’s first cities. Chapter 3 looks first at new ways of structuring time in early Italian cities, while Chapter 4 looks at agents responsible for overseeing early urbanization, and their commemoration as founding figures. Chapter 5 turns to a particular novelty, calendrical time, arguing that the use of calendars to arrange time crystallizes in the context of urban ritual starting in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Such innovation will have supported new modes of historical thinking, and Chapter 6 highlights one such novelty in the form of historical imagery in Italian art starting in the fourth century BCE. One major theme scattered throughout the chapters is the dynamic interaction between long-​term sociopolitical processes and history—​again, we find ourselves confronted with the social meaning of historical culture. In particular, we will see the major importance of the Italian city as a catalyst for new forms of historical culture. It is the city that will be seen to encourage an all-​important shift from history built on ancestral time to history built on timeframes of larger and more transferable scales. A concluding chapter seeks to bring these threads together.

102 And also because of some issues establishing absolute dates, particularly for the Early Iron Age, as discussed further in the next chapter.

2 Ancestors As the previous chapter’s discussion of monumentum and cognate words makes clear, Italian society placed particular emphasis on tombs as bearers of historical meaning. To trace the origins of this practice, this chapter turns to the archaeology of death and burial in Italy during the Iron Age. From the ninth to the sixth century BCE, the political structure of Italian communities expanded from the family-​based societies of the Late Bronze Age into differently structured collectives.1 While much of the evidence discussed throughout this book comes from tombs, this chapter is the most narrowly focused upon burials as sites of historical culture. The process, too, is important: coming together to bury the dead was an occasion for surviving communities to reflect upon the role of their ancestors in the construction of their continuing social order. I discuss some previous approaches to burials and the burial process and suggest that we may profitably understand what happened in Italian burial practices in this period in terms of an intensifying reliance on the past to stake claims of social authority.

Burial and Social Structure in Early Italy By far, the largest single corpus of material for the reconstruction of Italian society during the transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age comes from the excavation of burials. At issue is how to view what must have been an enormously complex set of sociopolitical transformations through this relatively limited window of information. Anthropologists have repeatedly cautioned that burial is at best an imperfect reflection of social structure.2 On top of this, we should consider some issues more particular to the interpretation of archaeology in early Italy. Changes in Italian burial patterns in this period are 1 For synthesis, Bartoloni 2003; Bietti Sestieri 2018; Riva 2010 focuses on Etruria but with wide-​ reaching relevancy. Latium’s archaeology in the period is particularly well served by recent monographic studies, as see Smith 1996; Alessandri 2013; Fulminante 2014. 2 Parker Pearson 1999: 32; Cuozzo 2016 for Italy.

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0002

Ancestors  33 often understood to reflect shifting aristocratic notions of descent and property. This idea resembles some tenets of processualist archaeological theory, particularly the so-​called Saxe/​Goldstein hypothesis developed by New World archaeologists and applied explicitly to burial in Iron Age Greece. This theory holds that the emergence of formally designated burial grounds speaks to the appearance of family groups seeking to lay claim to property through inheritance.3 Similar concepts emerge, more often than not implicitly, in Italian archaeology in recent discussions of tombs as markers of family property in Etruria and Latium.4 These concepts might be traced all the way back to Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges’ influential nineteenth-​century reconstruction of the rise of property rights out of the needs of ancestral cult, and the contribution of such religious practices to the development of cities out of family groups.5 In Italian archaeological literature, these ideas about property, social structure, and burial are often applied to archaeological evidence through the mediating lens of the Roman gens. What was the gens?6 Formally, the gens was a unit of relationship in Roman Republican society larger than the family but smaller than the state, which we know had particular bearing on issues of marriage, inheritance, and descent. From fragments of the early law code known as the Twelve Tables, we know that the gens appeared in these arenas of law and politics by the mid-​fifth century BCE, but otherwise our sources for the Roman institution are entirely later in date. Nonetheless, the concept is often applied in very specific terms well beyond Rome to other Italian communities. We find assertions that formal burial areas in cities other than Rome served as locations for members of gentes or that they were organized around branches of gentes, confirming the relational structures that bound individuals to each other and marking land held collectively by the gens’ members. In this way, burial formed a crucial and archaeologically visible element in the solidification of what is called società gentilizia, gentilician society, a regularly used but rarely defined phrase intending to describe a transitional stage of society between the Bronze Age family and the Archaic city-​state.7



3 Morris 1991; Whitley 1995.

4 Zifferero 1991; id. 2006; for Rome, see Cifani 2009. 5 Yoffee and Terrenato 2015: 6–​10.

6 The following depends on Smith 2006; id. 2019a.

7 For società gentilizia, see the essays collected in Di Fazio and Paltineri 2019.

34  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy That death and burial in Iron Age Italy led communities to confront notions of family and descent seems unobjectionable, and I will take it for granted that the archaeology of burial in this period reveals aspects of family groups. Later in this chapter, I discuss some of the earliest inscribed objects from Italian tombs, which regularly mark kinship relations through filiation. One grave marker from Asculum Picenum even preserves a descendant’s claim to set up the monument “for his mother and father.”8 However, the issue is how to describe how these sorts of claims came together to make up wider social structures, and problems emerge in the detailed application of the Roman gens to Iron Age Italy. Christopher Smith points out that, while the gens seems to have been an important unit in early Roman society, the later Roman sources upon whom we depend provide neither a consistent nor coherent picture of it. Moreover, even if we could glean an authentic idea of the early gens, the contingent character of aristocracy at any point in Rome’s history means it should only be used to analogize societies beyond Rome with the utmost caution, if at all.9 Thinking about the specific idea that collective burials marked gentilician claims to property, for example, actual evidence for the hereditary principle in early Mediterranean aristocracies is scarce, while the early Roman kings, according to tradition, were not descended from each other.10 It is entirely possible that the gens, instead of being a primordial component of Roman Iron Age social formation, rose to the fore of sociopolitical relations in the fifth century BCE as the rising power of an elite hereditary group known as the patricians sharpened interest in inherited status. Gentilician concerns visible in the Twelve Tables would in this view be somewhat more recent, and anyway by that point several centuries removed from the Early Iron Age burial practices sometimes interpreted as signs of società gentilizia. If these are technical arguments, we can insist simply that kinship and ancestry are socially constructed concepts, and this makes it problematic to work from an external notion of social structure toward the evidence, rather than the other way around.11 One need look no further for an example of the artificiality of descent than later Republican Rome, where Graham Burton and Keith Hopkins have portrayed adoption and marriage as demographic imperatives for prolonging aristocratic power beyond a few generations. For

8 Imag.Ital. I.192–​93, Picenum/​ASCVLVM PICENVM 2, matereí patereí. 9 Smith 2006; id. 2019a.

10 Smith 2021.

11 Schneider 1984; Sahlins 2013; cf. Smith 2019a: 29–​30.

Ancestors  35 the basic reason of high infant mortality and low life expectancy, families were compelled to create social, but not biological, links with other families to perpetuate their authority across several generations.12 There is no reason to assume that kinship in Early Iron Age Italy was always biological or that practices like adoption did not already exist. In many societies, ancestorhood was an achieved status, not merely created by death, but ancestors were designated through particular postmortem rituals.13 The fictive or at least non-​ biological nature of kinship made it contingent, and this problematizes the idea that we may ever really parse family relationships on the basis of burial archaeology.14 Nor has modern DNA science eliminated these issues, as ancestry today can refer to an array of genetic relationships ranging from direct genealogical descent to similarity expressed in a group’s genetic material to various degrees.15 It would be anachronistic to expect ancient societies to have had more exacting or interculturally stable ideas of lineage and descent. Where does this leave us? I think that we can reasonably suppose we are dealing in Early Iron Age Italy with groups who understood their relationship to one another through concepts of kinship, but we must also assume that such concepts were labile and dynamic, as they always are. A number of scholars have emphasized the role of Iron Age burial in Italy in generating collective memory, and this is not unreasonable as the mnemonic power of death and burial is widely recognized across cultures.16 However, in the last chapter I voiced my dissatisfaction with the imprecision and implications of a memory-​based approach to Early Italy. We can be more precise: it is not just that phenomena discussed below like heirlooms, multi-​burial tumuli, ancestral images, and so forth were commemorative in a broad sense, but they were historical in that they reveal the use of the past to knit society together—​ there is an important social element here. I think that Italian burial archaeology helps reveal a form of historical culture that Marshall Sahlins terms “anthropomorphic history” in which social relationships are mainly understood as relationships to celebrated women or men in the past. This was a world in which genealogy and ancestry mattered greatly to the construction of society.17



12 Hopkins and Burton in Hopkins 1983: 73–​74. 13 Whitley 1992: 122. 14 Zerubavel 2012.

15 Mathiesen and Scally 2020.

16 Cuozzo 2003; Di Fazio 2019: 80–​83. 17 Sahlins 1983: 519.

36  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The other thing to say is that, in the overall shape of historical culture in Iron Age funerary contexts, ideas of continuity, either real or invented, must have played a dominant role.18 The claim to derive authority from burial implies a certain conservatism as, confronted with the loss of a prestigious member, the surviving community turned to its past to support its renewal and continuing place in the abiding social order. Much of this chapter’s exploration of funerary ideology centers upon the many ways in which Iron Age burial grew increasingly recursive, by which word I mean that the repetition or recollection of spatial or material aspects allowed communities to extend the prestige of buried individuals over longer and longer periods of time. This temporal extensivity, I suggest, allows for a sort of ready quantitative metric for revealing the intensification of a historical impulse. By burying in the same area or even in the same tomb as a celebrated ancestor, however ancestry was understood, or by depositing in the grave objects with temporally based value, Iron Age communities supported a sense of their permanence. As Michel Gras emphasizes, the power of Iron Age Italian aristocracies therefore depended on their consciousness of time, and their prestige insisted that past status endured into the present and would continue into the future.19 The sections of this chapter each tackle a different dimension of historical culture in the material record of burial in Italy from the eighth, or sometimes ninth, down to the sixth century BCE, extending from the Early Iron Age through the orientalizing period.20 I have chosen to organize discussion thematically, not chronologically, as change unfolded at different paces in different areas. I also present an eclectic collection of examples from across Italy, rather than concentrate on single regions such as Latium or Etruria, to give the two best studied examples. The evidence is greater than can be treated 18 Zerubavel 2003: 37–​54; for Italian burial as “invented tradition,” see Cuozzo 2003. 19 Gras in Principi Etruschi 2000: 15–​16; see also Di Fazio 2019: 81; the ideas find resonance in the classic anthropological discussion of social orders by Parry and Bloch 1989: 23–​28. 20 A few words on the fraught topic of Iron Age chronology as it applies to this chapter: while the absolute chronology of the Early Iron Age remains debated, the start of the orientalizing period is firmly anchored to the last quarter of the eighth century BCE by the discovery of an Egyptian scarab in an early orientalizing burial from Pithecussae and a situla from Tarquinia bearing cartouches of the Pharaoh Bocchoris, whose short reign may be dated to 720–​715 BCE, as see Ridgway 1999. As for the Early Iron Age, there is debate between traditionalists, who see a condensed cultural development over two generations preceding the orientalizing period, or those who depend on recent radiocarbon work to extend the beginning of the Iron Age back into the ninth century BCE, making sociopolitical developments seem less abrupt; Nijboer 2016 reviews the debate. I do not wade into the complex topic here except to note that it has implications for sites such as the relatively late (traditional) dates of the Iron Age at Osteria dell’Osa versus the relatively early (radiocarbon-​based) dates at Francavilla Marittima. Sociopolitical development in these two sites may have been more contemporary than the following discussion suggests.

Ancestors  37 in full here, and there is no claim made to comprehensiveness. Instead, the ensemble that follows intends to support the idea of very geographically extensive consistencies in practice, even as they manifested differently at the local level.

Burial before History The claim to find historical impulses in Early Iron Age burial does not intend to imply that earlier Italian societies did not also create and pass on traditions in similar contexts. Iron Age burial practices often present a situation of intensification, not innovation, as Italy in general shows greater social continuity through the Bronze to Iron Age transition than some other parts of the Mediterranean world, most notably the Mycenean Aegean.21 Some elements of Italy’s Iron Age funerary ideology display very long legacies. Multi-​generational burials in Italy go back at least as far as the Early Bronze Age. Burial sites also saw reuse over long periods of time, either continuously or discontinuously, as at the site of Crostoletto del Lamone near Lake Bolsena, where Middle Bronze Age tombs were reused in the Final Bronze Age, at a distance of several centuries.22 There are also spectacular examples of Bronze Age burial tumuli. We will focus in this chapter on the use of the burial tumulus as a basis for historical culture, but the form was by no means an Iron Age invention. A series of burial mounds reaching 24 m in diameter from the area of Parma are dated to the nineteenth century BCE. The earth and stone burial mound at Torre Santa Sabina near Brindisi, almost 16 m in diameter, was built atop at least twenty-​five different burials. At its center, the earliest burial contained pottery dating to the fifteenth or fourteenth century BCE.23 However, the frequently isolated and singular nature of such cases tends to prove the point. In the area around Brindisi, for example, we do not see other tumuli like that at Torre Santa Sabina, which has been compared with examples across the Adriatic, while Iron Age burial grounds in general are noticeably absent from much of Messapic Apulia.24 Thus, while a peninsula-​wide perspective turns 21 Bettelli 2015; Smith 2021; for the Iron Age as a moment of transformation for burial practice in Etruria, see Riva 2010. 22 Naso 2011: 116–​17. 23 Onnis 2011; Tagliamonte 2015a: 486. 24 Iacono (2019: 81) emphasizes Albanian parallels for Torre Santa Sabina; for Apulian burial, see Tagliamonte 2015a: 488–​89; this has led to the suggestion that local practices of adult burial were such as to leave little archaeological trace, perhaps involving the scattering cremated ashes.

38  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy up precursors of later funerary practices, they often appear exceptional or locally isolated. We can also identify specific discontinuities in burial over the Bronze to Iron Age transition. At several sites, the Early Iron Age sees new cemeteries or areas within cemeteries open as older ones go out of use. There is also a discernible change in scale of the material record of burial from Bronze to Iron Age, something surely relating to the increasing size of settlements starting around the eighth century BCE. In Central Italy, where cremation burial starts in the twelfth century, the large Final Bronze Age necropolis at Poggio la Pozza near Allumiere in northwest Lazio contains only some fifty burials.25 Related communities were unlikely larger than 100–​300 individuals, often smaller, and may to some extent have been impermanent or seasonal.26 Final Bronze Age and Early Iron Age burials show less social stratification of wealth, and this is sometimes interpreted to reflect a more egalitarian society. The situation then transforms rapidly, especially in the early orientalizing period in the last decades of the eighth century BCE. Appearing around this time, the first wave of “princely” burials contains a striking amount of lavishly wealthy grave goods and exotica imported or adopting styles from the Eastern Mediterranean.27 To characterize early burial, however, egalitarian probably overstates the case, as we do see select wealthy earlier burials.28 We also can point to attempts to distinguish individual graves within Bronze Age cemeteries, for example, through mixed cremation and inhumation practices.29 All of this once again makes it prudent to think of changes to Italian funeral ideology in the Iron Age as a process of

25 Bartoloni 2002: 87. Bronze Age Northern and Southern Italy show somewhat different situations with larger communities in the Po Valley and Salento, as see Cardarelli 2015; typesites include the terramare of Casinalbo near Modena, where 674 graves have been excavated, and the monumental Bronze Age settlement of Coppa Nevigata in Puglia. Interestingly, both regions are then latecomers to urbanization in the subsequent period, whereas Central Italy with its smaller Bronze Age cemeteries sees more precocious urbanization. 26 Demography in this period is a guessing game, but for figures of this magnitude see Cardarelli 2015: 167; for the Early Iron Age, compare Bietti Sestieri 1992: 99–​102. 27 Here and throughout, I follow scholarly convention in calling the wealthy tombs, often containing objects imported or aesthetically linked to the East, “princely” burials, although there is no specific indication that these were princes in any real sense. In fact, the identity, often in some cases the gender, of individuals buried in these wealthy tombs is variable. The implied assignation of royal status is wrapped up in assumptions about elite identity in this period that have lately come under criticism, as see Riva 2006 with reference to Etruria. 28 Guidi 2010: 18; indeed, Bietti Sestieri 2018, in the revised edition of her 2010 handbook, largely moves away from the concept of egalitarianism. 29 See Cardarelli 2015: 172–​73 for Northern Italy.

Ancestors  39 intensification of longer-​term social strategies surrounding burial, although the degree of intensification was in many cases significant.

Spatial Clustering The location of burials within cemeteries is a longstanding point of focus for burial archaeology, which recognizes how particular patterns or organizing principles reflect social status and the way in which communities construed their internal structure.30 We may also note how recursive spatial practices—​ returning to the same place over time—​form powerful ways of scaffolding commemorative practice and facilitating claims of historical continuity.31 These are relevant considerations for Early Iron Age Italy as burial in the period witnessed considerable changes of a spatial nature. We see the establishment of entirely new areas of burial around Italy, and, in cases where continuity is observed, the abandonment of older areas and opening of new ones within existing cemeteries. These new Iron Age cemeteries commonly display burial organized in distinct clusters of burials. These clusters are visually apparent either by a space left open around a dense area of tombs or by the addition of physical features like borders of stones or other markers. In places where visual features do not make clustering obvious, the study of the distribution of goods deposited in different graves often reveals clustering patterns. Each cluster shows its own internal organizational logic, often developing concentrically or linearly outward from older central burials.32 The spatially recursive organization of burial suggests that communities identified corporate relationships connecting themselves to earlier members or ancestors over time. Archaeologists often correlate burial clusters with family units, households, or clans.33 This is likely to be true in a generic sense, although for reasons discussed above, I am cautious about attempts to pursue a more intricate understanding of family or political groups on the basis of clustered burial patterns. Instead, what I want to emphasize is that the force consistently operating in these developments may be understood as historical in the sense that we can see space used to make connections with past 30 Parker Pearson 1999: 11–​17. 31 Zerubavel 2003: 40–​42; on temporal scaffolding, see Snyder 2019: 647–​48. 32 For some Late Bronze Age precedents, see Peroni and Vanzetti 2006: 26. 33 This is not only true of Italian archaeology; cf. Goldstein and Mainfort 2010 for a number of studies of space and family units in Mississippian culture.

40  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.1  Early phases of burial (tenth–​eighth centuries BCE) in northwest area of Iron Age necropolis of Osteria dell’Osa, Latium, showing expansion from initial groupings North and South to other clusters. Drawing by author based on data in Bietti Sestieri 1992.

members of the community. Clusters functioned to create temporal scaffolding for the preservation of status or ideology over several generations of burial and sometimes for very long periods of time, extending from a particular deceased individual to later members of their community. Whatever the more particular motivating impulse, the return to particular burials may be thought to depend upon traditions handed down after their death about an individual’s status and authority. One of the most discussed examples of burial clustering in Iron Age Italian archaeology comes from the cemetery of Osteria dell’Osa in Latium (Figure 2.1).34

34 Bietti Sestieri 1992; Smith 2006: 147–​50.

Ancestors  41 This was one of several burial grounds around the edge of Lago di Castiglione, in the vicinity of the later settlement of Gabii, some 15 km east of Rome.35 The necropolis’ almost 600 excavated burials span an arc of time between the late tenth and early sixth centuries BCE. Already from the earliest period, tombs arrange into clusters of inhumations around central cremation burials. The borders of these early clusters were not defined by any visible architectural features, but their spatial distinctions have been detected through the study of grave goods and burial rituals. The first two clusters emerge contemporaneously, and each lasts for about a generation, maybe thirty years. Different clusters then emerge in an adjacent area until much of the northwest part of the cemetery fills with a series of twelve clusters, each containing an average of thirty-​five burials and spanning about three decades’ time. In the first half of the eighth century BCE, the situation at Osteria dell’Osa changes radically with the appearance of a new cluster (Group 230–​93) to the southeast, outside the area of the plan illustrated in Figure 2.1 and spatially separated from the earlier burial area by a margin of empty ground. The fifty-​ six tombs of Group 230–​93 densely occupy a circular area about 15 meters across and cover a much longer span of time, from circa 770 to 650 BCE.36 At the center of the area are two burials, an elderly male inhumed in a trench grave and a female probably in her twenties cremated and buried in a pit grave. Both these burials are particular. The male burial contains the earliest full-​sized weapon found at Osteria dell’Osa, a bronze spear point, while the female burial is among the last cremation burials at a time when local practice had shifted to inhumation. The detailed evidence from Osteria dell’Osa allows us to track one community’s development of the spatial organization of burial from an initial period of many clusters adjacent to one another to a single larger cluster that was physically distinct and more temporally durable. The excavator, Anna Maria Bietti Sestieri, attributes this change to the enlargement of social units from family to gens, but for reasons discussed above I am less convinced that we may apply this interpretation. What interests me instead is the undeniable if more basic observation of convergence of spatial and temporal aspects: as clustering began to employ physical markers to give it greater visibility in the landscape, it also saw an extension of temporal durability. The

35 For burial in the area of Gabii, see Mogetta 2020. 36 I use the absolute chronology based on ceramic sequences followed by Bietti Sestieri 1992, although radiocarbon work may now raise some of these earlier dates.

42  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy establishment of Group 230–​93 seems to mark a new phase of intensified interest in commemorating past individuals through time. Bietti Sestieri’s exemplary excavation and publication of Osteria dell’Osa offers a detailed view of these spatial trends, but evidence from elsewhere in Italy leads us to suspect their considerably broader geographical scope. Staying within Latium, we detect family clustering more or less coeval to Osteria dell’Osa’s Group 230–​93 at Castel di Decima and Ficana.37 At Satricum, Demetrius Waarsenburg demonstrates how princely central tombs became focal points for the spatial arrangement of subsequent burial.38 Individual elite groups at Satricum displayed clustering in different ways, with one group erecting an earthen mound around a central burial around which they continued to bury for over a century, while another group’s cluster lasted for around the same extent of time but did not include the erection of a burial mound. At Acqua Acetosa di Laurentina, circular clusters from the first quarter of the eighth century BCE display an apparent correlation between distance from central elite burials and the quality and quantity of grave goods, with fewer signs of wealth the farther one moves from the central burial.39 At Caracupa near Sermoneta, we find four distinct burial groups emerging in the first half of the eighth century BCE. Three groups center on one or a pair of inhumation burials, each lasting thirty to fifty years, while a fourth composed only of female burials is within the Iron Age settlement.40 Thus, even within a single region, we find a widespread trend toward clustering, but with considerable variety in its local expression. Rome may be mentioned in this same context, although our view of the Iron Age city’s cemeteries is hindered by overbuilding and the generally poor quality of available archaeological data. Very little can be said about the spatial configuration of the vast Esquiline necropolis, rapidly excavated in the late nineteenth century.41 From the tenth century BCE onward, multiple nodes of burial emerge around the city, some in close proximity to one another, but how each area was initiated or internally organized is impossible to say.42 Clustering also appears frequently in Early Iron Age cemeteries over the Tiber in Etruria. Burial grounds at Veii and Tarquinia show family clusters

37 Bedini 2018; id. 2020. 38 Waarsenburg 1994.

39 Bedini 1984, interpreting this as a gens leader and his dependents. 40 Bietti Sestieri 1992: 227–​28.

41 Pinza 1905 catalogues over two hundred tombs. 42 Damiani and Parisi Presicce 2019: 199–​226.

Ancestors  43 from an early date.43 Generally, in Etruria the trend of returning to the location of an earlier grave was amplified from an early date by the construction of monumental architecture, a phenomenon discussed below in a separate section of this chapter. By the later eighth century and into the seventh century BCE, we find clustered burials at numerous sites representative of the diaspora of Etruscan culture, from Verrucchio in Emilia-​Romagna to the north to Pontecagnano in Campania to the south.44 At Pontecagnano, completely new funerary areas were opened around the settlement in the late eighth century BCE, which then endured until the early fifth century BCE. Grave goods suggest a social articulation of space with areas reserved for distinct elite groups who espoused internally consistent ideologies but differed from one another. That is, there was no dominant material culture for the Iron Age site, but rather different groups showed particular affinity with South Etruria, or with the cultures of the Campanian hilltop sites of South Etruria, while each group staked claim to spatially discrete areas for burial. Again, spatial changes are nearly universal, but unfold in different ways even among elite groups of a single community. Each area at Pontecagnano shows internal clustering around wealthy tombs. One circle of tombs in the northern area formed around the inhumation of an adult woman buried in the late eighth century BCE with lavish prestige goods including imports from the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. Over two dozen burials arrayed concentrically around this grave attest to continued burial into the early fifth century BCE, as traditions about the social prestige of this “princess” shaped the spatial organization of burial practices for over two hundred years.45 Another group, somewhat earlier in date, consisted of four male inhumation burials placed around the earlier central cremation of another male, whose grave was covered by a stone platform and surmounted by a roofed wooden hut.46 We can move even further afield, beyond the realm of sites identified with Etruscan culture, to observe family clustering evident in the cemeteries of other early Italic peoples. I give a range of examples to illustrate both the very wide geographical scope as well as the persistent local variability of the 43 For family clustering in the ninth century BCE at the Veian necropolis of Quattro Fontanili, see Toms 1986: 72–​73; Guidi 1993: 78; Nizzo 2011; for Tarquinia, see Trucco et al. 2005. 44 Clustering at Verruchio: Von Eles 2006: 67. 45 Cuozzo 2003: 108–​11. 46 D’Agostino 1990, employing the interpretive framework of the gens; critical remarks by Morris 2016.

44  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy phenomenon. We find examples across the entire length of the Tyrrhenian seaboard, starting in the extreme south in Calabria, where family clusters are detected at Oenotrian cemeteries at Torre Galli or Francavilla Marittima.47 At the latter site, one tomb mound contained twenty-​seven burials around a central princely tomb. Internal to the mound were eight or nine subgroupings, perhaps relating to generations. In all, burials in the mound at Francavilla span three centuries, from circa 830 to 525 BCE.48 We can move as far north as Liguria to the key regional cemetery at Chiavari, some 35 km down the coast from Genoa. Material from burials here shows links with the Iron Age Golasecca culture of northern Italy. The cemetery develops in the late eighth century BCE and grows to include 126 excavated tombs divided into three separate plots, which were all in use more or less simultaneously and may reveal competing elite groups. The division into plots belongs to the very earliest phase of the cemetery, as is confirmed by stone boundary markers defining the edges of each section and stratigraphically relating to the cemetery’s earliest phases. Two of the three sections are partially destroyed, but a third is preserved more or less intact. Here, several waves of burials were inserted into separate enclosures within the larger burial area, each enclosure either circular or rectangular in form with its edges marked by rows of stones. The second wave of burials followed the initial burial in each enclosure after perhaps twenty-​five years. Around the middle of the seventh century BCE, another group of burials was made in new enclosures, mostly smaller rectangles, inserted within the open spaces between the earlier ones. A few final burials were inserted within these secondary enclosures at the end of the seventh century BCE, by which point the whole plot was very densely occupied by graves.49 Once again, the particular pattern is distinct to the site, even as the desire to return for several generations to bury near to particular tombs resembles what we see elsewhere in Italy. Across the Apennines, we find clustering in the Sabine and Samnite highlands and in Adriatic Italy. At Corvaro near the border between Lazio and Abruzzo, recent excavation focuses on a spectacular example of a mound some 50 m in diameter containing 364 burials.50 Moving into Samnium, at 47 Torre Galli: Pacciarelli 1999. 48 Kleibrink 2011: 204–​12 on the Temperella cemetery; part of the reason for the long timespan is Kleibrink’s acceptance of radiocarbon dates revising upwards the beginning of the Early Iron Age on the site. 49 Paltineri 2015. 50 Alvino 2012: 132–​36, reporting burials from the Iron Age to the Mid-​and Late Republican periods.

Ancestors  45 the large cemetery at Alfedena in the upper Sangro valley, the best published Iron Age necropolis from the Abruzzo, the earliest tombs were clustered from the seventh century BCE in circular enclosures originally delimited by stone circles or ditches, each cluster containing balanced numbers of men, women, and children, a pattern suggestive of burial according to family units.51 Similar circular groups appear at other, smaller burial grounds in the Sangro Valley like those at Val Fondillo or Colle Ciglio.52 In the latter case, continuous burial activity for around three centuries in the necropolis at Colle Ciglio starts in the seventh century BCE in circular patterns then in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE continues in parallel lines framing the original circles within rectangular areas of later burials made end to end.53 In the central area of Le Marche at Matelica, recent excavations identify a circular tumulus containing thirty-​eight tombs, covering a long arc of time from the ninth to fourth century BCE. The burials are not regularly distributed in time, but over half date to the latest period. These later burials may not have belonged to the family initially responsible for the tumulus, but the tomb’s continuing visibility and general prestige within the wider necropolis made it a destination for renewed burial activity for a long time.54 At Novilara in the northern Marche, there are family clusters without princely or exceptionally wealthy central tombs, whereas princely tombs seem to initiate nucleated burial patterns at the cemetery at Campovalano in Abruzzo.55 Interestingly, the latter case reveals a sort of editing process whereby the desire to return to a central burial seems to outlive the capacity of circular burial areas delimited by stones, and larger circles were then made to accommodate newer graves.56 Again, local variety is considerable. In one burial area at Bazzano near L’Aquila, graves cluster for four to six generations not in circles but within a large rectangular space defined by a wooden fence.57 In these areas of Italy, the historical importance of clustered burial seems confirmed by several cases in which clusters are initiated with the exhumation and reburial of prominent individuals in earlier tombs. Remains from 51 Faustoferri 2011: 154–​55; Scopacasa 2016: 229. 52 Acconcia and Ferreri 2020: 328. 53 Faustoferri (2011: 155–​56) suggests that the change relates to political structure, while continuity of grave goods reveals continuous ethnic or cultural orientation. 54 Casci Ceccacci and Biocco 2020: 191–​93. 55 Beinhauer 1987–​88; Naso 2019: 161–​62. 56 D’Ercole 2015: 424. 57 Bernardini and Bestetti 2003; D’Ercole 2015: 425–​26.

46  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy earlier burials were exhumed and then reburied in newly made coffins or vessels.58 In these cases, the spatial power exerted by earlier burial supported a highly intentional act based upon a community’s renewal of the authority of long deceased individuals. We have by now covered most of peninsular Italy, and many further examples could be named, but the general trend seems reasonably clear. The Early Iron Age saw a marked rise in both the frequency and durability of clustered burial. The more precise pattern of clustering differed from site to site, even sometimes within single sites, but this is to be expected considering that each community will have constructed elite identity and kinship in its own way. Across these cases, we see communities using funerary space recursively to denote continuing relationships to past individuals, and we can think that such practices operated by encoding and transmitting the reasons for these individuals’ authority beyond their death.

Spaces for Cult The recursive nature of Early Iron Age burial was reinforced not only by the placement of the dead but also by the inclusion within cemeteries of spaces for rituals and cult relating to death and burial. Such spaces present a sort of natural accompaniment to clustering, as the practice of concentrating burial in some areas of cemeteries left other areas open and available for the living to assemble among graves and tombs.59 The material residues of cult within burial grounds has been especially detected in Etruria, where it took several forms.60 In some cases, there are signs of repeated cult in tombs themselves, for example, in signs of burning from offerings made against sealed loculi in vestibule tombs in sixth and fifth century Veii.61 In many other cases, ritual took place at structures other than tombs, but close beside them. In North Etruria at Populonia’s Casone necropolis, altars built of stones were inserted among burials at the end of the seventh century BCE and continue in use into the fifth century BCE or

58 Gamba et al. 2015: 95 (Este); Roncella 2011: 163 (Samnite Beneventum); D’Ercole 2015: 424 (Piani Palentini a Scurcola Marsicana in the Abruzzo). 59 Generally, see von Eles, ed., 2006; Etruria is especially well studied, as see Colonna 1993; Steingräber 1997; Zifferero 2006. 60 Riva 2010: 125–​36. 61 Arizzo 2020: 350, 404.

Ancestors  47

Figure 2.2  Cortona, the stepped altar of the Sodo II tumulus, mid-​sixth century BCE. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons.

possibly beyond.62 South Etruria abounds with examples. The early sixth-​ century BCE necropolis of Grotta Porcina comprises a large rock-​cut tumulus and a nearby altar made in circular form, not dissimilar to the shape of the tumulus. Around the altar was a rectangular stepped area also carved in the rock, and it has been proposed that this served for audiences at funeral rituals.63 This combination of altar and steps is unparalleled, but both features are attested separately at other Eruscan cemeteries. The tumulus itself was an important focal point for ritual and cult-​related architecture. Entrance vestibules of large tumuli sometimes had stepped features linked to the need to host audiences for funerary games and rites. Other burial tumuli contain small side rooms related to cult.64 The great Sodo II tumulus at Cortona had an ornately decorated stepped altar constructed adjacent to it in the mid-​sixth century BCE (Figure 2.2).65

62 Biagi et al. 2015. 63 Colonna 1993: 331–​34; Colonna 2006b: 138. 64 Steingräber 1997: 191–​92. 65 Zamarchi Grassi in Principi Etruschi; for other examples, Daamgaard Andersen 1993: 52–​53; Principi Etruschi 2000: 165.

48  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The rock-​cut burial tumulus at Blera contained a sort of altar or cult space installed on the summit of its mound. Andrea Zifferero suggests that various access ramps and stairs allowed passage onto the top of some tumulus mounds possibly for cult practices. On this basis, he argues that the mounds of Central Italian tumuli may have often been consecrated spaces.66 As with other phenomena discussed in this chapter, while material signs of cult are observable in monumental form in Etruscan Italy, the practice was by no means restricted to that region. In some areas, evidence of funerary ritual consists simply of notable deposits of material within the area of a cemetery. At Tornareccio in the Abruzzo, a large pit or natural depression in the rock beside several tombs was filled with an enormous quantity of drinking vessels. The absence in this deposit of cookwares or other ceramics suggests these drinking vessels were used for ceremonial banqueting or libations connected to the space if not the action of burial over a period of time.67 We sometimes find architectural elements added to give ritual sites greater formality. Adjacent to burials at Casalecchio near Bologna, stone slabs were used to pave areas, whose excavation revealed accumulations of pottery indicative of repeated ritual activity at the graveside.68 Another notable example comes from Pontecagnano, the Campanian site whose spatial configuration we have discussed above. While the site is representative of Etruscan influences in Campania, even its earliest, pre-​Villanovan burial grounds from the early ninth century BCE seem to maintain empty spaces reserved for cult activity.69 In a plot of the northern cemetery of the early orientalizing period, which developed around the grave of the “princess” discussed above, we find adjacent to the circle of burials a fenced-​off precinct for cult. This precinct was expanded in the seventh century BCE and remained in use until the early fifth century BCE, for over two hundred years. It contained a series of canals, probably connected to libation rituals, and a notable density of ceramics. The precinct also served as a destination for several infant burials, mostly female.70 As with the phenomenon of clustering, these examples present multiple locally specific solutions to what appears to have been a similar concern, in this case the desire to create permanent space within burial grounds for assembly and ritual activity. 66 Zifferero 2006; it is notable, however, that stairs and ramps rarely go beyond the drum of the tumulus, making this thesis not unproblematic. 67 Suano 2011. 68 Von Eles 2006: 77. 69 Cuozzo and Pellegrino 2015: 444–​48. 70 Cuozzo 2003, 2016.

Ancestors  49 Archaeological theory stresses the distinction between funerary ritual, the rites of mourning within the context of burial, and ancestor worship, which often took place beside an ancestral tomb but at intervals sometimes long after the funeral itself.71 Both interpretations are sometimes applied to the same Italian material: Giovanni Colonna and Stefan Steingräber connect stepped areas and altars to games and rituals for funerals, while Helle Daamgard Andersen relates the same evidence to ancestor worship. We need not limit ourselves to either interpretation, as death’s importance as a liminal moment in a community’s religious life meant that its commemoration could serve for all varieties of ritual activity. Other ritual purposes are also possible. The burial of infants and newborn children within the precinct at Pontecagnano has been connected with fertility cult. Even if we cannot always clarify the nature of cult, the increasingly common designation of spaces for the assembly of the living within Iron Age burial grounds must have emphasized the juxtaposition between a community’s past and present. The creation of cult spaces and their increasingly formal nature will have facilitated the repetition of rituals that were becoming an expected part of burial and its commemoration. Several seventh-​century BCE tombs contain small figurines depicting mourning women whose consistent pose recalls the ritualized, serial lamentations over the dead known from the world of epic poetry.72 It goes without saying that funeral songs and related practices were vastly important and productive moments for social memory, and the intersection between ritualized mourning and history-​making in ancient culture is well studied.73 With open places for assembly and cult, we can think that Iron Age Italian cemeteries granted regular opportunities to the formation and transmission of traditions about the deceased.

Visibility Another significant trend in Italian burial archaeology may be understood in terms of increasing visibility. The period saw consequential changes in the architecture of the tomb and its related burial furniture. In this section and the next, we take up the ways in which the Iron Age tomb itself facilitated 71 Whitley 1995: 46. 72 Bonghi Jovino 2015. 73 See e.g. Flower 1996: ch. 4; Hope and Huskinson, eds., 2011; for Iron Age Greece, Alexiou 1974 is classic.

50  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy recursive commemorative practice. In order for a community to return to a particular site of burial, it needed first of all to recognize its location in the landscape. The literally semiotic function of tombs in landscapes is a well-​ established component of Greek Iron Age thought. The phenomenon seems attested archaeologically by prominent burials such as the Early Iron Age tumulus at Lefkandi, and we might mention the double meaning in Homeric epic of the Greek word sema as both tomb and sign. The sight of such semata held the power to prompt recollection of men “long ago dead.”74 In Italy, the aim of making the tomb more visible was achieved in a variety of ways. The natural landscape presented its own inherent possibilities for emphasis. At Quattro Fontanili at Veii, the wealthiest Early Iron Age burials were often sited at higher and more visible points in the terrain.75 The practice of employing caves or exceptional natural features for special burial has a long history in Italy starting from the stone age. Another way to mark burial sites in the landscape was by placing monumental objects atop of tombs. Exceptional burials in the Bronze Age were sometimes marked with upright stones or stelai, as was the case at Torre Santa Sabini near Brindisi, described above. Over time, grave markers became more elaborate and distinctive in form. Ninth-​century BCE tombs from the cemetery of Poggio di Selciatello Sopra at Tarquinia were topped with stelai carved roughly in the form of a hut, and somewhat later but similarly shaped tomb markers are known from elsewhere in South Etruria and Latium.76 The forms of such markers could be characteristic to particular settlements or regions. Some orientalizing-​period tumuli around Vetulonia were topped with large stones carved into the shape of broad cones, interpreted as either representations of the boss of a shield or of the defunct who had first been buried in the tumulus. In the fifth century BCE, aniconic stelai were used commonly as tomb markers at sites like Vaste in Messapic-​speaking Apulia.77 In regions such as the Po Delta where good stone was harder to find, tomb-​ markers were often carved of wood.78 By the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, grave markers often incorporated human or figural forms. Statuary in general proliferates on and around tumuli 74 Hom. Il. 23.330–​34; notably for thinking about the link with history, the precise identity of the dead man in this passage is not revealed; see Sinos 1980; Nagy 1990. 75 Zifferero 2011: 88–​89. 76 Bartoloni 2002: 133–​34; Gasperini 2005; Naso 2011: 117 for segnacoli a capanna in Etruria; Zifferero 2011: 94 notes an example from Crustumerium. 77 Lomas 2016. 78 Gauci 2015: 141.

Ancestors  51

Figure 2.3  Tarquinia (?), conically shaped disc of nenfro with human and animal frieze in low relief, possibly a tomb-​marker. Image after Milani 1909, tb. 6.

in this period, and sculptures found atop graves are sometimes interpreted as markers. Andrea Zifferero identifies a fragmentary relief from the area of Tarquinia of animals and figures on a conical shaped stone as a later and more ornate example of the Vetulonian broad conical grave markers (Figure 2.3). Meanwhile, the famous Vetulonian stele of Avele Feluske with its shallow relief depicting a hoplite warrior with an accompanying inscription (625–​600 BCE) was likely erected at the center of a tumulus mound (Figure 2.4).79 The incised style of the carving is comparable to that found on one side of another stele from Roselle, badly broken but perhaps originally also a grave marker. Another warrior was carved on the reverse of the Roselle stele in

79 Maggiani 2007: 67 with previous bibliography. The inscription names Avele’s father and mother as well as a certain woman Hirumina daughter of Phersnalna, who gave the inscription or the stele, or even the tomb. Maggiani suggests she was a hetaira or had philia with Avele.

52  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.4  Vetulonia, the stele of Avele Feluske, 625–​600 BCE. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

shallow relief at a later date, forming a good example of how grave markers themselves could accumulate layered meanings through time.80 This trend of human figural motifs depicted on grave markers encompasses most of Italy, everywhere showing local differentiation. In the Po Valley, particularly around Bologna, burials were regularly marked with sandstone stelai fashioned in a rectangle-​and-​disc shape and decorated with figural or architectural forms.81 In Iapygian territory, stelai of local stone dating circa 700 were discovered in the 1990s with their upper ends roughly cut into a form suggestive of a human head and shoulders. Low relief on their surfaces portrayed various signs of warrior culture: chariots, horse teams, lances, and javelins. From Picenum, there is a general trend of human figural sculpture

80 Maggiani 2007.

81 Meller Padovani 1977.

Ancestors  53 used as grave markers starting in the seventh century BCE. Two stelai from Penna Sant’Andrea, very likely tomb markers, display mask-​like human faces (see below, Figure 2.7).82 The monumental warrior statue from Capestrano, discussed in greater detail below, was also probably originally situated atop a tomb (Figure 2.5).83 The enormous, helmeted head of a warrior from Orvieto inscribed with the name of Larth Cuperes son of Aaranth was used to mark the named individual’s tomb (Figure 2.6).84 Not only does figural imagery appear on these grave markers, but they regularly began to host epigraphic texts associated with burial, and these texts often contained discernibly historical information about the deceased. The Penna Sant’Andrea stelai, just mentioned in reference to their depiction of mask-​like faces, also contain “speaking texts” of a type well known from Greek funerary epigram, which communicate the nature of the monument they mark by naming their dedicator and/​or commemorated individual (Figure 2.7). While translation is not easy, these protosabellic texts appear to display historical elements. The best preserved of the three Penna Sant’Andrea texts contains reference to fitiasom múfqlúm, a collocation interpreted to mean, “a monument of what you have accomplished.”85 Another contains the masculine plural form nerf, a word understood to mean “leaders, heroes.”86 The erection of a personal monument on the tomb in these cases was specifically linked to the desire to commemorate the actions of the deceased. Vincent Martzloff compares these texts to Roman examples of commemorative monuments, citing as an example Livy’s description of the erection of a statue in the comitium for Horatius Cocles for his heroic virtue, on behalf of the Roman state.87 However, I feel it is important to emphasize the funerary context of these Picene inscriptions. As such, these grave markers represent the end of a longer development of demarcating burials of important individuals whose actions could now be commemorated in writing, while 82 Imag.Ital. I.196–​201, Praetuttii/​INTERAMNIA PRAETVTTIORVM 1–​3. These three stelai were found near the necropolis of Penna Sant’ Andrea, but were not related to any one tomb, leaving their precise original position unclear, although I agree with the editors of Imag.Ital. (I.11 n. 43) that it is unlikely they derive instead from the sanctuary on Monte Giove. 83 Naso 2019: 170–​71. 84 Della Fina and Cenciaioli 2017. 85 Martzloff 2006: 67; Imag.Ital. I.197. 86 Wallace 2007: 64. 87 Martzloff 2006: 77 citing Liv. 2.10.12. Implicitly supporting her comparison with the erection of a statue to Horatius by the civitas in a public place may be the appearance of safinas, perhaps an ethnonym for the Samnites, in the Penna Sant’Andrea texts, suggesting commemorative action undertaken on behalf of a larger sociopolitical group; see summary of debate on this point in Scopacasa 2015: 33–​36. Nonetheless, these stelai almost certainly pertained to tombs.

54  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.5  Capestrano, monumental statue of a warrior, possibly from a tomb. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

similar commemorative impulses manifest in non-​linguistic ways for several centuries. Another inscribed grave marker from the same region of Italy, dated stylistically and orthographically to the late sixth century BCE, depicts a naked human figure shown with arms bent and hands over their

Ancestors  55

Figure 2.6  Orvieto, tomb marker in the shape of a helmeted head, identified as Larth Cuperes son of Aaranth by an Etruscan inscription. Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

stomach.88 Around the figure is a paleosabellic inscription reading “By the road you see the covering (?) of Titus Alius, buried in this tomb” (postin: viam: videtas: tts: tokam: alies: esmen: vepses: vepeten:). The stele seems to describe two distinct parts of the funerary architecture: the tokam, perhaps related to the Latin word toga for covering or roof, and the vepeten, probably the tomb itself. In this case, tokam may refer specifically to the marker or stele, which covered or anyway sat atop the burial.89 This distinction in combination with the use of the second-​person plural verb (videtas) and reference to road presumably passing the tomb (postin viam) reenacts in writing what the object itself was intended to do visually: draw a passerby’s attention to a specific individual’s grave in the wider landscape. 88 If this is indeed a grave marker, as it appears to be, although it was discovered ex situ; Imag.Ital. I.202–​3, Praetuttii/​INTERAMNIA PRAETVTTIORVM 4. 89 Cf. Wallace 2007: 64.

56  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.7  Stele with paleosabellic inscription and relief of human face from Penna Sant’Andrea. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons.

Monumentality Marking the place of burial went hand in hand with monumentalizing the tomb itself. The increasing use of tumuli in Italian funerary architecture represented an important step in making burial visible. As noted in this chapter’s introduction, burial mounds in Italy are not an invention of

Ancestors  57 the Iron Age but go back at least to the Middle Bronze Age.90 Nevertheless, the trend of mound building in several regions peaks in the Early Iron Age and orientalizing periods. During this time, Etruria presents a “landscape of tumuli,” while the practice of burying in mounds was very widespread in Italy around the same time.91 Zifferero emphasizes how tumuli in Etruria functioned to reinforce a landscape of elite power, with their position along important routes leading from settlements and their arrangement in manners that may indicate the evolving formalization of aristocratic property ownership.92 What I would like to draw attention to is the function of these monuments as a form of historical culture. The large corpus of Iron Age tumuli presents a range of funerary architecture. A tumulus could be no more than an accumulation of stones and earth heaped over a trench or pit grave. In the Abruzzo, where the use of tumuli peaks in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE, it was customary to erect a simple mound of stones and dirt over the cremation pyre after ashes were collected.93 By contrast, some Etruscan tumuli display highly complex architecture with solid masonry construction and elaborately designed burial chambers drawing visual cues from elite residential architecture.94 Emblematic of this sort of monumentality is the Banditaccia necropolis at Caere with its hundreds of rock-​cut tumuli beginning in the early seventh century BCE and continuing for about 150 years (Figure 2.8). Their design may reveal the influence of Near Eastern craftsmen, perhaps from northern Syria, making these tumuli themselves part of orientalizing connectivity and trade relationships upon which the Caeretan aristocracy’s wealth and status depended.95 The earliest monumental Etruscan tumuli come not from South Etruria, but from the northern site of Populonia, whose proximity to Elba’s rich iron mines supported precocious socioeconomic development. The Populonian necropolis of Piano and Poggio delle Granate contains the earliest chamber tombs in Etruscan culture, dating from the ninth century BCE and consisting of a sort of elaborated trench grave covered by a false dome supporting an earthen mound, a design connected to architectural forms from either Sardinia or pre-​colonial Sicily. By the very early eighth century BCE or

90 Naso 2015.

91 Colonna 2015a: 7, “paese dei tumuli”; see regional surveys in Naso, ed. 2011. 92 Zifferero 1991, 2006. 93 D’Ercole 2015. 94 Prayon 1975.

95 Naso 2007: 143.

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Figure 2.8  Caere, tumuli in the extensive Banditaccia necropolis. The burial area was laid out in the early seventh century BCE. Photo by author, used with the kind permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia.

perhaps even already in the later ninth century BCE, these chamber tombs developed into proper tumuli. The best-​known example, the tomb of the lunate razor, had a circular interior chamber circa 2.70 m in diameter preceded by a short entrance passageway or dromos.96 We can follow the emergence of tumuli at other North Etruscan sites like Vetulonia, where it is possible to track the progression from multiple burials within discontinuous circles of stones to more consistent stone circles, and then to grand masonry tumuli by the early seventh century BCE.97 The overall architectural development from ditch grave to elaborate chamber tombs within tumuli has been well enough established by Friedhelm Prayon and others (Figure 2.9).98 We might ask why this evolution took place, and answers to the question have tended to focus on the dual function of the tumulus as both protective covering for burial and as a sema marking



96

Bartoloni 2003. Rafanelli 2015. 98 Prayon 1975: 14; Riva 2010: 109–​25. 97

Figure 2.9  Architectural evolution of burial in Etruria from ditch grave to monumental tumulus after Prayon 1975: 14. Adapted from Riva 2010: fi ­ gure 29, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

60  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the burials.99 In addition to these rationales, I want to explore the idea that tumuli, once built, facilitated later (and thus recursive) burials. It is true that, in some regions, tumuli remained used for single burials for the entire Iron Age. A good example of this are the Campanian canal tombs encountered in the Sarno Valley from the ninth to seventh century BCE, distinctive tumuli surrounded by a shallow circular ditch interrupted at a point oriented with the feet of the inhumed individual.100 But such strict interaction between the form of the tumulus and the orientation of a single, initial burial is rarely attested elsewhere. More common is the use of mounds for multiple generations of burials. There were numerous solutions for placing subsequent burials into a tumulus. In the largest and most ornate tumuli, the burial mound could host multiple, separate chamber tombs, each with its own elaborate internal design. The two largest tumuli at Caere’s Banditaccia necropolis, the tomb of the Colonel and the Grand Tumulus II, both contained four separate burial chambers. In Grand Tumulus II, the four chambers span the arc of about two centuries, and it appears that the entire tumulus’ architecture was refurbished and possibly repainted with each successive chamber’s creation.101 Multiple burial chambers appear in other exceptionally large Etruscan tumuli such as the Sodo II tumulus at Cortona or the Cuccumella at Vulci. These multiple chambers are sometimes interpreted within the framework of the Roman gens, but I would like to emphasize the more basic point that they demonstrate the social importance of a particular burial place or monument across multiple generations. Some examples of burial in tumuli were extremely large. Excavators working at the site of Crustumerium in Latium have recently realized that the massive hill covering 4000 m2 and rising 6 m above the surrounding plain was in fact an enormous artificial earthen tumulus covering over a cemetery of some four hundred extant burials dating to a period of three centuries from circa 800 BCE until the site’s abandonment around 500 BCE.102 Another solution for subsequent burials was to bury in the area immediately adjacent to the tumulus. At a seventh-​century BCE tumulus at Blera in Etruria, excavators found nine burials dating as late as the fourth or third



99

Colonna 2015b: 12–​13. Tagliamonte 2011. 101 Naso 2011: 121. 102 Attema, Bronkhorst, and Noorda 2017. 100

Ancestors  61 century BCE carved into the bedrock beside the tumulus wall and in some cases even partly into the wall itself.103 As these cases might suggest, the permanence of tumuli meant that they often remained destinations for burial for very long periods of time. In some cases, Roman Imperial-​period burials were placed adjacent or partly atop old tumuli in ways that seem to respect the importance of the place even after the passage of almost a millennium.104 The tumulus at Corvaro, discussed in the last section, contained burials ranging from the Iron Age to the Late Republican period.105 One wonders in these cases whether the much later inhabitants of these landscapes remained aware of the particular histories of earlier tumuli. There is very little by way of Roman-​era accounts of Italian funerary architecture, and exceptions often seem more legendary than historical.106 However, an initial historical meaning to the construction of tumuli seems very likely, especially in aforementioned cases when such structures were initiated by the reburial of exhumed earlier graves.107 Sometimes tumuli were significantly enlarged or made grander in a phase subsequent to their creation, suggesting a community’s decision to invest in the commemorative power of an earlier burial.108 At several sites in the Abruzzo, tumuli were simple structures of earth surrounded by multiple concentric circles of stones containing later burials, as an initial circle proved too small for subsequent burials, and the monument needed to be expanded and remade over time.109 The burial community in these cases seems to have outlived the design of the small, initial tumuli. Remarkable confirmation of the evocative power of the tumulus itself, irrespective of any burial it contained, comes from the recent publication of an early seventh-​century BCE tumulus from via San Jacopo in Pisa (Figure 2.10).110 Here, immediately below the center of a large earthen mound delimited by stone slabs, excavators found a small wooden chest deposited within a trench carved into the bedrock. Above the chest was a stone altar. The altar and chest

103 Ricciardi 1987. 104 Fedeli 2015: 280–​81 for an example from Cortona. 105 Alvino 2012: 132–​36. 106 E.g. Varro’s fantastical account of the architecture of the tomb of Lars Porsenna at Plin. HN 36.91–​93, or the eteological story of the burials of the Horatii and Curiatii at Liv. 1.25. 107 See above, pp. 45–​46. 108 Zifferero 2011: 78–​79 (Montalbano). 109 D’Ercole 2015: 244. 110 Floriani and Bruni 2006.

62  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.10  Pisa, the cenotaph on via San Jacopo, early seventh century BCE. Photo adapted from Alecobbe on Wikimedia Commons.

were buried with a number of animal bones and sacrificial implements as well as an iron trident, which was deliberately broken and displayed upright on a triangular base, but there were no associated human remains. The tumulus sits on the edge of one of the city’s larger Villanovan necropoleis, and over the course of the later seventh century BCE, four cremation burials were placed in its earthen mound. The adjacent area continued to serve as a location for burial into the next century, and perhaps even longer to judge from a single burial of the later fourth or early third century BCE, although this activity may have been discontinuous in time and is hard to relate directly to the initial meaning of the monument. The tumulus also attracted continued architectural attention with the addition of a series of stone cippi around its circumference. At first glance, this remarkable monument from the northern confines of Etruria matches the character of other Italian burial tumuli. It was initiated in monumental form in the seventh century BCE and held longstanding influence in the landscape on the destination of subsequent burial. However,

Ancestors  63 for all its trappings of funerary ritual, the tumulus lacked a corpse. Stefano Bruni proposes that we find here a monument to an elite individual who died in a manner in which his body could not be recovered. Judging from the marine symbolism of the trident, perhaps they were lost at sea.111 This idea is impossible to verify, of course, but we cannot help but think that this unusual monument somehow intended to relay the historical circumstances of an individual’s loss. Later activity on and around the tumulus confirms its role as a potent bearer of historical meaning in the community over time.

Objects This analysis of burial has largely focused on the position and form of the tomb, but we should also discuss how grave goods functioned to extend and incorporate the chronological dimensions of burial. In some ways, the temporality of objects placed in graves contrasts with other ways of adding to the historical value of burial rites and practices. By virtue of their deposition, grave goods were removed from circulation, concluding their lives as functioning objects. Thus, they stand opposite to the recursive or durable behaviors discussed so far in this chapter. These objects thus often came into the burial ritual already laden with historical meaning and were by virtue of their inclusion within the graves of elite individuals intended to heighten links with the past in the context of their deposition. Indeed, many grave goods found in Iron Age Italian burials conform to the expectations for elite wealth in the period. Drinking sets associated with commensality are standard, even as form or fabric varies from site to site.112 Other objects function in the construction of gender. These include spinning and weaving equipment in women’s tombs.113 Weapons feature prominently, although not exclusively, in male burials, where they support the idea of a warrior elite whose status was connected to leadership in martial conflict.114 It has been noted that weapons and other signs of military leadership become more prominent also in rich female burials starting in the later eighth century BCE and into the orientalizing period, a trend interpreted to reflect a



111

Bruni 2000. Among a vast bibliography, see Riva 2006; Iaia 2016. 113 Gleba 2008: 171–​75. 114 De Santis 2005. 112

64  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy changing focus on new corporate social groupings, rather than on the single male warrior.115 It is not always easy to detect how weapons or objects relating to textile making, common as they are, connect to memory and temporality, even if we should not exclude the possibility that they regularly did so. One suggestive case is in the discovery of arms or textile equipment in tombs of small children or infants, where such objects seem unlikely to have held straightforwardly functional meanings.116 In some instances, arms and armor in children’s graves are noticeably older than other objects in the assemblage and may have been passed down by direct relatives, perhaps parents, to the prematurely dead children as a means of securing to the infant in death part of the inheritance they would have received if they had survived to adulthood.117 We may elsewhere detect hints of a similar idea that passing certain objects down through time invested them with great power to sustain aristocratic authority. Several ceremonial staffs or scepters have been found in a number of tombs, mostly of princely level, around Italy (Figure 2.11). These objects have been compared to staffs held by rulers in Near Eastern art, or attested as preeminent symbols of political authority in Greek epic.118 Homeric poetry refers to “ancestral scepters” and in one instance mention of Agamemnon’s scepter triggers a short history of the king’s lineage and the handing down of the object from the gods to his father to him.119 Scepters from Italy were clearly prestige objects, as their manufacture confirms, and we may cite some iconographic evidence to support their association with ancestors, particularly in Etruria. One of the two seated figural statues from the tomba delle statue at Ceri, discussed below, holds a scepter (cf. Figure 2.16), while terracotta sculptures of seated figures identified as ancestors who adorned the roof of the Murlo Palace and similarly posed figures on cinerary urns from Chiusi have their hands positioned in way probably intended to grasp metal or terracotta scepters, which have now been lost. I discuss these figures’ interpretation as ancestors later in this chapter. However, the context of scepters’ discovery in Italy is also noticeably variable. We find burials 115 Riva 2006: 123. 116 Child burials are relatively infrequently attested in Italy in this period, making us think that those burials we do find are of individuals who were deemed special in some way; the topic receives considerable recent attention, as see Nizzo 2011; Tabolli 2018; Mogetta 2020. 117 Nizzo 2011: 65. 118 Bartoloni 2002: 139–​40; Weidig 2015; Naso 2019: 166–​68; for other heroic objects in burial areas that also contained scepters, see Weidig 2021. 119 Hom. Il. 2.101–​8; Unruh 2011.

Ancestors  65

Figure 2.11  One of four mace-​head-​shaped sceptres of iron and bronze with scene of the lord of horses found in tomb 8 at Spoleto, seventh century BCE. Image © Joachim Weidig.

containing multiple examples, such as the four scepters from a single tomb in Spoleto, which also contained two rattles, suggesting all these objects may have held a sort of magico-​religious meaning.120 Scepters also appear in wealthy female burials from Veii, Verruchio, and Capena, complicating their reading within the context of patrilineal descent and authority of Greek epic.121 Especially important for thinking about the historical or temporal meaning of grave goods are things identified as heirlooms, objects whose age and transmission, often handed down from family member to family member, granted them value beyond their intrinsic or material worth.

120 Weidig and Bruni 2015: 537. 121 Veii: Guidi 1993: 83, fig. 6.16; Verucchio: von Eles 2002: 132; Capena: Mura Sommella 2016. For scepters, gender, and political authority in Iron Age Italy, see Riva 2006: 124.

66  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Recent discussion often equates such objects with the Greek term keimelia in reference to treasures mentioned in epic poetry as holding particular historical value in contexts of gift giving or burial.122 There are some methodological considerations to take into account here. Most Italian Iron Age burials contained items dating to a range of time, providing a commonly available recourse for archaeologists to identify a comparatively older object as an heirloom. However, we need to be cautious that we are not projecting modern scientific understandings of time or our ability to seriate various classes of archaeological materials onto past communities who may have understood the relationship between an object’s style and its age in different ways. Moreover, the designation of an object as an heirloom cannot only be about age but relates to a social assignation of value enhanced by transmission across generations. With that said, we may still suspect that Iron Age Italian communities placed value in comparatively old objects deposited in the grave. There are, for example, instances of extremely old objects buried in Iron Age graves, such as Neolithic knapped stone points deposited with burials at Orvieto or Pithecussae.123 In such cases, we still struggle to understand whether these objects were valued for their generational transmission rather than for other aspects, such as their exotic nature. Some high-​status objects manufactured significantly earlier than their deposition were imported from the Aegean or Near East. Examples include a Mycenean mirror found in a tomb in Tarquinia’s Poggio di Selciatello Sopra necropolis, or several old Egyptian scarabs.124 One scarab from a mid-​ eighth-​ century tomb at Francavilla Marittima bears the cartouche of the pharaoh Ramesses II, who reigned some five hundred years earlier.125 A tripod possibly made in Urartu was perhaps three hundred years old when buried in a princely tomb at the Picene settlement of Numana near Ancona.126 The rarity and unusualness of these and other objects made them exotic in Italy, and they presumably reached Italian elites via economies of gift exchange.127 The combination of age and 122 See e.g. Hom. Il. 23.618–​19, where a phiale given by Achilles to Nestor is called a “treasure, a reminder of the funeral of Patrocolus” (κειμήλιον . . . Πατρόκλοιο τάφου μνῆμ᾽); for the phenomenon of keimelia in antiquity, including in Italy, see Nizzo 2010; Reiterman 2014, 2016; Bardelli 2019; Di Fazio 2019: 81–​83, suggesting confirmation of the concept in Roman sources. 123 Orvieto: Bizzarri 1963: 86, 111; Pithecussae: Buchner and Ridgway 1993: 305—​it is possible this point came from a Neolithic burial disturbed by the Iron Age settlement. 124 For the mirror, see Delpino 2005; for a list of scarabs, see Nizzo 2010: 99 n. 105. 125 Kleibrink 2011: 208. 126 Bardelli 2019. 127 For the trading relationships behind such material, see Murray 2022.

Ancestors  67 this presumed mechanism by which these objects entered these communities is suggestive. However, we are again unable, based strictly on the material itself, to understand the degree to which these objects were handed down locally before being deposited in these graves. Another possibility is to identify as heirlooms those locally made grave goods found within assemblages of a much later date. As a rule of thumb, Massimiliano Di Fazio suggests that objects made more than about two generations before deposition might have seemed incongruous within assemblages of objects placed into a burial.128 A long list of items fits this definition: a Late Bronze Age vase or askos from a mid-​seventh-​century BCE burial at Gabii, two cups from a sixth-​century BCE burial at Colle del Forno in Sabine territory, a middle geometric cup or kantharos from a mid-​eighth-​ century BCE burial at Francavilla Marittima, several bronze vessels from a drinking set deposited in princely Tomb II at Satricum are half a century or more older than the tomb, a simple ovoid jug with three small feet from a burial at Osteria dell’Osa, a double-​edged razor blade maybe a century older than the tomb in which it was found at Pithecussae, and so forth.129 The list is extensive, encompassing all regions of Italy and including some exceptional objects.130 From Bologna, the Certosa situla, a masterpiece of its type, was made perhaps a century before its deposition in the tomb in which it was found.131 Sometimes the gap in time between manufacture and deposition could be considerable, as in the case of the mid-​fourth-​century BCE chamber tomb of the Velminei from Vignanello in Faliscan territory, which contained bronze shields manufactured in the later seventh century BCE.132 Another intriguing possibility comes from older objects that show signs of conservation or repair. A significant number of repaired metal prestige objects like razors, mirrors, or situlae and other containers are known from burial goods of the villanovan and orientalizing periods.133 Arms and armor occasionally show signs of repair.134 A Phoenician metal cup from a female burial at Francavilla was repaired by a local craftsman.135 Repairs could 128 Di Fazio 2019: 81; see Nizzo 2010: 79. 129 Gabii: Cohen and Naglak 2020: 149; Colle del Forno: Di Fazio 2018: 498; Francavilla Marittima: Kleibrink 2011: 208; Satricum: Waarsenburg 1994: 204; Osteria dell’Osa and Pithecussae: Nizzo 2010: 68, 90. 130 Many further examples in Nizzo 2010; Di Fazio 2019: 82. 131 Bartoloni and Morigi Govi 1995. 132 Nizzo 2010: 100–​1. 133 Camporeale 2012. 134 Cf. Bartoloni 2002: 150 for a possible example of a sword from Tarquinia. 135 Kleibrink 2011: 202.

68  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy be extensive, as with a bronze basin from the princely tomb II at Satricum whose entire bottom was skillfully replaced at some point prior to its deposition.136 From Cumae, a Laconian krater in a fifth-​century BCE tomb has several holes for lead clamps around its foot and bears two owner inscriptions in Greek, each paleographically distinct, and divided in date by about two generations. Paola Lombardi identifies the two signatures as a grandfather and grandson, a hypothesis that would confirm that family transmission granted this object particular value.137 This list of chronologically remarkable grave goods could easily be longer, and that depth of possible evidence seems important. Interpretive difficulties will always remain in considering this topic. As Amanda Reiterman points out, several processes other than inheritance can account for gaps in time between an object’s manufacture and its deposition in a tomb.138 With that said, the sheer weight of evidence suggests that, at least in some cases, Iron Age communities were aware of the added value that time and transmission could grant to objects placed in tombs, making some objects an important form of historical culture.

Writing Considering one of this book’s overarching themes is the interaction between textual and non-​textual information, it is important to observe among those objects deposited in Iron Age tombs the significant presence of writing.139 Inscriptions on metal and ceramic objects appear with a certain frequency in the context of elite burial. Graves have yielded our earliest alphabetic inscriptions from Italy, including a short alphabetical text on a vase from Osteria dell’Osa and “Nestor’s cup,” the famous Greek metrical inscription on a Rhodian cup from Pithecussae, discussed below.140 The practice of writing itself seems to have formed an important indication of aristocratic status.141 Evidence of this appears in abecedaria, alphabetical inscriptions related to the acquisition of writing, deposited in some



136

Waarsenburg 1995: 213–​14. Lombardi 2000; Reiterman 2016: 93. 138 Cf. Reiterman 2016: 49. 139 We have already discussed writing on grave markers above. 140 For debate about the language of the Osteria dell’Osa inscription, see Holloway 1994: 112. 141 For an overview, see G. Sassatelli in Principi Etruschi 2000. 137

Ancestors  69

Figure 2.12  Ivory writing table with alphabetical inscription in Etruscan from a grave in Marsiliana d’Albegna, ca. 650–​625 BCE, image published by concession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana).

Etruscan burials. An abecedarium on a small ivory tablet dated circa 650–​ 625 BCE from Marsiliana d’Albegna was deposited in a grave with other model writing implements including a stylus and eraser also of ivory (Figure 2.12).142 Alphabetical inscriptions appear on bucchero vases from elite tombs from Veii, Caere, and Pontecagnano of around the same date.143 In the context of the grave, writing was often a means of distinguishing identity, whether of ethnic or parental nature. Filiation, the recording of one’s parents’ names, appears in some of our earliest epigraphic attestation of personal names. From the very early seventh century BCE, several objects from the princely Regolini-​Galassi tomb at Caere record the name larθia velθurus, “Larth (son of) Velthur,” endowing the assembly with a sense of inherited property and prestige.144 Binomial (two-​ name) inscriptions appear in Etruria from the very early seventh century BCE onward, and much has been



142

McDonald 2019: 145 with previous bibliography. For Veii and Caere, see McDonald 2019: 146; for Pontecagnano, Pellegrino 2016. 144 Buranelli and Sannibale 2006. 143

70  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy made of this fact. Rather than a single name system, a binomial incorporates a sort of adjectival form of a name asserting of an individual’s connection to a larger social unit, be it a family, ethnic group, settlement, or so forth.145 The contemporaneity in South Etruria of the practice of burial in monumental chamber tombs and some of the earliest binomial Etruscan inscriptions has been taken to corroborate the rise of the gens shaping both new forms of nomenclature and burial. The problem is that we have exceedingly little epigraphy from outside burial contexts from this period, and it is hard to see how these two intersecting but not identical realms of social practice, naming and burial, might have been developing independent of each other. We can cite some examples of what are probably ethnonyms, or at least parts of names staking claims of belonging to ethnically or topographically defined groups, from burials in this early period. We have already encountered the stele of Avele Feluskes from Vetulonia, whose second name has been associated with Faliskos, that is, Faliscan, in reference to the people who occupied an area much farther south near Falerii Veteres, modern Cività Castellana.146 The earliest attestation of the term “Latin” appears in an Etruscan graffito reading “I belong to Titus Latinus” (mi tites latines) on a small amphora from a late seventh-​century BCE tomb from Veii.147 An impasto cup from a burial dated to circa 650 BCE from Pontecagnano bears the inscription in Etruscan, “I am the gift of Venela and Velchae Rasunies” (mi mulu Venelasi Velχaesi Rasuniesi).148 The last word Rasuniesi appears to derive from the Etruscans’ word for themselves, Rasna, although the more precise meaning of its suffix remains obscure.149 It represents by several centuries the earliest attestation of some form of the ethnonym.150 All three cases of possible ethnonyms find names associated with places or ethnic groups outside of what can be considered their core areas, and the suggestion therefore is one of mobility. This fact is not entirely surprising: it makes sense that people were taking care to identify themselves when outside of their

145 Smith 2006: 158–​59 contains accessible and sensibly cautious discussion of both phenomenon and interpretation; see now Maras 2020a. 146 Poccetti 1999; Maggiani 2007: 71; contra Maras 2020a: 28–​29, who reads this as a patronymic. 147 Malkin 1998: 184. 148 REE 2002 no. 84. 149 Pellegrino 2016; I agree with Morris 2016: 155 that the name is dubiously interpreted as a gentilicium, but his overarching interpretation is overly skeptical about the power of this vase to tell us anything at all about the identity of the deceased or those who placed it in the tomb; cf. Pellegrino 2016: 54 for another vase from a nearby tomb with the sigla ra. 150 Cf. Bourdin 2012: 1016–​17, the next example is ET Vs 1.179 from Orvieto, dating to the third quarter of the fourth century BCE.

Ancestors  71

Figure 2.13  Pithecussae, Rhodian cup with Greek metrical inscription, ca. 740 BCE, found in the burial of a boy about ten years of age. Photo adapted from Marcus Cyron on Wikimedia Commons.

home community. Vetulonia’s Avele Feluskes is considerably distant from Faliscan territory, Titus Latinus is on the wrong side of the Tiber for a Latin, and Pontecagnano was an Etruscan outpost in Campania. This phenomenon can be paralleled in other cases.151 Overall, ethnonyms are uncommon in early Italian epigraphy, and their appearance in contexts of implied mobility confirms that writing was important to the relational process of identity creation, which often arose from such encounters.152 What also might be seen to grant inscribed objects historical power is the fact that many belong to burials of infants or subadults. The famous object known in modern scholarship as Nestor’s cup from Pithecussae, one of our earliest examples of Greek epigraphy and reception of Homeric epic poetry from the West, comes from the tomb of a boy who died around the age of ten to twelve. The sympotic implications of the object and its inscription are therefore often seen as the expression of unfulfilled potential by the surviving community, rather than a reflection of the defunct’s personal experience (Figure 2.13).153 At Pontecagnano, inscribed objects appear 151 Bradley 2000: 24–​25 gives early epigraphic references to Umbrian ethnicity from Abruzzo and northern Lazio; see Scopacasa 2015: 33–​36 on safinas (Samnite?) from Penna Sant’ Andrea. 152 For a list see Bourdin 2012: 1054–​56. 153 Murray 1994; Malkin 1998: 156.

72  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy universally within burials of children, often infants who would not yet have possessed the ability to speak, not to mention read or write.154 This reinforces the idea that written objects deposited in burials formed important markers of inherited and intergenerational status.

Ancestors in the Burial Ground One of the most intriguing historical dimensions of Early Iron Age burial revolves around the possibility of ancestor cult in cemeteries and tombs. I have already noted the importance of ancestry to our discussion. What I have called the recursive nature of burial, particularly the return to places of earlier burial, was a way to mark connections between dead and living that we can only assume were understood in some way as forms of ancestry. The question is how much this implied thinking about ancestors imbued all the practices and objects associated with burials. In this context, this section discusses figural imagery in plastic arts from elite burial contexts, above all in Etruria, which are often interpreted as depictions of ancestors receiving cult and serving as protectors of their descendants. In addition, we can point to some special burial contexts that show signs of enduring religious attention that some scholars understand as reflections of ancestor cult.155 Scholars support the idea that these attest to ancestor worship in two ways. First, they note a comparative context of the widely attested practice of ancestor worship in societies adjacent to Italy dating back at least to the Neolithic period.156 Second, their interpretations are often explicitly modeled on textual accounts of later Romans’ particular veneration of ancestors. During the Republic, Roman elite households were known to keep wax masks of their ancestors in cupboards in the atria of their houses, where these masks were displayed along with short inscriptions recording their ancestors’ names and notable achievements. These masks were taken out and used in performances at Roman funerals to bring back to life, as it were, an elite’s high-​ranking ancestors.157 It is relevant to the wider arguments of this book that such materials are regularly seen to have formed an important, if not 154 Pellegrino 2016. 155 I reserve for Chapter 4 some exceptional instances of communities venerating graves at Rome and Veii. 156 Bartoloni 2013. 157 For these practices, see Flower 1996.

Ancestors  73 unimpeachable, archival source for the early elaboration of written Roman histories. Ancestor images and their accompanying texts are therefore understood as a vital form of Roman historical culture.158 Because many elaborate Etruscan chamber tombs are thought to reproduce architectural elements of elite houses, it has been argued that statues in those tombs demonstrate that Etruscans also kept images of ancestors in their houses, and that Roman practice was therefore built upon early Italian precedents.159 In fact, we know next to nothing about the interior details of Etruscan house architecture in this period, so while the idea is certainly possible, it must remain at some level speculative. This grants the whole interpretive logic a certain circularity: that is, we cannot independently confirm in most cases that the statues we find in Etruscan tombs depicted ancestors, or that Etruscans espoused practices similar to those found in later Rome, so we turn to Roman evidence to fill in the gaps and support analogies between Etruria and Rome. Comparison is often corroborated by textual evidence such as Livy’s discussion of ancestor masks used by Rome’s Etruscan kings, or Vergil’s ekphrastic depiction of the ancestral palace of King Latinus with wooden effigies of ancestors in his atrium (Aen. 7.177–​91), but these late Latin authors are not independent witnesses. As Harriet Flower notes, the earlier Etruscan material never precisely matches our evidence for Roman Republican ancestral images.160 Outside Rome, there is no evidence for the use of wax masks or for limiting the possession of such masks to holders of high-​ranking offices. Early Etruscan statues thought to depict ancestors sometimes depict women, and do not present the sort of individualized style recognized in Roman ancestral images and thought to have been an important element of their function, at least from the Mid-​Republican period. This does not mean that the practice of depicting and worshipping ancestors did not exist outside Rome; however, it does warn against using later Roman practices to fill gaps in our knowledge about non-​Roman peoples. Instead, we might start from the Italian evidence itself by asking what grounds there are for identifying ancestor worship in early Italy. Some of this material is recently discovered, and the topic therefore repays close attention. In some more generous interpretations, almost any figural sculpture from a



158

Oakley 1997–​2005: vol. I, 28–​29; ancient sources admit problems: Cic. Brut. 62; Liv. 8.40. Colonna and von Hase 1984. 160 Flower 1996: 351. 159

74  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.14  Montescudaio, cinerary urn with figural decoration, early seventh century BCE. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons.

funerary context is held to depict an ancestor.161 The problem then becomes the commonality of figural forms in sculpture accompanying burial. Roughly made terracotta figurines appear among grave goods in tombs of the Early Iron Age at several sites in Latium. Human figures also regularly appear as appliques on ceramic and metal vessels. Rather than see ancestors 161 Daamgaard Andersen 1993; Donati 2005 goes so far as to interpret chevron patterns on some Villanovan biconical vases as seated figures and, therefore, as ancestors.

Ancestors  75 everywhere, however, the commonality of these figural forms probably points to their wide and variable meaning. In more elaborate multi-​ figure sculptural objects, it is possible that characters assuming particular poses or shown holding or wearing particular items were indeed intended to be understood as ancestors. Considering the symbolic importance of the house to aristocratic power, a topic taken up in the next chapter, the argument has been applied to a seated male (?) figure perched on the roof of a ninth-​century BCE hut urn of unknown provenance, possibly from Bisenzio.162 Another noteworthy example for the complexity of its figural sculpture is the Montescudaio cinerary urn (ca. 700–​650 BCE), found in the area of Volterra. This urn’s lid is decorated by an elaborate scene of feasting centered on two figures of different size, one male seated at the table and the other a smaller female (?) attendant (Figure 2.14). A third figure sits apart on the handle facing outward. He wears a cape and holds his arms as if to hold a cup or another symbol of power.163 The level of detail here raises the possibility that we see individuals related to or even representing the defunct whose cremated remains were placed inside these vases. In the seventh century BCE, Chiusi and its territory produced characteristic cinerary urns depicting on their lid a large central figure surrounded by several smaller figures in a manner interpreted as a family leader and their relations.164 Otherwise, we find from the same region cinerary urns of the same period whose whole form comprises a single human figure, including the object on this book’s cover. These have been interpreted as depictions of the defunct whose cremated remains were placed within the vessel (Figure 2.15). There are alternative interpretations for these scenes. The figures may be surviving family members of the deceased, or they may be gods, although the division between divinity and ancestor at this period may not have been significant.165 Although it seems likely to me, we also cannot be absolutely sure whether Etruscans at this time saw their gods take human form as was particular of Greek religion.166 If we do accept that some figural depictions on funerary objects portrayed ancestors in either a specific or generic sense, we still need to establish the matter of cult. The problem lies in the distinction,

162 For the hut as symbol of aristocratic power, see pp. 90–​91. 163 Tuck 1994: 617–​18; Bartoloni 2013. 164 Tuck 1994; Maggiani 2020. 165 Rüpke 2018: 140; see reference in Donati 2005: 378; Maggiani 2020: 183 to the “antenato divinizzato.” 166 For doubts about early Etruscan anthropomorphic deities, see Smith 2014: 87.

76  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.15  Chiusi, cinerary urn with lid shaped like human head, sixth century BCE, image © Metropolitan Museum of Art object 96.9.50a–​b.

noted above in relationship to cult spaces around the tomb, between general rituals owed to the dead and performed during burial and a more properly conceived post-​funerary cult, which entailed the continued veneration of ancestors as protectors of their descendants. This distinction especially becomes an issue in the case of cinerary urns or figurines placed inside tomb and effectively sealed off from forming tangible parts of continuing ritual practices.

Ancestors  77

Figure 2.16  The facing statues of seated figures from the vestibule of the tomb of the statues of Ceri. After Tuck 1994, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

In this regard, it is important to consider alongside figural sculpture on grave goods some examples of life-​sized statues used to mark tombs or tumuli, as the latter remained visible after the funeral. The earliest examples from Etruria are a pair of seated figures who appear in the vestibule of the tomb of the statues from Ceri, discovered in 1971 (Figure 2.16). This rock-​cut tomb consists of three rooms: an entrance hallway, an antechamber with the two facing statues carved in high relief on the walls, and an innermost burial chamber, which contained the burial of a married couple on couches. The two figures are both male. They sit on thrones and wear pointed shoes typically worn by Etruscan aristocrats. An argument for their interpretation as members of the community, and not deities, comes from various emblems of high-​ranking political status, including their shoes and thrones, while one figure holds a lituus, the curved staff of a priest, and the other holds a scepter.167



167

Colonna and von Hase 1984; Flower 1996: 343–​46.

78  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The Ceri statues have been used to interpret analogous seated figural statues from Etruria as ancestors as well. This includes the acroterial statues from the palace at Murlo who wear brimmed hats and in some cases hold status objects. As residential, not funeral, sculpture, the Murlo sculptures fall outside our scope but remain relevant to the broader iconography.168 Instead, in terms of sculpture from grave contexts, we can note a recently discovered fragment of a freestanding stone sculpture of an individual seated on a throne from Veii. Only the feet and bottom parts of the legs survive, although they show a clear resemblance to the Ceri sculptures.169 Another example comes from the tomb of the five seats at Caere (Figure 2.17). At the back of one of the tomb’s side chambers, five thrones are sculpted from the rock, while two further thrones were made along a side wall. The nineteenth-​ century excavation report notes that, at the time of their discovery, the five thrones at the back of the room had small seated statuettes placed upon them, three males and two females. Extant fragments have been restored into three surviving statuettes, each with their right hand outstretched and palm open, probably to hold a libation cup. The two empty thrones on the side of the room have been interpreted as being for the defunct buried in the tomb, who would have joined their ancestors in death, confirming their relation through descendancy.170 Some other examples of figural sculpture inside Etruscan tombs are less firmly interpreted as ancestors. Standing figures from the entrance hallway of the tomba della Capanna at Caere or the Molinello tumulus at Asciano dating to the seventh century BCE have sometimes been interpreted as ancestors, but their position outside the burial chamber and antechamber may suggest instead that they represent spirits who guided the deceased to the afterlife.171 Fragments of several female statues from the tumulo della Pietrera at Vetulonia similarly come from the dromos leading into the tomb, and not the burial chamber itself. Their bent-​arm pose may portray them in a state of mourning, but I see no reason to insist they depict ancestors.172 A spectacular example of tomb sculpture in Etruria comes from two life-​ sized standing figures from Casale Marittimo, recently recovered from the

168 Edlund-​Berry 1992a. 169 Bartoloni 2011. 170 Prayon 1975: 109–​13; Colonna and von Hase 1984: 37; Daamgaard Andersen 1993: 46–​47; Tuck 1994: 619; Riva 2010: 129–​30. 171 Van Kampen 2009: 137. 172 Contra Daamgaard Andersen 1993: 52; also Riva 2010: 128, offering multiple parallels.

Ancestors  79

Figure 2.17  Reconstruction of the interior of the tomb of the five seats from Caere (left) with figure seated on throne (right). After Tuck 1994, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.

art market but said to come from the necropolis of Casa Nocera (Figure 2.18). Dated to the first half of the sixth century BCE, these figures are among the earliest known sculpture in the round from Etruria, and they may have functioned as grave markers atop a burial mound or mounds—​ unfortunately, their illegal and unscientific excavation leaves us unable to say for certain.173 The statues depict two male individuals in the act of mourning with bent arms. They are individuated from each other by details of dress and hairstyle. There is no definite reason to call these ancestors, although they are frequently identified as such. They are not seated on thrones, for example, as at Ceri and Caere. However, we may also note that they lack attributes that might identify them as deities, while they are individualized and depicted in the process of mourning. While scholarship has focused on ancestors in Etruria, the phenomenon of figural statuary often thought to depict ancestors extends to other regions of Italy. From Liguria, we may cite a series of almost sixty known anthropomorphic grave stelai from Lunigiana, the region of southern Liguria around the Carrara massif, which feature stylized depictions of male and female figures and date from the Late Bronze Age down to the sixth century BCE (Figure 2.19). Each statue shows distinct anatomy or personal items, such as jewelry

173

Esposito 1999; Maggiani in Principi Etruschi 2000, pp. 172–​76; Naso 2019: 172–​73.

80  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy or arms. Four display Etruscan inscriptions of personal names, which along with their individualized nature suggests they may have represented the defunct and marked their tombs.174 Human figural statuary combines with text on grave markers in Picene territory, where we have already examined historical aspects found in the Paleosabellic texts on grave markers from Sant’Andrea in the region of Teramo. From the same general region, a famous possible depiction of ancestors comes in the form of the warrior of Capestrano, the monumental sixth-​century BCE sculpture of a male figure with arms crossed bearing arms and wearing a distinctively broad, sombrero-​like hat (cf. Figure 2.5). The statue was found in pieces in 1934 in the area of a necropolis along with a fragmentary torso of a second statue of a female figure, while another torso of similar style appeared on the art market in 1992 of unknown provenance. Alessandro Naso suggests all these sculptures pertained to the same group and belonged atop a single monumental tomb, where he argues they collectively formed a family statuary group, comparable with Greek monuments such as the Geneleos Group from the Heraion of Samos, whose six figures in various poses are interpreted as a depiction of a family.175 The Capestrano warrior bears a dedicatory inscription in paleosabellic language naming the statue’s dedicator Aninis and the individual, Nevius Pompius, on whose behalf the statue’s dedication was made.176 A major point of contention relates to the interpretation of the word rakí, an appositive applied to Nevius, which has been compared to the Latin rex or “king.”177 While by no means certain, it is striking to consider the possibility of a family statuary group centered around a figure identified as a king placed atop a tomb. Naso also suggests that the Capestrano sculpture group was intentionally dismantled and smashed in an act of cancelling out its commemorative power at some later date. He identifies similar actions in the two figures from Casale Marittimo, which lack their feet and may have been cut from their original position on a tomb.178 These ideas cannot be verified on the basis of extant evidence, especially when we possess no contextual information on these sculptures’ original positions. If correct, however, this would form a

174 Ratti 1994; Paltineri 2011. 175 Naso 2019. 176 Imag.Ital. I.226–​27, Vestini/​AVFINVM 1; Naso 2019: 179–​81 with previous bibliography. 177 La Regina 2010: 239–​47; the editors of Imag.Ital. are doubtful and suggest other readings. 178 Naso 2019: 172–​73, on analogy with the Hirschlanden warrior, found smashed into pieces at the base of a burial mound upon which it had initially sat.

Figure 2.18  Statue B of a male figure from the necropolis of Casa Nocera, Casale Marittimo, early sixth century BCE, image published by concession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione regionale Musei della Toscana).

82  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 2.19  Lunigiana, funerary stele found in 1975 at Cavallino di Taponecco. Image reproduced with permission of the Museo Statue Stele delle Lunigianesi.

powerful example of the way in which the historical memory of particular, high-​ranking individuals shaped subsequent funerary ideology in these communities in both positive and negative ways. To sum up this discussion of sculptural ancestors, the ways in which figural sculpture appears in relation to burial in Etruria and elsewhere in Italy is often interpreted as depictions of ancestors, even if we cannot be absolutely sure. This ambiguity makes it important to situate the interpretation of these objects within the larger context of this chapter’s discussion. The frequent

Ancestors  83 interweaving of burial with ideas of family and lineage does seem to appear in spatial trends, in multi-​generational tumuli, or in objects that appear valued for their age and transmission. During the Iron Age, Italians were thinking deliberately about ancestry and social relationships in burial, and it would be no surprise to find similar ideas surrounding monumental sculpture. If this broader context grants us some confidence in thinking that at least some of these images were likely to depict ancestors, what remains harder to determine is the ritual purpose, if any, they held. Certainly, nothing here suggests these images of ancestors, if that is what they were, served for the same sort of elaborate rituals knows from Republican Rome. We do have some possible attestations of ancestral cult in Etruscan epigraphy, such as the title aprinthvale in text discussed at length in the last chapter, Laris Pulenas’ sarcophagus inscription. The word may refer to a priestly office perhaps related to apa, Etruscan for father.179 However, this third-​century BCE text is much later than the Iron Age material. In thinking about these statues, we might instead turn to the hypothesis of Zifferero noted above that tumuli were consecrated space and served themselves as sites of ritual practice. It is important to think about these possible depictions of ancestors’ visibility from monumental altars on or beside tumuli, for example, or related cultic architecture.180 Considering this nexus of ritual and (possibly) ancestral material, it seems possible that especially statues on or within large burial tumuli held some ritual function, even as the details of such practices remain elusive.

Conclusions In this chapter, I have focused on how Italian communities largely of pre or proto-​urban date constructed the past in the context of burial grounds to create or affirm social relationships in order to perpetuate authority through time. Iron Age burial practices intended to construct aristocratic time, marked by ideas of descent, continuity, and renewal over generations. Certain aspects of burial practice appear consistently in Iron Age archaeology from across the peninsula, and I emphasize once more the geographical extent on display here. The pace of change as well as the particular expression of burial

179 180

Bonfante and Bonfante 2002: 150. Riva 2010: 125–​36 provides an excellent account of this.

84  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy rites varied considerably from region to region and even sometimes within single sites. Nonetheless, the evidence presents sufficient unity to see a phase of intensification of the commemorative aspect of funerary ideologies across Italy in this period. As a sort of rough-​ and-​ ready measurement for the success of a community’s efforts at using burial to construct social legitimacy, we might consider the longevity of specific burial areas or tumuli. A sampling of the chronological persistence of burial sites discussed in this chapter suggests an overall trend toward greater durability over time, at least down to the Archaic period.181 This is manifestly demonstrated by the case of Osteria dell’Osa, where clusters lasting only a few decades gave way in the early eighth century BCE to the larger Group 230–​93, which in turn endured for over a century. This latter timespan compares well with other sites around Italy, from the circa 150-​year duration of burial at Temperella in Francavilla Marittima182 to a similar lifespan for Section A at Chiavari. We can cite some longer-​lived destinations for burial as well: two centuries of continuous activity are evident in the largest tumuli at Banditaccia, or even three centuries in the large mound at Crustumerium in Latium, at Colle Ciglio in the Sarno Valley in the Abruzzo, or in some burial areas at Pontecagnano in Campania.183 The recently discovered tumulus at Matelica in Le Marche served as a destination for burials four centuries apart, although the site perhaps was not continuously active over that time.184 It seems reasonable to take the spatial or architectural continuity of burial practice as a sign of the continuation of whatever ideologies bound these groups together. If this chapter has examined the use of burial grounds by elite groups to stake claims to historical continuity, it is also worth raising some concluding questions about discontinuity. Why did burial areas formally bounded by space or architecture eventually fall out of use, especially those which had persisted over long periods of time? It is tempting to see in the end of burial in grave circles or monumental tumuli the lapse of claims to ancestral or corporate relationships. At Francavilla Marittima, we can compare the fate of two large clusters of tombs within the Macchiabate necropolis, both initiated

181 Pace Smith 2006: 155. 182 Publications of Francavilla Marittima rely on the new, earlier chronology based on radiocarbon dates. 183 Such continuity seems less evident in those cases of extremely later burial described above such as around the tumulus at Blera or the Roman-​era burials adjacent to burial mounds at Cortona. 184 Casci Ceccacci and Biocco 2020.

Ancestors  85 at almost the same moment in the later ninth century BCE. One, the so-​ called Cerchio Reale, continues as a focus of intense burial for only about two generations, with fourteen burials placed over a period of about fifty years in a circle around a central cremation burial. The other at the Temperella site contains over twenty-​seven burials dating down to the early seventh century BCE, for about a century and a half.185 Whatever strategies these individual groups employed for prolonging the sense of ancestry or corporate relationships, one group achieved lasting success, while the other did not. In other examples, more global developments may have been at play. At Pontecagnano, the spatial layout of the community’s Iron Age burial grounds persists for a considerably long time, until in the sixth and even early fifth century BCE the number of new burials contracts significantly and new burial grounds are opened up for the first time in centuries, with often very different assemblages of grave goods as the invention of tradition at Pontecagnano thus started anew. The break has been connected with the rising power of new groups of mercantile elites in the community, as happened at the same time elsewhere in Campania. Change in funerary practices in fifth-​century BCE Pontecagnano has also been connected to the more general changes in burial in Central Italy at this time.186 Changing social attitudes toward the display of wealth are held to have contributed to radically different patterns of burial at this time.187 This phenomenon has been closely studied in the restriction of lavish grave goods at Rome or Veii.188 We see entirely new funerary architecture at other places, including the single-​inhumation “coffin” tombs inserted amidst multi-​burial chamber tombs in the San Cerbone necropolis of Populonia, or the cube-​shaped tombs a dado, which replaced monumental tumuli in the Banditaccia necropolis at Caere.189 Imperialism and conquest could also have discernible effects. At Satricum, one of the more wealthy princely tombs appears to have been looted of its gold and silver personal ornaments in antiquity, most likely in the fourth century BCE, when Satricum was destroyed by Latin armies aligned with Rome.190 The same pattern appears at Veii, where a special Early Iron Age 185 Kleibrink 2011; note again that the excavators of Francavilla Marittima use the higher dates for the Italian Iron Age based on radiocarbon; the traditional chronology would compress the timeframes somewhat but would not alter the fact that one circle’s use significantly outlived the other. 186 Cuozzo 2003: 233–​34. 187 Colonna 1977. 188 Rome: Cornell 1995: 106–​8; Veii: Arizzo 2020. 189 Populonia: Romualdi 2000; Caere: Brocato 2012. 190 Waarsenburg 1994: 195.

86  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy burial, which we discuss at great length in the next chapter, no longer received cult after the fifth century BCE, and the area was converted into arable land after the early fourth century BCE, a change probably related to the Romans’ capture of Veii in 396 BCE. As this would appear to show, new elite groups possessed their own traditions and historical concerns and were often uninterested in maintaining those of conquered populations. In some instances, discontinuities appear dramatic. In a late sixth-​century BCE tumulus at Colle del Forno in Sabine territory, a second burial’s deposition accompanied the violent destruction of grave goods associated with the first burial.191 If Naso’s thesis discussed above is correct that statues of ancestors at Casale Marittima and Capestrano were subject to intentional removal and destruction, then we can imagine cases in which the rise of newly powerful elites was attended by very deliberate attempts to replace earlier traditions and create new historical consciousness in local funeral landscapes. These obliterations or lapses in the maintenance of burial monuments would suggest that these communities were fully aware of the historical dimensions of funerary practice.



191

Benelli 2014: 143–​44; Di Fazio 2018: 498–​99.

3 Cities This is the first of two closely connected chapters on the historical culture of the early city in Archaic Italy. By the sixth century BCE, developments set in motion in the Early Iron Age, and in many cases the Final Bronze Age, had culminated in a network of cities. The process of Italian urbanization was uneven in time and space, but undeniably the rise of the city over this period remains one of the most important and enduring developments in the peninsula’s history. New forms of settlement accompanied and often prompted an enormous degree of innovation. Cities called for an array of novel building techniques, information systems, modes of labor, and media of economic exchange, to name just a few areas in which we see radical transformation. Within this context, I explore novel patterns of historical thought that attended the urbanization of Italy.1 Recent research stresses differences between the urbanization process in Tyrrhenian Italy and other areas of the Mediterranean.2 In particular, the rise of Italian cities did not eclipse the authority of elite lineage groups, something that may be contrasted with some well-​known cases of Greek polis formation, which often included overt attempts to curb the political aspirations of individual families.3 Instead, a wealth of evidence suggests that the family group, however it was understood to operate in each local situation, remained a vital unit of Italian political life long after the rise of urban society. To give

1 Compare Smith 2015 on new forms of remembering and the Italian city. 2 For Italian urbanization, I follow here the lines of the so-​called proto-​urban revolution pioneered by Peroni (1969, 1989) and elaborated by scholars like Pacciarelli (1991, 2001); see critique in Ziolkowski 2005, noting considerable variation in Latium. Riva 2016 offers a good summary of the evolving debate. The model sees a first phase of shift to central, upland sites in the Final Bronze Age, with continuity of settlement at most Iron Age cities from this moment onward. The seventh or sixth century BCE represents a moment when processes, already by that point long in motion, accelerated rapidly. A crucial question remains what we mean by a city, and surely the answer rests on ideas of social structure as much as on any particular form of material evidence. For the important role of extended-​family units, see Terrenato 2019. 3 I think here in particular of the Cleisthenic reforms at Athens, although the role of kinship in the Greek polis was obviously complex; see now Humphrey 2018.

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0003

88  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy one example among many, several early Italian cities are not laid out around a central urban core but rather contain spatially distinct nuclei of settlement surrounded by large circuit walls. This configuration, largely if not exclusively unique to Italy, suggests that families or houses remained physically and to some degree politically distinct, while they also pooled resources to defend the broader community.4 This situation famously applies to Rome’s city of seven hills (albeit dispersed settlement was not necessarily familial in this case) but has been discovered by excavations at Tarquinia, Veii, and other communities, which behaved like collectives in some ways, while at the same time displaying internal divisions in continuity with pre-​urban social structures. As a result, a tension between individual and collective must have been one of the most characteristic features of early Italian urban society, and it complicated the ways in which the past was used to create legitimacy. Aristocratic family histories and ancestors still mattered, even as they now were related to the broader history of city-​based social groups. That is, if the last chapter’s analysis of burial practices in Italy confirms that Early Iron Age aristocratic groups were already actively turning to the past to consolidate and perpetuate authority, elites in the consequent period worked to integrate those uses of the past within new, broader civic constructions of society. Of course, similar tensions characterized the much later development of written history in Rome, where early historians like Fabius Pictor, Licinius Macer, or Valerius Antias wrote large-​scale Roman histories intended in part to promote the achievements of their individual families, in this case their gentes, on behalf of the state. As this chapter’s discussion implies, such ambiguities were not new to Middle Republican Rome, but appear with the first emergence of urban life in Central Italy. In attempting to access the ways in which early urban communities understood and employed their past, this chapter turns again to the archaeological record. This approach is made necessary by the nearly complete absence of alternative routes into the topic. As Christopher Smith notes, we possess few if any Italian origin stories that do not reveal signs of Greek influence. Greek culture eventually came to exert an enormous influence on the ways in which Italian understood the rise of their own cities—​this interaction between Italian and Greek culture is a theme that we will contend with in much of the rest of this book, as it is central to a consideration of the historical culture of Italian urbanization. 4 For some Aegean parallels, however, see Hodos 2020: 169.

Cities  89 By way of an example, consider one of the more celebrated origin stories of an early Italian city other than Rome, that of Tarquinia. The story goes as follows: one day while ploughing his fields, Tarquinia’s founder Tarchon discovered a baby with an old man’s face. The baby’s name was Tages, and he taught Tarchon the practice of divination, thereby establishing the mantic arts in Tarquinia. The earliest extant account of this story appears in Cicero, who says he got it from Etruscan sources (de Div. 2.50). Other sources similarly claim an indigenous source. The Late Republican author Nigidius Figulus, as preserved by John Lydus, goes so far as to cite the writings of Tarchon himself (de ost. Praef. 3). Consequently, archaeologists have used the story to think about some discoveries from protourban Tarquinia.5 However, while the story may have some hints of autochthonous qualities, and while it was certainly presented as such by the Roman period, the version we possess reveals signs of deep Greek influence. Tages’ name seems to derive from the Greek word for “the earth” (gês) from which he was born, while in some versions the myth is attached to the Etruscan’s colonial emigration from Lydia, with Tarchon made into a companion of King Tyrrhenus. Even as it is said to depend upon Etruscan sources, this story starts to look like the product of a Greek discourse on the ethnic origins of an Italian people. Traditions like that of Tarchon raise the question of when Italian origin stories first began to look Greek, and whether there were ever earlier layers of native mythologies to begin with. This chapter argues for an early substrate of Italian interest in local pasts, and to access it we often have to go very far back in time. The first signs of Greek myths circulating westward to Italy date back to the earliest colonial encounters in Italy in the eighth century BCE.6 Admittedly, this opens up the possibility that early urban groups in Italy availed upon Greek origin stories as a sort of ready counterpoint to pre-​urban aristocratic historical culture. However, I want to argue that the archaeological record makes it clear instead that Italy’s first urban communities were already thinking about their pasts at a local level, before the arrival of Greek colonists. Archaeological material permits a view that our texts do not, in that we find historical culture playing an important role in Italy’s first cities in ways that relate more to local contingencies than to external influences. 5 Transcription of Tages’ teachings are often cited as a source for divination, as see Censorinus De die nat. 4.13; Lucan. BC 1.636, etc.; for Nigidius Figulus, see Turfa 2012 and below pp. 208–​09; for Tages and Tarquinian archaeology, see Bonghi Jovino 2010: 165; critical discussion in Riva 2016: 95–​96. 6 Malkin 1998.

90  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy While the material evidence leaves the precise details largely inaccessible to us, we can still discern particular patterns emerging in the uses of the past in the period of earliest Italian urbanization.

Continuity The urbanization process in Tyrrhenian Italy occurred over a long period of time, starting in some places in the Final Bronze Age and crystallizing in the sixth century BCE.7 More generally, from the tenth century BCE onward, sites that served as central places became more significantly settled, while minor centers became abandoned. Subsequently, especially by the seventh and sixth centuries BCE these central places took on greater demographic importance and started to display the various characteristics of Italian urban life.8 By virtue of the long-​term nature of this process and the implication of underlying continuity, it is necessary to think that urbanization in Central Tyrrhenian Italy compelled communities to confront the immediate legacy of earlier social relationships. And in fact, evidence reveals urban responses to the pre-​or proto-​urban pasts in several ways. This section focuses on one such pattern of response: the maintenance of the spatial configuration of early settlement into the more monumentalized fabric of the city. In particular, excavation in several Central Italian cities confirms that a number of early temples were built directly atop the remains of Early Iron Age huts, timber-​framed and thatch-​roofed structures of square or oval shape, which were comparatively large structures for the architecture of their day. When I refer to remains of huts, I am generally speaking of traces of cuttings and holes for the placement of timber posts, which are themselves now lost. We have very few examples of the actual architectural remains of these huts, but we frequently encounter signs of their existence in this form. What we can discern is the spatial placement of these huts within a settlement, and the relationship of huts to other structures on site. In many cases, the transition from hut to stone temple seems deliberately designed to carry on the sociopolitical associations of a particular location within an urban site.

7 For continuity of settlement at sites that would become cities from the Final Bronze in Latium, see Bietti Sestieri 1992: 47–​48; for elsewhere, Pacciarelli 2009 8 Peroni 1969; Pacciarelli 1991; Bietti Sestieri 2012: 262–​64; Rendeli 2015; Riva 2016; Terrenato 2019: 34–​44; Smith 2021.

Cities  91 To understand the significance of this topographical continuity, it is necessary first to emphasize the importance of the hut as a material symbol of aristocratic power in Early Iron Age Italian society.9 Even as Iron Age huts’ construction of perishable materials like timber and thatch makes them less visible to archaeological analysis, we can be sure that these structures served as hubs for all facets of Iron Age society. Their fundamental importance to the structure of Early Iron Age society is clear from the replication of huts in highly symbolic contexts, as the form of burial urns for elite cremations to miniature huts found in votive deposits. Huts also feature in iconography from the very earliest Iron Age, from designs on ceramics to motifs on markers of elite power such as wooden thrones or grave markers.10 Huts were homes to aristocratic family groups and formed the physical manifestation of their leadership and sociopolitical power.

Huts to Temples in Rome All of this makes it important that we commonly find remains of huts directly beneath monumental urban architecture, especially temples, in Central Italy. The pattern is relatively well attested at Rome, where later textual evidence also helps to clue us in to huts’ important commemorative power. I therefore start with Rome before considering the wider extent of the phenomenon.11 Ideologically important early religious structures in the city such as the temple of the Vestals or the civic structure related in some way with the monarchy known as the regia (from rex for “king”) in the Forum were built directly on the site of earlier huts. In the case of the Vestals’ sanctuary, Andrea Carandini imagines the circular plan of the Imperial temple replicating that of the round hut on the site, which related to the ritual ditch (favissa) excavated by Giacomo Boni and thus formed a site of continuous cult practice from the eighth century BCE, while nearby beneath the later precinct of the priestesses another hut, this one of rectangular form, functioned as a residence.12

9 For Italian hut architecture, see Brandt and Karlsson 2001; Potts 2015; Della Fina 2016. 10 Bruni 2016; for hut-​shaped grave markers, see the last chapter. 11 For huts at Rome found in early excavations, see Gjerstad 1953–​1973, vol. V, pp. 45–​51 with Ammerman 1990: 627. 12 Carandini 2017: ch. 7; Scott 2009: 7–​8 suggests less specific functions for the same structures, connecting them with other Iron Age huts in the area, which in his view simply formed a node of early settlement.

92  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The huts beneath the regia’s earliest stone phase contained two infant burials. This practice of burying subadults within aristocratic houses is well attested elsewhere in Early Iron Age Latium and speaks to the strong symbolism huts held in constructing kinship and lineage bonds.13 While the wooden structures beneath the regia were dismantled to make way for the new stone building in the early Forum, the infant burials were carefully conserved and redeposited in the new building, an act suggestive of a degree of ideological continuity.14 Recent excavations reveal another series of Iron Age huts on the northeastern slopes of the Palatine Hill, below the later sanctuary of the “old assemblies” (curiae veteres), again suggesting very longstanding elite presence at an important location in Rome’s early religious topography.15 We can compare these huts below sanctuaries with similar structures that were, by contrast, never replaced by later monuments during the city’s long history. Cuttings for Iron Age huts are known from the southeastern Palatine, a part of the hill strongly associated with the settlement of Romulus and the foundation of the city (Figure 3.1). Access to the area of these huts was maintained well into the Empire, and one of the structures may indeed have been the famous hut that Dionysius of Halicarnassus described as being continuously repaired up to his day, that is, up to the reign of Augustus, in original primitive style (1.78.11). By the Early Empire, there were at least two wood and thatch huts still extant at Rome associated with the legendary figure of king Romulus, one on the Palatine and another on the Capitoline.16 Scholars frequently note the power in later Roman literature of these still-​standing huts as places of memory, recalling both the historical person and character of the city’s founder.17 In light of the dubious historicity of Romulus, it is a pointless question to ask which of these huts was his actual residence. What matters is that later Roman authors constructing narratives of Rome’s origins latched onto these huts as material attestations of their stories. These huts thus formed monumenta transmitting the history of figures from the city’s earliest moments.

13 Naglak and Terrenato 2019; Mogetta 2020; for other huts with infant burials across the area of the forum in the necropolis beneath the Temple of Antoninus Pius and Faustina, see Gjerstad 1953–​ 1973, vol. IV.1, p. 48. 14 Brocato and Terrenato 2015: 15. 15 Quondam in Damiani and Parise Pressice 2019: 229–​40; for overview of the site, see Panella and Zeggio 2017. 16 For these huts, see Siwicki 2020: ch. 4 with previous bilbiography. 17 E.g. Edwards 1996: 37–​39.

Cities  93

Figure 3.1  Rome, cuttings for an Iron Age hut found beneath later structures on the southwest Palatine by the scalae Caci. Photo © John N. Hopkins.

Was there similar historical power surrounding huts beneath some of the city’s early sanctuaries? By contrast to the huts of Romulus on the Palatine and perhaps elsewhere, Iron Age structures below the sanctuary of the curiae veteres or the regia were not physically preserved or maintained by later construction. However, it is intriguing to consider in this context the hypothesis that the temple of Vesta retained an echo in the plan of preceding hut architecture on the same spot. The regia also had an unusual architecture plan, which seems intended, or was at some later point understood, to recall early elite residential architecture in Central Italy.18 Moreover, the invisibility of huts destroyed by later buildings did not preclude such structures’ continuing social importance. Matthew Roller points to about a dozen instances in sources of elite houses condemned to demolition for their owners’ misdeeds, where the destruction of the structure served to perpetuate and even sometimes amplify its meaning.19 We should not discount the idea that transforming huts into other structures negated pre-​ urban associations; instead, such acts were a form of commemoration. One

18 Hopkins 2019.

19 Roller 2010; see also Torelli 2017.

94  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy material indication of such intentions is the careful redeposition of earlier infant burials in the construction of the regia, as the later building physically incorporated these components of the earlier phase. We might also bear in mind that early Roman cult structures were not necessarily or strictly public monuments: families laid claim to particular temples or priesthoods well into the Republican period, and the division between conceptions of public and private in Republican Roman culture was not at all straightforward.20 In this case, while Iron Age huts were made invisible by the construction of early urban monuments, one suspects that spatial continuity spoke at some level to a desire to continue aspects of pre-​urban aristocratic power into the urban period.

Huts to Temples in Italy Rome presents an especially rich dataset to support the idea that spatial continuity, even where huts were destroyed, intended to carry forward ideological and symbolic connotations of hut architecture into the fabric of the early city. Bearing this in mind, let us turn to examples of the hut-​to-​temple phenomenon outside of Rome. In numerous cities in Latium, huts commonly appear beneath Archaic temples and sanctuaries. The phenomenon occurs frequently enough to suggest that what we see in Rome might be understood as part of this broader and characteristically Latin cultural habit. Remains of an Iron Age hut settlement with associated child burials were discovered beneath the sanctuary of the thirteen altars at Lavinium.21 At least five huts dating from the ninth and eighth centuries BCE appear beneath the temple of Mater Matuta on the acropolis of Satricum. The temple’s first stone phase dates to the very early sixth century BCE, while one hut lies directly beneath the temple’s cella, a notable spatial continuity interpreted to indicate continuous ritual function from hut to temple (Figure 3.2).22 Several votive deposits were found very close by, one in particular containing some 20,000 objects including, importantly, two model huts. The full assemblage remains unpublished, and the hut models are lost, but it would appear that the deposits date somewhat earlier than the remains of



20 Russell 2016; on gentilician cults, see Fiorentini 2007–​2008. 21 Castagnoli 1975: 3.

22 De Waele 1981; Colonna 2015a: 12.

Cities  95

Figure 3.2  Satricum, phases of the temple-​complex of Mater Matuta, showing the progression from huts to single cella structure to peripteral temple. Photo copyright of the Satricum Project—​University of Amsterdam.

huts.23 Close spatial continuity is also observed at the sanctuary at Colle della Noce at Ardea, where several ninth-​century BCE huts lie below the fifth-​ century BCE temple. Two oval huts in particular align along an axis identical to that of the later temple (Figure 3.3).24 Several recent discoveries expand the list of huts-​to-​temples in Latium. An Iron Age settlement including huts has been known for some time below the extramural eastern sanctuary of Gabii.25 This evidence is joined by the discovery at the same city of a hut dating to the ninth or eighth century BCE beneath a well-​preserved Archaic stone-​built structure of the later seventh



23 Waarsenburg and Maas 2001; Potts 2015: 125. 24 Crescenzi and Tortorici 1984. 25 Zuchtriegel 2012: 231–​32.

96  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 3.3  Plan of the fifth-​century BCE temple at the locality of Colle della Noce, Ardea, in Latium, showing the position of several Iron Age huts below the structure. Drawn by author based on Crescenzi and Tortorici 1984.

century BCE. In the early sixth century BCE, the structure was rebuilt again with a tripartite plan, which has been compared to the Roman regia (see below, Figure 3.7). As with the building in the Roman Forum, the Gabine structure reveals infant burials in its floor, possibly redeposited from the earlier hut.26 Another recent acquisition comes from the ancient site below the medieval church of Santi Stimmate at Velletri, where excavation in 2005–​ 2006 uncovered a mid-​eighth-​century BCE hut below the platform of the temple first constructed in stone blocks around 600 BCE. In phase with the hut are several other cuttings in the bedrock, and a number of miniature vessels and weaving instruments have been associated with these structures, suggesting we may be dealing with a phase of early cult on the site. The temple



26

Fabbri 2017; Hopkins 2019: 55–​153 offers extended critique of comparison with the Roman regia.

Cities  97 was considerably enlarged around 535 BCE when Velletri was under Volscan occupation.27 Nearby at Lanuvium, excavations begun in 2006 uncovered a complex situation below the temple of Juno Sospita.28 The temple contains three phases, a Mid-​Republican structure, an earlier temple of the late sixth century BCE, and the earliest ashlar masonry structure, a single-​room shrine built on a different orientation around 600 BCE. Beneath the earliest phase was a series of huts. The area of the temple’s podium was originally occupied by at least four oval huts dating to the early ninth century BCE. The huts went out of use in the very early eighth century BCE, as indicated by grave goods from an infant burial deposited at the edge of one hut. Then, the same area saw the construction of a large rectangular hut oriented more or less the same way as the first phase of the temple. This rectangular hut in turn went out of use around 740 BCE, when it was dismantled and cut partly by the deposition of an adult woman’s burial, which was attended by ritual deposit of burned legumes. Grave goods from the tomb along with radiocarbon dates taken from this material furnish a firm date. Two other adult burials, both lacking grave goods, also found beneath the temple, may date to this same phase. The final interesting find is a sort of well built on axis with the entrance of the rectangular hut. Its shallow form (1.80 m deep) and fill of ash and animal bones suggest a connection to ritual, perhaps relating to cleaning up after offerings and sacrifice. It appears to have been built contemporary with the temple’s first stone phase and was closed off when that phase went out of use with the late Archaic temple’s construction. Terracotta rooftiles in the well’s fill may even indicate it contained remains of the temple’s dismantled first phase. Remarkably, both the initial stone phase of the temple and this well attend closely to the spatial orientation of the rectangular hut, which at that point was no longer visible and had been replaced by at least one and probably more burials. The historical power of this last rectangular hut thus seems to have continued to shape the configuration of the sanctuary centuries after its disappearance. The excavators suggest we may even see in the hut a proto-​ temple from the early eighth century BCE. The sequence of transition from round huts to rectangular hut with ritual burial, to a sort of proto-​temple with ritual well, would furnish an example of very long continuity of function as well as place.

27 Ghini and Infarinato 2009.

28 Zevi, Attenni, and Santi 2011, 2012; Santi 2017.

98  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy For thinking about the diffusion of the hut-​to-​temple phenomenon in cultural terms, it is important to note that several of these sanctuaries in Latium pertained to settlements of non-​Roman cultural or ethnic groups, particularly Volscan sites such as Velletri and Satricum. In this same regard, it is interesting to note the presence from the eighth century BCE of hut architecture at an Iron Age site outside Agnani in the Liris Valley, nearby a later sanctuary site of the fourth century BCE. The site was Hernician and, as was apparently typical of that cultural group, shows few signs that cult practices ever involved any monumental religious architecture.29 All this material confirms there was nothing particularly Roman about the huts-​to-​temples phenomenon, which we have seen in evidence in early Rome. While huts are commonly attested beneath sanctuaries in Latium, the phenomenon was also not confined to that region. From South Etruria, the grand Archaic sanctuary of Portonaccio at Veii, built just outside the city’s walls at the western edge of the plateau, seems to have occupied the area of a previous group of Early Iron Age huts.30 At Caere, a hut as well as adult burials have been found beneath temples at the sanctuary at the site of Sant’ Antonio.31 The evidence is more ambiguous from another of Caere’s major Archaic sanctuaries at Vigna Parrocchiale, but cuttings in the bedrock beneath the temple there may also pertain to Iron Age huts; as discussed further below, it would appear the architectural transition here was also marked by a series of ritual deposits.32 A very long continuity of cult has been posited for the old city center of Tarquinia at Cività, where a small oval hut appears in the eighth century BCE, followed by a more monumental timber structure, the so-​called Edificio Beta, and finally the major stone masonry structures of the Archaic period.33 North Etruria reveals fewer examples; however, we also know of fewer monumental temples from that region, and the few significant Archaic sanctuaries there do present signs of continued frequentation from pre-​ urban to urban phases. Residual pottery and finds suggest that the area of the acropolis temples of Volterra was the site of an earlier Iron Age settlement,

29 Gatti 2011; for hut architecture, see Potts 2015: 130. 30 Colonna 2002: 146–​47; generally for the phenomenon in Etruria, see Marino 2015: 108–​10, who favors a cultic interpretation of the huts. 31 For Caere Sant’ Antonio, see Izzet 2000; Maggiani and Rizzo 2005; for Vigna Parrocchiale, earlier Iron Age cuttings in the rock below the sanctuary are suggestive, if their purpose is not entirely clear; see Guidi 2010; Bellelli 2013. 32 Bellelli 2013: 170. 33 Bonghi Jovino 2010; see below, pp. 139–​43.

Cities  99 although so far no related architecture has been discovered.34 From inland North Etruria, recent work reveals hut architecture from the first half of the seventh century BCE below the earliest stone phases of the temple on the acropolis of the small Etruscan settlement of Poggio Colla.35 Beyond the confines of Etruria and Latium, remains of a seventh-​ century BCE hut have been discovered below the Santuario Meridionale at Pontecagnano in Campania. The hut predates the monumentalization of the sanctuary by about a century.36 From much farther afield in South Italy, a long continuity of cult has been claimed at the sanctuary-​site of Timpone della Motta near the Oenotrian settlement of Francavilla Marittima in Calabria. Here, a late-​eighth-​century BCE monumental timber structure with a rectangular plan and a porch, identified by its excavators as a temple to Athena, was built atop the area of earlier apsidal timber huts. Excavation of one especially large hut revealed considerable evidence of weaving as well as elite objects also seen in female burials in the nearby Iron Age necropolis at Macchiabate. In the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the timber temple was rebuilt first in mudbrick, then in stone. Associated with the last phase are a large number of small juglets, perhaps instruments for cult. This evidence has been interpreted as sign of continuous worship on the site from (ritualized) weaving activity of the Early Iron Age hut to the Archaic temple to a Greek goddess, Athena, associated with textile production. This continuity would encompass an important cultural change, as the indigenous Oenotrian site received Greek colonists from nearby Sibaris at some point in the seventh century BCE.37

Assessing Huts to Temples Cumulatively, these examples show a wide distribution in Italy of early urban sites with temples or sanctuaries built atop earlier huts. To what extent are we speaking of the same phenomenon in all areas of Italy? Known examples of huts-​to-​temples concentrate primarily in Latium, followed in frequency by South Etruria. We might attribute the similar sequence of architecture 34 Bonamici and Rosselli 2017. 35 The evidence is not yet fully published but see Warden and Trentacoste 2012: 329; my thanks to Angela Trentacoste for pointing me to the site. 36 Cerchiai 2017. 37 Kleibrink, Jacobsen, and Handberg 2004.

100  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy at Pontecagnano to its Etruscan cultural orientation. Timpone della Motta stands out as an example beyond this ambit entirely, and instead from the Greek colonial world of South Italy. In that case, we should acknowledge connections to Greek cultural modes, as even the site’s pre-​colonial and ostensibly Oenotrian phases show strong links with the Greek Aegean and its colonial diaspora in Italy. In this instance, it may be better to discuss Timpone della Motta’s trajectory in relation to the transition from residential to sacred architecture in Greece, well studied by Alexandros Mazarakis Ainian, and it is worth emphasizing that at Timpone della Motta, unlike at the other sites discussed here, we appear to see initial timber phases to the temple.38 At the same time, Timpone della Motta shows the same interest in retaining the spatial configuration of the site through its various transitions from Oenotrian to Greek settlement. We might allow then that what we see is a phenomenon that was everywhere refracted by the local situation and contingent in the case of Timpone della Motta upon Greek cultural practice, but nonetheless revealing similar desires visible elsewhere for marking continuity with the past, which arose when urban society developed within a previously inhabited site. Indeed, it is interesting to note the absence of huts beneath sanctuaries in areas such as Adriatic Italy or Samnium, which remained significantly less urbanized in this period. The region did contain monumental sanctuaries, sometimes even with timber structures below their first stone phase, but this material appears dissimilar to what we see in Tyrrhenian Italy. The early timber structure below the rural sanctuary of Pietrabbondante in the Samnite uplands is a good demonstration of this point, as it has been interpreted as a large tent or enclosure forming an early iteration of the sanctuary itself, rather than as any sort of aristocratic hut.39 We have so far focused on continuity of site, but another important question is that of function. It must be acknowledged that the temples described above represent some of the earliest stone architecture in Italy. It is thus possible to read the shift from hut architecture to temple architecture as merely one of building technology, from timber to stone. Here we enter into the complex and difficult topic of the “sacred hut” and the beginnings of Italian religious architecture. As discussed above, claims have been made at sites like



38 Mazarakis Ainian 1997. 39 Coarelli 1996b.

Cities  101 Lanuvium, Satricum, or Timpone della Motta that temples were placed on huts that already served as cult structures. There has been considerable debate over whether some timber huts in Early Iron Age Central Italy served as primarily religious structures and therefore whether they formed a preliminary step in the development of the Italian temple. The problem, as Charlotte Potts points out, is that evidence for ritual function in Early Iron Age huts is ambiguous.40 Topographical continuity may itself be important, especially in cases like the site of Colle della Noce at Ardea, where the alignment of the subsequent temple precisely maintained that of earlier huts, but it seems assumptive to build the argument for functional continuity on this basis alone. Meanwhile, excavation has so far failed to yield unambiguously religious material from occupation layers of any Iron Age hut. Votive deposits or places of ritual activity did sometimes exist in close proximity to huts, for example at Lanuvium or Satricum, although this can only be suggestive, and the chronological relationships are not always as close as we might like to support a functional link between hut and ritual place. At Tarquinia, one Iron Age hut in the sacred complex was located close to a small natural cavity in which votives and other signs of ritual were found, but again nothing associated with the hut itself confirms that the structure directly supported the cultic activity taking place nearby.41 Another frequently cited index of rituality are infant burials found in the floors of Iron Age huts, as noted for the Roman regia and common especially in Latium. However, rather than an exceptional practice used to distinguish a structure’s function, this seems to have been a normal way of burying infants and stillborn babies from elite families.42 Consequently, while such burials were likely accompanied by ritual actions, it is hard to see their presence granting structures a primarily cultic function. It may be anachronistic in the first place to expect Early Iron Age society to provide examples of exclusively religious architecture. The assemblages of finds from Iron Age huts support the idea of multiple functions ranging from economic production to aristocratic symbolism and ritual.43 In Italy, we do not find Bronze Age examples of what might be understood as the distinctly religious architecture found in parts of the Greek Aegean, where 40 Potts 2015: 30; note Bietti Sestieri 2018: 140 for ritual activity in Bronze Age huts at Scoglio del Tonno. 41 Locatelli 2001; cf. Potts 2015: 19–​20. 42 D’Acri and Mogetta 2020. 43 Jarva 2001.

102  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy we can identify cult structures or altars dating to the second millennium BCE. There appears to have been no basis in Bronze Age Italian society from which a sort of functionally discrete religious architecture might have developed at a very early date. Indeed, the practice of making infant burials in the floors of huts would support this point: Early Iron Age huts were places where ritual action took place in the absence of designated sanctuaries, but huts were also central to family structures and ideas of generational renewal upon which Iron Age society depended as a whole.44 These huts were not deprived of ritual meaning, but they were also not religious buildings, and it seems unwise when faced with this sort of evidence to make firm distinctions between religious and secular, private and civic, and so forth. In that sense, the transition from hut to temple may be seen to have bridged two separate but related worlds, one occupied by the aristocratic kinship-​based societies of Early Iron Age Italy, and the other belonging to the realm of the early city and its urban community. That is, we seem to be encountering spatial continuity in a situation in which the social meaning of space itself was changing in the context of early urbanization. If we accept that Early Iron Age huts contained multiple functions, these structures stand in contrast to the narrowing function of stone temples in Italy of the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Some of these temples were significant buildings taking cues from Greek stone architecture of the period.45 Many such temples were international in style. They were intended to house deities, not aristocratic leadership, which granted them a more defined religious function. However, in other ways the early stone temples of Archaic Italy seem to have retained markedly aristocratic traits. I have already noted the persistence of family attachments to particular temples and cults at Rome, as probably pertained elsewhere in Italy in this period. Archaic sanctuaries unlike huts may have been dedicated to gods, but this shift did not preclude their ability to promote the power of aristocratic groups. Some sanctuaries have been interpreted as dynastic complexes intended to convey the authority of particular aristocratic families.46 Relevant are the famous bilingual inscriptions on gold tablets discovered within the coastal sanctuary 44 Cohen and Naglak 2020. 45 Hopkins 2016. 46 Humm 2017 reads the Archaic sanctuary at Sant’ Omobono in Rome as a Tarquinian monument; Torelli 2019 links the Spurinnae closely with the Ara della Regina at Tarquinia.

Cities  103 at Pyrgi, which reveal the claim of a local ruler, Thefarie Velianas, to have built and dedicated a temple to Astarte/​Uni.47 In more prosaic terms, we can point to the aristocratic symbolism in early monumental temple architecture found in many such structures’ decorative terracottas that carried images of aristocratic life: seated councils, banquet scenes, armed combat, chariot processions, and so forth.48 I would suggest that, while the shift from hut to temple in Archaic cities implied new political and social conceptions of space, it did not necessarily involve a full rejection of the earlier aristocratic world of princely elites. In this way, the phenomenon matches the particular complexities of Italian urbanization. We might speculate whether the decision to maintain topographical locations of power from hut to sanctuary was not also related to desires to retain aristocratic prestige in these urban monuments. Beyond Rome, we have little ability to know whom the huts belonged to, or whether the builders of early urban architecture conceived of themselves as real heirs to their aristocratic predecessors. Nonetheless, we are led to think that the aristocratic past encoded and transmitted through the continued use of space held important meaning for these early urban societies.

Discontinuity Establishing continuity was not the only way that early urban communities responded to the earlier inhabitants of a site. In some cases, we see a conscious attempt to create novelty and clear the way for the city’s emergence by materially signaling a break from the pre-​urban past. This section examines two ways in which cities deliberately broke from their past, looking first at rites of foundation and their material residues as ways of marking rupture, and then at some spectacular cases of the radical obliteration of pre-​urban architecture. This second topic returns us to the theme of the aristocratic hut as a powerful symbol of pre-​urban authority, but we will see cases in which this ideology provoked a markedly different response than that discussed so far in this chapter.



47 See below p. 174.

48 Winter 2009; Lulof and Smith 2017.

104  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Foundation While long-​term occupation characterized many of the sites of Italy’s first cities, one also gets the sense of a highly conscious feeling of novelty. Across Italy, we find toponyms in all Italian languages translating more or less to “new city,” such as Neapolis in Greek, Nola and Nocera in Oscan, and Kainua, modern Marzabotto, in Etruscan.49 Some of these cities were actually new, and rites and rituals of foundation attended their creation. Marzabotto is a paradigmatic case whose archaeology reveals a city plan created largely from scratch with an orthogonal grid oriented to the cardinal directions.50 The city’s creation seems to have been attended by ritual actions carried out from the altars and religious architecture on the acropolis at the city’s northwest edge and related to the burial of stone markers or cippi, at least one inscribed with an x, at important intersections in the city’s grid-​plan (Figure 3.4).51 These material residues of foundation rites from the creation of Marzabotto speak to the city’s sense of newness and separation from the past, and indeed no significant signs of a pre-​urban earlier presence have been found on the site. What is noteworthy, however, is that similar foundation rituals were undertaken at other sites with significant pre-​urban histories.52 Rome reveals a complex case of foundation acts apparently similar to those undertaken at Marzabotto and other foundation rituals carried out at multiple phases of the city’s early history. According to one strand of the literary tradition, the religious rituals of the city’s creation were carried out not by Romulus, but by the second king, Numa, who began his reign standing in priestly dress upon the high sanctuary of the arx to inaugurate the city below, using a curved sacred staff (lituus) to divide urban territory according to celestial design.53 Sources are not consistent in assigning these acts to Numa, and a list of foundation rites at Rome would need to include not only the famous augural competition of Romulus and Remus, but also Hercules’ earlier establishment of the Ara Maxima.54 Without entering into these complexities, we can easily enough make the point that rituals of foundation were by no means exclusive

49 Sassatelli 2017: 181. 50 Earlier phases of occupation on the site are known, but are irregular in plan and thus far remain difficult to restore; see Sassatelli 1989: 30–​33; Govi 2017b: 88. 51 Gottarelli 2005, 2010; Sassatelli 2017. 52 As also observed by Riva 2016. 53 Liv. 1.18; attribution of the lituus and rites to Numa, however, is not consistent across our sources. 54 On Rome’s various founders, see Lou-​Gille 1980.

Cities  105

Figure 3.4  Plan of the Etruscan city of Marzabotto. Image © Elisabetta Govi.

to Rome’s earliest moment, or even any single moment, in the city’s long urban history. There are no secure archaeological traces at Rome of these foundation rites, in contrast to the finds from Marzabotto.55 However, several other cities with deep settlement histories do reveal material traces of foundation rituals. The

55 It is problematic to any search for such evidence that early Rome’s irregular plan, seemingly devoid of any logical celestial layout, was famous already in antiquity, as see Liv. 5.55.3–​5 with Bernard 2018: 47–​48. Some early votive deposits are interpreted in relation to foundation rites, in particular the deposit found in relation to the wall excavated on the slope of the Palatine, as see Carandini 1997; D’Alessio 2013. Several claims have been made to locate the auguraculum, as see Magdelain 1968; Ziolkowski 1993; Tucci 2005.

106  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy actions undertaken to found Marzabotto do not seem to have been unusual in its region, for example. Giuseppe Sassatelli collects archaeological evidence to suggest that a number of other settlements in the Po Valley, some occupied from a much earlier date, saw similar foundation rituals to Marzabotto. The remaking of Bologna, which hosted an old Villanovan settlement, as the Etruscan settlement of Felsina may have accompanied the creation of a new orthogonally gridded street plan laid out from the city’s acropolis on its southern edge, from the sacred precinct discovered there at the site of Villa Cassarini, in a situation potentially very similar to Marzabotto.56 Elsewhere in the region, a number of stone markers or cippi inscribed with crosses appear to attest to their use to create regular urban layouts, again similar to what we find at Marzabotto. One such stone has been found at Spina in the Po Delta inscribed in Etruscan with the phrase mi tular, perhaps translatable as “I am the boundary (stone).” On the basis of paleography, the inscription dates to the fourth century BCE, after the earliest urban phases of the Spina.57 Other stones marked with crosses are known from Oderzo and Padua. The Paduan example, found in place at the intersection of a roadway and a ditch in the center of the urban area, can be dated to the sixth century BCE, in an area where the first traces of settlement go back at least three hundred years, while human presence at Padua itself is even older.58 It is tempting to relate this Paduan “foundation stone” with its inscribed cross to the broader tradition known at Padua of placing round inscribed stones in the ground to mark the boundary of burial zones, cult space, or water channels, attested by almost a dozen examples in the local Venetic language.59 Other categories of finds possibly related to moments of urban foundation are worth mentioning. Special depositions of material in stratigraphic layers related to but sealed off by the construction of early structures are often identified as “foundation deposits” held to contain ritual offerings. I discuss some remarkable finds often thought to form a foundation deposit from Tarquinia’s Ara della Regina in the next chapter. There are numerous other examples: from the Etruscan sanctuary of Gravisca, associated with the fifth building phase of the early fifth century BCE, is a burial of an amphora and a large crater filled with remains of coral.60 From Latium, we

56 Sassatelli 2017: 184–​85.

57 Zamboni 2016: 228; cf. Sassatelli 2017: 185 n. 7.

58 Gamba et al. 2005: 26; for Bronze Age activity at Padua, see Bietti Sestieri 2018: 198–​99. 59 Marinetti and Prosdocimi 2005: 37–​38. 60 Fiorini 2005: 73–​77.

Cities  107 can cite a bucchero cup in a foundation trench of the sixth-​century phase of Satricum, or deposits of heavy bronze coinage from the coastal sanctuary of Sol Indiges.61 We sometimes find examples of foundation deposits at rural sites either outside cities, such as two jugs or olle in a foundation cut of a sixth-​century farm-​site between Ariccia and Genzano in the Alban region of Latium, or signs of vegetal offerings made in the foundation trench of a farmhouse at Montemurro near Potenza in Lucania.62 Practices are different in various locations, but the basic idea of marking a phase in the life of a settlement with a ritual deposit is very widespread across Italy. Several Italian sites contain sanctuaries identified as augural temples for the carrying out of foundational rites, and reference to the laying out of an augural shrine or templum has been identified in the Umbrian text of one of the Iguvine Tables.63 Bantia contains probably the most famous example of this type of foundational sanctuary, while hilltop sanctuaries at Castelsecco near Arezzo and at Roselle have been claimed as possible parallels.64 Several monuments located in the center of settlements and consisted of shallow wells or pits filled with votives have been identified as their city’s mundus, or cult pit intended to receive foundational sacrifices.65 On analogy with a small platform with a well in its center on Marzabotto’s acropolis, about a dozen roughly similar monuments have been identified as mundi across Etruria.66 New evidence in this regard comes from an Etruscan inscription on a bronze lamina from the temple of Tinia in Marzabotto’s urban center, which refers to the construction or dedication of a structure called a muntie, perhaps equivalent to the Latin mundus, although this is not the only translation; I discuss this newly discovered text again in another chapter.67 In general, caution is required, as structures referred to as mundi in both literary and epigraphic sources of the later period have religious importance not exclusively connected to foundation rituals.68 Some other remarkable ritual deposits have been interpreted as the traces of acts of city-​foundation. Several come from Rome, including an example

61 Satricum: Gnade 1997: 102; Sol Indiges: Molinari and Jaia 2011. 62 Ariccia: Palladino 2016; Lucania: 63 Magdelain 1968; for the Iguvine tables, see below pp. 179–​81. 64 Michetti 2013: 334 with bibliography; for Bantia, see Torelli 1966. 65 On analogy with Plut. Rom. 11.2; for one idea of where this was located, or at least remembered in later times to have been located, at Rome, see Coarelli 2020: 68–​69. 66 Michetti 2013: 338–​39. 67 Govi 2014; see below p. 178. 68 Cf. Bendlin 2002.

108  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy related to a gate in the eighth century BCE Palatine wall at Rome.69 There are also the two pits containing exceptional bronze objects—​an axe, trumpet, and shield—​found in front of the entrance of the early timber monument known as Edificio B at the site of Pian di Civita at Tarquinia.70 As discussed in detail in the next chapter, while this area seems to have been a destination of cult possibly since the tenth century BCE, these objects relate to a significant change in the area’s monumental aspect in the early seventh century BCE. Focusing on the importance of the augural staff or lituus in foundation rites, we can note several examples identified with different degrees of certainty. A small, bronze figurine from votive material at Rome found in a deposit near the assembly space or comitium on one side of the Forum holds a curved staff often identified as a lituus; interestingly, the deposit also contained vulture bones.71 A bronze rod from the so-​called tomb of Aeneas at Lavinium (discussed in the next chapter) was initially thought to be a lituus, but is better interpreted as a fragment of a chariot fitting. A bronze spiral thought to be part of a model of a staff from Sant’Ilario d’Enza (Figure 3.5), similar in form to another miniature spiral found dated to the mid-​sixth century BCE from the tomb of the lituus at Caere. Problematically, the lituus appears with some regularity in Etruscan art in contexts related to a wider range of priestly activities than simply founding rituals, and again we cannot be absolutely sure these objects were understood to carry meanings of urban foundation.72 Another important material residue of rites attending urban foundation relates to a city’s walls and the line demarcating the boundary between urban space and surrounding territory. Again the paradigm for interpreting this evidence is often taken to be Rome, where sources refer to a boundary called the pomerium, which functioned in this way, although the relationship between Rome’s pomerium and its physical walls remains a fraught question.73 In the collective memory of an urban community, walls were probably often held to relate to a foundational act, although the enormous number and variety of Iron Age Italian city walls militates against applying any particular interpretion too firmly. In rare instances, excavation has identified furrows or trenches in the earth surrounding settlement areas, features reminiscent of the Roman idea of the “first furrow” (sulcus primigenius), sometimes

69 D’Alessio 2013; Coletti and Pensabene 2017: 578–​79. 70 Bonghi Jovino 2010: 168–​70.

71 See Damiani and Parise Pressicci 2019: 117–​19 with earlier bibliography.

72 Macellari 1994; for iconographic parallels, see Ambos and Krauskopf 2010. 73 Bernard 2012: 6–​7.

Cities  109

Figure 3.5  Sant’Ilario d’Enza, curved bronze finial of an augural staff or lituus. Reproduced with the permission of the Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia.

related to the pomerium, made around the future city by Romulus to receive its walls (cf. Dion. Hal. 1.88.2). At the site of Piazza d’Armi at Veii, a site we return to several times in this book, it is suggested that two parallel ditches, stratigraphically dated to the early eighth century BCE and discovered at the margin of a secondary street, relate to the initial delimitation of the urban area, as the site frequented since the very Early Iron Age took on increasingly organized monumental aspects.74 At the North Etruscan site of Populonia, an Early Iron Age hoard of bronze objects found at the site of Falda della Guardiola near to the city’s later lower wall circuit may relate to a ritual carried out at that spot to demarcate urban and exurban territory, a line later monumentalized by the city’s walls.75

74 Michetti 2013: 339.

75 Bartoloni 2004: 247; Lo Schiavo and Milletti 2011.

110  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The settlement of Pontecagnano in Campania shows especially interesting evidence in this regard. The urban area of the Etruscan settlement, dated to the very early sixth century BCE, displays an orthogonal division of territory surrounded by a circuit of walls. The walls’ internal face was accompanied by a continuous channel cut into the earth. Within the channel’s fill was a juglet or oinochoe of Italian production, dating perhaps to the initial phase of the urban area or even perhaps slightly earlier, intentionally broken. Also found at the interior margin of the walls was a circular pit containing what appears to be a ritual deposit. Luca Cerchiai connects this evidence with the possibility that colonists from Etruria employed Etruscan city-​foundation rituals in the sixth century BCE when establishing themselves on this site.76 It is especially relevant to note this discovery at Pontecagnano, as the site has a long earlier history of settlement, while this chapter’s last section has noted the placement of the urban area’s Santuario Meridionale atop an Early Iron Age hut. In this case, we find a complex strategy of confronting the past, which included both continuity but also the desire to mark through ritual actions the creation of a new phase of settlement. Another site in Campania that provides interesting evidence of a foundation ritual is Cumae, traditionally the first Greek colony established on the Italian mainland. A passage of Plutarch’s Moralia reports a labor-​intensive building project undertaken by the tyrant Aristodemus, who ruled the city in the late sixth century BCE: Around that time, Aristodemus was building a ditch (τάφρον) in a circle around the chora (of Cumae) a task neither necessary nor useful, but he wished to undertake it to wear down the citizenry and set them to busy work, for it was commanded to every citizen to carry an established amount of earth.77

The passage reveals a typical trope of tyrants inflicting their citizenry with heavy labor for urban construction, but the ditch’s purpose, or lack of purpose, gives pause.78 What is more, the ditch seems to find plausible archaeological support in a massive trench discovered along the outside of the north 76 Cerchiai 2008: 404–​7; see Michetti 2013: 339 for a possible comparison from Pyrgi. 77 Plut. Mor. 262b: τάφρον ἄγων κύκλῳ περὶ τὴν χώραν ὁ Ἀριστόδημος, οὔτ᾽ ἀναγκαῖον ἔργον οὔτε χρήσιμον, ἄλλως δὲ τρίβειν καὶ ἀποκναίειν πόνοις καὶ ἀσχολίαις τοὺς πολίτας βουλόμενος: ἦν γὰρ προστεταγμένον ἑκάστῳ μέτρων τινῶν ἀριθμὸν ἐκφέρειν τῆς γῆς. 78 For tyrants and corvée labor, see Bernard 2018: 112–​13.

Cities  111 walls of the city. The walls themselves were also rebuilt as part of a massive building program undertaken by the tyrant. Pointing to the archaeological trench as confirmation of the basic truth of Plutarch’s notice, Cerchiai argues that what Aristodemus intended to do was clarify the boundary between Cumae’s urban area and hinterland, its polis and chora, and he notes that Plutarch’s description of Romulus’ foundation of Rome uses much of the same language. This was, in that case, an act of refoundation employed by the Cumaean tyrant to establish the political space of his rule, a symbolic, but no less important, physical act undertaken alongside his monumentalization of the city itself. Cumae by the time of Aristodemus’ reign had already been an important urban center in Campania since its colonial foundation in the eighth century BCE.79 In this case, the physical and apparently labor-​ intensive act of urban foundation was undertaken in order to mark off in physical terms a transition in the city’s political history. The situation at Cumae can be connected to Pontecagnano, or Padua and Bologna, in the sense that foundation rites appear frequently in situations of longstanding settlement. Foundation more often than not formed an artificial and ideological act intended to mark discontinuity in longstanding settlement. Marzabotto, where foundation rituals were undertaken at an initial moment in the city’s history, in fact appears to have been an exceptional case. As a means of engaging with a site’s history, such foundation rites reveal aristocrats seeking to clear away their pre-​urban past to make room for a sort of new zero point in their communities’ historical consciousness. Subsequently, time could be measured out from these zero points, with pre-​ urban time relegated to the realm of mythology. Such chronological division is well known from later Roman history, while the use of dates “from the foundation” (ab urbe condita) at Rome is paralleled by eras counted from local founding dates in other cities.80 Thus, foundation rituals can be seen to produce a sense of rupture by relegating the past before a city’s founding to a sort of prehistory.81

79 Cerchiai 2000; D’Acunto 2015. 80 Especially at Padua, on which see Harris 1977; Liu 2007; see Harris op. cit. 290 n. 31; Clarke 2008: 19 for local eras from elsewhere in the Empire; see Kosmin 2019: 97–​98 for similar practices in the Hellenistic Greek world. 81 For the timekeeping implications of these actions, see Chapter 5.

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Obliteration In some cases, we see even more deliberate attempts to disassociate urban communities from their pasts, with cities going so far as to obliterate and abandon monumental spaces associated with pre-​or proto-​urban society. A stunning example of violent rupture between proto-​urban and urban society has been discovered by recent excavation on the acropolis of Populonia in North Etruria.82 The last chapter discussed Populonia’s impressive early monumental funerary architecture, no doubt related to wealth acquired from the community’s involvement in metal trade deriving from inland mines as well as Elba. The various Early Iron Age cemeteries at Populonia are distributed along the coastal area from Poggio delle Granate, the earliest, to the north to San Cerbone at the foot of the acropolis. Considering this distribution of burial grounds, it was initially thought that the Early Iron Age settlement was also scattered on several high places in the area relating to different burial grounds. However, excavation on the summit of the acropolis hill revealed an Iron Age settlement centered on a monumental timber hut, traceable from the holes cut in the bedrock for its posts, and now reconstructed by the local archaeological park services (Figure 3.6). The hut’s location afforded a privileged view of the water channel between the mainland and Elba, seemingly confirming the ideological and perhaps political link between the aristocracy who resided in the hut and the seaborne metal trade flowing through this region. The hut’s earliest phases belong to the ninth century BCE, when it took on a simple but nonetheless substantial ovular shape. This makes its creation contemporary with the earliest monumental tombs in Poggio delle Granate, down the hill to its north, while survey on hilltops closer to that burial area have thus far produced no signs of early occupation. In the eighth century BCE, the hut was remade using the same construction techniques but with a rectangular plan. The contemporaneity of this hut structure with the earliest monumental tombs suggests it was the focal site for the pre-​urban community and its leadership. Gilda Bartoloni, whose excavations on the acropolis have brought this remarkable structure to light, dubs the Populonia hut the “house of the king” (casa del re).83 In terms of a connection to the apex of the early community’s

82 For the following, see Bartoloni 2009, 2010. 83 Acconcia and Bartoloni 2007.

Cities  113

Figure 3.6  Populonia, modern reconstruction of the “House of the King” on acropolis, ninth century BCE. Photo © author.

sociopolitical hierarchy, the name fits, even if we might wish to avoid the more specific connotations of monarchy with little other evidence to shed light on early Populonia’s political structure. However, this large hut with its direct view of maritime exchange routes upon which aristocratic power depended must have served as both material and symbolic center of the pre-​ urban community. In the first quarter of the seventh century BCE, this “house of the king” was ritually destroyed. As part of this process, a cut in the bedrock almost a half meter deep was made across the midpoint of the structure. In this cut was deposited an enormous quantity of high-​handled cups (kyathoi) used for ladling and drinking wine, a form associated with banqueting ceremonies (Figure 3.7). Excavators found over eighty cups, and their good preservation indicated they were ritually deposited in a single action after use, presumably in relation to the dismantling of the structure. We are led to reconstruct a large group of elites taking part in a ritual drinking ceremony, which involved the obliteration of the site of earlier aristocratic power at Populonia: a toast together to the destruction of the house of the king.

114  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 3.7  Populonia, deposit of drinking cups made in the early seventh century BCE during the destruction of the Casa del Re. Photo © Gilda Bartoloni.

What is more, the ritual destruction of the hut seems to usher in a long phase of abandonment on the site. After the dismantling of the hut, we find minor signs of further occupation on the hilltop for a few decades. By the mid-​sixth century BCE, there is no trace of occupation on the acropolis at all, and we do not find so much as a single sherd of residual pottery from the later sixth or fifth century BCE anywhere on the hilltop until the reoccupation of the site around 300 BCE. This lapse of activity in the area of the Iron Age hut cannot be explained as a decline in the broader fortunes of Populonia.84 Even as the hilltop shows few signs of human activity in the Archaic period, occupation continues in other parts of the site. There is significant burial activity from the sixth and fifth centuries BCE in the cemeteries by the beach, and the city’s iron industry seems to expand as, in the mid-​sixth century BCE, a major industrial quarter for metalworking was established near the beach at the foot of the acropolis. Energetic iron production in the following period was responsible for the

84 Fedeli 1993.

Cities  115 first of several thick accumulations of ancient iron slag found blanketing the area.85 Thus, the city of Populonia in the Archaic period was economically vibrant and active, even as the acropolis, the seat of earlier proto-​urban power, sat dormant. Populonia thus presents a paradigmatic case of an act of intentional rupture in the history of settlement accompanying the emergence of a new urban aristocracy. It seems reasonable to assume that those elites who participated in the ceremonial destruction of the so-​called house of the king would also guide the city’s subsequent development. In ritually dismantling and then abandoning the acropolis site, their actions intended to relegate a focal site of proto-​urban leadership to memory, and to establish a new tradition with which to create the ideology of the subsequent city. In this way, this destructive act of obliteration takes on similar intentions to the foundation rituals examined in the last section. All of these actions were highly conscious of the past and deliberately sought to mediate the relationship between past and present at these sites. While evidence is less sensational, the use of ritual to mark the abandonment of pre-​urban settlement can be found at other sites. We are looking for evidence of a sort of inversion of foundation rituals in which religious acts were used to obliterate rather than create, while both types of actions may be understood to seek discontinuity in their own ways. Across the Apennines at Verucchio, we find a possible ritual deposit in phases associated with the abandonment of the Villanovan settlement in the mid-​seventh century BCE, after which the area appears unoccupied until the late fifth century BCE.86 Another interesting case comes from the small Iron Age settlement at Campassini, near the medieval fortified town of Monteriggioni, east of Volterra.87 The site of Campassini centers around two huts built at the end of the eighth century BCE, accompanied by two burials, an adult man and woman, unusually placed in close proximity to the area of habitation. In the seventh century BCE, the settlement became an active artisan center, particularly for metalworking, as indicated by a large square cistern and several pits relating to such activity. The site was abandoned in the later sixth century BCE, when several pits were closed off with deposits of animal parts or complete pots, speaking to attendant sacrificial or libation rituals. The date of



85 Bonamici 2015.

86 Harari 2017: 42–​45.

87 Ciacci and Acconcia 2004; Acconcia and Biagi 2005.

116  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the abandonment of Campassini corresponds with the earliest sacred monumental architecture on the acropolis of Volterra, built in the last quarter of the sixth century BCE.88 We might connect the ritualized abandonment of a minor center at Campassini with the emergence of the larger city at Volterra, as part of the wider process of centralization typical of long-​term Italian urbanization. We also find some cases of deliberate obliteration of earlier aristocratic monuments in the context of ongoing urban development in the Archaic period. Above, I noted the possibility of huts beneath the Archaic sanctuary of the site of Vigna Parrocchiale at Caere. It would appear that, instead of continuity from hut to temple at that site, an entire Iron Age quarter was systematically demolished to clear way for the sanctuary and its temple. Debris from this earlier phase was used to level the area, and several vases holding agricultural offerings were ritually deposited in this levelling phase immediately prior to the temple’s construction.89 Another interesting case of obliteration comes from Gabii and the recently excavated aristocratic building with a tripartite plan, which has been mentioned above in the context of its construction atop an Iron Age hut (Figure 3.8). Around 500 BCE, most of this structure’s contents were removed, and the monument was dismantled and partly razed before being covered over by a massive mound set on a stone drum. The precise historical circumstances of the building’s violent cancellation in the urban landscape are unknown. Sources suggest that Gabii was made a satellite of Tarquinian power under the last Roman king, and Marco Fabbri suggests this destructive act was carried out under the influence of Roman magistrates as part of a treaty between Rome and Gabii in the course of wars in Latium between Tarquin and his allies and the early Republic.90 Whether or not this sequence of actions relates to the narrative found in the sources, it remains remarkable that the intentional destruction of this structure, ostensibly an important location of aristocratic power since the Early Iron Age, was closely followed in time by significant developments in Gabii’s urban profile. Around the time of the structure’s destruction, a nearby habitation cluster, which had existed since at least the eighth century BCE, was also intentionally destroyed and not reoccupied. The same seems to have happened at several other 88 For Volterra, see Bonamici et al. 2017; as in other cases, the growth of Volterra was very long-​term. 89 Bellelli 2013: 171. 90 Fabbri 2017.

Cities  117

Figure 3.8  Gabii, the so-​called regia, a tripartite building ritually destroyed and buried ca. 500 BCE. Photo © Marco Fabbri.

longstanding Iron Age settlement clusters in the city, although the process is less clear. Meanwhile, the city’s walls and gates, initially built in the late seventh or sixth century BCE, were remade, and the stone cult building at the Santuario Orientale was rebuilt after a fire with an entirely different plan.91 Gabii would undergo another important stage of urbanization in the later fifth century BCE with the rebuilding of the walls again, this time to accommodate an orthogonal street plan. However, it is important to contextualize the ritual obliteration of the aristocratic structure around 500 BCE within a wider phase of urban development of the late Archaic period, one that saw the community more broadly concerned with cancelling out earlier and, by that point, long-​lived Iron Age settlement patterns associated with the previous aristocracy and starting the process of their replacement. The city of Gabii, of course, represents the culmination of social developments in its area seen much earlier at the Early Iron Age cemetery of Osteria dell’Osa, discussed in the last chapter. In the obliteration and reconfiguration of the site’s architectural landscape, we see the settlement’s community continuing to turn to their monumental surroundings as an important way of manipulating historical culture. This discussion of deliberate rupture as strategy for the creation of urban community leads us to consider Rome itself, as there has been debate over whether archaeology reveals the violent cancellation of the Tarquinian



91 Johnston and Mogetta 2020: 9–​10 with further bibliography.

118  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy monarchy in the first years of the Republic. In this case, however, the evidence is ambiguous.92 Both the Forum Boarium, where we find the Archaic temple at the site of Sant’ Omobono, and around the Forum at the assembly area or comitium and the area of the fountain of Juturna show evidence of destruction by violent fire in the late sixth century BCE. Problematically, our tradition on the end of the Tarquinian monarchy makes no mention of widespread violent destruction, so it is not immediately clear how to integrate this archaeological material with the sources. It has been suggested that the Sant’ Omobono site in particular hosted a sort of dynastic sanctuary created by the Tarquins, and its destruction was followed by almost a century of disuse, as its ruins served to encode and display the memory of the overthrown kings. This is a spectacular thesis, and more recent study suggests instead that the site was more rapidly rebuilt after its destruction by fire. The large platform at the site that hosted the twin temples of Fortuna and Mater Matuta was created shortly after the previous Archaic temple’s destruction. Meanwhile, alongside monuments around the Forum that show signs of destructive fire in the late sixth century BCE, we may point to others, such as the regia or the two Archaic houses below the Forum of Caesar, both very close to the comitium, which do not. Furthermore, the first decades of the Republic saw the completion of a number of monuments planned or otherwise associated with the later Roman kings, a continuity seemingly at odds with the idea of any systematic obliterating of the material landscape of monarchic Rome.93 There are reasons, then, to doubt the idea of widespread urban destruction at Rome intended to obliterate the monuments of the Tarquinian dynasty. If the Roman case, then, is not clearly applicable, what the other examples from outside Rome nonetheless serve to underscore is that, just as foundation rituals could take place at multiple junctures in a city’s development, it is not unusual to find ritualized destruction—​obliteration rituals—​used to mark closures of phases in sites that were already undergoing processes of urbanization. Within this category we can include cases of obliteration not necessarily intended to mark the end of entire communities but used to signal important transitions in that of particular urban monuments. One example has been identified at Veii’s Portonaccio, where during the restructuring of the temple several of the large architectural statues from the previous phase were taken down and ritually buried in a fenced-​off area in the sanctuary.94

92 See Hopkins 2023a.

93 Hopkins 2016: 125–​52; Hopkins 2023a. 94 Bonghi Jovino 2005.

Cities  119 Another remarkable case of a possible obliteration ritual comes from the temple at Velletri beneath the church of SS. Stimmate. The destruction of the sanctuary in the late fifth or early fourth century BCE was attended by the smashing of ceramic vessels and objects from the temple and then their scattering over the site. This ritual action seems to have been meant to signify the obliteration or expiation of the religious site and may perhaps pertain to Velletri’s changing of hands in those wars between Romans and Volscans in that period.95 We might compare the case of the famous fifth-​century BCE Latin inscription from Satricum recording a dedication to Mars on behalf of Valerius Publicola by his followers. The stone bearing the inscription was found upside down and reused in a phase of the temple of Mater Matuta. This placement of the inscribed surface in a way that made it no longer visible may have been intended to efface and obliterate the memory of the monument and its actors. The cases of Velletri and Satricum may be corresponded with our sources, which suggest that rites of obliteration at both cities belonged to periods of conflict in the region of Latium. It seems plausible that new groups who gained control of these Latin cities invested in marking a break with the past, and the manipulation of historical culture here may be seen as part of the toolkit of conquest. While we see signs of actions undertaken at sites where urbanization was then already well underway, it is worth connecting this evidence to other cases like Populonia and elsewhere where destructive acts appear from very early points in urban development. In general, a consistent pattern emerges in which we find not only that the past mattered at these sites, but also that a rupture from that past was sometimes desirable for whatever reason and could be marked off by ritualized actions, leaving traces in the archaeological record.

Conclusions Italy’s first cities were compelled to confront their past by virtue of the very widespread circumstances of underlying settlement continuity, and they did so in different ways. The process of becoming urban in Italy was long in duration, and often major steps along the way entailed negotiating material residues of previous occupation on the same site. As we have seen,

95 Drago et al. 2016.

120  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy this confrontation stimulated a spectrum of responses, ranging from the maintenance of space as a way of continuing forms of earlier authority to the opposite attempt to uproot or obliterate traces of prior settlement and stake claims to novelty. All of these, I suggest, should be understood to form new technologies of engagement with the past, which developed during the process of Italian urbanization. When viewed purely from the archaeological record, these actions taken by early urban communities seem locally determined and shaped more by the particularity of Italian urbanization than by any external influence. The various ways of confronting the past here form an early urban historical culture, but it is a culture rooted to place and to the sociopolitical complexion of each emerging urban community.

4 Founders This chapter seeks to write an archaeology of the commemoration of individuals in early Italian cities. Discussion intends to complement the previous chapter’s focus on the ways in which Italy’s early urban communities responded to their pasts, drawing upon the key particularity of Italian urbanization that its emergence often took place within systems of pre-​existing settlement. The last chapter confronted urban responses to the past largely as an abstraction, looking at patterns of continuity or discontinuity. Here instead, I turn to more specific questions of agency concerning whom or what these communities were commemorating, in particular thinking about the transmission of historical information surrounding particular individuals from a community’s earliest moments. One way we might refer to these individuals collectively is as “founders.” By this term, I simply mean that these were leading figures during the earliest moments of their respective urban communities, and I do not intend to imply that individuals discussed here were actually the agents responsible for performing the sort of foundation rituals described in the last chapter. Consider as parallel that the English phrase “founding father” (or mother) in American history may refer either specifically to those participants of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, or more generally to those prominent figures from the early nation’s history.1 As I use the term, the application of “founder” then follows largely chronological lines: individuals discussed below lived during the earliest moments of urbanization and were often commemorated by their respective communities a generation or two after their deaths. Calling these figures “founders” in this generic sense allows this chapter to argue for several points. First, I intend to trace a shift in historical culture as we move toward urban life in Italy. In an earlier chapter, we also saw the power of individuals upon the historical behavior of social groupings. In particular, I highlighted how important burials of ancestors drove recursive 1 Cf. the Merriam Webster dictionary s.v. “founding father.”

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0004

122  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy practices in Iron Age burial grounds. But the pattern of behavior now starts to look different, as individuals venerated as founders seem to hold importance not to kinship groups but to broader urban collectives. While the binary certainly flattens a complex and fluid situation, we might think of founders as in some sense public historical individuals, just as ancestors were private ones. Second, I argue that this shift in historical culture occurred broadly across Italy. I locate founders in Greek colonial communities of South Italy, as well as farther north in centers that were urbanizing long before Greek contact. We can see Italian communities venerating founding individuals in ways that were closely similar to early Greek practice, and in some cases like with the extraordinary new discoveries from Veii we even catch glimpses of what appears to be cult offered to founding figures. Archaeology is once more key to making such connections between peoples of different cultural or ethnic orientations. Archaeological material rarely if ever can reveal to us finer details about who these founders were, but copious evidence shows early Italian cities commemorating recently dead individuals in particular ways. This evidence suggests in turn that communities across the peninsula were working to transmit records of who these people were as part of the creation and maintenance of their urban societies. As with the last chapter, my intention in arguing for a broad geographical scope to the trend is to highlight Italians’ own conscious engagement with their history from an early point, rather than ascribe such engagement to external, Greek influences. This argument is especially important, because so much of what we know about the founding of Italian cities from our sources looks Greek and relates to later interest on the part of these communities in creating links with the protagonists of Greek mythology.2 We thus encounter some of the same issues raised with the myth of Tages, founder of Tarquinia, in the previous chapter. I suggest that archaeology affords the possibility of moving below this dense stratum of Greek influence. The point that legends about Greek founders of Italian cities were artificial will not be surprising, but I want to make a more fundamental argument about the relationship between Italian urbanization and Greek myth—​the relationship between Italian and Greek culture looms particularly large in this chapter’s discussion. I will focus in particular on a rich corpus of archaeological material relating to one such legendary founder, Aeneas, as he was grafted onto what 2 Malkin 1987; my introductory comments at p. 28 about the closeness of myth and history as ways of understanding past time are relevant to this chapter.

Founders  123 appear to be earlier and ongoing processes of historical culture in Latium. By recovering and highlighting Italian modes of thinking about founders, we come to understand that Greek myths of founders like that of Aeneas did not appear upon a blank canvas. This was never a case of Italians adopting foreign founders because they lacked stories of their own, but we see that historical culture mattered greatly to Italy’s urban communities from the earliest point. One might even suspect that it was precisely their active and ongoing interest in the past that made these communities receptive to the later, pervasive influence of Greek historical culture.

Figures and Events I have referred to the fact that we are rarely aware of the finer details of what was being venerated with the historical culture of early Italian cities. I want to begin with a rare possible exception to this rule as a way of illustrating some of the main dynamics we are interested in here. Only in one case that I know of do we possess a nearly contemporary Greek account of an Italian city monumentalizing an early historical episode, which has possibly also left traces in the archaeological record. This case from the Etruscan city of Caere relates to a historical event, not a founder, but the potential interplay between text and archaeology, as well as between Greek and Italian practices, prove instructive for my subsequent discussion of Italian founding figures. The event in question appears in Herodotus’ description of the aftermath of the naval battle between Phocaean colonists and a coalition of Carthaginians and Etruscans off the coast of Alalia, modern Aleria, Corsica, circa 540 BCE. Herodotus calls the battle a “Cadmeian” victory for the Greek Phocaeans, who won but at such a cost that they were compelled to withdraw from Corsica and the Tyrrhenian area. Following his description, this battle of Alalia is often identified as a watershed event of Western Mediterranean political history, with Greek colonization concentrating from that date onward to the south in Sicily and South Italy, and Carthaginians and Etruscans left to establish their own spheres of control in the Tyrrhenian sea.3 As Herodotus goes on to describe, prisoners taken from captured Greek ships were divided

3 For a traditional reading, see Pallottino 1991: 80–​81; recent work is more suspicious of this state-​ based reading, as see van Dommelen and Gómez Bellard 2008: 9–​12; Terrenato 2019: 87; for a skeptical reading of the event’s history, see Pilkington 2019: 33.

124  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy between the Carthaginians and Etruscans, with the Etruscans of Caere, apparently a leading city in the engagement, taking their prisoners back home with them to Central Italy. Speaking of these prisoners, Herodotus says that the Caeretans, “leading them out, executed them.” The place of their execution became cursed, he goes on to say, prompting the Caeretans to consult the Delphic oracle, upon whose advise they established annual rites and games for the dead Phocaeans, which Herodotus says continued up to his day (1.167). While the event did not mark the founding of Caere per se, the battle and the resulting establishment of favorable trading relations with Carthaginians in Tyrrhenian Italy brought considerable clout to the Caeretans with the subsequent rise of both their city and its port at Pyrgi. Moreover, the manner in which Herodotus relates the whole story makes it seem etiological, intended to explain the cultic honors the Caeretans paid to the Phocaeans, which continued to his day from the earliest moments of the community’s history. Scholars have connected the episode recounted by Herodotus to a structure interpreted as a cult building dating to around 530 BCE at the Caeretan site of Montetosto, 4 km west of the city center along the main route leading from the city to its port at Pyrgi.4 The connection is supported in various ways. First, on the basis of Herodotus’ topographical notice that the Caeretans “led the prisoners out,” the exurban location of the Montetosto site is held to correspond to the details of his account. This may overinterpret of the text: the phrase in question follows on Herodotus’ mention of the allotment of prisoners between the Carthaginians and Caeretans, presumably still at Alalia, so that he may rather intend to say that the Caeretans “led the prisoners away” from the battle in Corsica and executed them, rather than implying first that they took them home to Caere, and then led them out of the city.5 Second, the date of the Montetosto complex’s construction seems to match the contours of Herodotus’ story with the first phase dated to the last quarter of the sixth century BCE, in the general period of the Battle of Alalia’s aftermath. Evidence for the continuation of cult into the third century BCE also adheres well with Herodotus’ note that rituals and games continued up to his day. Again, there is a great deal of ambiguity here, as this is not the 4 Colonna 1963; Torelli 1981; Bellelli Marchesini et al. 2015; more cautiously, Riva 2010: 126–​28. 5 There also seems to have been no specific injunction in Etruria against executions of prisoners within urban settlements, as Tarquinians were said to have murdered Roman prisoners in their forum, for example, while Etruria’s archaeology reveals several other unusual and possibly ritually murdered human burials within urban settlements, on which see Di Fazio 2001; Di Fazio 2017b.

Founders  125 only sacred site at Caere monumentalized in the later part of the sixth century BCE. Beyond this, there are some other more complex iconographical and architectural arguments. Giovanni Colonna identifies a small terracotta head of a bald, bearded male figure from the pedimental sculpture of the Montetosto structure’s first phase as Busiris, the mythological Egyptian king who notoriously sacrificed his guests until Hercules killed him, thereafter abolishing human sacrifice in Egypt. In Colonna’s view, the scene reflects the story of Caeretans’ human sacrifice and subsequent atonement for their impiety. Unfortunately, the head is very badly preserved, and there are no other fragments of the pedimental sculpture to bolster this reading. There is also the fact that the Montetosto complex is unusual in plan, consisting of a large and almost perfectly square structure with a central courtyard flanked by a series of rooms. In the context of Archaic Etruscan architecture, the building’s layout resembles aristocratic palaces such as those excavated at Murlo or Acquarossa, rather than other Archaic temples, although its location along the major road between the city and port and affinities between its roof decoration and contemporary Caeretan sacred architecture may suggest its civic status. It was also located very close to a large burial tumulus now known to have formed part of a more extensive area of tumuli in the area. Mario Torelli in particular connects the structure to the tumulus to argue for a strongly aristocratic flavor to the whole site. In his view, the sacrifice of Phocaean prisoners took place in front of the Montetosto tumulus as the family burial area connected with the Caeretan leader who led the expedition to Alalia—​he cites as comparison the Homeric story of the sacrifice of Trojan prisoners at the grave of Patroculus. The monument’s construction served to expiate divine anger at this impious act while its form, once associable with aristocratic power, was intentionally reclaimed and repurposed by the wider community of Caere.6 Amid these arguments surrounding the Montetosto complex’s interpretation, it is worth observing that Herodotus never mentions a temple or Greek hero-​shrine (heroon) but rather focuses attention on the rituals and games the Caeratans performed at the site of the original murder of prisoners after the Battle of Alalia.7 Certainly the Montetosto structure’s plan does

6 Torelli 1981; Belelli Marchesini et al. 2015: 148; however, cf. Biella and Michetti 2018: 452–​53, the tumulus does not appear to have been isolated. 7 Belelli Marchesini et al. 2015: 148.

126  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy not resemble canonical temple architecture. Perhaps its open inner courtyard and exurban location would have been conducive to games, not unlike those funeral games we know otherwise took place within Etruscan burial grounds.8 But these associations, like all of the arguments linking site to text, contain a significant degree of overinterpretation. Of course, we cannot exclude these reconstructions, but it remains difficult to say with any certainty that the site of Montetosto is indeed that referred to by Herodotus. Instead, if we approach the Montetosto sanctuary and Herodotus’ story separately, both still yield data for understanding the function of historical culture in Caere’s early urban landscape—​and here is the important takeaway of this analysis for my broader argument. Whatever the identification of the Montetosto complex, it seems plausible that it functioned for something like civic cult while retaining an architectural plan that resembled elite architecture harkening back to Etruria’s pre-​urban aristocracies.9 The translation at Caere of an aristocratic architectural form into a civic monument shares similarities with what we have previously seen elsewhere in Italy, for example in the phenomenon of huts to temples discussed in the last chapter, including examples at Caere itself. It is not necessary to make a precise identification of the structure to find Caere’s early urban community thinking about how to fit aristocratic symbols of power into their new urban landscape. In other words, even if this is not the site referred to by Herodotus, the Montetosto complex still reveals that Caeretans living around the same time were fully conscious of their past. A second point is that, regardless of whether we follow its identification with the Montetosto complex, Herodotus’ account suggests that specific events were in fact being commemorated in later periods in ways closely tied to Caere’s urban fabric. As I have noted, Herodotus remains silent about whether any monumental architecture existed in relation to the commemorative practices he describes. However, he unequivocally ties commemorative rites to a location: the act of walking through the point in Caere’s topography where the Phocaean prisoners were executed was bringing injury to animals and men, prompting the search for expiation and the consultation of the Delphic oracle. This episode thus presents a good example of a monumentum, as the sixth-​century BCE cityscape of Caere contained locations embedded with the memory of specific past events. 8 See discussion above p. 47. 9 Similarly, Riva 2010: 127–​28.

Founders  127 A critical question is whether Herodotus here transmits indigenous Italian practices and does not merely reflect his own cultural perspective. The commemoration of a battle within urban space finds plenty of parallels in Herodotus’ Greek world, and familiarity with such practices have influenced Herodotus’ account. It has been argued that elements of his language in this passage reflect Greek, not Italian, religious practices especially in describing the ritual murder of the Phocaeans.10 However, at the time that Herodotus wrote in the later fifth century BCE, the Battle of Alalia was an event not in the very distant past and seems more historical than mythological, if it is fair to make that distinction. There is also the invocation of the Delphic oracle in the story. Caere was known as the only Etruscan city with its own treasury in Delphi, and it seems reasonable to think Caere consulted the Greek oracle for advice on a divine plague associated with the pollution of a particular place.11 While it is likely that parts of Herodotus’ presentation have been shaped by his Greek cultural perspective, these contextual aspects anchor his account, granting some confidence that as a whole the episode is not purely Hellenizing invention. While we have trouble affirming a link between the Montetosto complex and Herodotus’ account of Caere, then, each piece of evidence serves to strengthen in different ways the argument that Italian cities like Caere were deliberately engaging with their histories on their own terms.

Founders’ Cults Herodotus’ account of the aftermath of the Battle of Alalia also shows the very rare evidentiary conditions needed to identify commemorative practices in close detail in the archaeological record. That is, the only reason we even know to look for a monumentum to murdered Phocaeans at Caere is because we have a fifth-​century BCE historian describing in detail an episode involving Etruscans, an especially rare occurrence in our extant historiographical sources. Unfortunately, this episode is unique for its account of an Italian city’s practices in contemporary sources, and we need another way of accessing potential instances of historical culture. Considering these difficulties, I turn now more fully to the material record. As noted, the subject

10 Di Fazio 2017b: 449–​50. 11 Strabo 5.2.3.

128  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy of founders’ cult has been studied extensively in the Greek world as an offshoot of hero-​cult. It will be useful to start with some results of this research, both to point us toward what we might be looking for and also eventually to help point out Italian deviations from Greek practice. One prominent view finds the origins of Greek hero-​cult in signs of religious activity subsequent to burial in Greek tombs starting in the Bronze Age and then at some Early Iron Age sites, where cult appears to be centered upon exceptional burials.12 François de Polignac and others identify this process of veneration as a major catalyst of urbanization, serving to mark the transition from the ancestral cult of the Homeric hero to the civic cults that formed essential elements of Greek political life—​the change is not dissimilar to the private (ancestor) to public (founder) development I am arguing for in Italy.13 Perhaps the most famous example of the early phases of this transition comes from the island of Euboea and the site of Lefkandi, where a large mound was built over a tenth-​century BCE timber long house with burials made in its floor, while somewhat later parallels can be cited from Eleusis, Lesbos, Thermon, Naxos, and elsewhere.14 In none of these instances can we restore the name of the individuals buried in these sites, but the close chronological sequence of death, burial, and veneration suggests each was known to members of their respective communities. The example of Lefkandi is very early, but in many other cases these venerated burials date back to the earliest moments of their respective city-​ states in the eighth or seventh century BCE. The structure identified as a hero-​shrine (heroon) found at the west gate of the Greek city of Eretria is particularly significant in thinking about the intersection between exceptional burial and urbanization. Within the structure, seven burials date to the last quarter of the eighth century BCE. The latest buried individual, an adult male, has drawn attention for unusual grave goods, including a Mycenaean spearhead, and his death falls at a critical juncture in Eretria’s development. Following his burial, the area was paved over with stone slabs and transformed into a small triangular precinct in which various signs of cult were found. It has been suggested that this figure was the final member of a pivotal generation who oversaw Eretria’s transformation into a polis society.15 The burial and its cult are compared to stories in the sources such as the

12 Coldstream 1976; Antonaccio 1995; Antonaccio 1997; Whitley 1995; Hägg 1997. 13 De Polignac 1995: 136; Riva 2010: 135–​36 applies this to Italy. 14 Lists in Whitley 1995: 54; Mazarakis Ainian 1997. 15 Berard 1970; De Polignac 1995: 129–​33.

Founders  129 burial and column erected in the agora of Chalcis for a certain Cleomachus, who died fighting on behalf of his city in the Lelantine War.16 Recently, another interesting case for its relationship to early urbanization has been identified at the Western Greek city of Selinunte in Sicily. Within the city’s agora laid out in the sixth century BCE, excavators found a small precinct of ashlar blocks (6.75 m × 8.65 m) surrounding a tomb containing an adult male around twenty years old at death. Another rectangular cutting in the bedrock for a second tomb sits just outside the precinct. Dieter Mertens reconstructs a sequence of actions here starting with two more or less contemporary tombs, followed by the surrounding of the one tomb with the precinct wall, which was later remade in more solid form and contained a destination for cult.17 The appearance of multiple tombs suggests to him a possible relationship between these burials and the extensive early burial area to the southwest, which sat below the Archaic agora. The significant act of urbanization implied in the agora’s creation entailed the replacement of this more extensive funerary space with civic space, a transformation paralleled in many other cases in the Greek world. However, for whatever reason the community decided to preserve and emphasize the tomb of one pre-​urban individual, who must have been considered important to the earliest urban community. Selinunte’s burial in the agora confirms that cults’ importance to urban definition often emerged in spatial terms. As the definition of urban space crystallized in most Greek cities in the Archaic period, intramural burial became a highly exceptional practice reserved for special individuals.18 This change reflected the designation of urban space for political and civic activities other than family-​based funeral cult, with spaces for the dead now removed from the urban center. Within the restricted class of burials allowed within city limits were heroes and, it would appear, specifically founding figures. Crucially, a scholion on the poet Pindar’s first Olympian ode, in reference to his discussion of the cult site for Pelops, founder of Olympia, reports that “founders were customarily buried in the center of the cities.”19 This 16 Plut. Moralia 760e–​761b; the passage does not specify cult but suggests that the Chalceans remained aware in Plutarch’s day of the monument and its history. 17 Mertens 2007–​8; Mertens et al. 2012; for cult, see the fifth-​century votive deposit found just outside the precinct reported by Adorno in Mertens et al. 2012: 155–​65. 18 Morris 1987 for Athens, but also noting the problem that evidence for Archaic Greek settlements is not always well preserved; Malkin 1987: 200; Harris 2019; the exception is Sparta and its colonies, whose unusualness was noted in antiquity. 19 Schol. ad Pind. Ol. 1.149

130  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy practice seems to be an offshoot of the wider burial of civic heroes in the agora, attested by textual sources in the aforementioned tomb-​monument of Cleomachus at Calchis and elsewhere.20 In the archaeological record, we have seen a possible candidate for this practice at Selinunte. Another commonly cited example comes from the North African Greek city of Cyrene, where there is an isolated burial in a fenced-​off precinct located at the corner of the city’s agora. In this case, the tomb’s occupant has been convincingly identified as King Battos I of Cyrene, with the structure intended to house cult in his honor established after his death around 590 BCE.21 These intraurban tombs were not ancestor cults but rather civic cults around burials of individuals who received veneration by a collective defined not by kinship, but by new sociopolitical relationships. The question I want to ask is whether Greek intraurban cults focused upon prominent burials find corresponding practice in the early cities of Italy. In particular, we want to be sure we are identifying tombs with particular historical or mnemonic resonance during the period of the rise of Italian cities, and not merely exceptionally wealthy or princely tombs, as were not otherwise uncommon in orientalizing Italy.22

Founders’ Cults: Poseidonia and Greek Colonial Italy In seeking to identify Italian practices analogous to Greek ones, it is worth starting with an example straddling both worlds from Poseidonia, the Greek colonial city in Campania, later transformed into the Roman colony of Paestum in 273 BCE. Here, a small architectural complex in some ways resembling an elite burial and located—​importantly—​in the center of the agora of the Greek city has occasioned much discussion as a possible site of founders’ cult. In 1954, excavations in the agora uncovered a rectangular precinct (18.6 × 15.5 m) delimited by a masonry wall (Figure 4.1). The only monument inside the precinct was a rectangular stonemasonry structure, a sort of small temple or sacellum 3.9 × 3.6 m in size, comprising a single room with a pitched roof. The room’s contents, found undisturbed, 20 Other examples in Malkin 1987: 200–​3; an updated list in Harris 2019: 265. 21 Stucchi 1965; Malkin 1987: 213–​16; the lasting power of this tomb to extend the historical memory of Battos may be attested in Catullus’ reference to Cyrene’s “sacred tomb of old Battos,” Batti veteris sacrum sepulcrum (7.6). 22 Cf. De Polignac 1995: 129.

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Figure 4.1  Poseidonia/​Paestum, the heroon and its precinct, ca. 500 BCE. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​ Ministero della Cultura.

consisted of a small table made of two stone blocks surrounded by eight bronze vases and a ninth Attic black-​figure amphora painted by the Chiusi Painter. The Attic vase dates to 510 BCE, and a late sixth-​century BCE date also matches the style of the bronzes. On the table were five iron spits, each 1.5 m long, and some associated animal bones suggest they were placed on the table with roasted meat. At least some of the bronze vases were originally filled with honey. Some other fragmentary ceramics probably from the structure provide further evidence of ritual banqueting and libations. A group of fragments bears graffiti consisting of the Greek letter mu. Another black-​ figure jug bears a graffito recording a Greek dedication to the nymphs. Further explorations in the area over subsequent decades provide clarity as to the monument’s phases. Some limited construction seems to predate the creation of the sacellum in the late sixth century BCE. The precinct wall was a later addition, perhaps even as late as the transformation of Poseidonia into the Latin colony of Paestum in 273 BCE, as the structure survived this important change in the settlement’s status. We may also confirm that the original structure consisted of a large earthen tumulus with the sacellum at its center, and two steps of an altar associated with the tumulus have also

132  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy been identified. We thus find in Poseidonia’s agora a monument in the form of a mound or tumulus with an altar, architecture that we have seen in the last chapter well associated by this date with elite burial throughout Italy. We also know that this monument was created shortly after the founding of the colony and then elaborated over time, while its intramural position in the agora and the surrounding precinct wall furnish important architectural similarities with the Battos monument at Cyrene. Other aspects, however, set the Poseidonian monument apart from those Greek practices discussed above. The first is the sherd inscribed with a dedication to the nymphs, something whose possible relationship to founders’ cult has yet to find satisfactory explanation.23 Another issue is the absence of any actual human remains. Since the sacellum was found undisturbed, the absent burial must have been an initial feature of the monument. This problem of a missing body has been explained with the idea that the structure celebrated not the founder of Poseidonia itself, but the founder of its mother city Sybaris: after the destruction of Sybaris, Sybarites fleeing to Poseidonia would have maintained their mother city’s foundation cult in their new home.24 If this is true, then the monument would serve to encode a complex history not only about Poseidonia itself, but about its regional priority and the background of its early inhabitants. It would also be interesting to consider how this particular past was in turn received through the period of the city’s Roman colonization. However, the thesis remains speculative, while we can cite no other example of cult to founders not of cities themselves, but of the mother cities of segments of their population. While such complex cult would be unparalleled, what we can cite in evidence are other “empty burials” from Italy. Examples from both Tarquinia and Rome are discussed below as also relating to founders’ cults. Instances of what appear to be inhumation-​type burials without human bones, but with grave goods, have been discovered in some Archaic cemeteries in the Abruzzo.25 The Greek poet Lykophron refers to a “false tomb,” perhaps a cenotaph, of the mythological Trojan seer Calchas in Daunia (Alex. 1047–​48).26 From Pisa, the remarkable empty tumulus of via San Jacopo was discussed 23 Greco 2014: 17 offers an overly complicated and unconvincing attempt to explain this evidence away. 24 Greco 2014. 25 Aquilano 2009: 279, 280 n. 2. 26 This is perhaps related to a heroon to the same figure reported by Strabo 6.3.9, and there was possibly another tomb or cenotaph of Calchas at Siris. See Mac Sweeney 2018: 249 with previous bibliography.

Founders  133 in a previous chapter. Whatever particular circumstances gave rise to these empty burials, at the very least they confirm that the appearance of burial architecture without a body was not entirely unusual in Italy. Thus, the Poseidonia monument in some ways fits other monuments to Greek founders or special civic leaders who received burial in the agora but also reveals important differences. It is tempting to think that the Poseidonian monument’s distinctive character resulted from the colonial interaction of Greek practices with local or even Italian ones, although it is hard to point to firm signs of this bilateral process. The dedication to the nymphs in the context of hero-​cult remains intriguing and difficult to explain. We must also admit that it is hard to identify anything similar to the Poseidonian structure in other Greek colonies in Italy. The aforementioned example from Selinunte offers a possible parallel from Sicily, but colonial settlements on the mainland furnish few similarities. Even the textual evidence comes up short. While sources contain plenty of references to mythological founders of these Greek colonies in Italy, they rarely mention cult. One of the few examples is Phalanthus, the Spartan founder of the Greek city of Tarentum, for whose basic historicity some have doubted. The hero is said to have died at Brundisium and may have received cult either there, or back in Tarentum, where his ashes were scattered in the agora.27 Recently, Gabriel Zuchtriegel draws attention to parallels between the Poseidonia monument and the so-​called tomb of the Policoro Painter at the Greek colony of Heraclea. This burial contained a service of some twenty vases including several large vases by a single Attic workshop not attested elsewhere. This material helps secure this exceptional tomb’s date to the ambit of Heraclea’s colonial foundation in 432 BCE; however, the monument’s position, while somewhat isolated, remains within one of Heraclea’s burial grounds outside the city walls. There is also no altar or precinct as found at Poseidonia, and there are no other clear signs of post-​depositional cult or veneration. Similar issues problematize Walter Burkert’s association of a large burial mound at Thurii dating to that colony’s earliest period with Lampon, the leader of the city’s colonial expedition party from Athens. The tomb famously contained a set of gold orphic tablets, while textual evidence associates Lampon with oracular practices.28 However, as at Heraclea the burial mound was not located in the agora but was the richest of several

27 Strabo 6.3.6; Justin. 3.4 for the scattering of his ashes; see Malkin 1987: 216–​21. 28 Burkert 1975.

134  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy dozen tumuli in its surrounding countryside. It is possible for complex historical reasons that Lampon was not regarded as founder of Thurii, and we might speculate he was therefore not accorded the privilege of burial within the city, but this is impossible to say.29 What these examples emphasize is that, without the distinguishing criterium of intramural burial, it is hard to differentiate wealthy or princely burials, in continuation of a practice well known in Italy from the orientalizing period, from burials of individuals considered historically important to the foundational histories of cities. Thus, whether or not the Poseidonian tomb was indeed a monument of founders’ cult—​and I certainly do not exclude that possibility—​the site does underscore the importance of intramural location to our interpretation.

Founders’ Cults: Veii We now turn away from the Greek colonial world to consider cases more firmly grounded in Italian cultures. In those parts of Italy that urbanized in the Archaic period, burial within the boundaries of urban space becomes increasingly rare from about the seventh century BCE onward.30 The shift to move burials outside of communal space often predates the construction of walls: in Latium, starting already in the Early Iron Age, the vast majority of adult tombs are placed outside of lines that will later be followed by stone city walls. This makes burial an extramural practice, even if technically the “mural” aspect would sometimes follow this change. Intramural burial increasingly becomes an exceptional practice in urban space, and if we take this phenomenon as a guide, Central Italy yields several sites of note. Perhaps the most intriguing of all is the so-​called funerary chapel at Veii, one of the most remarkable recent discoveries from Central Italy (Figure 4.2). The site reveals an exceptional burial venerated within an urban area for a very long time in a way that has suggested to its excavator Gilda Bartoloni that an isolated pre-​urban tomb was transformed into a place of “poliadic” cult.

29 Zuchtriegel 2018: 91 30 Just why this is not entirely clear and has merited much discussion, above all for Rome. Emmerson 2020 argues against an overarching idea of death pollution in antiquity. Cicero says such burial was reserved for clari viri (leg. 2.58), and see further Andrews and Bernard 2017: 250 n. 24 for archaeological discussion centering on the Esquiline necropolis. Note that less urbanized parts of Italy at this time show other practices. In Messapic territory, burials appear both in and outside settlements: Cocchiaro and Sciarra Bardaro 1988: 26 n. 7; Ciancio 2007–​8.

Founders  135

Figure 4.2  Veii, reconstruction of the funerary chapel on Piazza D’Armi showing small and larger structures built around an early ninth-​century BCE burial. Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni.

The site begins with the Early Iron Age burial of an adult male, between thirty and thirty-​five years old when he died, in the central area of the plateau of Piazza d’Armi, the southern high point and acropolis of the later city of Veii. This individual was buried in a trench grave in the early part of the ninth century BCE with no grave goods. Shortly after the individual’s death, the exceptional nature of his burial is indicated by the monumentalization of his grave, first with the construction around it of a small curvilinear structure, either a hut or a fence, which was substituted in the later eighth century BCE by a larger rectangular hut and an accompanying altar, forming what has been called a sort of funerary chapel. The monumentalization of an earlier burial is by no means unique in Iron Age Italy. Even the creation of a wooden hut around the grave finds a parallel in Pontecagnano, as we have seen in the second chapter, where it was argued that such funerary monumentality represents an important form of historical

136  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy culture.31 However, several elements do serve further to distinguish the Veii burial. First, the matter of the burial’s disposition, something already flagged at Poseidonia, is important here. The funerary chapel was located at a far remove from the several active cemeteries where other members of the community were buried. Technically, this was not originally an intramural burial, but only because the tomb predates the settlement’s walls, which would later surround the plateau. Over time, only one other individual was buried on this part of the plateau, a juvenile male about fifteen years old at death, who was deposited around 730 BCE within a nearby structure in the form of a sort of hearth-​shaped ash altar dug into the ground. As with the first burial, this second individual was inhumed and laid in the grave in an identical orientation with no grave goods. Both burials were anomalous from wider Veian burial practice in similar ways, while their identical orientation and funeral rites further suggest a connection between them. Far removed from Veii’s cemeteries, these two burials were situated in the center of what would become one of the main areas of the city, and here we come to the reason for interpreting at least the earlier burial as a foundation cult of sorts. The eighth-​century BCE funerary chapel was conserved and rebuilt several times as the surrounding area was reorganized to accommodate denser inhabitation and architecture. In the seventh century BCE, a road system was laid out on the plateau of Piazza d’Armi, with the funerary chapel now sitting alongside the principal artery linking a porticoed building built nearby to other structures within the walls. The second burial in the altar had a stone cippus added to mark its location but was cut and then covered over by one of these structures. The cippus suggests an attempt to preserve the memory of this second burial, which did not however see the same type of monumentalized conservation as the first grave. The funerary chapel continued to receive cult into the early sixth century BCE, when the structure was rebuilt with stone foundations and a tile roof. The architectural transformation also encompassed several adjacent structures and a monumental cistern, the whole now forming a precinct around the distinguished burial, by that date already several centuries old. Rooftiles from these structures depict a chariot procession and, from the first stone and tile phase of one building, fragments of a monumental ridgepole statue group comprising a seated dog and a standing male figure placing his hand on the dog’s head (Figure 4.3). Bartoloni suggests these depict the

31 D’Agostino 1990, see above p. 43.

Founders  137

Figure 4.3  Veii, reconstruction of acroterial terracotta sculpture from the roof of the funerary chapel of Piazza d’Armi showing a life-​sized depiction of a standing male figure and a dog. Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni.

defunct ancestor himself with his trusty canine companion as protective spirits of the place. The highly fragmentary state of the statue group urges caution, although it is true that, unlike similarly sized and nearly contemporary statue groups from the roof of the Portonaccio sanctuary at Veii, it is hard to think of ready mythological identifications for man and dog in Archaic Italian art.32 The chapel and the burial it surrounded continued to function as a destination for cult well into the sixth century BCE, by which point Veii had developed into an extensive urban site with an array of other monumental cult sites, including the Portonaccio temple and as many as eight other known sanctuaries.33

32 Bartoloni 2011; Acconcia and Bartoloni 2014: 289–​96. 33 Bartoloni and Sarracino 2017: 14–​20.

138  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Bartoloni suggests these burials from Piazza d’Armi served as catalyzing elements in the urbanization of the community, implying a role similar to what de Polignac suggests for early Greek hero-​cult.34 The very long veneration especially of the first grave at Piazza d’Armi, conserved for over three centuries, bridges the period in time before and then during Veii’s development into a city. The first grave is plausibly interpreted as the burial of a leader of the pre-​urban aristocracy, whose memory was then preserved and even amplified in the early city. It is difficult to say anything more precise about the nature of this cult. We should be cautious against reflexively interpreting the site as a Greek heroon, as this line of interpretation risks covering over the distinctness of this Italian monument by analogizing it with Greek practice.35 For example, we do not know how the specific identity of the buried individual granted him a particular position in his community. Chapter 2 raised the idea that the funerary chapel might relate to the Etruscan practice of ancestor worship legible in other Iron Age burial evidence. Did those who first monumentalized this tomb consider themselves descendants based on some idea of kinship with this dead individual, or simply inheritors of his prestige in the more Greek sense of a founding civic hero? Just as importantly, we do not know if the burial held importance to the wider pre-​urban community at Veii, or only to the lineage group settled upon Piazza d’Armi. It even seems possible, although we have no way of knowing, that the tomb’s audience at some point shifted with the rise of the city. As discussed elsewhere, we find a characteristic durability of family groups within early Italian urban society, and this quality makes it difficult to see the Veii case representing a straightforward transition from princely burial to civic cult, as sometimes read in Greek evidence.36 These remain difficult issues to address on the basis of the evidence at hand; however, the archaeology on its own clearly shows the very long-​term conservation of an exceptional burial made before the city in a location that became a central urban place. On its own, this sequence strongly suggests the commemoration of a particular past was a powerfully constitutive aspect of Veii’s urbanization process, and this is what makes the funerary chapel so remarkable.



34 Bartoloni and Sarracino 2017: 1.

35 See Maggiani’s discussion of Bartoloni and Sarracino 2017 at p. 451. 36 De Polignac 1995.

Founders  139

Founders’ Cult: Exceptional Burials within Settlement Areas In its ensemble, the funerary chapel at Veii is so far unique in Italy’s archaeology, but certain aspects reappear at other sites. In particular, we may follow the intersection between hut architecture, intraurban burial, and cult site. I return to the symbolism of the hut as a site of pre-​urban aristocratic power.37 In last chapter’s review of evidence for the phenomenon of huts-​to-​temples in several early cities, we can note that many of the sites of this transformation also reveal adult burials.38 Often, burials related to huts contain few or even no grave goods and are isolated from larger cemeteries, clearly marking them out for both ritual and spatial aspects. Examples includes major sanctuaries like that at Sant’ Antonio at Caere or Juno Sospita at Lanuvium, which were built not only above huts, but also above associated adult burials.39 At Ardea, Early Iron Age burials are found below the sanctuaries at Colle della Noce and Casalinaccio. Otherwise, and also recalling the case of Veii, a number of other burials, while not associated with sanctuaries, appear within the contemporary or later mural circuits of cities. As I have noted, the division, especially in Central Tyrrhenian Italy, between intra-​and extramural burial happens very early in the Iron Age and often precedes the construction of a physical circuit of walls. Alessandro Guidi’s review of intramural burials in Latium, for example, turns up instances at Fidenae, Tibur, Ardea, and Satricum, which is to say, at most sites in that region that have seen significant excavation of Iron Age and Archaic levels.40 There are multiple examples of intramural adult burials from the center Rome itself down to about 700 BCE, and we return to the site shortly.41 One of the most intriguing Latin examples comes from the site of Caracupa, near ancient Norba and the modern village of Sermoneta. The finds here, noted briefly in the last chapter, include a group of four intramural burials of women, all buried with objects related to textile production as well as items suggestive of cult, which has led to the suggestion that these 37 See above pp. 90–​91. 38 For the different phenomenon of subadult burial in relation to Iron Age huts, see pp. 91–​92. 39 Delpino 2008: 600 cautiously suggests the ritualized nature of the Caere, Sant’ Antonio material; unfortunately, the intriguing idea of Riva 2010: 27–​28 that one of the adult burials was monumentalized in the construction of the Archaic sanctuary is disproven by radiocarbon dating of the skeletal material, which confirms a date in the Late Empire, as see Maggiani and Rizzo 2005: 182 n. 37. 40 Guidi 2007–​8. 41 Gusberti 2007–​8; see above p. 42.

140  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy were possibly priestesses.42 Neither their gender nor priestly rank would exclude their leading role in the early political history of the settlement in which they lived.43 The list of intramural burials also encompasses minor settlements like Campassini in the hinterland of Volterra, discussed in the previous chapter, where we do not have a wall, but where two adult burials are situated in close proximity to the Early Iron Age hut at the center of the inhabited area. The sum of this discussion is to emphasize that, while we can say little about the historical circumstances of these burials, select and often otherwise exceptional burials are found within urban settlement with a certain regularity in Central Italy. Some particular cases of this phenomenon require more focused discussion, and we turn to those now.

Founders’ Cults: Tarquinia An especially complex interplay between burial and urban cult site appears at the city of Tarquinia. Excavation in the sacred precinct on Pian di Civita, the western side of the plateau that formed Tarquinia’s ancient urban center, have unearthed a wealth of important material for the ritual practices that attended the city’s creation.44 The area reveals signs of cult activity starting from the tenth century BCE. Interestingly, important transitions in the monumental aspect of the site were frequently attended by unusual burials. Around 800 BCE, the creation of a cavity in the ground, which was used to receive ritual deposits, was related to the burial of a child, probably eight years old, whose skeleton suggests they were albinic and suffered from brain trauma and epilepsy.45 Considerable debate has followed the discovery of later burials, including one isolated adult male individual, perhaps thirty years old, buried in the same area around in the second quarter of the eighth century BCE. He was killed by a blow to the head, and it has been suggested that he was a victim of human sacrifice related to cultic activity in the area. The same interpretation has been applied to an infant buried perhaps two

42 Bietti Sestieri 1992: 228; Guidi 2011: 21 identifies these as vestals. 43 Compare Strabo 4.1.4 on priestesses active in the foundation of Massalia with Zuchtriegel 2018: 91–​92. 44 Summary in Bonghi Jovino 2010; longer reports in Chiaramonte Treré and Bagnasco Gianni 1999; Bonghi Jovino et al. 2001; Bonghi Jovino and Bagnasco Gianni 2012. 45 For a possible parallel of a child burial marked as a prodigium from Rome, see Zeggio in Damiani and Parise Pressicci 2019: 223–​24.

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Figure 4.4  Tarquinia, view of the Ara della Regina. Photo © John N. Hopkins, reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale.

generations later, who appears to have been beheaded.46 From the early seventh century BCE, another decapitated male child was found beneath a wall of the later monumental precinct. While the site continued to develop around and sometimes above these burials over the next centuries, it is not clear that the burials themselves became the focal point of cult practice, as happened at Veii. However, clearly Tarquinians were thinking about the relationship between cult and exceptional burial from a very early date. The eastern side of the same plateau, the Pian della Regina, housed the construction in the sixth century BCE of a massive stone temple known as the Ara della Regina—​the “Queen’s Altar,” although I will refer to the structure following convention by its modern Italian name (Figure 4.4).47 The deity to which this temple was dedicated is debated, but it was enormous: in its day, this was the second largest temple in Central Italy behind only the Roman Capitolium. Both scale and location suggest the temple served a central civic function for the community of Tarquinia. Mario Torelli argues this

46 Bonghi Jovino 2010: 165–​67; for this material in the context of the practice of human sacrifice in Italy, see Di Fazio 2001, 2017b. 47 Bonghi Jovino and Bagnasco Gianni 2012; Bonghi Jovino 2017; Torelli 2019.

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Figure 4.5  Tarquinia, view from above the foundations of Altar Alpha beside the Ara della Regina. The stone chest or sarcophagus is visible beneath the lowest course. Photo © Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni, reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale.

was a temple to Tinia, the Etruscan equivalent of Jupiter, and formed the terminal site for triumphal parades just as the Capitolium did in Rome.48 As regards this discussion of founders, the most important evidence comes from below one of the two altars (altar alpha) located in front of and obliquely oriented to the Ara della Regina’s porch. Altar alpha’s lowest course of blocks rests at one corner directly upon a stone chest resembling a small sarcophagus but without any human remains inside (Figure 4.5). The chest’s placement is stratigraphically related to the first monumental phase of the temple around 570 BCE, and the chest remained exposed and visible below the lowest blocks of the altar into the fourth century BCE, when the temple’s third phase included the construction of a large podium covering the area and raising the ground level. The excavator, Maria Bonghi Jovino, who views the temple as a family monument of the Tarquinian dynasty, interprets the 48 Torelli 2019: 46–​59; Bonghi Jovino 2017: 236 suggests instead Hercules in relation to the claimed Heracleid descendancy of the Tarquins and her restoration of the demigod in the sculpture of the pediment of the fourth-​century BCE temple.

Founders  143 chest as a cenotaph symbolizing the burial of the city’s founder, Tarchon.49 This interpretation would make the site and even perhaps the temple itself into a place of founder’s cult meant to amplify the role of the descendants of Tarchon as progenitors of Tarquinia. This interpretation is rejected by Mario Torelli, who suggests instead that the alignment of altar alpha, notably different from that of the temple itself, accords not with Greek chthonic offerings for hero-​cult, but rather suggests a dedication to the temple’s celestial deity whom, as noted, he thinks was Tinia, the Etruscan Jupiter. Instead of a cenotaph, he suggests the chest was intended to hold first fruits dedicated in relation to foundation rituals, a practice known from Greek colonies and from Plutarch’s account of the founding of Rome.50 However, the parallels he cites are not very close, and foundation deposits from Italy, discussed in the previous chapter, more typically appear in ceramic containers. In any case, his argument proceeds in somewhat circular fashion by assuming, and then finding, Greek rituals in evidence at Tarquinia.51 Judging from the continuous worship attested on the plateau of Pian di Civita from the tenth century BCE, I do not think we should be so quick to turn to Greek interpretive models here. Furthermore, Tarquinian cult practices on this site reveal clear idiosyncrasies, perhaps including human sacrifice, but certainly involving the custom of marked burial in ways that are hard to correlate to Greek practice. We might otherwise point to the unusual set of bronzes—​axe, shield, and lituus—​found in the votive deposit in front of Edificio Beta, noted in the last chapter. All of this material particularizes the situation and suggests we should start from the Tarquinian evidence itself rather than from external analogy. Nonetheless, what Torelli’s critique does demonstrate is the difficulty of reaching any unimpeachable interpretation of the chest below the altar. The material evidence remains open to multiple interpretations, while it should also be pointed out that Bonghi Jovino’s idea of the site as one of founder’s cult also relies on later evidence. I have already noted that the foundation legend of Tarquinia involving Tarchon’s discovery of the unusual boy Tages, while said to depend on Etruscan sources, reveals plenty of signs of Greek influence.52 It remains difficult to say when such influence asserted itself, or whether any part of the story is in fact Tarquinian. Tages appears

49 Bonghi Jovino and Bagnasco Gianni 2012; Bonghi Jovino 2017: 243 with previous bibliography. 50 Torelli 2019: 23–​25, 51; Plut. Rom. 11.2; cf. Ov. Fast. 4.820–​24, and Coarelli 2020: 68–​69. 51 The only comparandum from Etruria he cites is the Roman colony of Cosa. 52 Above, p. 89.

144  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy on the handle of a fourth-​century BCE bronze mirror now in the British Museum, but cannot be identified in earlier Etruscan art.53 Bonghi Jovino supports her identification by pointing to a very fragmentary inscription discovered at the site of the Ara della Regina, which names Tarchon, but the text in question is unfortunately without firm context in the sanctuary and is anyway of Imperial date.54 Indeed, Torelli is right to question the whole idea that the sanctuary served programmatically to celebrate the Heracleid Tarquins, something that forms an important part of Bonghi Jovino’s wider argument, but that largely depends on her reading of the pedimental statuary of the temple’s third phase, dated to circa 380 BCE. We can note that the most famous epigraphic discovery from the site of the temple is the series of inscribed elogia recording the exploits from earlier Tarquinian history of members of the Spurinna family, discussed above in my introduction.55 These texts belonged to a larger family monument with presumably with statues of the Spurinnae (cf. fig. 1.2), and it would be odd to find such a monument within a sanctuary strongly attached to the dynastic authority of a different family. Concentrating only on the object itself, Maria Bonghi Jovino is right to note that the chest’s shape and size make it resemble a sarcophagus, albeit of small dimensions for an adult inhumation.56 If this chest did intend to recall a sarcophagus, the lack of a body is not necessarily problematic. With cases from Poseidonia and elsewhere, we have already noted that the empty burial finds many parallels in Italy. This raises the idea that we see here a monument intended to reflect exceptional burial within a city, aspects otherwise suggestive of significant historical meaning to the urban community. Especially when compared to an empty sarcophagus from Rome discussed in the next section, a possible relationship with foundational figures is intriguing. However, it remains difficult to say whose burial this chest at Tarquinia memorialized, or whether a relationship to cult practices at the site was intended, and the evidence itself will not take us much further.



53 Richardson 2008.

54 Cornell 1978: 168.

55 Torelli 1975; Cornell 1978; Torelli 2019; see above pp. 13–​15.

56 Bonghi Jovino 2017; I am grateful to Charlotte Potts for pointing out the small dimensions.

Founders  145

Figure 4.6  Schematic section of the shrine atop a seventh-​century BCE burial on the southwestern Palatine Hill, Rome. Drawing by author, adapted from Smith 1996.

Founders’ Cults: Rome Probably the most widely discussed example of possible founders’ cult in Italy comes from Rome, although the Roman material is, as usual, discussed on its own more than in relation to any wider phenomenon. To reverse this interpretive trend, I have saved discussion of the Roman evidence for after the Italian examples, which, I argue, provide an important framework. Sources refer to a large number of tombs associated with early figures from Rome’s legendary history, including places in the urban topography associated with burials not only of Romulus and early kings, but also of figures from early Roman legend like Faustulus or the Horatii and Curiatii. Rather than recapping the considerable scholarship on these and other aspects of Roman founding mythologies, I restrict myself here to archaeological traces of commemorative practice from the early Roman settlement, especially material that suggests parallels with the other sites examined above. There are three sites of venerated early burials from the city center: (i) First, we return to the southwestern area of the city’s Palatine Hill, where in the context of the last chapter’s discussion, we have already touched on evidence for a settlement of huts, perhaps connected to Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ discussion of the hut of Romulus continuously rebuilt down to his day. Close by to one of the easternmost of the Iron Age huts on this part of the hill were found traces of a cremation burial of the seventh century BCE (Figure 4.6). In the sixth century BCE, this burial was enclosed within a small shrine with an ashlar masonry foundation and a tile roof. The structure

146  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy was rebuilt again in the fourth century BCE, when it was transformed into a two-​room structure with a small altar placed immediately above the burial’s location. Patrizio Pensabene interprets this complex site on the Palatine as a hero-​ shrine—​he uses the term heroon—​associated with the location venerated as the hut of Romulus, thus pushing back at least some aspect of the Romulus story into a very early period.57 I note, however, that nothing in the tradition suggests Romulus was buried on the Palatine. It is safer to focus on the basic but still remarkable fact that archaeology reveals an individual’s burial on the Palatine became respected and monumentalized a little over a century after their death. One thing that has not been established sufficiently is how this monumentalized burial relates to the wider Iron Age settlement on this part of the hill. Pensabene suggests the tomb formed part of a small cemetery, and it is worth noting that the adjacent hut (eventually related to Romulus?58) was one of several such structures in an area extending westward around the ridge of the hill.59 It is possible, although available evidence does not afford much clarity, that another princely burial found beneath the atrium of the so-​called House of Livia farther up the slope of the same area of the hill also received cult. Considering the temples that later filled this part of the Palatine, we may find the same connection among burials, huts, and cult space detected elsewhere in Central Italy.60 One also wonders about the implications for reading this material of Andrea Carandini’s eighth-​century BCE wall found on the opposite side of the Palatine facing the Forum, on the basis of which he confirms the idea of an early Romulean sacred boundary or pomerium.61 Setting aside the difficulty of interpreting Carandini’s structure as a circuit wall around the Palatine, its existence would seem to imply very early thinking about the division of the hill’s space for different purposes. This makes it interesting to find tombs from around the same time located so close to an area of huts, and a likely case of mixed burial and inhabitation. In sum, it remains difficult to say whether the burial on the southwest Palatine was intra-​or extramural, or to understand the extent to which it 57 Coletti and Pensabene 2017: 577–​78. 58 Not everyone is convinced, as see Coarelli 2012: 131. 59 Huts even farther west than those at the top of the Scalae Caci excavated in the early twentieth century are reported in Coletti and Pensabene 2017, making this a very extensive Iron Age settlement. 60 Coletti and Pensabene 2017: 579. 61 Carandini 1997; this is by no means certain, as see Cirone and Hurst 2003: 25; Bernard 2012: 6.

Founders  147 was isolated either from other tombs or from the remainder of the Iron Age settlement. Certainly by the sixth century BCE, when this burial was first endowed with a stone structure, the location was well within the limits of the city. Although the evidence is by no means as clearly intelligible, this might suggest a sequence similar to what we find at Piazza d’Armi at Veii, and we might especially compare the tantalizing parallel of long-​term commemoration centered upon an exceptional burial that bridged the pre-​urban and urban periods. The surrounding area of the Palatine was an important destination for cult practices already in the Archaic city, as nearby the commemorated burial were other possibly religious monuments of the sixth century BCE as well as votive deposits found in the area of the later Middle Republican temples of Mater Matuta and Victory.62 Stephan Zink’s work on the adjacent area of the Palatine covered over by the large Augustan complex of the Temple of Apollo has revealed another Archaic shrine respected by later construction.63 While it is not easy to reconstruct what was going on here in detail, clearly the early residents of this part of Rome were highly conscious of the meaning of particular topographical locations. (ii) The second and third Roman sites of possible founders’ cult take us down the hill to the Forum and specifically to its northwest corner in the area of the senate house and assembly space, the curia and comitium. We start with an unusual monument adjacent to the comitium’s northern edge consisting of an underground chamber paved over with black stones. These pavers help identify the site as the “black stone” (lapis niger) monument referred to in the antiquarian lexicon of Festus, who calls it a “funerary site” (184L: locum funestum). As Festus admits, just whose funeral the site recalled was no longer certain and admitted a plurality of associations, from the burial site of Romulus to that of Faustulus or Hostus Hostilius. These traditions found various supporters. Varro also held that Romulus was buried near the speaker’s platform of the comitium in a place still in his day marked off by two lions,64 while a passage of Dionysius of Halicarnassus supports an identification of the site with Faustulus (1.87.2).65 Considering the site’s supposed “funerary” nature, the absence of any grave here is noteworthy. It is not only that we encounter no actual body, 62 Coletti and Pensabene 2017. 63 Zink 2015. 64 Varro’s text is preserved in two scholiasts to Hor. Ep. 16.13, Pseudo-​Acronius and Porphyry, who record a crucial difference, discussed below. 65 See F. Coarelli, “sepulcrum Romulii,” in LTUR IV.295–​96.

148  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy something we have seen elsewhere in Italy, but also that there are no clear signs of tomb architecture. Instead, the site beneath the black rock paving stones consists of a u-​shaped stone platform, perhaps intended to support the lion statues seen by Varro, and a series of subsidiary monuments including an altar, a well, a pillar, and the inscribed stele known as the lapis niger (“black rock”) inscription preserving one of the earliest extant Latin texts. This configuration of structures dates to the sixth century BCE and has been identified by Filippo Coarelli as the Archaic sanctuary referred to as the Volcanal.66 In explaining the absence of a tomb at a site otherwise related by the Late Republic to funerary cult, we could indulge the story in our sources that Romulus’ body was never recovered, as the first king was either torn to bits by jealous senators or ascended to heaven (cf. Liv. 1.16). However, the absence of a grave makes it hard to recover the meaning of the monument at the time of its construction, and whether it intended already in that moment to monumentalize a place in the city tied to a specific dead individual. (iii) The final site also relates to the supposed tomb of Romulus. In 1900, Giacomo Boni published a brief note on the discovery of a monumental stone sarcophagus found immediately beneath the steps of the Roman senate house, the curia.67 The sarcophagus, lacking a lid, was found empty aside from some seashells, pottery sherds, and bits of red plaster. It was placed beside a fragmentary section of a round stone pillar in a small chamber deliberately made beneath the steps. After its discovery, the area was largely concealed from view by the modern repair of the curia’s steps, but it has recently been reopened by Rome’s archaeological superintendency accompanied by sensational announcements in international media.68 These reports suggest the current thinking that the sarcophagus is sixth century BCE in date, although there is no clarity on the reason for its date or when the small underground chamber around it was created. The Roman curia was held to have been a very old construction dating back to Rome’s third king, Tullus Hostilius, although there is no material evidence of that phase. Seeing as the chamber must have been constructed prior to the currently standing curia, a structure that dates to the later Empire, it is tempting to associate its creation with

66 Coarelli 1983: 161–​78; Coarelli 2020: 55–​59. 67 Boni in NSc 1900: 299–​300. 68 See “Roma, straordinaria scoperta nel Foro: ritrovato un sarcofogo nel punto in cui si crede sia sepolto Romolo” [“Rome, extraordinary discovery in the Forum: a sarcophagus has been found in the place in which Romulus is believed to have been buried”], in La Repubblica, February17, 2020

Founders  149 earliest political architecture in the same area including the first monumental phases of the comitium and the lapis niger monument discussed above. The identification of the monument beneath the curia stairs with Romulus returns us to Varro’s account of the founder’s burial cult, mentioned above.69 Crucially, Varro’s report comes from a fragment of a lost work transmitted via two late antique commentators on an epode by the poet Horace. Both sources give slightly different versions: an anonymous author we refer to as Pseudo-​Acronis records the burial of Romulus in rostris, while the other commentator Porphyry describes it as pro rostris. That is, both commentators relate the site to the stepped speakers’ platform called the rostra, which sat along the southeastern side of the comitium, although they use different prepositions to describe that relationship. The speakers’ platform consisted of a curvilinear structure running from the steps of the curia to the area just beside the lapis niger monument. We can therefore either privilege Pseudo-​ Acronius’ in rostris or “in front of the speakers’ platform” to place the site at the lapis niger monument, or we can put it pro rostris or “behind the speakers’ platform” to put it in the area of comitium steps, and so both sites can conceivably be made to fit Varro’s account. Whichever the case, what matters here is that we actually have material suggesting a burial, even if we have no body. More than that, we have something that very closely resembles the situation at Tarquinia where an empty chest was incorporated into an early cult site, as the original comitium was reportedly a templum, that is, religiously sanctified space. Bonghi Jovino has drawn a more specific parallel here between the situation at Tarquinia, where the empty chest below altar alpha relates to the civic temple of the Ara della Regina, and Rome, where we find this site in the forum at the foot of the Capitoline hill with its own civic temple. Both sites, she points out, bear some relationship to the tradition of the ruling Tarquinian dynasty.70 This perhaps overextends the evidence: I have already raised some issues with the interpretation of the Ara della Regina site as a dynastic complex of the Tarquinian family, while the spatial relationship between the chest beneath altar alpha at Tarquinia seems far more intentional than that between the Capitoline temple of Jupiter and the shrine below. The constitutive topographical elements in the Roman case are instead the forum and the senate house.



69 I gratefully acknowledge pers. comm. with Christopher Smith for the following discussion. 70 Bonghi Jovino 2017.

150  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy I want to set aside the question of which of these forum monuments was related by ancient antiquarian writers of the Late Republic to the tomb of Romulus. Clearly the multiple interpretations for the lapis niger site recorded by ancient sources like Festus or Varro suggest that the connection of site to myth was already unstable by the Late Republic, and several Roman founding figures could be linked with this area of the city’s topography. What matters to present discussion is that these sites of ostensibly Archaic cult seem to have retained a close association with legends of the city’s foundation. That is, instead of reading these monuments within the framework of their relationship to the specific origin story of Rome, let us think about this material within the broader context of the archaeology of the commemoration of founding figures in Central Italy. In this context, we can point to similarities between aspects found at Rome and elsewhere. At both Rome and Tarquinia, for example, we find the use of an empty sarcophagus in a cult site, while at both Rome and Veii, we find the subsequent veneration of an Early Iron Age burial at a site that becomes central to the emerging topography of each respective city. Finally, the Roman evidence presents a case, or perhaps two cases, of burial in the Forum, equivalent to burial in the agora, something we also saw at Poseidonia, and which was apparently central to Greek conceptions of founders’ cult.

Founders’ Cults in Italy: Some Other Possibilities A few sites from elsewhere in Italy suggest practices discussed were more widespread, although the evidence is generally harder to interpret, not least of all because some of these sites fall outside core areas of early Italian urbanization, where our understanding of settlement is often sparser. From Falerii Veteres, the old Faliscan site with close connections to Etruria, some unusual architectural features of the sanctuary of Juno Curitis at Celle, the temple located at the foot of one of the city’s Iron Age cemeteries, have been reinterpreted by Maurizio Harari as a shrine to the city’s heroic founder Halaesus. The fourth-​century BCE temple includes a small rectangular structure extending out from one of its side walls. The little structure seems to continue an earlier cult site of the sixth century BCE, from which sculptural terracotta rooftiles have been found, and one tile is interpreted as depicting Halaesus. Harari draws this together with orientalizing sculptural elements depicting human figures and a lion found at the same site that he attributes

Founders  151 to a monumentalized tomb in the same area. In his view, the sanctuary developed first as a monumentalized burial site, and then in the Archaic period took on aspects of founder’s cult relating to Halaesus. When in the fourth century BCE the temple was built, this cult was embedded into the architecture of the new monumental complex.71 The purpose of this small structure built onto the temple remains unclear, but this particular reading rests on a string of conjectures and is best treated with caution.72 Other examples reveal evidence of special burial or commemoration less clearly related to sites that may be called urban. Across the Apennines, notable are unusual burials including a male skeleton buried with two dogs and two inhumation burials made in a residential (?) structure within the proto-​ urban Venetic settlement at Oppeano near Verona.73 From Celtic territory in Northern Italy, excavations at the center of Aosta found the inhumation burial of an adult male of high rank, to judge from his arms and his burial within an 18 m wide tumulus of stones, placed at the center of a much large circular area, 150 in diameter, marked off by a ring of stones in the ground. Grave goods date the burial securely to the seventh century BCE, when we know very little else about the surrounding settlement. If the Celtic oppidum was located at the same point as the later city of Aosta, established as an Augustan colony in 25 BCE, then this would indeed be a significant burial at its center, although the earlier position and layout of the settlement are difficult to determine.74 Another intriguing example can be cited from the far south of the peninsula, in Strabo’s offhand remark that the “palace of the king” was still visible at a site he calls Ouria, possibly modern Oria, in the Sallentine Peninsula. Problematically, we have no archaeology with which to correspond this report. Some modern attempts to connect Strabo’s account with an ashlar structure in the region known as the “Centopietre” run up against the fact that this structure contains some reused Roman headstones and thus appears Medieval.75 In any case, again, it is very hard to know who this king was whose house Strabo notes, and considering the region’s settlement history it seems unlikely he served as the head of a community that could be described as urban.

71 Harari 2014.

72 Biella and Michetti 2018: 444–​48, esp. 448. 73 Saracino and Guidi 2020. 74 Mola 2018. 75

Whitehouse and Whitehouse 1966 suggest it is an Iron Age structure; however, see Pagliara 1976.

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Italian Founders’ Cult? Having reviewed all this evidence, let us now return to the overarching question of the relationship between Italian practices and the better-​attested founders’ cult in the Greek world. I am optimistic that we have located something identifiable as the veneration of founding figures, in the general sense of that phrase, in Italian cities. Here it is worth recalling discussion in the second chapter, which noted ancestors depicted at the tomb and in cemeteries from the very earliest moments of Italian urbanization and slightly earlier. If the implication is that Early Italian Iron Age society was long accustomed to venerating ancestors after death, then we may think that aspects of this practice were adapted to the organizational level and social reality of the early urban community. The remarkable discoveries from Veii are perhaps the best example of this process, especially because the site spans pre-​urban and urban society and has been read plausibly as finding its beginnings as an example of Early Iron Age ancestor cult.76 While the site remains unique, aspects of its archaeology can be paralleled elsewhere, and this allows us to create a sort of materially based vocabulary for recognizing sites in Italy potentially related to urban cults for founding figures. Two important aspects that emerge are the centrality to cult practices of earlier burial, accomplished either by monumentalizing an actual grave or by incorporating elements of funerary architecture, as well as the placement of the site in the center of a settlement. At the same time, we have also seen some limits to our ability to interpret this material. If we go looking for founder’s cults in Italy, it is true that we find amenable evidence, but we should also admit its variance from what we find in Greece. Italians do seem to be incorporating specific individuals from their recent past in the construction of their first cities, but there is no single site that matches what Greeks would identify as a hero-​shrine. Importantly, this variance even extends to the Greek colonial world, and this variance complicates the idea that such practices were imported along with a larger cultural package from the Aegean to the West through colonization. Thinking about the best available case from the Italian mainland colony of Poseidonia, a very skeptical view might be inclined to privilege the graffito naming the muses found in the Poseidonian structure and therefore to interpret the whole site as having nothing to do with the city’s foundation,

76 Bartoloni 2013; Acconcia and Bartoloni 2014.

Founders  153 although to my mind the building’s architectural parallels with burial in general and with Cyrene more specifically remain meaningful. Elsewhere in Greek colonial Italy, is difficult to tell whether tombs that we might otherwise simply call princely burials were in fact encoded with greater historical resonance. It may be the case that we are witnessing the refraction of Greek practices through the encounter with Italians’ own existing ideas about commemoration in the colonial setting of Poseidonia and its peer cities. In sum, various early urban communities across Italy were actively commemorating their recently dead but in different ways than in contemporary Greece. One reason for variance may be that hero-​cult required Greeks to believe in a sort of middle ground between human and divine, and we might question, as Christopher Smith has recently done, whether this conception of divinity extended to the world of Central Italian religion.77 Another issue may be the comparative resilience of Italy’s aristocratic lineage groups into the period of urbanization and the consequent social tensions inherent to the early Italian city.78 Indeed, there is no reason to think that the emergence of any of the founders’ cults discussed here necessarily eclipsed earlier cultic practices in cemeteries described in the last chapter, at least not in any dramatic way. Corinna Riva argues that the retention of ancestral cult may be what distinguished Etruscan from Greek practices in the orientalizing period, and I would agree. In Greece, hero-​cult offered a new form of collective, public worship that helped cement the political relationships of the polis. In Etruria, by contrast, the pre-​and proto-​urban tomb had functioned as a destination for both public collective rituals and private familial cults related to the ancestors. This discussion poses an important complication to my suggestion in introducing this chapter that this period saw a move from private to public: in Italy, that move was never straightforward.79 In the eighth century BCE, burial grounds in Tyrrhenian Italy remained the primary focal points for cult, as discussed in Chapter 2, even as “public” hero-​cults started to emerge at Greek cities like Eretria. However, the Italian evidence discussed here also suggests that, by the sixth century BCE, commemorative practices increasingly (and belatedly, by comparison to Greece) began to move from cemeteries to city centers. It is interesting to connect these trends with the



77 Smith forthcoming; see Ekroth 2007 for Greek belief and hero-​cult.

78 Terrenato 2019.

79 Riva 2010: 134–​36.

154  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy major changes in funerary architecture in Central Italy in the later sixth and fifth centuries BCE, and one is led to wonder whether the diminution of grand tumuli and multi-​generational burials of the orientalizing period might reflect the diminishing cultic role of tombs as monumental urban sanctuaries built around the same time became primary destinations for community worship.80 That is, I might speculate that, as the temple replaced the tumulus, founders as an extension of ancestors became a primary means of conceptualizing the community’s past. We may be witnessing a crucial distinction as politically important cults were more durably connected with cemeteries and multi-​generational burial in Italy than in Greece, at least until the sixth century BCE when they increasingly began to yield to the spatial logic of urban collectives.

Greek Myth and Italian Founders’ Cults: Aeneas in Latium Having investigated the nature of Italian founders’ cult, I want now to examine its later distortion and recasting into those (Greek) origin stories transmitted by our extant written sources. I hope to have left little doubt that Italians possessed their own historical culture, but what can we say about its later interaction with foreign influences? This section turns to look closely at a final case study of the archaeology of Italian founders’ cult, but this time from the realm of Greek mythology. We follow the commemoration of Aeneas in hopes of getting a clearer picture of how Greek origin stories came to be applied to Italian cities, even ones which already had an active tradition of commemorating founders. My hope is that most readers will be familiar with the Trojan prince Aeneas, the legendary founder of the Roman people, whose travels from Troy to Italy, where he established the line of rulers who would eventually found Rome, are famously depicted by Vergilian epic. His wanderings after the conclusion of the Trojan war form one of the more famous cases, perhaps second only to Odysseus, of a series of stories of mythological heroes whose westward travels were exploited as an etiological framework to link Italian and Greek society through a common past.81 In the context of this chapter, Aeneas merits discussion because, more than any other Greek hero in Italy, there is a significant corpus of archaeological 80 For changes to funerary architecture in Central Tyrrhenian Italy in this period, see above Chapter 2. 81 Malkin 1998, and much else.

Founders  155 material that scholars have related to his veneration there as founding figure. As with the previous discussion in this chapter of founder’s cult at Rome, I restrict my analysis as far as possible to the archaeological data, setting aside the different problem of the developing portrayal of Aeneas in Roman culture.82 Material culture suggests that some version of the Aeneas legend was known from an early date in Central Italy, as related myths appears with some frequency on black-​and red-​figure Attic vases from Etruria, and even on a few vases of Etruscan manufacture.83 Little independent evidence, however, reveals to us how the figure of Aeneas was received in Etruria, however, and there is little to support his position as founder of any cities north of the Tiber.84 Terracotta figurines found at the Campetti sanctuary at Veii depicting the hero carrying his father Anchises do not appear to be as old as some have thought, but instead belong as late as the fourth century BCE, by which date their production may even be related to Roman cultural influence.85

Lavinium In Latium itself, where Aeneas would come to be known as a central ancestral figure, three sites have been identified with his worship. Some of this evidence has been uncovered by recent excavations, granting further value to its analysis here. In all cases, identification depends upon reading the archaeology against key passages of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whose history of Rome grants very detailed attention to Aeneas’ actions as well as those sites of his cult among the Latins of his own day. The first and most famous is his account of the hero’s tomb: The Latins built a hero-​shrine to him with this inscription: “To the father and god of this place, who presides over the waters of the river Numicus.” But there are some who say the shrine was erected by Aeneas in honor of

82 Key studies include Perret 1942; Cornell 1975; Lou-​Gille 1980; Enea nel Lazio 1981; Ampolo 1992; Gruen 1992; Rodriguez-​Mayorgas 2010; Torelli 2011. 83 Pontrandolfo 2007; for Etruscan-​made vases, see Torelli 2011: 226 n. 123. 84 This thesis was considered especially by Alföldi 1963: 14–​19; Galinksy 1969: 122–​37; and it is now revived by Colonna 2009, although his reconstruction of Aeneas carrying Anchises in a monumental ridgepole statue from Veii is unacceptably speculative; see further, Rodriguez-​Mayorgas 2010: 101. 85 Torelli 2011: 226 n. 123.

156  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Anchises, who died in the year before this war. It is a small mound, around which has been set out in regular rows trees that are well worth seeing.86

This account has been connected with a remarkable monumentalized tumulus located upon the coastal plain outside the walls of ancient Lavinium, the city to which Aeneas first arrived in Latium. The much-​discussed monument, first explored in the 1950s, sits about 100 m west of the sanctuary of the twelve altars, the old cult sites that may have hosted meetings of the Latin League, the confederation of Latin cities that formed in the late Archaic period and played an important role in the development of the Early Roman Republican state. The tumulus originally consisted of an Iron Age burial mound of probably the mid-​seventh century BCE with a single inhumation burial in a center pit lined with stone slabs (Figure 4.7). Over the chest of the inhumed body, the pit was closed with a single circular slab. In the fourth century BCE, this tumulus was radically transformed to accommodate cult. A small pronaos with two antae was added into the mound in front of the burial area fronting a sort of cella carved into the tumulus into the area of the earlier grave. The cella remained inaccessible, closed off by a set of false stone-​carved doors.87 Following Paolo Sommella’s publication, the site is commonly referred to as the heroon of Aeneas. Its monumentalization in the fourth century BCE, moreover, is held to reflect the Romans increasing ideological interest in the Aeneas myth as a way to understand their position in Latium after Rome dissolved the Latin League in 338 BCE.88 The structure fits the description in Dionysius’ account of a round tomb monument, even if no traces of a related inscription have been found. The identification, however, is not without issue.89 As Ana Rodriguez-​Mayorgas points out, the tumulus may be in the wrong place.90 Aeneas was held to have died in a battle at the Numicus River and to have been buried not far away. Most sources are fairly vague on where 86 1.64.5: καὶ αὐτῷ κατασκευάζουσιν οἱ Λατῖνοι ἡρῶον ἐπιγραφῇ τοιᾷδε κοσμούμενον: πατρὸς θεοῦ χθονίου, ὃς ποταμοῦ Νομικίου ῥεῦμα διέπει. εἰσὶ δ᾽ οἳ λέγουσιν ἐπ᾽ Ἀγχίσῃ κατασκευασθῆναι αὐτὸ ὑπ᾽ Αἰνείου, ἐνιαυτῷ πρότερον τοῦ πολέμου τούτου τελευτήσαντι. ἔστι δὲ χωμάτιον οὐ μέγα καὶ περὶ αὐτὸ δένδρα στοιχηδὸν πεφυκότα θέας ἄξια. Text and lightly modified translation from the Loeb Classical Library edition. 87 Sommella 1971–​72. 88 Castagnoli 1972: 96–​100. 89 Some supporting evidence is also now to be excluded from discussion, as the inscribed cippus from Torre Tignosa (CIL I2 2843) once thought to read lare aenia d(onom) (“a gift for Aeneas the household god”) has been reread as a dedication by an otherwise unknown A(ula) Venia; La Regina 2014; Flower 2017: 14–​16. 90 Rodriguez-​Mayorgas 2010: 101; Smith 2020: 18–​19; Smith pers. comm.

Founders  157

Figure 4.7  Remains of the Iron Age burial chamber (foreground) and foundations of Middle Republican pronaos of the so-​called heroon of Aeneas outside the walls of Lavinium, Latium. Photo © author.

more precisely in this region his tomb lay. In his history, Livy, for example, says only that the hero was buried “above the Numicus” (super Numicum). The passage of Dionysius cited above gives by far the most topographically detailed description of Aeneas’ burial monument but does not specify its relationship to the river except by implication. Appended to his account of the battle at the Numicus in which Aeneas died, the suggestion seems to be that the monument sat in relation to the river, and Dionysius records an inscription on the monument that made Aeneas protective deity of the river. If we think the tomb had a clear topographical connection to the river, it becomes an issue that it does not sit near any known ancient water course. Ferdinando Castagnoli identified the small stream of the Fosso di Pratica with the ancient Numicus, and that has been enough to satisfy some scholars, but the course of the Fosso di Pratica as it exists today is about a km away from the tumulus, and the issue remains.91

91 Castagnoli 1967: 242, followed by Galinsky 1974: 6.

158  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy I am not sure this topographical problem is insurmountable. Livy’s super Numicum is sufficiently vague, while again Dionysius never actually states that the monument sat along the river, even if his passage does offer an implied connection. However, it must remain possible that what has been discovered at Lavinium is not the heroon of Aeneas, but something else entirely, and we return to that possibility shortly.

Sol Indiges? The second and third sites both claim relationship to a second detailed passage in Dionysius: While [the Trojans’] fleet lay at anchor off Laurentum and they had set up their tents near the shore, in the first place, when the men were oppressed with thirst and there was no water in the place (what I say I heard from the inhabitants), springs of the sweetest water were seen rising out of the earth spontaneously, of which all the army drank and the place was flooded as the stream ran down to the sea from the springs. Today, however, the springs are no longer so full as to overflow, but there is just a little water collected in a hollow place, and the inhabitants say it is sacred to the Sun; and near it two altars are pointed out, one facing to the east, the other to the west, both of them Trojan structures, upon which, the story goes, Aeneas offered up his first sacrifice to the god as a thank-​offering for the water.92

This passage describes a sanctuary associated with Aeneas’ arrival to Latium also characterized by solar cult, and topographically distinguished by (i) the presence of a small hollow place, possibly an old water source, and (ii) two strangely oriented altars. The existence of a sanctuary at the place where the river met the coast is also supported by Pliny, who refers to the “site of Sol Indiges,” an autochthonous solar god, found at the mouth of the Numicus

92 1.55.1–​2: ἐπειδὴ γὰρ ὅρμῳ χρησάμενοι τῷ Λωρεντῷ σκηνὰς ἐπήξαντο περὶ τὸν αἰγιαλόν, πρῶτον μὲν πιεζομένοις τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ὑπὸ δίψης οὐκ ἔχοντος ὕδωρ τοῦ τόπου ῾λέγω δὲ ἃ παρὰ τῶν ἐγχωρίων παρέλαβον᾽ λιβάδες αὐτόματοι νάματος ἡδίστου ἐκ γῆς ἀνελθοῦσαι ὤφθησαν, ἐξ ὧν ἥ τε στρατιὰ πᾶσα ὑδρεύσατο καὶ ὁ τόπος περίρρυτος γέγονε μέχρι θαλάττης καταβάντος ἀπὸ τῶν πηγῶν τοῦ ῥεύματος. νῦν μέντοι οὐκέτι πλήθουσιν ὥστε καὶ ἀπορρεῖν αἱ λιβάδες, ἀλλ᾽ ἔστιν ὀλίγον ὕδωρ ἐν κοίλῳ χωρίῳ συνεστηκὸς, λεγόμενον ὑπὸ τῶν ἐγχωρίων ἱερὸν ἡλίου: καὶ βωμοὶ δύο παρ᾽ αὐτῷ δείκνυνται, ὁ μὲν πρὸς ἀνατολὰς τετραμμένος, ὁ δὲ πρὸς δύσεις, Τρωικὰ ἱδρύματα, ἐφ᾽ ὧν τὸν Αἰνείαν μυθολογοῦσι πρώτην θυσίαν ποιήσασθαι τῷ θεῷ χαριστήριον τῶν ὑδάτων.

Founders  159 (NH 3.56).93 Other sources also suggest Aeneas’ cult was synchretized with another god in some way with his posthumous worship as either Sol, Jupiter, or Pater Indiges.94 In 1966, Castagnoli explored a small section of a monumental sanctuary at the mouth of the Fosso di Pratica river along the Latial coastline. He discovered architectural terracottas suggesting the structure dated at least as early as the fifth century BCE. More recently, Alessandro Maria Jaia has returned to the site and confirmed the existence of a monumental prostyle temple as well as more terracottas extending the sanctuary’s history into the sixth century BCE.95 The temple’s most significant construction phase, when the whole site was also surrounded by a large precinct wall, can be securely dated by related coin finds to the early third century BCE. Thus, we find an earlier Archaic sanctuary that was considerably enlarged about a generation after the restructuring of the so-​called heroon at Lavinium.96 If we uphold Castagnoli’s assertion that the Fossa di Pratica is the ancient Numicus river, then the temple would be in the right place. It is further interesting to note that some later commentators on the Aeneas legend never use the Greek word heroon, as Dionysus does in describing the burial mound, but do refer to a sanctuary or templum along the bank of the Numicus river.97 However, there are two issues with the identification of this site as the sanctuary to Aeneas and the sun described by Dionsyius and Pliny. First, while Jaia argues that a monumentalized feature beside the temple consisting of a natural depression perhaps for collecting fresh water forms the “hollow place” to which Dionysius refers, there has been no sign found of the two perpendicular altars forming the other distinguishing topographical feature of the site. Second, while there has been considerable material related to cult found at the temple, none of it offers any substantive link with either Aeneas or solar worship. Instead, excavations have revealed a considerable number of anatomical votives, suggesting a healing cult, as well as the well-​known Heraklesschalen, black gloss pottery cups marked with a painted H, which are known to be associated with the worship of Hercules.98 Of course, it is 93 For Pliny’s text at this point, see Castagnoli 1972: 93 n. 10. 94 Liou-​Gille 1980: 85–​92, and for the complex meaning of the epithet indiges, 99–​116. 95 Jaia and Nonnis 2012; Jaia and Molinari 2012. 96 Molinari and Jaia 2011. 97 Serv. ad Aen. 1.259, but note also ad Aen. 7.150, where he seems to refer to cult based on Aeneas’ burial; Fest. 94L. The Latin word templum means only an inaugurated space and can, but does not necessarily, require the presence of a temple structure, but this remains noteworthy. 98 Jaia and Nonnis 2012.

160  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy not impossible that worship on this site encompassed other aspects or other deities, but nothing found here positively confirms a relationship to divine Aeneas.

Castrum Inui A competing claim has been made to find the Aeneas sanctuary described by Dionysius and Pliny at the mouth of an entirely different river, the Fosso dell’Incastro, another small water course that meets the coast just to the southeast of Lavinium, below the ancient town of Ardea. Ardea was the capital city of the Rutulians, the Italian people who were held to have most fiercely resisted Aeneas’ arrival to Latium, but the coastal site is at some remove from Ardea itself. Instead, this seems to be an ancient site known as Castrum Inui, one of the places mentioned among a catalogue of the places ruled by Aeneas’ descendants in Vergil’s epic Aeneid. At this location, covered by a thick layer of coastal sand dunes, excavations discovered a well-​ preserved and extensive sanctuary (Figure 4.8).99 The site initially consisted of a monumental temple of the sixth century BCE, transformed in the early third century BCE into a large complex, also surrounded by a square precinct wall, and endowed with a second, smaller temple.100 (The transformation of all three sites we discuss here in the fourth and third centuries BCE is noteworthy and speaks to a broader moment of regional change.) Thanks to the layer of dunes that covered them, these structures’ preservation is extraordinary, and the site represents one of the most significant recent acquisitions for our understanding of early Latin religious architecture. Notably in this Middle Republican phase, the whole area was paved, and two altars were built in front of the earlier Archaic temple, one’s orientation turned almost 90 degrees different from the other. A cistern or well was created under the older temple, which Mario Torelli suggests may be the “hollow place” referred to by Dionysius. It is especially the two altars whose unusual orientation seems to match the description in Dionysius, which provide the basis for associating this site with Aeneas. Moving Dionysius’ account to this site would also require

99 Di Mario 2007; Torelli and Marroni 2018; Bernard 2019. 100 Based on architectural terracottas, Torelli 2018: 497–​98 speculates about the existence of a second Archaic temple somewhere beyond the confines of the excavated area.

Founders  161

Figure 4.8  The two altars in the sanctuary at Castrum Inui (Ardea), Latium, viewed from the cella of Temple B looking west toward Temple A. Observe the oblique orientation, possibly corresponding to the description of Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Photo © author.

us to identify the Numicus river with the Fosso dell’Incastro, contrary to Castagnoli and others’ suggestion that it was the Fosso di Pratica. I note that the thesis would require us to eliminate the so-​called heroon at Lavinium entirely from the archaeology of the Aeneas legend, since it would make the Lavinian mound nowhere near the ancient Numicus and in fact closer to another river.101 Torelli makes a number of complex arguments for other connections between the Castrum Inui sanctuary and the legendary figure of Aeneas, including seeing the deified hero represented in second-​century BCE pedimental sculptures from the smaller, later temple, but these sculptures are too fragmentary to confirm his attribution with any certainty.102 Indeed, the Archaic terracottas from the earlier first temple remain difficult to interpret but certainly do not show any known aspects of the Aeneas legend. Most curious is the appearance in two phases of the temple’s early roof of a bearded hoplite warrior whose helmet has an unusual transverse crest and is draped with what appears to be the pelt of a deer. It remains unclear who this figure is or to whom the initial temple was dedicated, but he is definitely not Aeneas,

101 This problem does not seem to be acknowledged by Torelli 2011, who seems to want to retain all three monuments as authentically described by Dionysius of Halicarnassus. 102 Torelli 2011, 2018.

162  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy and nothing otherwise from the Archaic temple’s terracottas suggests any relationship to the Trojan prince whatsoever.103

Evaluating the Archaeology of Aeneas Like the temple (to Sol Indiges?) at the mouth of the Fosso di Pratica, the site of Castrum Inui thus presents a mixture of evidence for and against an association with the cult of Aeneas, and the same can be said about the so-​called heroon at Lavinium. Another possibility, which I do not think we can exclude, is that all three sites were at some point pulled into the topography of Aeneas in Latium. The coastal topography here is highly unstable, as we witness in the thick layers of sand dunes that buried the site of Castrum Inui after its abandonment in the Early Empire. It is entirely possible that the memory of Aeneas came to be venerated at both the mouth of the Fosso dell’Incastro and that of the Fosso di Pratica simply because the sources of the Late Republic and Early Empire were themselves no longer certain which water course was the ancient Numicus of Trojan legend. Indeed, the Vergilian commentator Servius may relay something to this effect, stating that the river must have once been larger, but had dried up and was by his day little more than a spring (ad Aen. 7.150). Furthermore, how we evaluate these sites depends greatly on when we think the Greek hero Aeneas first started to be viewed as a founding figure in Latin culture. Rodriguez-​Mayorgas offers a pessimistic view that Rome did not have a stable tradition of Aeneas as its founder any earlier than the later third century BCE.104 Such skepticism seems uncharitable to some of our sources, particularly the Sicilian historian Timaeus, while a version of Aeneas’ arrival in Italy and founding of Rome, albeit idiosyncratically referred to in the company of Odysseus, appears to have been known to the Greek author Hellanicus in the fifth century BCE.105 Writing in the third century BCE, Timaeus thought or was told that the inhabitants of Lavinium kept Trojan objects in a temple in their city. Whatever these objects actually were, what matters is that Trojan legends were by that point circulating 103 Bernard 2019: 569–​70, reviewing various interpretations. 104 Cornell 1975: 82–​83 also suggests the third century BCE as a turning point, but I believe he intends to mean the earlier part of that period, which is a very different contention. 105 The fact that it seems Hellanicus gave two vastly different versions of the Aeneas legend in two of his works does not, I think, undermine his importance as an early witness, contra Rodriguez-​ Mayorgas 2010: 93 n. 18, with further sources.

Founders  163 in local histories.106 I also find it relevant to observe that the three possible sites of Aeneas cult discussed here, even if each one has certain topographical problems, reveal signs of considerable transformation and monumentalization around the same time around 300 BCE. It seems logical to move from this archaeological evidence of a restructuring of cult places in coastal Latium, along with nearly contemporary sources like Timaeus and Hellanicus, to think that we are observing a moment of change or amplification. This would in turn favor the idea that Rome pushed a mythologically important link with Aeneas as founder of both the city and many other cities in Latium in the political situation in which it assumed priority in the region following the dissolution of the Latin League in 338 BCE. To my mind, the coincidence of archaeology and historical context here is highly suggestive. Setting this argument aside, however, we should say something more above all about what these three Aeneas sites reveal about the wider practice of the veneration of founders in Central Italy. Unlike those examples discussed above, we have a Greek hero-​founder who was certainly unhistorical in the sense that his burial or worship cannot have contended with Aeneas as an actual individual from these communities’ recent past. It is noteworthy in that case that not one of the three candidates for Aeneas cult matches even remotely the qualifications discussed above for Greek founder’s cult. None of these sites is located in the urban site of Lavinium, which Aeneas was held to have founded, including the so-​called heroon, which is situated outside that city’s walls. What is especially noteworthy is that all three cases reveal the use of earlier monuments or structures, which had probably nothing at all to do from their beginnings with the legendary founder Aeneas. This process of transforming an earlier site is most clearly observed in the case of the restructured burial tumulus but also pertains at the two sanctuaries, where worship is attested going back to the Archaic period. The synchretism of Aeneas and a solar god, or Pater Indiges, in our sources may be seen as a sign of just this process of grafting the Greek hero’s worship onto places of earlier (literally) indigenous cult. Torelli notes abundant signs, some more fragile than others, for very early solar worship at sites along the Tyrrhenian coastline.107 Even as many of 106 Rodriguez-​Mayorgas 2010: 103–​5 notes problems understanding what Timaeus meant by reference to the penates in this passage, but that should not lead us to throw out the whole as historically useless. She is similarly pessimistic about Timaeus’ report of the Trojan meaning of the Roman festival of the October Equus, but here she seems to take at face value the highly polemical view of Polybius toward the fragment, something that we should generally be cautious about when reading Timaeus, as see Baron 2013. 107 Torelli 2018.

164  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy these sites took on Greek religious practices, few if any of were transformed into an equivalent Greek solar deity, Apollo or otherwise, suggesting that their meaning over time was not necessarily stable. Along the Latin coast, this existing cultic topography seems in that case to have been labile and will have easily received the Greek foundational legend of Aeneas. I suspect this is precisely the sort of process I have been referring to whereby Greek stories of origins were applied to already existing local understandings of the past. The penetration of Greek mythologies in this region of Italy took advantage of an existing topography, which in many places already included other foundational stories and figures. The expectation of ancient sources when confronting a site relating to the Trojan foundation of the people of Latium was that it was very old. As we have seen in the passage cited above, Dionysius thought that sites related to Aeneas dated at least in part back to the Trojans themselves; the strangely oriented altars, for example, become explicable as old Trojan altars. Of course, archaeology expectedly confirms that the two altars at Castrum Inui, if they are indeed those Dionysius saw, were built around 300 BCE, rather than in the Bronze Age. But this dating depends on our modern understanding of stratigraphic chronology and reveals little about ancient perceptions of time in the Late Republic. What seems important is the fact that Greek origin stories by virtue of the prehistorical time to which they referred were well suited to take advantage of existing monuments; they were in that sense etiological stories intended to explain already existing markers within the landscape of Latium and, we must assume, elsewhere in Italy.108 This being the case, it may be asking the wrong question to pursue the single Aeneas-​ cult site, which most perfectly fits with the account of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and other sources. The process by which Aeneas came to be venerated as a founding figure in this region was at once both less stable and more extensive. It would not be surprising to find not only Dionysius but other authors writing at that time regularly explaining the monumental landscape of Latium, which preceded the arrival of the Trojan legend, in relation to the foundational stories of Aeneas. This same process likely appeared in regions of Italy other than Latium, even if we are never as well equipped to detect it. Maurizio Harari compares his reconstruction of a heroon at the sanctuary at Celle outside Falerii Veteres, 108 The availability of monuments for reinterpretation at later dates has been stressed in Greece, as see De Polignac 1995: 148–​49; Antonaccio 1997; see also Riva 2010: 134–​35 noting that orientalizing Etruria lacked Greece’s landscape of Bronze Age remains to imbue with collective memory.

Founders  165 discussed above, to the tomb at Lavinium, as this would be another case of cult to a Greek founder, in this case Halaesus, taking over an old burial site in the fourth century BCE. One wonders whether similar patterns might lie behind cult sites attested by Late Republican and Early Imperial sources to Calchas in Daunia, noted above, or to Diomedes, whose travel to Adriatic Italy was already known to Mimnermus, or to other mythological Greek founders elsewhere in Italy.109

Conclusions This chapter concludes having sought to address two goals. I have explored archaeological evidence for the veneration of important individuals in the context of early Italian urbanization. Certain repetitively observable features add up to a sort of vocabulary of practice that confirms interest in early urban communities in transmitting the memory of select individuals from their founding moments. Exceptional burial or reference to the features of burial were important, and space was a significant ingredient in providing that sense of exceptionality. The city saw the creation of new spaces for civic life, often achieved through the sort of ritual actions discussed in the last chapter. As the division became firmer between the city of the living and that of the dead, burials among the living stood out. That intramural, exceptional burials received cult in early Italian cities is secure from some of the examples we have looked at, perhaps no more spectacularly than at the funerary chapel discovered at Piazza d’Armi at Veii. The long-​term interest in this burial site as the city emerged around it represents an important form of historical culture and abiding social engagement with the past through the process of urbanization. I have also argued, however, that these Italian commemorations are not identical to those we find in Greece, especially as we move north of the colonial Greek world in South Italy. While spatially exceptional burial remains an important component across cultures, the commemorative practices in evidence at places like Veii, Tarquinia, Rome, and elsewhere seem distinct from hero-​worship in the early Greek polis. What we may be seeing, I have argued, is enduring interest in Italy in a sort of ancestral historical culture as generated in family tombs in the earlier Iron Age, as discussed above in Chapter 2.

109

Musti 1984; see also Briquel 1984.

166  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy This contrast makes the chapter’s second purpose all the more important, for it has hoped to reconstruct a model by which Greek ways of commemorating founding figures in urban history were mapped onto existing Italian practices. It is far and away this Greek mode of interpretation that we encounter most frequently in later authors when they discuss the founders of Italian cities. The commonality of Greek founders means that, in order to uphold ideas of autochthonous Italian practice, we need to locate a mechanism for their replacement. With the case of archaeology relating to Aeneas’ cult, precisely this process presents itself: we do not know, for example, who the obscure figure with a transverse crest on his helmet intended to represent on terracottas from the first temple at Castrum Inui, or to whom that temple was dedicated, but we may almost certainly exclude that it was initially a site related to Aeneas’ worship. The same appropriative process seems evident at Lavinium, where an early burial was remade into a cult place, if in fact that cult place can be connected to Aeneas. It is also interesting to find at all the sites of possible Aeneas cult we considered that we are outside of cities, and thus not in situations that present obvious features of early founders’ cult. Instead, we see how links with Greek myth and history were potentially mapped onto an existing Italian landscape of historical culture.

5 Time Continuing the previous chapters’ discussion of cities and their pasts, this chapter traces the development in Archaic Italy not of history itself but of the fabric from which it is cut, time. The human awareness of time is a construct and feature of its world, as ancient historians are increasingly aware.1 I argue that Italian urbanization in the Archaic period brought about important developments in temporal consciousness. My focus is on the construction of time based upon the lunar or solar cycle, culminating in an extended discussion of calendrical time in Italy. Calendars’ natural, cosmic basis offered a manner of constructing time that was freely observable and potentially universal; however, calendars are not purely democratic instruments, but calendrical time requires interpretation and calibration, and implies choice in its application to the organization of human activity.2 In Italy as in many pre-​modern societies, the use of the calendar was mediated by priests and interpreters of the relationship between human and divine. For this reason, this chapter seeks to understand early calendrical time as a form of temple time, closely related to the structures of temple-​based religion. During the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, the accelerating process of Italian urbanization prompted the energetic and widespread construction of monumentalized religious space. This was a remarkable period of temple building across Central Italy as communities invested considerably in cultic architecture constructed on unprecedentedly grand scales and with new, more durable building techniques.3 As in previous chapters, we should be alert in this dynamic context to the way in which new cognitive, and not just material, technologies supported Italian urbanization, extending in this case to calendrical modes of constructing time.

1 Momigliano 1966 is classic; more recent investigations of time in ancient history include Beard 1987; Laurence and Smith 1995–​96; Feeney 2007; Clarke 2008; and Kosmin 2019; interesting analysis interspersed throughout Rüpke 2011 and Riggsby 2019; for Ancient Italy, see Di Fazio 2012. 2 Ricoeur 1984: vol. III, 105–​9; Tanaka 2015; cf. Rüpke 2012: 93, “the moon is a democratic clock.” 3 Potts 2015; Govi 2017a; for Rome, see Cifani 2008; Hopkins 2016.

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0005

168  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The social constructedness of time encourages a historicist approach.4 Moreover, transformations in the construction of time are often closely connected to group formation.5 If calendrical time relates to temple-​based religion in the context of the early city, it may be opposed to the ancestral time of pre-​urban Iron Age society focused upon the family tomb.6 Indeed, these two ways of constructing time were fundamentally different: while the calendar depended on celestially observable movements, ancestral time was measured out according to generations and kinship patterns. As we shall see, the transition between these two ways of constructing time was neither simple nor complete. Iron Age family tombs displayed their own celestial logic, most visibly in the solar or astrological alignment sometimes detected in tomb architecture.7 Meanwhile, the evidence for early Italian calendrical time reveals what is by now an ongoing theme in this book: how elites maintained their individual political prominence within the framework of some early Italian civic calendars. The more nuanced process of changing constructions of time here will be seen to reflect the complex sociopolitical transformations of Archaic Italian society. By focusing on calendrical time in Archaic Italy, I do not intend to suggest that the celebration of festivals was not rooted in the rhythms of the passing year from a much earlier point. As Iain Morley and Colin Renfrew point out, the measurement of cosmologically observable time appears widely in both pre-​literate and literate societies.8 In the Italian case, it is probably impossible to determine when the moon and sun were first used to fix rituals, especially considering the idea frequently encountered in ancient and modern thought that early Roman religion was rooted in the peasant agricultural cycle.9 However, as we shall see, the close connection of calendrical time to other developments in early Italian urbanization argues for seeing its social role changed significantly through the emergence of the Italian city. This chapter’s inquiry into time is important to a wider discussion of historical culture because calendars articulate past and present in a different way than ancestral time.10 To an extent, this difference resembles what Arnaldo 4 Rüpke 2011: 2. 5 Zerubavel 1985: 70. 6 See Chapter 2. 7 Zifferero 2006: 202. 8 Morley and Renfrew 2010: 3. 9 But see Beard 1987. 10 Most famously on the close relationship between calendars and history, Ricoeur 1984: vol. III, 105–​9. For reasons discussed in the introduction, I do not agree that calendars supported history in an exclusive manner; however, his discussion valuably points out how calendars shape time in ways that are useful to normative understandings of academic history.

Time  169 Momigliano emphasized as the difference between history and genealogy, as discussed in this book’s introduction.11 As I argued there, however, I prefer to take ancestors and calendars not as structurally oppositional modes of temporal thinking, but as two configurations of historical culture. Still, the difference in these conceptions of time deserves some thought. Denis Feeney observes how Roman calendars offered a way of constructing time that formed both an arrow and a cycle: the records of annual magistrates, the consular fasti, for example, relayed a linear progression from past to present, but one that was measured by the recurring pattern of each year’s officeholders.12 Italian “temple time,” as I discuss, as it was closely related to calendrical units, similarly functioned not only to determine reoccurring points in the year, but as a vector extending away from a fixed point. Thus, temple time did not necessarily lead to linear, narrative history, but it started to open up the possibility. Moreover, calendrical time through its use of universally observable cosmic units was comparable from observer to observer and could offer a sort of time-​grid, which facilitated synchronization.13 In other words, if ancestral time was connected to a single family or descendants of a single figure in the past, calendrical time by turn supported historical thinking that cut across families. Temple time could thus encompass the histories of cities, ethnic groups, and other social groupings. Neither form of constructing time, however, was or need be exclusive, and one thing this chapter seems to point out is how the development of universal time preserved elements of aristocratic authority. For historians of ancient Rome, the most often cited proof, as it were, of calendrical time’s contribution to historical culture comes in the relationship of priestly calendars to historiography. Many readers will be familiar with the importance of annual pontifical records to the rise of annalist historiography—​the very name “annalist” reveals a basis of solar years (anni) as a means of measuring time’s movement from past to present.14 In its developed form, annalist time was very much calendrical time, covering with a continuously repeating structure the events of every year in progression. As Katherine Clarke’s work on time and history in the Greek polis shows, this model whereby annual priestly chronicles provide a pre-​literary substrate 11 Momigliano 1966; see above pp. 6–​7. 12 Feeney 2007: 169; Hölkeskamp 2020: 121 discusses the power of calendrical festivals to recall memories, and by implication to form connections with the past. For the use of both linear and cyclical time within single societies, see Shaw 2019: 1–​2. 13 Cf. Benveniste 1966: 5, “temps chronique qui est le temps des événements.” 14 Frier 1999; Rich 2017; Rich in FRH vol. I, pp. 141–​50.

170  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy for more complex narrative historiography has been influential on thinking about Greek, especially Athenian, historical culture as well.15 For Italy outside Rome, as discussed in my introduction, we mostly lack the endpoint of these developments in the form of written historiography; we also lack the more time-​bound historiographical genres familiar from the Greek world such as local chronography outside of rare possibilities like Hyperochus’ Cumaica, which anyway belongs to the Greek tradition.16 What we do have from early Italy is ample evidence for religious calendars, and the claim here is that this represents one of the best ways of accessing how time was constructed and understood in coeval Italian society. The chapter’s approach is to move from the Roman world outward to find parallel material in other Italian societies. As we shall see, many trends envisioned for Rome are attested for early Italy, sometimes in fact with more solid evidence. I start with discussion of temple time in the ceremony of the annual nail in Rome and elsewhere in Italy before turning more fully to extant evidence for the Italian calendar. Italian modes of reckoning time based on days, months, and years never look precisely the same inside Rome as they do outside it, and the homogeneity or heterogeneity of time-​based ritual is an important question. It would appear that every early Italian community, including Rome, kept local calendars, which converged to some extent.17 The assertion commonly made since Karl Ottfried Müller’s pioneering 1828 study that the early Roman calendar was a local version of a calendar used more widely across Italy is likely to contain some truth.18 Roman antiquarian writers also held that some aspects of early Roman calendrical time were imported from Etruria. More than any other part of this book, this chapter delves into textual evidence in the form of epigraphic documents in various Italic languages. Few of the relevant texts are new discoveries, but what this discussion exploits instead are recent gains in our ability to use this material for historical analysis. The study of texts in non-​Latin languages of Italy benefits tremendously over the last two decades from the appearance of corpora of various language groups’ documents. The availability of readily usable compilations 15 Clarke 2008: 178–​79. 16 On Hyperochus “chronicle,” see Gallia 2007. 17 For the local orientation of Italian calendars, see Di Fazio 2021. 18 Müller 1828: 2.323–​28; Mommsen 1859: 219–​20; Whatmough 1931; Edlund-​Berry 1992b; Rüpke 1999; Rüpke 2011: 12; cf. Macrob. Sat. 1.15.13–​14 for the idea that Roman elements were originally Etruscan, and note the word Etruria in the midst of an otherwise very fragmentary entry on regifugium in Festus (346L).

Time  171 like Helmut Rix’s Etruskische Texte has helped scholars establish the basic rules of Etruscan grammar and vocabulary. As a result, recent treatments of documents in the language have become more confident in making historical claims. The same can be said for Oscan language groups thanks to the groundbreaking publication of Imagines Italicae by Michael Crawford and collaborators. Nonetheless, much of these languages remains to various extents undecipherable. As John Wilkins repeatedly insists with reference to the Umbrian texts on the Iguvine tables, discussed below, skepticism is warranted both toward individual interpretations and toward an overarching methodology, which approaches these languages based on their supposed shared genetic basis. As far as possible, I try here to base historical claims upon more settled aspects of interpretation. Some speculation is inevitable, and I do my best to mark where I rely upon readings that remain points of debate or scholarly disagreement.

The Annual Nail at Rome One of the best demonstrations of temple-​based religion’s power over the construction of time is the much-​studied practice in Early Republican Rome of marking the year’s passage each September by driving an “annual nail” (clavus annalis) into (presumably) the doorpost of the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. We know details of this tradition thanks to Livy, who appends an account of the appointment of a “dictator for fixing a nail” in response to a pestilence in 363 BCE with a detailed account of the earlier practice (7.3.5–​7): There was an old law written in archaic script and language commanding whosoever was praetor maximus on the ides of September to hammer in the nail; the law was fixed on the right side of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, on which side there is the shrine of Minerva. They say that this nail, because writing was little known in those times, marked the number of the years, and for this reason the law was published by the shrine of Minerva because Minerva invented numbers. Cincius, a reliable authority on such matters, also affirms that at Volsinii nails indicating the number of years may be seen hammered in the temple of Nortia, the Etruscan goddess.

172  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Other sources confirm that annual nail was used as a timekeeping mechanism and that on at least four occasions in the Middle Republic it became necessary to appoint a dictator to carry out the ritual.19 The fact that Livy’s account comes in the context of the appointment of a “dictator to drive in the nail” suggests the practice may have fallen into desuetude, perhaps in relation to the lapse of the office of the praetor maximus, the official initially charged with the task. There is also the question of which Cincius provides Livy with his information, as there are two candidates, an early annalist historian and a Late Republican antiquarian author.20 What interests me is less these questions of Roman political structure or source criticism, and more the bearing of this practice on constructions of time. In his insightful study of historical thought in Republican Rome, Nicholas Purcell zooms in on the hammering of the nail as indication of early chronological consciousness, predating by several centuries the beginnings of Roman historiography.21 Livy’s account plays explicitly with the relationship between writing and history, relating these nails as an alternative, pre-​ literary form of record keeping—​although it is in that case ironic that he cites for his information an accompanying inscription, rather than the nails themselves. Purcell notes the use of an era “after the dedication of the Capitol” in passing in the context of later Republican history of the scribe Cn. Flavius’ actions in the later fourth century BCE.22 If this era was Flavius’ invention, then considering his interest in measuring time in this way, it may not be by chance that one political act he accomplished was a major reform of the priestly calendar.23 The various temporal attachments to the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, dedicated according to Roman beliefs on the first day of the Republic, supported what Purcell calls “Capitoline time” where the Republican past could be articulated by reference to the fixed point of the city’s most important religious monument.24

19 Festus’ vague phrase “sacred temples” (49L: clavus annalis appelabatur, qui figebatur in parietibus sacrarum aedium per annos singulos, ut per eos numerus colligeretur annorum) may suggest the practice occurred at other temples as well; for the dictatorships, see Liv. 7.3.3; 8.18.12; 9.28.6; several of these occur also in the Capitoline fasti; see Pina Polo 2011: 35–​40. 20 Heurgon 1964; Oakley 1997–​2005: vol. II, 81. 21 Purcell 2003; see also Feeney 2007: 141–​42 for the Capitoline era. 22 Plin. NH 33.17; Flavius’ era is not unproblematic for its implications for the early fasti, as see Cornell 1995: 220–​21. 23 On Flavius’ calendrical reforms, see Humm 2000. 24 For the idea that other urban temples at Rome had their own temporal meaning, see Beard 1987: 9.

Time  173 The sort of time the Capitoline fixed was civic time marked out, first of all, by the annual rotation of the sun and then by the days after the first of the month of September. “Capitoline time,” while patently religious in its connection to both temple and ritual, thus presupposes a calendar calibrated to universally observable natural units. The ritual’s date has been taken as significant, as the middle of September was remembered as the time of year when the first consuls entered office and dedicated the Capitoline temple in 509 BCE. The day may have marked a civic new year in the earliest Republic.25 Mid-​September also comes toward the end of malaria season in Rome, as was recognized in antiquity, and this may help explain how a regularly occurring ritual was instigated, as Livy reports, by the occurrence of plague. Roman and Italian religion seems widely to have employed the act of driving in a nail in what is called an apotropaic manner, to ward off danger or disease.26 Noting that sources depict Nortia as a goddess of fate, equivalent to the Roman Fortuna, Hendrik Versnel suggests that what we find here is a new year’s festival involving the hammering of the nail as an expiatory act to secure a favorable fate in the coming year.27 The Roman festival thus held both retrospective and forward-​looking temporal aspects, celebrating the community’s survival in the past year and its emergence from malaria season, while also sealing future hopes for the year to come. This was civic time, undertaken in Republican Rome by the holder of a priestly office rather than a member of any particular ruling family, and it was measured out in calendar years and constituent months. Capitoline time therefore reveals how the temple’s construction and use as a religious site facilitated modes of temporal behavior that are hard to locate in the record of the earlier period, and I might go so far as to argue that its emergence marked a real cognitive shift within the Roman community. There is a complex nexus of practices here involving (i) the use of calendrical time coordinated upon the movement of the sun and moon, (ii) the driving of the nail to mark the passage of time, and (iii) this civic religious monument, all of which seems far removed from the ancestral, generationally based time of the Early Iron Age. This is not to say that one way of constructing time necessarily cancelled the other out. There were certainly temples in Archaic and 25 Mommsen 1859: 86–​88. 26 For ancient recognition of September as malaria season, see John Lydus de mens. 4.130 with Sallares 2002: 53; more generally for the summer as malaria season up to the autumnal equinox, i.e., September 22, see Lucr. De rer. Nat. 6.1090–​1137; for empirical evidence of higher mortality at Rome in August and September, see Shaw 1996. 27 Versnel 1970: 272–​75.

174  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Early Republican Rome that maintained a strongly familial nature, but the Capitoline was different in this regard. Held to have been built largely by the Tarquinian dynasty but dedicated by the conspirators who overthrew their rule, the temple belonged to the Roman Republican community rather than to any particular ruling family.28

Ritual Nails in Italy The idea that Livy, citing Cincius, knew of a parallel practice of an annual nail used at the temple of Nortia in the Etruscan city of Volsinii suggests we see Romans employing a cultural and religious practice with a broader Italian pedigree. Hammers and nails played an important role in both Roman and Italian ritual practice. Roman authors speak of hammers and nails fixing desired or fated outcomes, while depictions in Etruscan art of chthonic gods like Charun or Athrpa (Atropos) holding hammers are thought to relate to the fixed and unavoidable nature of death.29 To this discussion we may add some corresponding archaeological evidence of nails used to mark time or otherwise in the context of ritual actions in temples from Italy outside of Rome. This material demands a certain caution as nails are among the most commonly encountered metal objects in any excavation, and we need to determine when a nail is, so to speak, not just a nail. Form and material, as well as archaeological context, can be helpful guides. We have no secure evidence of the cult site of Nortia at Volsinii referred to by Livy.30 However, we may note an interesting recent discovery from Fanum Voltumnae, the extensive Etruscan federal sanctuary excavated at the foot of Orvieto, probably ancient Volsinii. In the area of the small fourth-​century BCE temple A were found a great number of small bronze nails, which do not appear to have ever been hammered or used in construction. Stopponi suggests their deposition was connected to timekeeping in relation to the cult of Vertumnus/​Voltumna, although the hammering of nails was itself an important part of the ritual, and these may just as well be votives with some unknown meaning.31



28 For the temple in all its aspects, see Cifani 2008.

29 For hammers in Republican Rome and Italy, see Padilla Peralta 2018. 30

The cult of Volsinian Nortia is detected at the Umbrian sanctuary of Villa Fidelia by Coarelli 1997.

31 Stopponi 2012: 24.

Time  175

Figure 5.1  Pyrgi, the gold tablets on display at the Villa Giulia, late sixth century BCE. On either side are the gilded nails found deposited along with them. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons.

The archaeological material most frequently discussed in relation to the Roman ritual of the annual nail are the famous gold tablets of Pyrgi, the three small sheets, one inscribed with a text in Phoenician and the other two in Etruscan, found in the sanctuary in 1964 (Figure 5.1).32 The tablets record dedications to Uni/​Astarte by the Caeretan ruler Thefarie Velianas of a monument or sacred objects in Pyrgi’s sanctuary. They were found along with a fourth inscription on a larger bronze sheet, albeit in a poorer state of conservation, carefully deposited within a small architectural feature in the area between temples A and B, where they had been placed either after the Syracusan sack of the sanctuary of Pyrgi in the early fourth century BCE or, more likely, in the early third century BCE when the Romans established a colony at the site and dismantled the temple. Nothing in the deposit independently secures the date of the inscriptions themselves, although the careful burial of the gold sheets along with architectural tiles from temple B suggests a relationship with that temple, originally built in the late sixth century BCE. After their discovery, there was much discussion on this point, largely on a linguistic and paleographic grounds, with proposals ranging from the late sixth to the fourth century BCE.33 Some new evidence to support a date in 32 Original discovery reported in Colonna et al. 1964; reprised in Colonna 2015b; for recent scholarship, see the annotated bibliography of Bellelli 2015–​16; two volumes celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery provide a range of updated studies: Bellelli and Xella 2015–​16 and Michetti and Baglione 2015. The argument concerning the nails was initially doubted, as see Heurgon 1966: 11 n. 71, but has been reasserted to the point of becoming orthodoxy following the work of Colonna 1989–​90; Colonna 2000: 294–​95; Colonna 2010: 276–​78; Colonna 2015b: 60–​63; see also Giannecchini 1997: 198–​99; Maras 2009: 362–​64. 33 Pallottino 1981: 10–​11.

176  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the last years of the sixth century BCE appears in the publication of a tomb of circa 520 BCE from Caere, which Giovanni Colonna suggests belonged to Thefarie Velianas’ father, or at least another close member of the Velianas family.34 A late sixth-​century BCE date would also be contemporary to the Roman-​Carthaginian treaty struck in the first year of the Republic, a document to which the Pyrgi tablets are frequently compared.35 Their original location must have been widely accessible, as suggested by some markings on one tablet that appear to be later graffiti, and Colonna has reconstructed the tablets’ position nailed to the wooden doorpost of temple B as part of the structure’s ceremonial dedication by Thefarie Velianas.36 The tablets were found carefully rolled up around the nails used to affix them. The two tablets with longer inscriptions contained eighteen nails each, while the one with the shorter Etruscan text had eleven. Notably, these numbers of nails in all cases do not match the number of holes visible in the gold sheets, as the two longer texts—​the Phoenician text and Pyrgi A—​both have ten nail holes, and the shorter text (Pyrgi B) has twelve. In addition to all of this, within the same context excavators found eight additional nails with bronze heads gilded with gold. These gilded nails are larger than the nail holes rolled into the inscribed plaques. The careful deposition of the plaques with their nails, as well as the gilding on the larger nails, suggests these objects served a ceremonial or ritual function beyond simply serving to affix the gold sheets to the temple. In the literature, this position is further supported on the basis of a reading of the texts themselves.37 The Phoenician text closes by expressing a prayer for the longevity of Thefarie Velianas’ dedication in the temple of Astarte: “May the years . . . be as numerous as these stars” (bbty šnt km hkkbm ’l).38 As I discuss further below, the wish for eternity based on a quantity, often innumerable, of stars is a frequent trope in Near Eastern literature. However, the demonstrative “these” following stars (’l) gives us pause: to which stars does the text refer? Since Giovanni Garbini’s proposal at the time of this material’s initial publication, the reference is understood to be to the “starry,” that is, gilded nails displayed in and around the inscription. Thus, the text refers to the

34 Colonna 2006a; Colonna 2007a; Gras 2015. 35 Smith 2015–​16. 36 Colonna 2010: 276–​78; Colonna 2015b: 61, not on the door itself, but on its frame. 37 Giannecchini 1997; Maras 2009: 362–​64. 38 For further discussion of time in the Pyrgi texts, see below pp. 187–​90; for the translation, see Smith 2015–​16.

Time  177 innumerability not, or not only, of heavenly stars, but metaphorically of the annually fixed nails accompanying the inscription.39 Then, there are the Etruscan texts: the last line of the longer Pyrgi A text as well as the shorter Pyrgi B text both contain the Etruscan noun pulum. The noun is not otherwise attested, although Colonna suggests, following a proposal of Maria Durante, that the word relates to the Latin word bullae, meaning knob or nail head, and that it therefore holds the same double meaning of stars/​golden nails seen in the Phoenician text.40 In both instances in the Pyrgi text, pulum appears in close relation to the Etruscan word avil for “year,” supporting a temporal valence. The text of Pyrgi B is particularly interesting in this regard: vacal tmial avilχval amuce pulumχva snuiaφ. There are several words here we simply do not know outside of this text, and this makes interpretation elusive. However, pulumχva is a plural, the three words at the start of the clause ending in -​l are all genitives, amuce is a verb in the past tense, and snuiaφ is possibly a number. On this basis, Daniele Maras translates the line as something like “(the number) of the years of the ritual of the temple is attested by twelve nails.”41 This is as far as we might take our translation, and the reading is by no means certain.42 However, consider the combined weight of the evidence: the careful conservation of the nails with the gold sheets in the ritual deposit, the nails’ special manufacture, and the reference to timekeeping in the Phoenician text and likely, if not definitely, also in the Etruscan texts all combine to support the thesis that we are indeed dealing with nails ritually used to mark temple time at Pyrgi. That the date of Pyrgi temple B’s creation is on most views nearly contemporary with the Roman Capitolium is also noteworthy, as is the juxtaposition of inscribed texts and nails, in keeping with Livy’s citation of an “old law” posted on the Capitoline. All this material taken together is undeniably suggestive. Discussion of the Pyrgi material’s plausible relationship to Roman practice opens up interesting avenues of interpretation with regard to more fragmentary material from other sites. Bronze nails with gilded heads similar to those from Pyrgi are found in a fourth-​century BCE chamber tomb at Vulci, where they likely served to affix an inscription on metal, now lost, 39 Garbini in Colonna et al. 1964: 74; Schmitz 1995: 568 raises the idea that ’l is a pronominal copy of “stars,” but admits there is no grammatical problem with reading it as a demonstrative pronoun; I find no basis to the claim by Belfiore 2011: 6 n. 34 that ’l is accidentally inscribed. 40 Colonna 2010: 276–​78; see Durante 1965. 41 Maras 2009: 364. 42 For a minimalist approach, see Adiego 2015–​16.

178  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 5.2  Drawing of the bronze lamina inscribed in Etruscan from the temple of Tinia at Marzabotto. Drawing © Elisabetta Govi.

commemorating the tomb’s founding.43 Bronze as opposed to iron seems to have been the preferred metal for nails in sanctuaries and votive deposits in Etruria and Latium, a choice that may relate to superstitions against iron in sacred places.44 A bronze nail, now lost, found at the sanctuary of Sant’ Antonio at Caere was decorated with magical signs. Parallels may be cited from elsewhere in the Greco-​Roman world, and the object has been argued to have held a divinitory or apotropaic purpose.45 The large votive deposit relating to the temple of Mater Matuta in Satricum contained over a hundred nails, some with iron shanks and bronze heads.46 Whether any of these nails were used in time-​keeping rituals is impossible to say. A newly identified parallel for the Pyrgi material comes from the discovery in 2011 of a fragment of an inscribed bronze plaque with nail holes dated to circa 470 BCE found just beside the urban temple of Tinia at Marzabotto in the Po Valley (Figure 5.2). Elisabetta Govi has published an

43 Colonna 1981.

44 Weiss 2009: 74–​75 n. 174 with sources. 45 Bevilacqua 2001; Colonna 2001.

46 Colonna 1988a: 310 n. 93, noting also material from Rome (Regia, Sant’ Omobono) and Murlo.

Time  179 extensive study of this five-​line Etruscan text, which in her view forms a sort of building inscription describing the dedication of sacred monuments perhaps including the temple itself. In contrast to the dedicatory inscriptions of Thefarie Velianas from Pyrgi, the Marzabotto text names at least three different individuals, probably magistrates, reflecting the settlement’s different sociopolitical structure, but she makes a connection between the dedicatory occasion of this text and that suggested by Colonna for the inscription and display of the gold Pyrgi tablets.47 The inscriptions from Marzabotto and Pyrgi point to a link between building temples and creating texts, particularly on metal, as is otherwise confirmed by other finds.48 There is furthermore a common civic or community-​ based aspect, as both the Marzabotto and Pyrgi texts appear meant for public display. This seems indicated by nail holes for affixing the tablets of Pyrgi and one nail hole on the preserved right edge of the Marzabotto fragment in the blank margin beyond the text. One of the only other Etruscan inscriptions on bronze with a preserved edge, a fragmentary text of the third century BCE found in the area of the sanctuary of the Ara della Regina at Tarquinia, likewise has a nail hole along its edge and seems “public” in nature since it begins with a dating formula based on a pair of zilaths.49 Documents on bronze not meant for public display tend to show different forms of attachment and lack holes for nails.50 A final piece of this puzzle is the discovery in the same stratigraphic layer as the Marzabotto inscription of two nails made from bronze, not iron, a choice of material that may reflect the sacred context. The nails are too large to have been used to attach the plaque. Govi suggests instead they pertained to the inscription’s wooden support.51 While we cannot reconstruct the original context further, we find another instance of temples, inscribed texts, and nails, like what Livy saw on the Capitoline at Rome and what has been discovered at Pyrgi. This material extends the possible geographical range of the use of nails in relation to temples in Italy, but not necessarily the cultural range, as 47 Govi 2014; Govi 2017a: 169–​71. 48 Maras 2009: 182, 11 of 16 known Etruscan inscriptions on metal sheets are from sanctuaries. 49 ET Ta 8.1; Pandolfini Angeletti 2002: 54; Maras 2020b: 155. 50 The Cortona table or the Iguvine bronzes seem to be good examples of bronze texts without nail holes meant for storage rather than display. Govi 2014: 113 raises the parallel of an inscription found near Innsbruck and published by De Simone and Marchesini 2013, a fragmentary bronze sheet with a Rhetic inscription, whose text reveals Etruscan linguistic influence; the sheet has nail holes at its two preserved corners. 51 Govi 2014: 141 following Nenci 1994.

180  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Marzabotto was an Etruscan settlement in the Po Valley. Evidence becomes more ambiguous as we move outside of the Etruscan cultural ambit. Nails remain common finds in sacred contexts, but not always in ways that present special meaning. Bronze and iron nails from the federal sanctuary of the Hernici near Anagni may be just nails, as there is nothing contextual to suggest otherwise.52 We might accept a different status for the very large quantity of nails found with other ritual materials within the votive deposit of Mater Matuta at Satricum, noted above. Farther south from the border area between Latium and Campania, a small sixth-​or fifth-​century BCE bronze statuette of a female figure found at the sanctuary of the native deity Marica near Minturnae holds a long object in her left hand. The object has been interpreted as a nail and, on this basis, that Marica was venerated here as a goddess of fate similar to Nortia of Volsinii or Minerva at the Capitolium at Rome. Other interpretations are that she holds a key or even a lance or weapon of some sort.53 A last ritual context in which nails probably appear outside of Etruria is in the Iguvine tables (Figure 5.3).54 Discovered somewhere in Gubbio in 1444, the Iguvine tables are a series of seven bronze tablets bearing Umbrian inscriptions dating to the second or first century BCE.55 Much about these bronzes is obscure including the circumstances of their discovery and their original context. One thing scholars agree on is that the seven tables all describe ritual acts undertaken in or on behalf of the community of Iguvium.56 In terms of length and complexity, the tables are a unicum in any Italic language, and because the vast majority of Umbrian words in these texts appear only here, their interpretation brings along with it considerable speculation, but we may note some previous hypotheses. The third table’s text—​the seriation is modern, although the third and fourth tables are grouped together for similar size and writing on only one face, whereas the others are inscribed on front and reverse—​contains an extensive section relating instructions for the construction of a ritual object referred to as a kletra. Just what a kletra was 52 For nails from Anagni, see Gatti 1994–​95: 121. 53 Andreani 2003: 189. 54 However, we need to exclude the objects with Venetic inscriptions identified as nails in early twentieth-​century scholarship from the Baratella sanctuary at Este, as McDonald 2019: 140 n. 44 identifies them as writing styluses. 55 For general historical introduction, see Devoto 1948/​1975: 3–​25; Wilkins 1994; Bradley 2000: 8–​ 9; Sisani 2007. 56 Wilkins 1994, 1998 offers important critique of interpretation; others such as Devoto 1948/​1975; Poultney 1959; and Prosdocimi 1978; 1984; Borgeaud 1982 are more optimistic. For response to Wilkins, see Weiss 2009.

Time  181

Figure 5.3  Umbrian inscription on a bronze tablet, one of the so-​called Iguvine tables. Photo adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

is not clear, but the noun appears in Etruscan ritual texts.57 The text repeatedly in close detail prescribes the number and material of objects called seples used to affix various elements upon the kletra. The numerals are clear, as is the material of the seples, as the adjective ahesnes resembles Latin aheneus, 57 Kletra/​cletra is one of the few words to appear securely in both the Iguvine tables and the Zagreb linen book, discussed below; an important third instance now appears in the long sacred law from Populonia published by Benelli 2015, in which we find a sulicletram; for preliminary thoughts, see Benelli 2012: 240, and new lexical study seems in order.

182  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy “bronze.” As Giacomo Devoto first pointed out, the grammatical use of an ablative plural suggests these seples were instrumental, that is, that they were metal fasteners, likely nails.58 If this reading is correct, the specification of bronze would be interesting considering the aforementioned preference for bronze nails in sanctuaries, possibly reflecting religious superstitions against iron.59 The specified number of seples to be used are either two or three, so that even if we are correctly reading a reference to ritual nails, they hardly seem to be annually fixed. If there is no explicit temporal aspect to the nails, however, it is worth noting Michael Weiss’ overall interpretation of the texts of the third and fourth Iguvine tables in which reference to seples appears. Focusing on a congruence of calendrical dates and the appearance of the deity Vesuna, a fate goddess whom he compares to the Etruscan Nortia, he interprets the whole thing as prescribing aspects of an expiatory new year’s ritual akin to the annual nail at Rome.60 These interpretations must be understood as provisional considering our limited knowledge of the Umbrian language. The larger point is that nails appear in ritual outside of Rome, where they often functioned to mark time. With various degrees of certainty, we are led to think they were also ritually meaningful and even had timekeeping purposes in other Italian contexts, not just Volsinii, as Livy himself confirms, but elsewhere. Widening our lens, we can observe an interesting nexus among temple-​based religion, the creation of epigraphic text, and the use of nails to fix those texts onto temples.61 Another recurring attribute are civic figures, from the praetor maximum of Rome to Thefarie Velianas, the zilath/​ mlk of Caere, to the figures named in the Marzabotto inscription. While these individuals held different positions of authority in their respective communities, what cuts across the local context is the connection among political leadership, temple-​based religion, and writing. These were also all visible texts. Livy or Cincius saw the text on the Capitoline, while the scribbling on the Pyrgi tablets’ lower margins suggests they were visible and accessible, 58 Devoto 1954: 381; Weiss 2009: 132–​33. 59 It is also worth noting klavles at IgT IV.11, possibly similar to Latin clavus “nail,” but often read as a ceremonial wand or lituus; cf. Borgeaud 1982: 181–​82. 60 Weiss 2009: 244 61 Considering this, I wonder about a possible functionalist origin of the annual nail ceremony related to sixth-​century BCE temple architecture to stone block, trabeation, and heavy tile roofs. Obviously, such projects required more nails, and we might point to the fact that some Roman authors specifically referred to the fates or the goddess Necessity using “beam nails” (trabales clavi), as see Hor. Carm. 1.35.18; Cic. Verr. 2.5.53; Petr. Sat. 75, with textual emendation; generally, Padilla Peralta 2018: 278.

Time  183 as I have noted. Indeed, Govi’s point that nail holes tend to appear only on “monumental” bronze inscriptions means that we are talking about something that might reasonably be called early “public” epigraphy in the sense of both its display and its overtly political meaning. This suggests we are witnessing in Italy a relationship detected at other points in history between state formation and timekeeping. As we have seen, the link between public or civic time and Roman political identity was a central element in Purcell’s analysis of Capitoline time, in which the moment of the temple’s dedication also marked the beginning of the Republican state. From that moment, the temple with its annual nails not only helped to conceptualize Roman time moving forward, but did so in a manner overlapping perfectly with the lifespan of the Republican state. Pyrgi is the most likely case for a similar relationship elsewhere, while we might venture to think that politicized timekeeping was developing elsewhere in Archaic Italy, where other monumental temples were built as other cities were forming their own political structures.

Calendar Time: Early Rome In seeking to explore this relationship among constructions of time, political power, and ritual in Italy, I turn now to discuss the calendar, or how we may understand the use of calendrical time from the Italian epigraphic record. The use of an annual nail, hammered on an appointed day in an appointed month, presupposes calendrical time based on the movements of the sun and moon. A small but significant corpus of inscriptions permits us to view the use of calendrical time more directly, and perhaps less speculatively than working from an assumed relationship between nails and timekeeping rituals. The earliest epigraphic witness to the use of calendrical time in Italy is in fact those texts on gold tablets from Pyrgi. This material takes us backward to the last years of the sixth century BCE, and we will examine these and subsequent documents momentarily as a way of fleshing out our knowledge of early Italian calendars. The outlier in taking this approach to the history of calendrical time is Rome, about whose early calendar we know plenty, but not from any contemporary source. Few topics in the history of early Rome have received the amount of study as has the calendar, and I do not intend to

184  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy revisit the topic here in all of its complexity.62 However, some preliminary points will serve usefully to frame our investigation of Italian material. Scholarship on early Rome’s calendar depends on two types of sources. The first are epigraphic festival calendars or fasti, the earliest of which found at Antium dates to just before Caesar’s time, while the second are the works of Imperial writers like Macrobius, Censorinus, and Ovid, who wrote extensively on Roman time. Both sources reveal clues of previous practice, and these various bits of information have been integrated to produce several advances in our understanding of early developments. Ancient authors held that Romulus initially created a ten-​month lunar calendar, but that King Numa reconfigured this into a twelve-​month lunisolar calendar with months no longer strictly based on the lunar cycle with the whole calibrated to the solar year by insertion of an extra intercalary month every several years.63 A primordial ten-​month calendar seems likely based on the fact that ten of the original Roman month names derive from ordinal numbers. However, few scholars would support the reality of a formal and stable calendar in the eighth century BCE, and the all-​important development of the lunisolar calendar is normally placed at some later date.64 This is because it seems easy enough to explain why later Roman writers retroactively assigned calendrical invention to Rome’s legendary founder, while Numa’s intervention can also be understood as later Roman retrojection, probably in relation to M. Fulvius Nobilior, who published the first commentary on the fasti in his temple of Hercules Musarum in 180 BCE, a year after the Romans supposedly rediscovered Numa’s sacred books.65 The existence of a Roman priestly calendar seems secure by 304 BCE, when Cn. Flavius, the scribe who was noted above for his reference to a Capitoline era, published it publicly for the first time.66 Moving backward, three pieces of evidence suggest that the fifth century BCE was a point of significant calendrical innovation. First, we find mention of a Furian Pinarian law of 472 BCE on intercalary months, which Varro cites from an original

62 A select bibliography includes Mommsen 1859; Degrassi 1965; Michels 1967; Rüpke 2011; Humm 2000; Hannah 2005; Feeney 2007; Coarelli 2010; Scholz 2011; Forsythe 2012; Maiuro 2016. 63 For the lunisolar year, see Michels 1967: 12; some ancient discussions of festivals imply calendrical time before the Romulan foundation, as see, e.g., Plut. Vit. Rom. 12.2; Beard 1987. 64 Exceptions are Carandini 2006: 138–​39; Torelli 2012: 12 suggests the embryonic calendar goes back to the Bronze Age. 65 Michels 1967: 123–​24; Rüpke 2011: 38–​39; for the significance of Numa’s books, MacRae 2016: 1–​3. 66 Humm 2000.

Time  185 bronze inscription.67 The second is record of reforms of some (unknown) nature carried out by the decemvirs in 450. Third, the poet Ennius, probably working from information found in the pontifical annals, notes a solar eclipse on the nones of June in about the 350th year after the foundation of the city, normally identified with an eclipse visible at Rome in 400 BCE.68 This is important because, in a purely lunar calendar, an eclipse should occur when the moon blocks the sun at the start of a lunar month, while an eclipse on the nones instead suggests that strictly lunar months were no longer in force.69 Can we refine this gap in time between the eighth century BCE, when a calendar seems doubtful, and the fifth century BCE, when it seems definite? To do so, we turn from our literary sources to the epigraphic documents called fasti, large-​format calendrical inscriptions that list festivals in either large or small letters. Theodor Mommsen argued influentially that the difference in font size reflected chronology, and that the group of forty-​five festivals in large letters formed a fossil of the Numan calendar.70 Following this claim, several have performed a sort of stratigraphic analysis of the extant fasti inscriptions, with the presence or absence of certain festivals helping anchor hypothesized dates. The festival for Jupiter Optimus Maximus appears in small letters, for example, and this may be seen to argue for dating the large letter list prior to 509 BCE, when the Capitoline temple was dedicated. Since there is no direct evidence to test Mommsen’s deduction about font size, however, perhaps we might focus on the broader point that we ought to think about a relationship between cult and calendar, a conclusion also reached in the previous section of this chapter, working from Nicholas Purcell’s analysis Capitoline time. One important implication is a link between religious change and urban change. Historians of early Roman religion recently emphasize how religious developments in early Rome—​and I would include festival calendars within this context—​ presuppose the monumentalization of the city.71 Filippo Coarelli emphasizes that 67 Varr. apud Macr. Sat. 1.13.21. 68 Cic. Rep. 1.25; Frier 1999: 115–​17; Rich 2018: 22–​23. 69 Rüpke 2011: 40 argues that Ennius may merely transmit a reverse calculation based upon the lunisolar calendar in his own day; however, Cicero, who provides our citation of Ennius’ eclipse, states that it was the concurrence between the poet and the pontifical records that allowed other eclipses to be reckoned from that date, and so it seems likely that Ennius’ date matched what was found in the pontifical archives; for the passage and its relationship to the annales maximi, see Rich 2018: 22–​23. 70 Mommsen in CIL I, p. 361; summary of subsequent scholarship based on this theory in Michels 1967: 207–​20, who however is skeptical of his view. 71 Rüpke 2012: 28–​31; Padilla Peralta 2020b: 27.

186  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy archaeology confirms a wave of temple construction in sixth-​century BCE Rome, and that many cults noted with large letters in the fasti were at that date for the first time housed in monumental sanctuaries.72 Within this context, the late Archaic period becomes a very probable point for calendrical changes to have taken place. I have so far referred to Rome’s early calendar as a priestly calendar, and this characteristic should be emphasized. Before 304 BCE, the calendar was not publicly available, and its use was the responsibility of Rome’s priestly class. Marco Maiuro’s recent study allows us to say something more about the identity of these early curators of Roman time.73 He focuses on a group of festivals classified as “mobile” (feriae conceptivae), whose occurrence was not fixed to regular days in the year but was determined ad hoc by priests. Maiuro notes that these mobile festivals by and large relate to agricultural or exurban celebrations that took place outside Rome’s political center. These mobile festivals continued well into the period of the fixed festival calendar, but Maiuro rightly notes that nothing precludes the coexistence of different social calendars within a single society. Their existence points to the persistence of early, non-​urban elements in later urban society. He therefore argues that the sixth century BCE reflects just this political situation when Roman society was balanced between the close-​knit and not strictly urban elements of its past and the emergence of the politically powerful late Archaic city-​state. To sum up discussion on Rome’s early calendar, I draw attention to four aspects of early Roman calendrical time: • First, chronological development: the measuring of time according to the movement of the moon and sun at Rome was established by the fifth century BCE and formed a feature of Early Republican society. Prior to that, while we have every reason to suspect the existence of a priestly calendar, we have less certain evidence for its format or origins. • Second, context: what grants most confidence in the existence of a formal pre-​Republican calendar is historical context in terms of both state formation and developing Roman religion. In light of the 72 Coarelli 2010; I find his arguments persuasive, although I note that, while we do have plenty of discussion in our sources of the religious and institutional innovations of the later kings of Rome, we lack explicit mention of the Tarquins’ interventions in the calendar. A tradition concerning Servius Tullius is noted by Macr. Sat. 1.13.20, but cf. a few sentences previously at Sat. 1.13.18 when Macrobius suggests that the month of Servius’ birth was unknown. 73 Maiuro 2016.

Time  187 considerable investment in the late Archaic period in monumental temple building, it makes sense that cults gave greater substance to temporal and not only spatial urban institutions. It is intriguing to raise the possibility that calendars functioned from an early date primarily in temples, as remained the case into the early second century BCE at the time of Fulvius Nobilior. • Third, a relationship to political structure: the early calendar reveals the influence of the political ruling class. With feriae conceptivae or intercalation, priests continued to shape the Roman community’s sense of time. Thus, at least down to Flavius’ reforms in 304 BCE, calendrical time remained in a real sense elite time, and the calendar, reckoned on universally observable movements of sun and moon, should not be understood to reflect an egalitarian society. • Fourth, textuality: there is an important connection between calendars and writing. This is obviously true with the monumental fasti. It is also true with the Lex Furia Pinaria, allegedly inscribed on bronze, and possibly the pontifical annales as the source of Ennius’ eclipse. Time measured in lunar and solar units thus presents a close relationship to written records, as previous discussion of the annual nail also suggested.74 With these points in mind, I turn now to the development of calendrical time in Italy as it may be observed in our epigraphic evidence. Ultimately, I want to reinforce the view that an intersecting political interest in temples, writing, and calendars, detectable in Rome, also pertained to parts of Italy, with implications for Italian cognitive frameworks of time and, in turn, historical culture. I proceed here in chronological order examining a set of texts in the non-​ Latin languages of Italy. In some cases, especially for Etruscan, this inquiry is supported by some anecdotal evidence in Roman sources. Especially important are eight Etruscan month-​names listed in the medieval compilation of Latin glosses, the Liber Glossarum, which are generally thought to rest ultimately on an Etruscan source.75 Names found here sometimes match what we find in epigraphy.76 Otherwise, we can be fairly certain especially from the citation of ages on gravestones that we know Etruscan words like year (avil) 74 On ritual and writing, see Beard 1991, whose arguments I exploit again below. 75 Mountford 1923: 108–​10; Torelli 1976; Briquel 2006a; TLE 801, 805, 818, 824, 854, 856, 858. 76 Along with aclus and celius discussed below, hermeus may be attested in some other texts such as in the personal name Fasti Hermnei Tiusa Vetusal on a rooftile used to decorate the entrance to a tomb from Chiusi (ET Cl. 1.130), where it interestingly appears with tiusa, possibly related to Etruscan tiur for “moon” or “month,” or in the text of Laris Pulenas’ elogium discussed in the introductory chapter,

188  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy or month (tiu-​or tiur), and this is likewise helpful.77 For Oscan, we have less material to supplement our inscriptions, while for Umbrian calendar dates, we are almost entirely in the dark.

Time in the Pyrgi Tablets If correctly dated to the late sixth century BCE, the Pyrgi tablets represent the earliest epigraphic mention of calendrical time from peninsular Italy. While the texts on the tablets do not themselves form a calendar in contrast to other material discussed below, the mention of month names presupposes a calendar’s existence, while both the Phoenician and the Etruscan inscriptions are thoroughly shaped by complex temporal concerns. The texts function in this sense to extend the chronological consciousness already seen in the associated nails, discussed above. What is more, the Pyrgi texts show a layered chronological awareness in which the calendar is one but not the only way of constructing time. Our understanding of this complex temporal interest must start from the Phoenician text, whose meaning is better established. I cite a recent line-​by-​ line translation: To lady of Astarte: it is the sacred space which has made and offered Thefarie Velianas reigning over Caere, in the month of the “sacrifice to the sun,” as a gift in the sanctuary. And he has constructed a building because Astarte has asked this of him during his reign, in the course of the third year, 3, in the month of Kirur, on the day of the “burial of the divinity.” May the years of the divine statue in her temple be as numerous as these stars.78

Words for month (yrh) and day (ym) alert us to two calendar dates, that of the dedication of the temple, and that of the arrival of Astarte’s divine command inspiring the king Thefarie Velianas to undertake the project. The chronologically backward manner of listing these dates placing the later event

on which possibility see Belfiore 2011: 5. Problematically, the closeness of the name to the theonym relating to the god Hermes makes it difficult to be sure in these cases. 77 Especially CIE 5704 =​Rix ET At 1.22, which gives the deceased’s age at death: avils XX tivrs sas, “20 years and four months.” 78 Smith 2015–​16.

Time  189 before the earlier finds parallels in other Phoenician inscriptions.79 Both the month of Kirur and that of the “sacrifice to the sun” appear in Phoenician inscriptions from Cyprus, possibly revealing the source of the calendar in use here, although neither month can be located in the year.80 The meaning of the date of “the burial of the divinity” in the month of Kirur remains obscure.81 In both cases, however, we may observe a relationship between monthly time and ritual. The month “of the sacrifice to the sun” sounds like a holiday period and perhaps reflects the underlying use of a stable festival calendar. The second layer of time is regnal time or magistrative time created by the specification that the date of divine inspiration occurred in the third year of the reign of the Caeretan ruler (mlk) Thefarie Velianas. The mixture of foreign and local time is worth noting. A dating formula employing the political leadership in a given year is something with which we are all too familiar from the Hellenistic world or from Roman consular dates, but it bears stressing how early we are in the history of this practice in Italy.82 The final temporal layer is that of unending or eternal time. One further aspect of temporality deserves mention in the Phoenician text. We have already had reason to look at the closing of this text, which mentions “these stars” in a way that may suggest reference to timekeeping nails displayed with the inscription. In this interpretation, the text, which has anchored itself by universal (calendrical) and local (regnal) dates, now closes with a prayer that the rite of the annual nail proceed without temporal limit. Comparison with other such prayers in Phoenician texts suggests the reference to eternity was not simply for the dedication or the nails, but it was ideologically linked to the reign of Thefarie himself in hope that his reign continue beyond the power of human temporal reckoning.83 It is interesting to observe other Near Eastern gestures to unending time portrayed as stars, most famously in the Book of Genesis, where the descendants of Abraham are prophesied to be numerous as the stars (15.5).84 What we may be seeing here is Phoenician 79 Peckham 1987: 98. 80 Schmitz 1995: 564, the first named date (“the month of the ‘sacrifice to the sun’ ”) appears verbatim in a fourth-​century BCE Phoenician inscription from Kition in Cyprus, while the immediately following word for gift (mtn) appears as a month name alongside the month Kirur in another inscription from Larnaca, and indeed some have taken it as an appositive month-​name in the Pyrgi text as well. 81 Knoppers 1992; Smith 2015–​16: 205. 82 For magistrative time, see the next chapter discussing later evidence. If the Roman fasti consulares are authentic from their beginning, then they present that sort of time in a contemporary period, but that is by no means settled fact. 83 Schmitz 1995: 574. 84 Knopper 1992: 119.

190  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy temporal idiom transformed into or adapted to the local Italian practice of the ceremony of the annual nail. These three layers of time visible in the Phoenician text may also appear in the two Etruscan texts from Pyrgi, although we are not as well equipped to translate the language and must do so with reference to the Phoenician text.85 The longer Etruscan text Pyrgi A contains the phrase “three years” (ci avil) as well as two dating formulae, just as we find Thefarie Velianas’ third regnal year in the Phoenician text alongside two dates. Recognition of the dating formulae depends on the word ilacve, which closely resembles ilucve in the calendar of the Capua tile, which we discuss next. Its finer meaning is not well known, although in the Capua tile it appears beside the names of months. In the longer Etruscan Pyrgi text where ilacve appears twice, it would seem therefore to suggest two dating formulae, but unfortunately we can recognize no clear month names in any of the adjacent words. The shorter text also contains what appears to be temporal specification in both the word avilχval, the genitive plural of avil, meaning “of the years,” and in the collocation masan tiur unias. Tiur is the word for month, and it is possible that one of the adjacent words is a month name, either masan, which appears in dating formulas elsewhere, or the genitive god’s name unias, which might mean “in the month of Uni.” It may be that, rather than month names we recognize from other Etruscan calendrical terminology, we see translation into Etruscan of the descriptive dates found in the Phoenician text—​the month of the sun sacrifice, or the day of the burial of the divinity—​although this is by no means certain. Finally, we come to the concluding mention in both the Etruscan texts of pulum, which as noted has been taken to refer to the stars or metaphorically to the “yearly nails” (Pyrgi B: avilχval . . . pulumχva), mirroring an idiom identified in the last line of the Phoenician text. The direction of influence between the texts in each language is much debated, and some prefer to see the Phoenician text responding to an Etruscan original.86 Without attempting to settle this question, it is however interesting to find a clear month name in the Phoenician text, but not necessarily in the Etruscan texts, and one wonders whether this says something about the respective stabilization of calendars in both cultures at that date. At the least, it is noteworthy that the earliest secure

85 For the Etruscan dates, see Colonna 2015b: 63–​64. 86 Cf. Campus 2015: 217 for the reverse direction, focusing on the lack of Thefarie’s patronymic. It is always possible that we have a situation of amalgamation rather than unidirectional influence.

Time  191 month name in an Italian document is not Italian but is rather imported from Phoenician culture, which has a much longer history of written calendars.

The Capua Tile Let us turn to more definitive evidence of Italian month names and calendrical terminology. The earliest extant text in Italy that may properly be called calendrical is the long Etruscan inscription incised on a clay rooftile found in the late nineteenth century in Capua (Figure 5.4). More accurately, the inscription appears on a terracotta slab that resembles a rooftile in shape and size, but its raised border along all three extant edges, and not only on the two sides, differentiates it from a typical pan tile, and it seems more likely to have been made specifically for the purpose of bearing its inscription. Mauro Cristofani’s magisterial study of the tile’s text identifies it as a festival calendar of the early fifth century BCE, probably around 470 BCE. Some spelling variation in terms of syncopated and unsyncopated forms of the same word suggests that it was copied from an earlier text, and Cristofani dates the source to shortly after the establishment of Aristodemus as tyrant of Cumae in 504 BCE. The tile’s precise findspot is not known, but Cristofani argues it belonged to a sanctuary, and some associated Archaic architectural terracottas may belong to a related monumental temple. The text contains a locative hamaθi, which has been connected to the sanctuary of Hamae between Cumae and Capua. If true, this might reveal a regional focus with the calendar perhaps describing religious rites meant to be carried out at several locations.87 The tile is an awkward object. Two preserved nail holes suggest it was originally fixed onto a surface, perhaps the wall of the temple to which it belonged. Also awkward is the manner of the writing itself, which is in a cursive hand in sinuous boustrophedon style with the direction of writing changing 180 degrees every other line. Some modern commentators have insisted these qualities made it nearly unusable, as a priest or reader would have needed to turn the tile entirely around every so often.88 Perhaps we should be less surprised to find that ancient readers, too, could make out writing viewed upside down, but certainly the tile does not seem made for easy legibility.

87 Rüpke 1999: 272; cf. Liv. 23.35.3.

88 Turfa 2012: 23; Van der Meer 2015: 151.

192  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 5.4  Terracotta tile with calendrical inscription from Capua. Image © Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin –​Preussicher Kulturbesitz (Photograph by Johannes Laurentius, inventory number 30892).

Nine horizontal lines divide the preserved text into ten sections, each of which gives directions for festivals or offerings for consecutive months of the year. As Cristofani notes, the text’s structure suggests that Etruscan Capua used a ten-​month calendar year. Admittedly, the uppermost part of the text is broken, and it is possible, if the raised border did not continue onto the fourth side, that there was additional text at the head of the document, and some

Time  193 would prefer to leave the question open. However, in support of Cristofani’s view, L. Bouke van der Meer analyzes the deities mentioned in the opening preserved section and suggests they were gods whom Etruscans would have worshipped around the time of the new civic year. Without entering into the complexities of this argument, we can conclude that on balance it is more likely that the tile contained a complete lunar calendar of ten months. That the first month of the year was March is suggested by the fact that the second section, and the first whose dating formula preserves, starts with April. The dating formula repeats throughout preserved parts of the text. The full formula, first found in line 8, which commences the second section, is isveitule ilucve apirase. As noted, ilucve in the dating formula here is very close to the word ilacve found in the longer of the Etruscan Pyrgi tablets. While the Liber Glossarum gives the Etruscan name for April as cabreas, the month name apirase is in fact closer phonetically to the Latin Aprilis.89 Using the dating formula ilucve as our cue, we can identify several other month names in the Capuan tile. May and June are anpilie and acalve, respectively, both suggestively close to ampilus and acalvus in the Liber Glossarum, while acalve is also paralleled in the Zagreb linen book discussed below. From the position of the word relative to the dating formula, July may be parθumi, although this is considerably different from the traneus cited by the Liber Glossarum.90 Beyond that, the dating formulae fall in very fragmentary parts of the text, and the month names are not readily legible. Van der Meer suggests August may be papui, although the word falls before a large gap in the text, and the dating formula must be restored in its entirety.91 This would be considerably different from the Etruscan word ermius cited by the Liber Glossarum for August. Ermius does appear to be used in other epigraphic contexts, although less clearly for month names. As I note below, we also probably find a third, entirely different month name for August, θucte, in the Zagreb book. Cristofani interpreted the whole calendar as lunar with regularly established feast days falling on days counted out from the full moon or ides. More intricate reconstructions depend on deciphering words in the dating formulae or otherwise appearing with month names. The repeated word 89 A similar Etruscan month-​name may also appear in the inscription of Laris Pulenas, discussed above at pp. 4–​6; see Belfiore 2011: 8. 90 The reading of the text at this point is also not entirely clear, although the word’s location suggests a month name; see Olzscha 1954a: 87–​88. 91 Van der Meer 2015: 161; cf. Olzscha 1954a: 88.

194  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy ilucve, for example, is not securely established, but consensus supports its interpretation broadly as a class of days, probably the ides, or generally a feast day.92 Some have confidently used the text to reconstruct an intricate progression of feast days internal to each month based on the waxing and waning of the moon, a sort of Etruscan prototype for what we find in later evidence from Rome.93 This is plausible in the main, even if the more detailed reconstruction is necessarily speculative—​we possess next to no parallel for any of these words or phrases in other calendrical epigraphic texts. Still, that several words relating either to the dating formula or to month names in each section of the tile end with the identical suffix -​tule does suggest we see different classes of days, even if we cannot be entirely sure when they fell or how they were celebrated. Remarkably, the last line of the text ends with the self-​referential command that it be written down and even the name of the party responsible for having done so. The party’s name is mostly lost in a lacuna, but has been restored from another personal name, Canulis, known from Latium and Campania, and mentioned in a previous line.94 In a recent study, van der Meer points out that the text contains a significant number of other personal names throughout. These figures must have been prominent in the cult activity named on the tile, and he argues that select members were prominent figures in Capua’s community.95 That is, we find in this text an intersection among ritual, writing, calendrical time, and local political power.96 This personal and elite presence detectable in the text is not something that appears in our later Roman fasti, and I return below to this theme, which merits emphasis.

The Magliano Lead Tablet In 1882, an inscribed lead was found at Magliano in the middle Albegna Valley (Figure 5.5). The original context may have been a sanctuary, and there are reports of some other ritual or votive material, although there are also tombs in the area.97 This is an enigmatic object, a sheet of lead flattened

92 For earlier opinion, see Cristofani 1995: 62–​63; Adiego 2015–​16: 143. 93 Rüpke 1999; Rüpke 2011: 30–​31; cf. Van der Meer 2015: 8.

94 Cristofani 1995: 85–​88; followed by Van der Meer 2015: 160. 95 Van der Meer 2015; see already Rüpke 1999: 272.

96 Similarly, Rüpke 1999: 273 on the relationship of this text to state formation processes. 97 Van der Meer 2012: 323–​25; Massarelli 2014: 19.

Time  195

Figure 5.5  Etruscan inscription on a bronze disc-​like object from Magliano, Tuscany. Image adapted from Wikimedia commons.

into a roughly circular, almost heart-​shaped form, about 8 cm in diameter. Both sides contain a spiral inscription running centripetally to the center of the sheet. As with the Capua tile, the layout of the writing on this object must have impeded legibility, although the function and original context of the lead are difficult to establish. We rely on orthography and letterforms to date the lead broadly to the fifth century BCE.98 The text is at points very difficult to translate, and interpretations vary widely. In general, the lead relates ritual practices at sacred locations, but details are highly obscure. Take for example the phrase cepen tuthi. Cepen is a frequently occurring word in Etruscan texts and thought by some to refer to a priest or magistrate.99 Following this, van der Meer argues that the cepen tuthi was the priest of the village or district, and he takes tuthi as similar to the Umbrian and Oscan words totar or touto referring to a village or city district, and a similar priesthood may appear in the linen book’s reference to cepen tutin, discussed below.100 By contrast, Ignasi-​Xavier Adiego has argued that cepen is not a noun, but an adjective meaning “all,” and on this basis

98 Colonna 1988b: 25, 400 BCE; Van der Meer 2012: 323, after the Capua tile, that is, ca. BCE; Massarelli 2014: 35. 99 Maggiani 1996: 117; contra Adiego 2007; Massarelli 2014: 87–​88. 100 Van der Meer 2012: 336–​37.

196  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Riccardo Massarelli argues that tuthi in the lead is a verb form, while he does not venture a translation.101 That said, scholarly consensus holds that a calendrical temporal framework of some sort serves to define the rituals described by the lead. While not a calendar per se, the texts on both sides mention the Etruscan word for year (avil), and they also both contain a form of the Etruscan word tiu for moon or month. Context suggests that the implied lunar and solar cycles serve to measure the ritual, although it is impossible to venture beyond that point.102 Interestingly, while the text names several recognizable Etruscan deities (Cautha, Maris, Suri, Tin) and possibly specific priesthoods,103 it also may relate ritual practices specific to a family, the Murina, and perhaps to their tomb monument.104 If these interpretations are correct, the lead transmits an interestingly layered understanding of elite identity, with priests moderating a calendrically determined relationship between community and divine, while also in some capacity attending to family-​and ancestral-​based rituals.

The Calendar of Oscan Capua Our earliest significant source of information for the Italian calendar outside an Etruscan cultural context comes from a group of twenty-​six inscribed stelai found in nineteenth-​and early twentieth-​ century excavations in 105 Capua. The stelai are subdivided by material into seventeen examples in terracotta and nine carved out of the local volcanic tuff (Figure 5.6). The terracotta examples are generally held to be earlier than the tuff examples, and the ensemble ranges from the mid-​fourth to early third centuries BCE. All the stelai are inscribed in the Oscan language, and they are normally referred to in modern scholarship after the word iuvilas, which appears in the several texts.106 Together, the stelai decorated the sanctuary at the Capuan site of Fondo Patturelli, which has produced other interesting finds including a series of tuff sculptures of matrons holding newborn children. Architectural

101 Massarelli 2014: 77–​78. 102 Massarelli 2014: 79; for tiur, see Adiego 2015–​16: 147 on the Pyrgi tablets, with reference to other occurrences. 103 Along with cepen tuthi discussed above, see Colonna 2007b: 113 on the word marni. 104 Van der Meer 2012: 334; Massarelli 2014: 66 is more cautious. 105 Heurgon 1942; Franchi de Bellis 1981; Imag.Ital. Campania/​CAPVA 3–​29. 106 For the meaning of the word, which does not seem to refer to the stelai themselves but rather to an offering or sacred area, see discussion at Imagines Italicae I.27–​29.

Time  197

Figure 5.6 Terracotta iuvilas stele with Oscan inscription from the sanctuary at the site of Fondo Patturelli, Capua. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

terracottas from the site confirm the existence of a monumental sanctuary there from the sixth century BCE.107 The texts vary in length with the later tuff examples by and large tending toward more elaborate presentation. In general, they record or commemorate actions in the sanctuary, laying out the spatial and temporal characteristics of ritual practice. Where preserved, the earlier terracotta stelai have a variety

107

For the sanctuary at Fondo Patturelli, see Crawford 2009.

198  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy of sculptural motifs on their upper part above their texts, whereas the later tuff examples are simply stone slabs given over to lengthier texts, normally carved into a sort of inset panel on one side and without any accompanying sculptural features—​over time, it would appear that the texts themselves became more visually important to the expression of meaning these stelai intended to convey. The editors of Imagines Italicae reasonably suggest that the creation of a material written record must increasingly have become a central part of the ritual itself.108 Calendrical specification is a constant element in these texts. Jacques Heurgon deduced that the Oscan word fiísiaís in several texts in an initial position followed by calendrical terms corresponds with the Latin word feriae, or feast days announced by the chief priest to the community.109 Taking this as our starting point, we can list the calendrical festival days with the respective catalog number in the publication of Annalisa Franchi de Bellis:110 1. eiduis: 7, eidu[ma[; 20, eídúís mamerttiais; 10, fisiais eduis luisarifs 2. pumperias: 2, pumperias pustmas; 13, pumperi mamert(tiais); 18–​19, pump(erias) fal(enias); 21, pumperiais sullemnais; 23, fiisiais pumperiais prai mamerttiais 3. vehiianas: 17a–​b, pustrei iuklei vehiianasum; 14, vehiia 4. vesulias: 3, vesulias; 4, fiis[iais vesu[lliais; 8, ve[sulias; 12a, vesuliais deivinais; 24, vesulliais fertalis What can we deduce from this? First of all, we securely find three Oscan month names: Mamerttiais (March), Faleniae, and Luisares. Opinion parts ways on possible fourth and fifth month names, Solemnes and Fertalis.111 Only Mamerttiais, clearly March from its relationship to the name of the god Mamers or Mars, can be located with any certainty in the year.112 These names are otherwise unattested and may be local to the Capuan calendar.113 108 Imag.Ital. I.27–​29; cf. Beard 1991. 109 Heurgon 1942: 61–​63. 110 Franchi de Bellis 1981: 48–​61; cf. Zavaroni 2006: 48. 111 The attempt by Zavaroni 2006 to read sullemnais as akin to sollemnes and thus marking the grade of the pumperias, which he places in March, seems vitiated by the fact that we otherwise find the pumperias Mamerttiais; for Fertalis, see Franchi de Bellis 1981: 60; the editors of Imag.Ital. I.435 take this as an adjective modifying vesulliaís. 112 For a speculative attempt to place the other months, see Zavaroni 2006, who claims on this basis to recognize parallels with certain Roman calendrical events. 113 Franchi de Bellis 1981: 49–​50 notes Ov. Fast. 4.87 does not include Samnites among peoples who dedicated March to the god Mars, making mamerttiais a minor surprise. If the other months also derive from theonyms, we do not know them.

Time  199 Additionally, we find in the phrase prai mamerttiais what is probably reference to an intercalary month “before March.” Assuming this reveals the practice of inserting an intercalary month after the last month of the year, then the Capuan year began in March, as it had in the earlier Etruscan period. For our discussion of calendrical time, the most important festival to note is the eiduis or ides, marked by the full moon. Whether this emphasis on the waxing moon meant that the Oscan calendar was fully lunar, or that it simply had begun as a lunar calendar, we cannot say for certain. Other feast days are more obscure. The festival called the vesullias has been identified as a family-​ based cult connected with local members of the gens Vesullia. In this case, it is notable to find the festival sometimes named alone, other times modified as vesuliais deivinais (Vesuliae divinae), and once modified with month name in the genitive as vesulliais fertalis. We may here be seeing a case of the integration of Capuan private cult with the priestly lunar calendar.114 Another festival called the púmperias is referred to often in a similar way to the eiduis, followed by a month’s names in the genitive, that is, “the Pomperiae of such and such month.” As long noted, a similar word pumperias appears in the text of the second of the Iguvine tables, but it is less clear what might be made of this similarity.115 Heurgon suggested the Capuan pumperias were equivalent to Roman feriae conceptivae, movable holidays announced ad hoc by Capua’s priests, but the parallel with the ides, which were fixed by the regular cycle of the moon, argues against this. Furthermore, several attestations of this festival suggest greater and perhaps more predictable regularity.116 My suspicion is that the pumperias were a class of days within each month like the eiduis, perhaps counted out from some part of the lunar cycle equivalent to the Roman kalends or nones. The obvious conjecture is that the pumperias fell on the fifth day of the month, considering the closeness of the word to the Oscan numeral five.117 The overall point to take away from this discussion is that the complexity of calendrical terminology in these texts, when taken as a corpus, strongly points to coordination with a broader Capuan calendar organized by month and indicating festival days. Again, while these are not calendars per se, they clearly show a highly developed sense of calendrical time operating in Oscan



114

Heurgon 1942: 79; followed by Franchi de Bellis 1981: 61. Whatmough 1931: 169. 116 Heurgon 1942: 74; cf. Franchi de Bellis 1981: 58. 117 Cf. Laird 1906: 329. 115

200  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Caupa. The appearance of the intercalary month alone is enough to alert us to the maintenance of this calendar by a priestly class. This Capuan material starts to appear a little over a century after the Etruscan tile from the same city. By fortuitous discovery, this epigraphic corpus allows us to know more about the development of this Campanian city’s calendar than anywhere else in early Italy outside of Rome, and this leads to an important point about developing calendrical practice. Comparing the Capuan tile to the iuvilas inscriptions, we note how the names of months, days, and festivals have entirely changed; however, we have already noted that the year continued to commence in March, while the editors of Imagines Italicae point to the similar grammatical structure of the offering calendar on the Capuan tile and those named in the iuvilas texts. The sanctuary at Fondo Patturelli to which the iuvilas stelai pertain predated the transition from Etruscan to Oscan Capua and has yielded an Etruscan dedication on a fragment of bucchero pottery. It is also notable that some of these stelai must belong to the period after Capua received partial Roman citizenship.118 We may therefore be witnessing a situation where local or culturally specific modes of constructing time such as month or festival names were mapped onto a more stable calendrical framework operating continuously across Capua’s many cultural shifts.

The Linen Book (liber linteus) The longest extant Etruscan inscription is found on a series of rectangular linen sheets reused to wrap an Egyptian mummy. In 1848, the mummy and wrappings were purchased by a Croatian national and subsequently donated to the National Museum in Zagreb, where the linen book is now on display.119 Presuming that it was originally created in Etruria, how the linen book made its way to Egypt remains a mystery. Without provenance, only the document’s paleography and internal content can help us to understand the book’s original context and date. Its alphabet resembles that used in the region of Perugia, and the most authoritative recent studies suggest a date in the decades on either side of 200 BCE, making the linen book roughly contemporary with the Iguvine tables.120 Whether the use of a Perusine 118 Imag.Ital. I.29. 119 Belfiore 2010: 15–​25. 120 For a higher dating of ca. 250, see van der Meer 2007: 4, pointing to some radiocarbon work; for a slightly lower dating down to ca. 150, see Belfiore 2010: 49, dismissing the radiocarbon results as

Time  201 alphabet means the book derives from Perugia or from elsewhere, however, is debated.121 The nature of the text makes it likely that it is to some extent tralaticious, in other words that its contents reflect earlier practices, but just how far back in time its information goes is not clear.122 The whole represents our best-​preserved example of the ritual linen books, libri lintei, sometimes referred to by ancient sources.123 If further confirmation of the link between writing and ritual in Italy were needed, the linen book begins with the command that it be committed to writing, employing the same verb ziχri that appears in the Capua tile, although here we lack the accompanying name of the document’s author.124 Otherwise, the text’s exceptional length means that we encounter several word strings and words that do not otherwise appear in extant Etruscan, and there is wide range of opinion on points with significant implications for historical interpretation. Take the repeated word Ena, for example. According to one view, this is the toponym of an otherwise unknown Etruscan settlement for whose community’s use the book was specifically made. Other opinion sees this as a general word for a city, making the book’s rituals conceived for use in multiple cities.125 One thing that is certain is that the book’s governing organization is temporal, as the text lays out sacrifices and festivals according to calendrical dates.126 For use as mummy wrapping, each of the book’s pages was cut horizontally into eight strips with six strips crossing the text. We possess at most five strips of text from what were originally twelve different pages or columns. Columns 1–​3 are highly fragmentary, while 4–​12 are in better shape. Preserved in many of the columns is what appears to be a contaminated; further on the location of writing and its implications for dating, see Maggiani 2007; Benelli 2012: 237–​38. One still encounters arguments based upon a very late dating to the text, as e.g. Edlund Berry 1992a: 331; Rüpke 2011: 12; however, this is based on paleographic similarities with the inscription on the Arringatore statue, whose date has since been raised significantly, as see citations in van der Meer 2007: 4 n. 12. 121 Note van der Meer 2007: 157 on ursmnal, which may relate to a family known at Chiusi and Tarquinia. 122 Van der Meer 2007: 23–​25. 123 Piccaluga 1994; cf. Liv. 10.38.5, where the Samnite priest Ovius Paccius consults a “linen book” (liber linteus) for instructions on carrying out an old ritual (vetusta religio). This is probably the context we should imagine here, if perhaps under less sensational circumstances. 124 The Etruscan verb’s equivalence with Latin scribere is secured by a bilingual inscription ET Cl 1.320. 125 Van der Meer 2007: 54; Belfiore 2010: 71–​73. 126 It does not matter significantly to our argument whether the book is classified as a feriale, as Rüpke 2011: 12, or not, as Van der Meer 2007: 29 n. 82.

202  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy general dating reference: eθrse.tinsi.tiurim.avils.χis. We recognize securely the Etruscan words for day (tinsi), month (tiur), and year (avils). None of the words in this clause is a number or a month name, however, so how this dating formula actually functioned is unclear, but the arrangement was in some way based upon days in a calendar year.127 Below the dating formulae, the temporal framework is further specified by reference to a number of precise calendrical dates containing an ordinal number and month name, which in several cases preserves: In Column 6, offerings to the god Tin fall on the “18th of June” (eslem. zaθrumis.acale). The month name acale resembles aclus known from the Liber Glossarum as well as acalve in the Capuan tile. In Column 8, we find the ordinal thirteen (cis. saris.) followed by the noun θucte. Karl Olzscha’s suggestion that θucte is August is widely accepted. The Liber Glossarum gives the name Hermius for Etruscan August, so that, if correctly interpreted, θucte represents a local variant (TLE 836).128 Two lines down in Column 8, the next date is the 24th of September (celi.huθis.zaθrumis). The month name celi matches Celius in the Liber Glossarum (TLE 824). In Column 9, the ordinal number 27 appears followed by an obscure noun in what looks like a dating formula: ciem.cealχus.lauχumneti. Van der Meer considers but ultimately seems to reject a possible relationship with the month name of October, which the Liber Glossarum names as Xosfer (TLE 858).129 Considering the mismatch, I prefer Cristofani’s relation of lauχumneti to Latin lucomo, which Roman sources thought was the Etruscan title for rex. The text may thus refer here as some have thought to a royal palace or even to a grove (lucus in Latin), while a month name is doubtful.130 In Column 10, the number 27 appears again (ciem. cealχuz.), followed by the word capeni, which only appears here in extant Etruscan, and could be another month name. However, it is equally possible a fuller dating formula with the month name appeared in the lost sections between what exists from Columns 9–​10. Column 12 contains the ordinal number 29th followed by the word masn (θunem.cialχus.masn.). This suggests we find masn in a temporal context, 127 Belfiore 2010: 72–​73. 128 Olzscha 1959: 343; Rix 1986; Edlund-​Berry 1992b: 331; Van der Meer 2007: 121; Belfiore 2010: 154; θuχ-​appears in the Cortona table, where it seems to mean “house” or “door.” 129 Van der Meer 2007: 29, 131. 130 Cristofani 1991: 553–​57; cf. Belfiore 2010: 161–​62.

Time  203 while the word is probably a syncopated form of masan found in Pyrgi tablet B, where it appears beside the word tiur for month. It may therefore be a month name, likely December in this case, although this is not certain.131 A great deal of this discussion is conjectural, but analysis is anchored by proceeding from two firmly attested month names (acale and celi) and working on the assumption that other month names appear in the same position with respect to numerals in the rest of the text. Even if we restrict ourselves only to the month names acale and celi, the order of the text is clearly chronological, and it is also interesting to observe how dates are marked here by absolute numbers rather than in relation to a month’s lunar-​based festival days. Practice seems to have been to start a month’s ritual calendar with a full dating formula naming the month itself and then to mark consequent festivals in the same month only with the numbered day. Overall, the absence of any possible reference to the equivalent of the Roman ides, nones, or kalends, those markers of time according to the wax and wane of the moon, represents a change from what we have otherwise observed, and this might suggest that the linen book’s calendar was more detached from the moon-​based calculations of a lunar year.132 Another question is the length of the linen book’s calendar year. Van der Meer extrapolates from the position of June to argue that the book opened in March and ended in December, forming a ten-​month calendar identical to that of the Capuan tile.133 That the book had twelve pages does not imply a twelve-​month year, as pages do not correspond to months in any way. However, there is a potential issue of imbalance: if Columns 1–​5 contain only the three months of March to May, as June (acale) is securely named in column 6, then Columns 6–​12 contained by contrast the seven months of rituals from June all the way through December. To reconcile this, we might speculate that the book began instead in January, forming a twelve-​month year, dividing into two around column 6. However, this thesis contains its own problems, as the January start date was a noted novelty of the Julian calendar implemented at the end of the Roman Republic and seems unlikely to have appeared in Etruria in the third or second century BCE.134 One feature arguing in favor of the possibility of a calendar of ten months starting 131 Edlund Berry 1992a: 331; Belfiore 2010: 189; Adiego 2015–​16: 147; masn seems more likely than canal, which appears twice in Column 11, but cf. van der Meer 2007: 29. 132 Belfiore 2010: 193. 133 Van der Meer 2007: 29–​31. 134 Feeney 2007: 204–​5.

204  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy in March is the nature of the text in Column 1, which seems to form a sort of colophon or introductory statement.135 At least the first four extant lines down to the invocation that the book be “written down” in line 4 are concerned with general matters, and not yet rituals and dates. In this case, it seems plausible that the ritual calendar of March to May started in Column 2 and ran through 5. If this is correct, we find an interesting mixture here between the overall structure of a lunar ten-​month calendar with the internal numeration of days independent of the cycle of the moon. The linen book’s text does not yield secure mentions of personal names. Possibilities exist and have been debated, but we certainly do not find the density of individuals mentioned in the calendar of the Capua tile. In terms of the personnel involved in this ritual calendar, if cepen does mean priest, and I have already noted debate about this word, then we do find multiple priestly officers: the priest of the tomb (cepen θaurχ), of the citadel or hilltop (cilθl cepen /​ cepen cilθcva), and other more obscure examples.136 The cepen tutin seems to be the same as the cepen tuθi from the Magliano lead. Depending on how we read the word Ena mentioned above, the seemingly generic level of agency at which the linen book operates might reflect its use in multiple communities. In its agency and numeracy, then, the linen book structures time more generically than other calendars we have thus far looked at. It is the latest example in date we will look at from Etruria, and one wonders whether we are seeing a trajectory of development toward universality in Etruscan calendrical time, one that might be seen to parallel developments at Rome, where we can observe the near contemporaneity to the linen book of the creation of M. Fulvius Nobilior’s fasti.

Calendrical Time in the Iguvine Tables? I have already introduced the seven bronze tablets in the Umbrian language from Gubbio, as well as the difficulty inherent in their interpretation as unique linguistic artifacts. A number of phrases, especially in tablets 2 and 3, are normally understood as calendar dates or otherwise relating the temporal basis of the rituals the texts prescribe.137 Key to these readings is the 135 Van der Meer 2007: 44–​45. 136 For debate over this word, see above p. 194. 137 For temporal expression in the Iguvine tables, the fundamental studies are Olzscha 1954b; Bourgeaud 1982.

Time  205 phrase sume ustite, which appears twice followed by words in the genitive. Optimistic readings of this phrase venture a translation of these words as “at the highest moment” or “at the highest standing (of the sun),” in other words as a temporal locative meaning something like “at high noon.”138 In that case, the genitives following sume ustite should relate dates on which a ritual was to take place at high noon.139 This seems plausible for IgT II.a.16,140 where the genitive following sume ustite is antermenzaru cersiaru. Anter menzaru is interpreted as cognate with the Latin inter-​mensem as the kalends or festival day celebrating the passage of time “in between the month.” This would suggest, furthermore, that Cersia is an Umbrian month name.141 The same logic is applied to sume ustite sestentasiaru urnasiaru at IgT III.3, with sestantasiaru compared to Latin sextans or sextantarius, the “sixth part” of the month or the nones and by implication urnasia forming another Umbrian month name.142 Urnasia occurs again in IgT V.a.2, 14 in the phrase plenasier urnasier, where the first word is compared to Latin plenus (“full”), possibly making this a full-​moon date equivalent to the mid-​month Roman ides.143 Through a complex line of argumentation, Weiss argues that Urnasia was an early spring month and that we find here Umbrian new year’s rites similar to the fixing of the annual nail at Rome, as I have already noted.144 Another possible date or reference to monthly time appears on the second table in the phrase menzne kurclasiu. The first word reveals a similar root as menzaru and thus appears comparable with various other words for month, including Latin mensis, Greek μήν, and Oscan mesene.145 Kurclasiu is obscure.146 A final but considerably obscure temporal marker may appear in IgT II.b.1–​2 in the phrase tekvias famerias pumperias XII. As already noted, pumperias finds a possible parallel in a calendrical term in the Capuan iuvilas texts. However, if the word pumperias here means anything like its Oscan

138 Whatmough 1931: 164, comparing to Latin suprema tempestas at Varr. Ling. 6.5; Devoto 1948/​1975: 65; Poultney 1959: 177; Bourgeaud 1982: 29; Ancillotti and Cerri 1996: 434–​35; Weiss 2009: 33–​34. 139 As recognized by Whatmough 1931: 164; Olzscha 1954b. 140 Here and below, I cite according to the typical scholarly rubric: this is table 2, obverse side a, line 14. 141 Although cf. Whatmough 1931: 164, who reads the word as feriale. 142 Weiss 2009: 52–​59 for sestentasiaru. 143 Borgeaud 1982: 34–​35. 144 Weiss 2009: 220, 242. 145 Whatmough 1931: 164. 146 For speculation that this is the crescent moon, see Borgeaud 1982: 26; Weiss 2009: 47–​52.

206  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy equivalent and described a fixed class of feast days within an Umbrian month, it is not clear how it then functions with the (Roman) numeral twelve. Generally, these more confident readings identify in the Iguvine a well-​ developed rhythm of monthly time-​framing ritual practice, with points equivalent to the Roman kalends, nones, and ides. We cannot say at all how many months the Iguvine year might have included or whether this was a lunar or lunisolar calendar.147 The tablets present considerable obscurity, and it remains an obstacle that none of the other scrappy Umbrian texts offers support for these claims.148 At a very basic level, perhaps the strongest hint that we are in fact dealing with calendrical time is the Umbrian lexeme *menz-​and its plausible relationship to a cluster of words in many other languages related to *mens-​for moon and month, suggesting the tables made use of the widely diffuse convention of lunar time. A lurking issue is the late date of these tablets relative to the process of Roman acculturation in Umbria.149 Thus, we need to be cautious not only in terms of close interpretation but also in terms of taking this material as evidence for non-​Roman practice.

Time in the Agnone Table The bronze tablet, now in the British Museum, was found in 1848 in Samnite territory near a fortified hill-​top settlement of Agnone south of modern Capracotta (Figure 5.7). Its context may have been a sort of extramural sanctuary, as suggested by the text’s own reference to altars and an enclosure of Ceres, although the original architectural context is not entirely clear.150 Both sides of the tablet contain a long Oscan inscription datable to circa 200–​ 150 BCE on paleographic grounds. The text mostly comprises a long list of deities to whom presumably offerings were made in the enclosure or at the altars. The list of deities is long. Side A alone mentions eighteen offerings, and I hesitate to think all were made on one occasion. In that case, it is perhaps

147 Others have taken these as feriae stativae; see e.g. Ancillotti and Cerri 1996: 382. Rüpke 2011: 43 claims we see here empirical lunar months, but nothing in the text specifies whether these month dates are in fact based on empirical observation rather than on a transmitted lunisolar system. 148 For circumspect discussion of what else exists, see Bradley 2000: 281–​93. 149 On which, see Malone and Stoddart 1994; cf. Rüpke 2011: 120, speaking of both the Zagreb linen book and the Iguvine tables; his incorrect dating of the book makes this less of a problem in that case, but the issue remains with the Iguvine material. 150 See discussion in Imag.Ital. II.1200–​3.

Time  207

Figure 5.7  Bronze tablet from Agnone, Molise, with Oscan inscription on both sides. Image © Trustees of the British Museum.

surprising not to find any accompanying temporal information as to the day or time each deity was to receive veneration. Nonetheless, the text does seem to offer hints at a calendrical structure. The most adventurous interpretation of such would be the view of Aldo Prosdocimi, for whom the list of deities, long considered to comprise a sort of local Oscan pantheon, reveals an order reflecting the agricultural cycle. He finds this legible in the dominant position of the agricultural goddess Ceres, while the list of deities begins with

208  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Vezkeí, whom he identifies as the personification of the year similar to the Roman Ianuarius.151 More securely, an explicit temporal prescription seems to appear on both sides’ text following the list of deities in the reoccurring phrase alttreí pútereípíd akeneí. This seems to be the equivalent of the Latin altero quoque anno.152 What exactly the phrase translatable as something like “in every other year” would mean with regard to the rituals on the Agnone table is not clear. Were all of these sacrifices offered on some appointed day in alternating years? However, what we do find is a hint of interest in the annually based dimensions of this ritual act prescribed alongside the text’s spatial and cultic prescriptions. It may be that the elliptical information with regard to time suggests this text was used alongside another that provided fuller temporal information.

The Stele from Aveia A limestone stele from the ancient site of Aveia outside L’Aquila bearing an Italic inscription now in the Museo Nazionale dell’Abruzzo was discovered at some point in the eighteenth century, as it is first noted in a letter of 1755.153 Little more is known about provenance or original context. The stele’s shape with a smooth rectangular upper section and roughly worked base suggests it was set upright in the ground. Letter forms suggest a relatively late date for an Italic inscription to the period of circa 150–​100 BCE. The six-​line inscription reads as follows: mesene flusare poimunien atrno aunom hiretum In the month Flusare in (the precinct) of Pomona to Aternus, (one sacrifices) a lam and a ram.

The text thus prescribes the place and nature of a sacrifice, starting with the particular time of year it was to take place. If the translation of the editors of Imagines Italicae is correct, then we should see the stone erected within a 151 Prosdocimi 1996: esp. 535–​44; for the Agnone pantheon, see Devoto 1967; for the editors of Imag.Ital. II.1205, this sometimes pushes “etymology to its absolute limits.” 152 Buck 1904: 146; Prosdocimi 1996: 436; Imag.Ital. II.1205. The crucial word is akeneí, whose interpretation as “year” depends on similar words in the Bantia table; for the history of interpretation on this point, see Del Tutto Palma 1996: 325–​26. 153 Adams 2007: 72–​73; Segenni 2007; Imag.Ital. Vestini/​AVEIA 1.

Time  209 sanctuary of Pomona with the intention of defining ritual practices therein. The meaning of the initial date is clear, while mesene resembles the Umbrian word for a lunar month (menz-​) in the Iguvine tables, as discussed above. The spelling, with the u for o, the absence of rhotacism, and the suffix -​are corresponding to Latin -​al, shows several characteristically Italic language traits. In Latin, this would be Floralia, the name of the festival of the goddess Flora, whose celebration in Samnite territory is confirmed by the Agnone table. Interestingly, here the theophoric name is applied to a month. The short text gives no further clarification of when or how often within the month sacrifices were to take place. Notably, a similar phrase mense Flusare appears in Latin in a dedicatory inscription dating to 58 BCE from Furfo in a nearby area of Italy, where it appears to serve as a gloss for the more recognizable Latin month Quinctilis: “Lucius Aienus son of Lucius and Quintus Baebatius son of Sextius dedicated a temple to Jupiter Liber at Furfo on the third day before the Ides of Quinctilis in the consulship of Lucius Piso and Aulus Gabinius in the month of Flusare.”154 The preservation of all the Italic orthographic traits of Flusare, while mense is fully Latin, as well as the naming of a more recognizable Roman month, confirms that we have a local and non-​Roman date in this Italic inscription, despite its comparatively late date. There is also the question of corresponding this calendar to Roman time, as the Roman Floralia traditionally took place in April, whereas Quinctilis was July. In any case, once more we see a strong desire to mark the temporal and calendrical dimensions of ritual practice, while we also catch a glimpse of a more complex attempt to integrate local and global calendrical time in an Italian community in the later Republic.155

Lydus’ Brontoscopic Calendar and the Etruscan saeculum A final source for conceptualizing time in non-​Roman Italy, the brontoscopic calendar of John Lydus, needs to be considered, and I also take the opportunity of doing so to address the concept of the Etruscan saeculum. Both document and concept present real problems in terms of untangling their relevance to the earlier situation. The brontoscopic calendar, a document

154 CIL I 756 =​ILLRP 508: L. Aienus L.f., Q. Baebatius Sex.f. aedem dedicarunt Iovis Liberi Furfone a.d. III Idus Quinctileis, L. Pisone A. Gabinio cos., mense Flusare . . . . 155 Rüpke 2011; cf. Clarke 2008: 23.

210  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy intended to aid the interpretation of thunder, comes to us not from any direct source, but circuitously from a Greek work on omens by the early Byzantine author John Lydus. Lydus claims to transmit a previous Latin work by the antiquarian scholar Publius Nigidius Figulus, a contemporary of Cicero, who in turn claimed as his source Tages, who, so the legend goes, first taught mantic arts to Tarchon of Tarquinia.156 Jean McIntosh Turfa recently argues in a thought-​provoking and extensive study of Lydus’ text that its outlook matches that of Iron Age Etruria and reveals influences of earlier Mesopotamian traditions. For these reasons, she concludes that it reveals an authentic and largely unadulterated glimpse of calendrical time from Iron Age or orientalizing Etruria, which she suggests was first committed to writing perhaps as early as the seventh or even eighth century BCE. The text certainly presents a remarkable picture of time. Lydus’ calendar is organized by days listed under headings for each month starting with June. Each daily entry comprises a condition and response. I give an example of three sequential entries from July at random, which will also show that we are dealing here with a range of effects, from natural to human: 13. If in any way it should thunder, there will appear the most poisonous reptiles. 14. If in any way it should thunder, it shows one man will come to power over many. But this man is most unjust in state affairs. 15. If in any way it should thunder, there will be dissension among the common people and a scarcity of grain.

The work’s temporal framework is calendrical, but at the same time it is predictive to the point of being unhistorical: the occurrence of thunder will always bring about the same thing regardless of the agents or context involved. As the examples above illustrate, the range of results is considerable, from the agricultural world to whole sociopolitical events, everything was explained merely by calendar date. The brontoscopic calendar’s predictive, dehistoricized conception of time compares well with the much-​discussed Etruscan concept of the saeculum or cyclical time.157 As described in greatest detail by the Imperial writer Censorinus, later Romans held that the Etruscans believed in fixed temporal

156 157

For the Tages legend, see p. 89. Feeney 2007: 145–​48 with earlier literature.

Time  211 epochs reckoned according to cosmic saecula. Each saeculum marked the wax and wane of society and lasted about a hundred years, although in truth these were measured by generational, not calendrical, time. On the surface the saeculum presents a complex and different way of structuring time, which existed alongside the calendar we have seen in the epigraphic record. However, as it stands, we run into serious problems trying to make too much of this tradition for earlier Etruscan intellectual history. Problematically, the saeculum is known to us only from Roman sources who were invested in this schema for clearly eschatological reasons: Etruscans were said to have been allotted ten saecula to the Romans’ twelve, and so this temporal thinking helped them explain, as it were, the eclipse of Etruscan civilization by Rome. The saeculum is sometimes used to explain early Etruscan culture, but in ways that proceed through an almost purely assumptive logic.158 Denis Feeney wonders whether the whole schema did not emerge at a late date through Etruscans’ contemplation of their impending cultural absorption into the expanding Roman empire, and I do not think we should exclude this possibility.159 As a possible artifact of early Etruscan conceptions of time, I find the Lydus’ brontoscopic calendar similarly problematic.160 For one thing, what the calendar Lydus presents us is not what we find in earlier evidence. His year starts in June, not March, and it is twelve months long. These features differ from the Capuan table or the linen book, and such differences compel Turfa to take a skeptical stance toward the ten-​month calendar in those earlier documents.161 There is also variety in the way the months are depicted: some start with a notation of the new moon, suggesting a fully lunar calendar, while others do not, and all the months have a regular (but not lunar) thirty days. Finally, the opening attribution of the work to Tages, the Etruscan seer, shows an attachment to a mythical Tarquinian figure who is hard to trace to a time before Greek cultural influence, as discussed in an earlier chapter. It should also be said that the level of textual complexity and the essential use of writing that the hypothesis of an eighth-​century BCE date would presume finds no support whatsoever in the extant epigraphic corpus. While the brontoscopic calendar and the recurring time of the Etruscan saeculum form fascinating detours in the development of Italian temporal

158

See readings of the Francois tomb in relation to the saeculum, discussed at p. 229. Feeney 2007: 146. 160 For other criticisms of Turfa’s thesis of an early conception of the text, see Di Fazio 2021: 69 n. 32. 161 Cf. Van der Meer 2015: 152–​53. 159

212  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy consciousness, it is less clear to me that they represent authentic information extending back as far as the epigraphic documentation we have considered.

Local Influences and Elite Character In gathering together the epigraphic evidence, the first thing to observe is the almost universal concern for establishing time in ritual practice. The list of inscriptions discussed above also happens to comprise the major part of what exists in terms of early religious inscriptions from Italy. For those texts with secure archaeological contexts, and even for several about whose provenance we are less confident, most if not all of these inscriptions were originally made for sanctuaries. There are some exceptions, of course, but even where we can only see its faintest traces, such as at Agnone, we can still detect an interest in setting the temporal boundaries of ritual. It seems quite clear that time was a foremost concern in the religious life of the Archaic Italian city.162 In other words, so far as we may view it, Italian ritual practice by the fifth or even sixth century BCE was anxiously interested in time, while its construction of time was largely calendrical. To what degree was this widespread interest in time the result of a particular political context? Let us try to answer this, first of all, by confronting the question of homogeneity in the assembled evidence. I set out the collected evidence for the names of Italian months in the texts above (Table 5.1). What unites these calendars? One thing may be the overall shape of the year. We would like to say with more confidence that the Etruscan calendars of Capua and in the linen book were ten months long, as this lunar framework would form a unifying aspect potentially also linking them to the early ten-​month Roman calendar of Romulus. Several calendars also appear to start in March as in early Rome, probably in Oscan Capua, and perhaps also in Umbrian Iguvium. It may not be arbitrary that the Liber Glossarum’s reports of Etruscan month names begin with March as well. Traces of the 162 Most notably there is no temporal information in the complete texts of the Velitrae table and the Piacenza liver, although the lack of temporal detail in the latter is perhaps understandable. Another exception is the very early Etruscan text on the Vicchio stele published by Maggiani 2016, an absence perhaps suggesting a temporal development. There may also be an issue of genre, as sacred laws such as texts such as the lapis niger inscription from Rome, the new lex arae from Populonia, or the Corcolle altar, show less clear temporal features, although see Benelli 2015: 198 for a possible temporal locative in the Populonia text.

Time  213 Table 5.1  Italian month names Roman Pre-​ Etruscan Julian month names in names the Liber Glossarum

Etruscan and Phoenicia, Pyrgi (ca. 510–​500 BCE)

Etruscan Capua (ca. 450 BCE)

Martis

velcitanus

Aprilis

cabreas

apirase

Maius

ampiles

anpilie

Junis

aclus

acalve

Quin(c)tilis

traneus

parθumi?

Sextilis

hermius

papui?

September

celius

October

xosfer

Oscan Capua (ca. 350–​250 BCE)

Area of Perugia? Linen book (ca. 200 BCE)

Umbrian Iguvium (ca. 200–​100 BCE)

Oscan Aveia (ca. 150–​ 100 BCE)

Mamerttiais

acale flusare θucte? celi

November

capeni?

December

masn?

Januarius Februarius (Unplaceable)

Kirur masan? unias?

Faleniae Solemnes? Luisares

Cersia? Urnasia?

lunar structure of monthly rituals also appears across cultures. A feast day on the full moon equivalent to the Roman ides, for example, appears perhaps in Etruscan Capua, certainly at Oscan Capua, and possibly in Iguvium. With that said, the evidence laid out in Table 5.1 reveals little correspondence among month names. Little connects Roman months to those elsewhere in Italy, with the exception of March and Mamerttiais in the Capuan iuvilas texts, notably from a period in Capua’s history when links with Rome mean that Roman influence cannot be excluded. Otherwise, Eva Fiesel argues that the name Xosfer given in the Liber Glossarum as the Etruscan name for October derives from the Etruscan word cezp-​for eight, relating both Latin and Etruscan month names to the ordinal number.163 The argument has found followers, but it has alternatively been pointed out that many 163 Fiesel 1936; followed by Torelli 1976: 1004 n. 11; van der Meer 2007: 29 n. 82; van der Meer 2015: 171 n. 134.

214  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Etruscan month names in the Liber Glossarum seem related to names of Greek gods and mythological figures, often in preference to known Etruscan god names: velcitanus from Vulcan rather than the Etruscan Sethlans, ampiles from Amphiareus, aclus from Achilles, hermius from Hermes, rather than the Etruscan Turms, and so forth.164 The implication of this observation would be that Etruscan month names reflect Greek cultural influence, rather than links with other Italian calendrical nomenclature. Since aclus (Achilles) is firmly attested in the Capuan tile, the Etruscans’ adoption of names drawn from Greek myths—​although interestingly not from Greek months—​will have already started to occur by the fifth century BCE. A pattern of naming months exhibiting variation and possibly external cultural influence suggests the role of local or regional invention in the elaboration of calendrical time, at least as far as its nomenclature.165 Similar variability in month names in calendars of the Greek world has led to the observation that there were “virtually as many calendars as there are cities and tribes,” and the sentiment seems applicable also to early Italy.166 That such variability persisted in Italy for a long time past the point of Roman imperial expansion is best exemplified by the Republican inscription glossing the month Quintilis with the Oscan name flusare; even the spread of the Roman calendar, it would appear, did not stamp out local nomenclature. To my mind, this local character reinforces the idea of persistent influence by local elites on early calendrical time in Italy, pointing to an important phase of development at a point when families still held substantial power within nascent civic communities. My view of Italy’s calendars is in this sense identical to Maiuro’s reading of the sociopolitical implications of movable festivals in the Roman calendar. Even as the Italian calendar’s basis in natural planetary movements presented a certain universality, its implementation remained in the hands of each community’s religious and political elites, and this is what we may be seeing in the evidence. One very remarkable aspect of the early Italian evidence considered here that does not appear in any of our Roman fasti is the common presence of personal names. This is true of the Capuan calendar, which following Bouke van der Meer’s analysis is replete with personal names, and the Magliano lead may even contain reference to ancestral cult governed by calendrical time. Considering the importance 164 Hoenigwald 1941. 165 Cf. Di Fazio 2012: 152 on the local character of the linen book. 166 Burkert 1985: 225; Clarke 2008: 22–​23; cf. Rüpke 2011: 12 for the persistence of local calendars in Italy through the Late Republic.

Time  215 of imported Greek objects to aristocratic identity in Central Italy, it is possible that the early decision to name months like June after Greek epic heroes like Achilles (aclus, acalve, acale) was part of a similar pattern of elite consumption. The idea that Italian calendrical time preserved an elite aspect also appears in the material aspects of the texts described above. The difficulty of legibility posed by orthographic features of the Capua tile or the Magliano lead, for example, would confirm the role of local priests or religious experts as mediators between written information and the wider urban community. Not only does the Italian calendar as it appears here reveal a certain elite register, but the locally specific information also presents a historical quality that does not appear in our later evidence from Rome. That is, while Cn. Flavius or M. Fulvius Nobilior transformed aspects of the Roman calendar, neither figure is remembered by Roman sources to have created a calendar “of Flavius” or “of Fulvius.” Reference to such calendars is purely modern convention. By contrast, the text of the Capua tile preserves the name of its author, “Canulis wrote this,” and it describes a world inhabited by named individuals and families such as we do not find in extant Roman fasti. Nor is the Capua tile unique in this regard, temporally or culturally, as previous discussion has shown that calendar time more often than not appears alongside family-​based cults in the Italian epigraphic record. It is of course possible, even plausible, that individual names appeared at some early point in Roman calendars, too, but this texture has been lost to later re-​elaboration and transmission. I put this suggestion forward cautiously, but if we do see a genuine development, and not merely a regional or contextual difference, in the linen book’s more generic level of agency by comparison to the Capuan tile and other earlier texts, then we may be seeing a trajectory of universalization of calendar time in Italy that also may have taken place at Rome itself. It is true, to return to a point made in this chapter’s introduction, that Italy lacks the chronographical historical tradition of the Greek city-​state. We might think of Jack Goody’s binary division of chronicle-​writing between event-​dominated and calendar-​dominated types.167 The Italian texts we have looked at are calendar-​dominated, whereas Greek chronography is event-​dominated, but both are ultimately species of the same outlook. With the inclusion of so much locally specific information in some of these Italian texts, we might even allow that they form a sort of Italian version of

167

Goody 1977: 91–​92.

216  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy chronographical texts—​the recourse to particular people or places tends to make these calenders into their own form of historical culture. Local specificity also helps relate this material, with its temporal and even historical texture, to processes of Italian urbanization. If we think back to material analyzed in previous chapters, we might reflect that the appearance of ancestral cult or individual names in calendrical ritual matches expectations for Etruria, where at the site of Veii, we observed a pre-​urban tomb of an elite individual remaining a major focal point for urban religion for a long time. The possible appearance of the Murina family’s tomb cult in the Magliano lead or the Vesullias family’s role in the festival calendar of Oscan Capua suggests a similar situation where the universal nature of calendrical time did not dislodge other modes of constructing relationships to the past.

Conclusions Considering that I started this chapter by arguing for a historicist approach to the role of time in group formation, it comes as no surprise that we end up by concluding that Italian calendrical time followed the broader sociopolitical trajectory of urbanization in Italy. The link between urbanization and calendars helps explain why most of the material discussed here comes from the Central Tyrrhenian world from Etruria to Campania, where cities first developed in Italy. It is further supportive of this point that the Iguvine tables, which come from a region of Italy that was relatively late to develop urban culture, have been seen in the sweeping archaeological analysis of Carolyn Malone and Simon Stoddart as a sign of the crystallization of the city-​or territorial state in Umbria.168 Cities in Italy intensified sociopolitical processes, which also generated new modes of temporal construction. Throughout the material discussed here, we have observed a nexus between urban temple-​ based religion, political power, and the construction of time. This was temple-​time in the basic sense that our inscriptions mentioning calendrical dates are also all ritual in nature, and this alerts us to the fact that timekeeping mattered in civic religion, where its use was directed by the priestly class. We have also seen how overtly textual the expression of this relationship was, not only in the common appearance of texts with temporal information in temples and sanctuaries, but even in the

168

Malone and Stoddart 1994; see also Bradley 2000: 13.

Time  217 explicit command found in two Etruscan calendars to commit calendrical instructions to writing. Even in cases where timekeeping mechanisms were said to function in place of written records, text is inescapable. Consider Livy’s description of the annual nails on the Capitoline, a ritual he says served to mark time when “writing was little known”—​but he gets his information not from the nails, but rather from an explanatory inscription in archaic letters accompanying them. And we have seen probably the same situation of non-​literate and literate forms of timekeeping used in tandem at Pyrgi. The close connection between writing and ritual leads us to suspect, following Mary Beard’s analysis of the acts of the Arval Brethren, that writing down a record of acts may have become intrinsic to the ritual itself.169 Calendar time thus appears in Italy at the intersection of other advances, from the monumentalization of religious space to the more elaborate use of writing. Considering how closely related calendrical time was to these developments, one wonders how much older than them calendrical time can have been. That is, did Italians organize ritual by regularly arranged annual or calendrical, rather than ancestral, time much earlier than those traces of such practice in the Pyrgi tables or the Capitoline nails? Of course, festival time or natural time were probably in use earlier, but we might wonder how rigorously their underlying temporal concepts were applied. I also note foreign elements in early evidence, from the Phoenician calendrical vocabulary at Pyrgi to month names in Capua possibly derived from names of Greek heroes. It becomes possible to reconstruct a highly contingent process in which greater interest in calendrical time in the specific context of the Archaic Italian city with all of its links to the wider intellectual world was driving both importation and innovation. In sum, this chapter argues for understanding calendrical timekeeping as one of those new technologies fundamental to the making of early Italian urban society. Perhaps this supports a reorientation of the usual way we connect time to history in this period. Modern scholarship has long considered the role of priestly archives with their calendrical structure in the development of historical consciousness in Rome and, to a lesser extent, in Italy; however, it has done so by arguing over the extent to which early historiography drew material from archival sources. The procedure is teleological in the sense that it looks to written records to explain written history. In its most famous formulation, this was a process of “the expansion of the past”

169

Beard 1991.

218  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy from archive to historiography, as the first Roman historians made use of annually organized priestly accounts.170 Of course, the priestly material in question is almost entirely lost and can be accessed only through inference. In this chapter, we have examined what actually does exist in terms of temporally organized priestly or ritual material from Italy, and we have found that it does indeed yield historical elements, although we are hardly in a position to gauge what direct influence, if any, these documents had on later historical thought in their respective communities. Instead, what may have mattered as much, if not more, to this story than the contents of these records is the cognitive shift this material implies. As Katherine Clarke notes, there is an important difference between measuring time by human lifespans and by the “artificial currency” of the calendar, and this difference has considerable consequences for the making of history at a conceptual level.171 Rather than an expansion of the past, what may have resulted from early developments in priestly writing were new ways of arranging past and present within an innovative temporal fabric.



170 171

Badian 1966. Clarke 2008: 2.

6 Images In the last chapter, our examination of constructions of time in the Archaic Italian city concluded by raising the idea that breaking new temporal ground will have paved the way for the elaboration of new historical forms. This chapter supports this proposition by describing novel forms of Italian historical culture, especially in the fourth century BCE. The trends here are not necessarily linked to the last chapter’s temple time in any direct manner—​by and large we return here to the context of burial. Nonetheless, they reveal a period of considerable imagination and innovation in the making of historical culture in Italy. In particular, we will examine a series of tomb paintings that display a heightened interest in historical detail. These examples show great geographical breadth alongside a certain chronological narrowness: there appears to be widespread interest in historical themes in painting around Italy, while we encounter trouble locating such interest earlier than the fourth century BCE. Instead, historical images appear to be an innovation in many cultures across Italy, and I conclude by considering some possible motivations, from Hellenization to ongoing processes of Central Mediterranean state formation.

Beyond Fabius the Painter As elsewhere in this book, this chapter treats a topic that may be familiar to Roman historians, but does so in unfamiliar ways. Narrative painting is often discussed as an important stage in the early development of Roman historiography, while I set out to frame material in a less Rome-​centric perspective by implication of a widened geographical and cultural contextualization. The role of painting in the development of early historiography depends, first of all, on the family name of our earliest historical author, Q. Fabius Pictor, “the painter.” We learn that Fabius Pictor inherited his nickname from his grandfather Gaius, who painted the walls of the temple of Salus dedicated by

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0006

220  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy C. Junius Bubulcus at Rome in 304 BCE.1 No source confirms that the elder Pictor depicted historical subjects; however, it is usually assumed that his paintings celebrated Junius Bubulcus’ triumphant military accomplishments against the Samnites.2 This assumption is made on analogy with other contemporary paintings from Rome known from textual sources. These tell us that two early third-​century BCE Roman magistrates were depicted in triumphal procession in paintings in temples dedicated by them after their victories.3 At one point, Livy cites a painting as his source for his account of a banquet following the triumph of Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in 214 BCE. The painting was visible in the temple of Libertas dedicated by Sempronius Gracchus’ father on the Aventine.4 Another painting in the third-​century BCE temple of Aesculapius on Tiber Island described by Varro showed cavalry riders known as ferentarii in action during the Second Punic War identified by painted labels.5 By the same period, a practice existed of using painting to re-​create crucial moments of a triumphal campaign, and carry these scenes on painted boards in triumphal processions to broadcast a victor’s accomplishments. This genre of triumphal painting is often considered the model for the other temple paintings noted here, including Pictor’s in the temple of Salus. This discussion is bolstered by a small number of actual examples. There are tantalizing hints that the initial mid-​third-​century BCE façade of the monumental tomb of the Scipios may have been decorated with figural paintings, but evidence is very fragmentary.6 The two better-​known examples are from tombs within the city’s Esquiline necropolis. The first is the famous painting dating to the early third century BCE thought to depict scenes from the Samnites wars (Figure 6.1).7 Scenes are arranged horizontally in registers, something often taken to reflect a formal visual relationship with the episodic content of triumphal paintings.8 The two better-​preserved registers focus on pairs of men embracing in what appears to be a gesture (of truce? Of 1 Cic. Tusc. 1.4; Val. Max. 8.14.6; Plin. NH 35.19; cf. Dion. Hal. 16.3.2; see FRH I.162–​63; Moormann 2011: 19–​20. 2 Coarelli 1999: 229–​ 30 suggests they depicted the triumphal exploits of Junius Bubulcus; Moormann 2011: 19–​20. 3 Fest. 228 L, referring to T. Papirius Cursor at the temple of Consus in 272 and M. Fulvius Flaccus at the temple of Vertumnus in 264; see Moormann 2011: 20–​21; Davies 2017: 54–​55. 4 Koortbojian 2002. 5 Varr. Ling. 7.57; on the phenomenon, common for the period, see Padilla Peralta 2019: 85 n. 20. 6 Lauter-​Bufe 1982; Flower 1996: 215; Di Fazio 2019: 84; Volpe 2021: 111; the second-​century BCE phase is assumed to include figural scenes, as see Davies 2017: 56; Hölkeskamp 2020: 202. 7 Coarelli in RMR 200–​8; La Rocca 1984; De Nardis 2010; Hölkeskamp 2020: 202–​8. 8 Brilliant 1984: 26; Holliday 2002: 198–​205; Koortbojian 2002: 39; De Nardis 2010: 195–​97.

Images  221

Figure 6.1  Drawing of painted scene from tomb on the Esquiline, Rome, showing encounter between Samnites and Romans. Image adapted from the Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 17 (1889) tb. 11–​12.

negotiation? Of surrender?) following military engagement. In both pairs, one man wears a Roman toga while the other wears armor identifying him as Samnite. There are various scenes of combat including a fortress or walled city at the left of the uppermost register, and a combat scene to the left of the central pair of figures on the middle register, while to their right they are watched by a group of children and adults in non-​military dress. The central

222  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy pairs are labeled with epigraphic titles: M. Fan[nios] and Q. Fabios in the middle register and on the uppermost probably [F]‌anio(s) S(extos) Fa[bios]. The appearance of a member of the Fabian gens leads some to suggest the composition closely reflects the style of Fabius Pictor’s grandfather. The second painting, also from the Esquiline, from the so-​called tomb of the Arieti, has been dated variously to the third or second century BCE. The style is different than the Esquiline painting of Fabius and Fannius, but considering its very fragmentary state of preservation and the absence of any independent chronological information, it is hard to say how to relate these two works or use them to construct any idea of stylistic development.9 The extant fragments from the Arieti tomb show two or three scenes, presumably different episodes from the career of the individual or individuals or buried in the tomb, but the scenes seem to fill the entire space and are not arranged in registers. The largest scene shows a magistrate riding in triumphal procession on a four-​horse chariot attended by lictors. A second scene shows a battle, and another fragment shows a nude bearded man with arms raised, often thought to be crucified. These textually and archaeology documented paintings readily confirm elite interests in documenting accomplishments, particularly military ones, in visual media at Rome in the century leading up to the start of Roman historiography. However, this material is often used to support grander theories about historical imagery’s place in the Roman national ethos.10 An interest in visual history is seen to embody an especially Roman trait to the extent that analyses of key examples of Roman art often start from assumptions of historical detail. This approach categorizes attempts to decipher the Roman “historical reliefs” of a large sculptural monument known as the so-​called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, as opposed to the monument’s other half depicting Greek mythological scenes, or works to extrapolate from the figural terracottas from an elite house at Fregellae the historical events in which the house’s owner supposedly participated.11 Understood as developed under the influence of painting, Republican historical relief sculpture forms the background for famous “historical” works of Imperial art, from the Ara Pacis reliefs to the scenes on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.12 9 Holliday 2002; Giatti 2007; Talamo 2008. 10 Cf. Gruen 1992: 141–​45. 11 Domitius Ahenobarbus monument: Torelli 1992; Kuttner 1993; Maschek 2018; Rose forthcoming; Fregellae: Coarelli 1996a: 239–​57. 12 Kähler 1965: 20–​21; Torelli 1992.

Images  223 The same approach pertains to analysis of Republican art outside of Rome, especially the so-​called Pydna monument built by L. Aemilius Paullus beside the temple of Apollo at Delphi. An accompanying inscription in Latin, a noticeable language choice in a sanctuary filled with Greek epigraphy, states that Aemilius Paullus seized it (presumably the materials?) from the defeated Macedonian King Perses. Treatments of the figural frieze crowning the monument have traditionally sought to match details with those extant literary accounts of Aemilius Paullus’ defeat of Perses at the battle of Pydna. Consequently, by a sort of reverse Hellenization, the monument is seen to export the Roman tradition first found in the Esquiline paintings and other triumphal paintings at Rome to Delphi, where its distinctive style signaled the Roman conquest of Greece.13 I am not opposed to any of these interpretations in particular, but rather I discuss them to show how influential the view has been that Romans during the Republican period were particularly inclined toward the use of historical imagery. We should also note, as the ultimate source of this style is triumph in both its specific and generic sense, these ideas closely relate historical imagery to imperial success and Roman exceptionalism. It is this broader view that I want to critique, first of all, because we have seen throughout this book that historical culture was not the exclusive domain of imperial victors, while its underlying impulse was often the local expression of societal forces like group formation or urbanization. Secondly and in very basic terms, the timing upon which some of the grander assumptions rest does not work. As the rest of this chapter sets out to demonstrate, if historical imagery first became prominent in the fourth and third centuries BCE, then it did so at a time when Roman imperialism was by no means fait accompli. Instead, we ought to attend to recent critiques of Roman exceptionalism in Middle Republican Italy, while, as we shall see, Rome was by no means singular among Italian societies in its recourse to historical imagery in that period.14 In the following, this chapter aims to expand our understanding of the origins of historical imagery in Italy. Discussion moves regionally starting with the famous example of the François tomb from Etruria, which will prove less isolated than sometimes thought in that region, and then on to other parts of Italy. This material confirms that history in pictorial form was by no means exclusively Roman. What does emerge is a certain chronological

13 Most explicitly by Kähler 1965: 16–​17; contra Taylor 2016. 14 Cf. Eckstein 2006; Terrenato 2019.

224  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 6.2  Scene of combat between Italian heroes from the wall of the François tomb, Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia commons.

focus, as historical painting appears as a new phenomenon around Italy at this time, and the chapter’s closing sections return to consider what gave rise to this form of historical culture.

Etruscan Historical Imagery: The François Tomb Probably the most famous case of historical painting from Italy outside Rome are the frescoes from the François tomb in Vulci dated to the later fourth century BCE (Figure 6.2).15 The paintings are regularly cited as an example of interest in historical imagery on the part of Rome’s enemies during early Roman expansion. The tomb is called after its first modern explorer, Alessandro François, the Florentine nobleman who excavated the tomb together with the French archaeologist Adolf Noël des Vergers in 1857 on land conceded to the project by Prince Alessandro Torlonia. In the 1860s, Torlonia commissioned the removal of the frescoes from the tomb walls, and they entered his family’s collection in the Villa Albani at Rome, where they remain.

15 From an enormous bibliography, I rely in following on Buranelli, ed., 1987; Holliday 1993; Cornell 1995: 130–​41; Coarelli 1996a: 138–​78; Bruun 2000; D’Agostino 2003; Andreae 2004; Briquel 2006b; Maras 2010; Letta 2013; Rathje 2014.

Images  225 The tomb itself is the largest and most architecturally complex of almost two dozen known burials in the necropolis of Ponte Rotto, located on the other side of a ravine defining the eastern edge of the plateau of ancient Vulci. The necropolis shows continuous use from the earlier fourth century BCE down to the first, spanning the period before and after Rome’s capture of Vulci in 280 BCE. Entrance to the François tomb’s main chamber is made by an exceptionally long dromos cut into the soft volcanic tuff. The dromos seems initially to have led to an earlier chamber, found in a collapsed state, carved into the space exactly above the later tomb’s central room. The most likely explanation for this configuration is that the family noted an older chamber starting to collapse and abandoned it, building a new one off of the same entranceway at a lower position within more solid layers of bedrock. This will have happened in the late fourth century BCE, as the François tomb’s axially symmetrical architecture and programmatic paintings suggest it was laid out in a single act of construction. However, the presence of an earlier chamber is not the only additional phase. At some point later than the fourth century BCE, a wall was put up blocking the door leading from the François tomb’s central room and the burial vestibule to the righthand side. At an even later point, presumably when the entire tomb was full of burials, supplementary rooms were carved into the rock on either side of the dromos close to the tomb’s entrance. We can date none of these actions with precision, but the tomb must have functioned as an active destination for burial for several hundred years. The main tomb consists of seven rooms laid out axially around a large central chamber shaped like an upside-​down T (Figure 6.3). Frescoes entirely fill the walls of the central room in a series of figural scenes in megalographic style. The figures are labeled with epigraphic tags. Clockwise from the door, we start with a series of recognizable heroes from Greek epic: Ajax slaying Cassandra, Phoinix and Nestor, Eteocles fighting Polyneices, and on the long wall at the end of the room on the left a large scene of Achilles sacrificing Trojan prisoners. The opposite wall shows a series of four pairs of Italian heroes, among them figures identified by their tags as Macstarna and two Vibennae (Aule and Caile Vipinas), along with Larth Ulthes, Laris Papathnas, Velznax, Pesa Arcmsnas Sveamax, Rasce, and Venthical[ . . . ]plsaxs. Continuing clockwise around the corner, we find two figures labeled Marce Camitlnas and Cneve Tarchunies Rumach. Flanking either side of the door to the burial chamber leading to the right of the room are presumably the couple from Vulci buried in the tomb: Vel Saties and his dwarf Arnza, who

Figure 6.3  Plan and cross-​section of François tomb, Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

Images  227 holds a small bird, and his wife Thanchvil Verati, whose painting is entirely lost. And then immediately to the right of the door are Amphiaraus and Sysiphus. The tomb’s visual presentation juxtaposes scenes from the Trojan war with a series of Italian stories and realistic portrayals of ranking individuals from fourth-​century BCE Vulci. We recognize the series of frescoes on the righthand side of the tomb as Italian following several links between what we find here and other sources for early Roman history. The most famous such tangent is between the two Vibennae brothers shown here and Macstarna, whose adventures together are referred to by the emperor Claudius in a speech to the senate recorded on a monumental inscription on a bronze plaque found in Lyon in 1528, the so-​called Lyon table. The speech finds Claudius engaged in a long digression on the history of Early Rome’s openness to foreign elites in order to support his motion to allow noblemen from transalpine Gaul into the Senate: Servius Tullius, if we follow our own (Roman) sources, born to the slave woman Ocresia, if we follow Etruscan sources, a faithful follower of Caelius Vibenna and a companion on his whole adventure when, after he was thrown out by various fortunes, with all his remaining troops of Caelius’ army, he departed Etruria and occupied the Caelian hill, and it is so called from their leader Caelius, and having changed his name, for in Etruscan his name was Mastarna, he was so called as I say, and his reign brought much benefit to the republic.16

The constellation of names finds parallel in those individuals labeled in the tomb frescoes, and there has been considerable effort trying to tease out the historical reality that forms the basis of Claudius’ speech and the François tomb frescoes. Undeniably, both cases relate characters associable with early Roman events. Macstrna/​Mastarna bears a relationship to Rome’s sixth king, Servius Tullius, although as has been pointed out the name itself problematically lacks a first name or praenomen and may stand for a more general military leader, cognate with the later Latin word magister. The Vibennae 16 CIL XIII.1668, my translation: . . . Servius Tullius si nostros sequimur captiva natus Ocresia si Tuscos Caeli quondam Vivennae sodalis fidelissimus omnisque eius casus comes postquam varia fortuna exactus cum omnibus reliquis Caeliani exercitus Etruria excessit montem Caelium occupavit et a duce suo Caelio ita appellitatus mutatoque nomine nam Tusce Mastarna ei nomen erat ita appellatus est ut dixi et regnum summa cum rei p(ublicae) utilitate optinuit . . .

228  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy also appear variously elsewhere, not only in later Roman sources but also on some epigraphic material, most notably an early-​sixth century BCE bucchero vase from the Portonaccio sanctuary at Veii, which bears the inscription in Etruscan, “I am given by Aulus Vibennae” (minemuluv[an]ece avile vipiiennas). One or both Vibennae are depicted on mirrors and cinerary urns from around the same date as the François tomb.17 An additional hint that we view scenes bearing some relationship to historical conflicts between Vulci and other cities including Rome appears in the figure labeled Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, or Gnaeus Tarquinius the Roman. Again, I am less interested in puzzling out the apparent discrepancy between this figure and known members of the Tarquinian family, none of whom have the same first name, and rather I stress the existence of some relationship to an otherwise identifiable early Roman family. Christer Bruun suggests that the figure striking him down labeled Marce Camitlnas might bear some connection to Marcus Furius Camillus, the semi-​legendary Roman protagonist of Early Republican history.18 While we cannot locate other figures identified in the François tomb in our sources, we can note that some seem to have topographical cognomina similar to Rumach. That the Vibennae and Mastarna are not given similar names may suggest a local connection to Vulci. We cannot say whether the scenes, which divide into several pairs of figures, are meant to be taken altogether with these figures perhaps forming a federation of elites from different cities fighting against the Vibennae and Mastarna, or whether perhaps we see a string of events. Some details of the characters’ portrayal, for example that Mastarna is freeing the bound hands of Caelius Vibenna, or the fact that local heroes are nude whereas those figures with topographical nicknames are not, suggest that we are to understand these images as scenes from a more extensive narrative. I note Claudius’ elliptical reference to Mastarna’s other exploits (postquam varia fortuna), which suggests the story he describes of the capture of the Caelian Hill at Rome formed part of a longer narrative of exploits. These were thus figures about whom Italians in Etruria and Rome were telling stories in the Archaic period. It is probably not arbitrary that they fill the same wall upon which we find Vel Saties and his wife. Saties is dressed in a purple toga with figural designs similar to the Roman toga

17 Di Fazio 2018: 323; see Buranelli, ed. 1987: 242–​43 for other material. 18 Bruun 2000.

Images  229

Figure 6.4  Detail of Vel Saties from the painting of the frescoes of the François tomb. Adapted from Wikimedia Commons.

picta worn by triumphant magistrates, and he also wears a laurel crown (Figure 6.4). His face is individualized with his eyes glancing upward. It has been suggested that he observes the flight of birds released by his dwarf Arnza, who still holds a bird, displaying his talent in the augural practice of etrusca disciplina. From Greek to Italian heroes, to the present time of Vel Saties, and even to the future time he may observe through his augury, we see multiple temporal layers in this tomb. How should we understand their juxtaposition? To my mind, it seems anachronistic to claim as some have that the Italian scenes form a historical pendant to the mythological scenes drawn from

230  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Greek epic on the opposite wall.19 Their position opposite each other obviously suggests comparison, but a distinction between myth and history was perhaps less important to ancient than modern viewers; more interesting to the ancient viewer may have been the attempt to synchronize global (Trojan) with local pasts. Plenty of material from around the same time or slightly later shows attempts to knit together, rather than contrast, Greek epic to local events upon a unified a chronological axis.20 It is worth noting that the rise of Aeneas cult in Latium explored in a previous chapter was unfolding around this same time. This same idea speaks against another argument that sees these paintings as revealing the structuring of past time according to Etruscan conceptions of the saeculum.21 First of all, as noted in the previous chapter, this temporal construct is mostly known to us from later and largely eschatological contexts.22 But more fundamentally, it is not clear how these scenes of Greek and Italian heroes would conform to the concept of saecula. Their temporal distance is not measured generationally, nor does it approximate a period of about a hundred years. And while all the scenes reference military victory of some sort, they show a recursive understanding of events in time only in the most generic sense. In any case, the noticeably complex structuring of past and present in this tomb provides clear material for these scenes’ interpretation as historical. Vel Saties’ portrayal, too, should be seen as historical in the sense that the paintings celebrate his death and form a monumentum, in the Roman sense of that word discussed in the introductory chapter. We need to bear in mind that, as this tomb continued to be used for generations, the progenitor Vel Saties increasingly became a figure of the past, while the present continued to rest with the family burying their dead here over generations. The François tomb in this sense presents a variety of historical cultures, not only the linear narrative past apparently shown in the Italian figures, but also an ancestral past captured in Vel Saties and Thanchvil Verati. There is nothing that exists in Etruscan tomb painting quite like these paintings, although in following I will argue for a broader contextualization of their historical interests. But it is also worth reflecting on their novelty 19 Contra Holliday 1993: 187–​89; I am in agreement with Coarelli 1996a: 160. 20 A good contemporary point of comparison is the Marmor Parium. On synchronistic thinking linking what we might call myth and history, see Feeney 2007. 21 Coarelli 1996a: 178; Holliday 1993. 22 Above, pp. 209–​10.

Images  231 from previous tomb-​painting practice. Filippo Coarelli makes the brilliant observation that the Italian scenes often seem to copy the composition of the Greek scenes paired across from them, most noticeably in the poses of Eteocles stabbing Polyneices and Marce Camitlnas doing the same to Cneve Tarchunias Rumach; however, when it comes to the long walls opposite each other, the compositional parallels change. The painting of Achilles murdering the Trojan prisoner is a complex, multi-​figure composition with close attention to perspective, as all the Greek heroes turn their eyes to the point of Achilles’ knife. Opposite from this, the scene of Italian heroes is considerably different and less artistically complex, with the eight figures divided into four separated pairs. Coarelli argues that this reflects the fact that the Greek scene was made from pre-​existing models derived from Hellenistic depictions of the Trojan War, whereas the Italian scenes were inventions, probably created for the occasion of their painting in the tomb.23 His formal analysis is convincing and important, for it emphasizes that the pictorial depiction of the Italian figures had little precedent around the time of the François tomb’s creation.

Contextualizing the Francois Tomb: Historiography The multitemporal images of the François tomb feature little in recent discussions of Hellenistic painting styles in Etruria, as they are not seen to form part of a larger representational trend. Instead, where we find the tomb’s images playing a central role is in discussions of Etruscan historiography. Evidence for history in Etruscan written by Etruscan authors is not considerable, but evidence in favor of Etruscan historiography was marshaled together in a justly classic study by Tim Cornell, and the idea has received further support in passing comments by other scholars.24 Cornell points to references to a lost work of “Etruscan History” by the Roman antiquarian author Verrius Flaccus as well as to Claudius’ also lost work Tyrrhenica on Etruscan history. These are both Roman writers of a much later period than the events they describe, but Cornell points in particular to Claudius’ citation in the Lyon tablet, discussed above, of auctos Tuscos, “Etruscan sources,” 23 Coarelli 1996a. 24 Cornell 1976; revisited in Cornell 1978; Cornell 1995: 135–​40; see also Sordi 1960: 177–​82; Heurgon 1961: 305–​9; Chassignet 1996: xlv–​xlvi; for more negative opinion, see Harris 1971: 4–​40; Poucet 1985: 61–​62.

232  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy to support the idea of a native historical tradition, possibly even originally written in the Etruscan language. He also draws attention to Varro’s citation of information on the Etruscan saeculum from a written source he calls “Etruscan histories” (Varr. apud Cens. De die natalis 17.6: Tuscae historiae). Cornell notes the plural and the absence of an author’s name to argue that these Etruscan histories were akin to Roman pontifical records, a suggestion he supports with the “annalist” structure of the imperial inscriptions discussed in my introductory chapter known as the elogia tarquiniensia, and by the use of magistrates’ names to mark time in Pyrgi inscription of Thefarie Velianas and the tomb of the shields at Tarquinia (more on which below). Alternatively, he raises the possibility that Varro consulted Etruscan priestly books (libri Etrusci), which would also make sense considering that the source was cited for information on Etruscan cosmology. Considering the amount of detail on the Etruscans we find in Roman antiquarian and historian works of the Late Republic and Empire, Cornell must be right to presume the existence of some mechanism for transmitting events into record. Nonetheless, this thesis operates in two ways that, I think, encourage us to think more closely about the nature of this mechanism. First, it rests mostly on what we find in later Roman authors, and we cannot be sure we are dealing not with a native tradition but with what Roman sources could reconstruct about the Etruscan past. Even the monument containing the famous elogia tarquiniensia is Imperial in date, although I would follow Cornell in seeing these epigraphic texts’ source as local historical records in Tarquinia.25 However, the firmest indication of a historical tradition in the hands of Etruscans themselves in Cornell’s analysis is the François tomb, which forms an isolated example. Viewed only from this evidence, then, we actually find ourselves making the argument from a fairly limited (and limiting?) position. The second concern is that this reconstruction of Etruscan historiography is interested primarily in demonstrating that Etruscans possessed a historical culture resembling Rome’s. This is an old view, expressed already by Barthold Georg Niebuhr, who conjectured that Etruscans possessed their own annalist tradition, which continued to develop as late as the first century BCE.26 Nothing excludes the possibility, even if it seems unlikely to me that such a tradition vanished so completely that we cannot even name one Etruscan historian. However, the approach again seems limiting in that it

25 Cornell 1978; see now Torelli 2019. 26 Niebuhr 1837: 384–​85.

Images  233 seeks to affirm a fairly narrow understanding of history as written, narrative, and linear practice—​of course, these are precisely the sort of assumptions I have sought with this book to undermine.

Contextualizing the François Tomb: Iconography Let us proceed in a different manner by casting our net more widely for Etruscan historical culture (rather than historiography) of the period before Roman conquest. Perhaps because of the unusualness of their subject matter, one thing that the study of the historical dimensions of the François tomb frescoes has not sufficiently accounted for is their artistic context: their date in the later fourth century BCE puts them at a moment of profound change in the wider iconography of Etruscan tomb painting.27 This change is best witnessed at Tarquinia, where evidence is fullest, but similar trends detectable at other sites suggest a more widespread phenomenon. The basic gist of this change is a shift away from the generic aristocratic scenes of symposia, dance, and games of Archaic-​and early Classical-​period painting in Etruria and toward a greater focus on the underworld. Chthnonic deities and demons appear more commonly. In some formulations, this change is interpreted as one from earlier playful to more frightening imagery, which reflected increasing uncertainties in Etruscan society as it increasingly became embroiled in military conflict with Rome, or otherwise a shift in Etruscan religion with greater interest in mystery cults with eschatological ideologies.28 Whatever the motivations for this change, one aspect that catches our eye in the pictorial themes of later Etruscan tomb painting is the newfound prominence of local political leaders or magistrates.29 Several tombs show magistrates in a way that now celebrates these figures as particular individuals in their urban communities, not dissimilar to the appearance of a portrait of Vel Saties as progenitor and triumphator in the François tomb. In some earlier examples, it is sometimes hard to determine whether we see an imagined scene of the defunct led to the underworld, especially as underworld demons often appear accompanying the defunct in procession. 27 Torelli 1997; Steingräber 2006; Fiorini 2007; Roth 2013; Rasmus Brandt 2015. 28 Rasmus Brandt 2015: 106–​7. 29 In this chapter, I use the term magistrate in a broad sense to refer to local political leadership without intending to suggest nominally elected or public governmental structures equivalent to what we know for Republican Rome; for the political structure of Etruria at this time, see Maggiani 1996; Tagliamonte 2015b; Maras 2020b.

234  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy The same ambiguity applies to scenes resembling triumphs and showing the defunct in a chariot attended by infernal deities. In other cases, riders in chariots are preceded by attendants who hold instruments indicative of their civic positions, such as the lituus or musical instruments we find depicted in the Golini II tomb from Orvieto, or a man in a chariot preceded by dancers and musicians in the tomb of the blue demons from Tarquinia. In these cases, processional imagery relates to scenes of diners banqueting on couches, and sometimes we find couples on couches as in the tomb of the shields, perhaps dining in the underworld. Friedhelm Prayon makes the interesting suggestion that these scenes of procession depict the defunct joining his ancestors in the underworld, forming a pictorial extension of the ancestral cult, which characterized Etruscan burial practices since the Early Iron Age.30 In tombs where infernal iconography is completely absent and crowds of togate men move together, it is possible paintings intend to depict civic processions that were not funerary in nature. These tombs appear to depict magistrates or political leadership, with painting departing the world of mythology and generic ritual to that of the urban community.31 The iconographical interest in magistrates has been traced back to scenes in sarcophagi of the later fifth century BCE. Processions of magistrates first appear in paintings in the tomb of the pygmies at Tarquinia in the very early part of the next century, and features in other tombs of the fourth century BCE like the tomb of Typhon, the Bruschi tomb, or the tomb of the conference (Figure 6.5).32 In the last example, the procession of lictors holding fasces and other attendants moves in a dense crowd along two adjacent walls around the defunct, who is distinguished by a laurel crown and identified by an inscription as Larth son of Arnth, who served the high office of zilaθ ceχaneri.33

30 Prayon 2004; see also Holliday 1990; there is also an interesting potential link here with the reanimation of the defunct among his ancestors in the context of the Republican pompa funebris, on which see Flower 1996: 91–​127; Hölkeskamp 2020: 123–​24 with references. 31 Menzel and Naso 2007; for brief but similar reading of paintings of magistrates as important mnemonic material connected in that sense to the François tomb, see Di Fazio 2019: 84; the tendency to see these as funerary rather than civic processions remains strong, as see Hölkeskamp 2020: 204 n. 160. 32 For the date of the tomba dei Pigmei, see Harari 2005; for the tomba Bruschi, see Vincenti 2009, redating the tomb to the fourth century BCE; the much later dating of the tomb in some accounts would make it a significant outlier, showing isolated interest in magistrates after the municipalization of Tarquinia. 33 Maggiani 1996; Menzel and Naso 2007; Michetti 2016; for the office, see Maras 2020b: 170–​71.

Images  235

Figure 6.5  Processional scene from the Tomb of the Conference (tomba del convegno), Tarquinia. Photograph by Gaetano Bellucci, image © by Alessandro Naso.

Contextualizing the François Tomb: Style and Epigraphy That these tomb paintings of magistrates and processions intended to commemorate specific individuals is suggested by two aspects: the realistic portrayal of select figures, and the nature and content of accompanying inscriptions. Starting with the first issue of style, select figures in tombs of this period have details clearly intending to mark them as known members of their community. Details are either particular styles of dress or regalia, or distinctive facial features. Age is often specified, as in the older man with gray hair and beard in the tomb of the shields, or the youth from the Orco I tomb.34 Considerable comparative attention on the part of painters toward facial differentiation is confirmed by recent photogrammetric study of the tomb of the shields (Figure 6.6). Close measurement of the figures in the various scenes confirmed that their limbs and bodies were composed using modular templates of limbs and torsos, which were resized and repositioned to create a variety of poses. The size of the heads and the angle of the faces, too, appear to have been created using stock templates, and the templates were reused to create scenes of banqueting, procession, and so forth. However, in contrast

34 For the youth, see Torelli 2019: 134.

236  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 6.6  Drawing of banqueting scene from tomb of the shields, Tarquinia. From Monumenti inediti pubblicati dall’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica. Supplemento (Berlin 1891).

to this replicative compositional technique, the details of the faces from the hairstyle to the modeling of the features are entirely distinct from figure to figure. Comparatively great care was taken to make each of these figures a distinct and presumably recognizable individual.35 This attention to distinguishing individuals based on facial features finds parallel in sculpted sarcophagi lids deposited in some of these same tombs, where we also find highly modelled and individualized portraits. One exemplary sarcophagus of this type is that of Laris Pulenas discussed in this book’s opening chapter, and there are several others from Chiusi, Volterra, and elsewhere. Some have detected the influence of Hellenistic royal portraiture in some of these Etruscan sarcophagi, with facial features of known



35 Tomassetti and Arrighi 2019.

Images  237 portrait types of Ptolemy III or other rulers copied in Etruria. However, as with the tomb of the shields, where modular patterns were reworked, the practice seems to be one of the use of models ultimately to produce individualization, focusing especially on the face. This realistic style has supported arguments that Roman Republican veristic portraiture itself evolved directly from this Etruscan background.36 This is probably too restricted a view of a more polysemic development.37 However, it is worth noting that an important ingredient of what is often considered a uniquely Roman style finds ample parallels in funerary sculptures and tomb paintings of ranking elites in Etruria. Turning now to the epigraphic content of these paintings, the shift in tomb iconography of the fourth century BCE was accompanied by important changes of associated epigraphic habit. Most of individuals that I have identified as magistrates in tombs of the fourth or third century BCE are identified by labels noting their personal names. The appearance of personal names in Etruscan tombs is, of course, a very old phenomenon dating back to the very origins of extant Etruscan epigraphy, but the convergence of names with portraits is a notable novelty of the later period. In addition, we find a number of lengthier texts that combine personal names with information about genealogy, lifespan, or career offices, formally similar to, if perhaps less easily translated than, the familiar elogia of Middle Republican Rome.38 That the epigraphic material was often intended to function alongside the images as part of a unified communicative system is suggested by cases like the tomb of the shields (cf. Figure 6.6). Here, the featured male figure, depicted banqueting in the underworld to the right of the main axial door of the tomb’s central room, is identified in especially large letters just to the left of his head by name, Larth Velcha, while nearly the entire space between his head and the ceiling is filled by a long elogium-​type inscription recounting his genealogy and civic offices.39 Another epigraphic novelty in these tombs is the use of eponymous dating systems, so that we do not just find record of the offices held in life by the 36 Kaschnitz-​Weinberg 1926; Richardson 1953; see generally Torelli 1997; Flower 1996: 339–​40 is more circumspect. 37 For other ways of explaining Roman veristic portraiture, see e.g. Flower 1996; Rose 2008; the literature is vast. 38 Cf. Van Heems 2016; some examples include: ET Ta 7.59 from the tomba dell’Orco I; ET Ta 1.171 from tomba 5203; some tombs like the tomba di Anina (ET Ta 1.151–​63) or the tomb at Sette Camini (ET Vs 178–​810 have series of elogia-​type inscriptions above individual burials or sarcophagi). 39 For this inscription, Morandi 1999.

238  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy defunct, but other magistrates’ names are used as anchors in a broader chronological system. This sort of gridded, comparable time seems relatable to the calendrical temporalities discussed in the last chapter. Cornell notes this practice as a possible feature of underlying Etruscan historiography with reference to two examples, one the naming of the regnal year of Thefarie Velianas in the Pyrgi tablets, and the other from the tomb of the shields. A more recent sounding of Etruscan epigraphy by Daniele Maras for the appearance of eponymous dates based on officeholders brings the count up to nine examples. If the new Marzabotto inscription on lead discussed in the last chapter contained eponymous dates, as seems likely, it provides another fifth-​century BCE example, and a tenth total inscription.40 As this last example from Marzabotto confirms, not all instances are in tombs, but we find also from Pyrgi the listing of a zilath on a fragment of an Attic vase, probably functioning to date the vase’s offering in the sanctuary in the mid-​fifth century BCE.41 From the end of the fourth century BCE, the fragmentary shoulder of an amphora from Castellina del Marangone is marked with two magistrates’ names. This remarkable find, paralleled by another amphora marked with a zilath’s name from second-​century BCE Tarquinia, confirms the independent use of magistrate dates to mark years, as the names appear to have served to provide a vintage or production year for the contents, probably wine, of the amphorae, equivalent a practice known from the second century BCE onward on Roman amphora using consular dates. The practice would also seem to suggest very widespread and possibly even intercommunity awareness of magistrates’ names, if we presume the date was useful to the shipper or consumer of the amphora.42 The implication may be that of the circulation of standard lists of magistrates in some form. Eponymous dating formulae become more frequently attested over time. From the third century BCE, we find eponymous dates on a bronze weight from Caere and on the fragmentary inscribed bronze plaque from the area of the Ara della Regina at Tarquinia, noted in the previous chapter.43 From the second century BCE, along with the Tarquinian amphora, an eponymous dating formula appears on the lengthy inscription on bronze relating a property transaction known as the Cortona tablet.44

40 Govi 2014: 125.

41 Maras 2009: 96; Maras 2020: 154. 42 Colonna 1995.

43 ET Ta 8.1; Pandolfini Angeletti 2002: 54. 44 ET Ta 2.39; ET AC b2–​3.

Images  239 The two examples of eponymous dates from tombs both come from Tarquinia. The first is from the tomb of the shields, which also features individualized couples banqueting on couches. The temporal locative zilci velusi hulχniesi, “in the zilacate of Vel Holconius,” appears twice in the painting of the vestibule of the tomb.45 It is unclear what is being anchored to that year, but in one instance the date falls at the end of an elogium-​type inscription, which starts with the name of a different individual, leading us to think that Vel Holconius’ name functions for purely chronological purposes. The other date is from the Orcus I tomb, also in the locative case, and another a member of the Holconii, a certain Larth Holconius. The family to whom the Orcus I tomb belonged is debated, but on all counts cannot be the Holconii, so we are once again seeing the naming of a magistrate in what appears to be a purely chronological device.46 The use of magistrates’ names as means of synchronizing events thus begins to appear in Etruscan epigraphy in the late sixth century BCE and becomes more prevalent by the fourth and third centuries BCE, just as we see greater attention to civic status and officeholding in tomb paintings and related epigraphy. The chronological convergence might be strengthened if we consider that the earliest and somewhat isolated extant example cited from the Pyrgi tablets is a different practice, since it gives a numeral (3) and lists the years of a single individual’s career, rather than using one person or couple’s year in office to synchronize events independent from their actions in office, as seems true in the case of the tomb dates and the use of eponymous dating for the contents of transport amphorae. This material reveals important information about how these Etruscan communities were marking time in a way that increasingly supported synchronization and intercommunity historical comparison.47 It is worth noting that the material from Etruria significantly precedes the earliest direct evidence for consular dating formula in evidence in Roman epigraphy, although of course the consular fasti allegedly went back to the first year of the Republic.48

45 ET Ta 5.4-​5; Maras 2020 154 n. 24. 46 ET Ta 5.2; debate is between the Murinas or Spurinas clans, depending on how one restores ET Ta 7.59 [-​-​-​-​]urinas; see Torelli 2019. 47 For eponymous magistrate lists, synchronization, and history, see Feeney 2007; Clarke 2008: 20–​21. 48 Possibly the consular date of 241 BCE on a breastplate from Falerii, as see Flower 1998: 231; for positive and negative evaluations of the early fasti, see respectively Smith 2011; Richardson 2017.

240  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Converging representations of magistrates across wall-​ painting, epigraphic texts, and sarcophagi fully attest to the role of civic leadership in granting status in Etruria. Remarkably, we will find this attention very widespread in Italian art at this moment, as the next sections will also attest. I want to argue that it forms an important form of historical culture. The celebration of an elite’s status in his civic community, rather than inherited aristocratic status, represents a connection to his specific actions and accomplishments; the implication is that of the historical transmission of information. We are familiar with this sort of thing from Republican Rome, where historically meaningful events like elite funerals displayed the regalia of office as a way to recall what high-​ranking members had accomplished on behalf of the Republic.49 Reference to civic achievement was complicated in the context of family tombs where deceased individuals’ civic or institutional status was celebrated. I have already referred to the way in which the long use of the François tomb for burial makes its portrayal of Vel Saties into a sort of monument or monumentum in the sense that the painting commemorates the accomplishments of a past member of the Saties family and the civic leadership of Vulci. The same thinking can be applied to other depictions of magistrates, who become parts of their community’s past in ways that retain specific reference to individual accomplishments. Depicting magistrates in writing and iconography in tombs in Etruria was thus a particular form of historical culture suited to Etruscan society. More broadly, we may return to the François tomb by observing that, while its narrative historical scenes find few parallels, its contents match a wider impulse toward history within significant changes to the painted iconography of Etruscan tombs of the same period. We can only speculate about whether this turn reflects other traditions of (written) history about which we know so little. However, through the lens of historical culture, the François becomes less of an outlier.

49 The implication need not be that Etruscan societies had identical magistrative systems to Rome. Scholars like van Heems 2016 point out that the Etruscan epigraphic corpus differs because it is not public and concentrates only on the tomb. The political system of Etruscan city-​states in this period is a complex topic. Romans thought that most, though not all, of Etruria’s cities were led by this date by annually elected magistrates (cf. Liv. 5.1.3). In other instances, we can detect something like monarchic rule persisting into the fifth century BCE and perhaps beyond. For summary of modern opinion, see Tagliamonte 2015b: 130–​31.

Images  241

Historical Tomb Paintings in Campania Many of the trends seen in tomb painting in Etruria also appear in Campanian painting of the same period, and we turn to consider the region’s evidence.50 Campania was a region of considerable cultural complexity moving into the fourth century BCE. I will refer to the communities responsible for these Campanian tomb paintings as Oscan following Fritz Weege’s monumental 1909 study, which grouped together paintings from the area under this rubric.51 The identification of fourth-​and early third-​century BCE Campanian tombs as Oscan is largely a product of their chronological overlap with the occupation starting in the mid-​fifth century BCE of a number of cities in the region by peoples of allegedly Samnite origin.52 The extant source tradition portrays the Oscan takeover of Campania as a series of invasions and seditions, often violent, which installed elites from Samnium in previously Etruscan or Greek settlements.53 However, it is worth noting that tomb painting was not a common feature in Samnium itself, although there was an earlier Italic tradition of tomb painting beginning in the very late sixth century BCE in Apulia, and painting did have a considerable legacy in Campania itself under previous Greek and Etruscan influences. As opposed to the multi-​generational family burial monuments of Etruria, the painted tombs of Oscan Campania were typically cist tombs used for single burials. Still, we find some iconographical parallels with Etruscan tomb paintings, especially in Campanian tombs of earlier date that tend to feature stock scenes of aristocratic behavior. The most common picture in Campanian tomb painting is that of a male figure on horseback interpreted as a returning warrior (Figure 6.7).54 There are numerous variations on this theme, sometimes growing to multi-​figure processions, or depicting warriors in armor on horseback attended by other figures on foot. These scenes all belong to a broader genre, general in nature, of depictions of aristocratic display. Portrayals are variations on readily recognizable themes, from scenes of women sitting in their toilet, mourners, or iconography related to elite activities such as banqueting or athletic contests and chariot races. Such generic



50 This section builds on a preliminary study in Bernard 2023.

51 Major studies since include Corrigan 1979; Pontrandolfo and Rouveret 1992; Benassai 2001. 52 Cf. Scopacasa 2015: 125–​29. 53 Cornell 1974.

54 Nicolet 1963; Corrigan 1979: 365–​90; Pontrandolfo and Rouveret 1992: 44.

242  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 6.7  Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 12A. The return of the warrior, 380–​370 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​ Ministero della Cultura.

depictions of aristocratic behavior appear in the earlier tombs but persist into the third century BCE. From this background, three tombs distinguish themselves for different subject matter that seems narrative or referent to historical events. The first of these is a tomb painting from Cumae. Cumae does not present extensive evidence of painted tombs in this period with few other examples, the best

Images  243

Figure 6.8  Cumae, painted slab from a tomb, Benassai 2001 no. Cu.13, ca. 300 BCE. Drawing by author modified from Benassai 2001.

known of which is a traditional scene of an elite woman at her toilet.55 In 1996, Nazarena Valenza Mele published a painted limestone block from a different tomb, which had been overlooked in the storerooms where it had presumably been taken from the city’s extensive northern necropolis (Figure 6.8).56 Despite the challenges posed by the small size of the painted surface (24 × 21 cm) and the lack of archaeological context, there remains enough visible of the scene to discern immediately that we see something considerably different from the generic aristocratic scenes of other Oscan tombs. The fragmentary scene depicts figures arranged either in at least two registers, or in foreground and background perspective.57 Four pairs of legs are visible along the upper margin of the block, notably only one of each pair is fitted with a greave. An arm, larger in scale in the foreground or on a lower register, frames the scene’s right side with its hand closed around what appears to be a lit torch. At the lower-​left margin is another hand belonging to a figure

55 Weege 1909: 100–​1. Valenza Mele 1996: 351–​55; Benassai 2001: 260 suggest Cumae’s elite intentionally rejected painted tombs as an expression of political differentiation; cf. D’Angelo 2019. 56 Valenza Mele 1996; Caputo 2000; Benassai 2001, 215–​18; D’Ippolito 2004, all largely in agreement on the iconographical reading. The block’s dimensions parallel ashlar construction in the other Cumaean painted tomb Weege 1909, no. 1; cf. Benassai 2001: 80. 57 Valenza Mele 1996: 216; Benassai 2001: 216.

244  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy whose togate shoulder may perhaps be seen along the block’s leftmost edge. His hand holds something sprouting, perhaps a clump of grass or leaves. The ground beneath the legs is painted an ochre color. The space defined by that color is delimited on the right side by a dark line, while the background farther to the right is lighter in color. The interaction of these figures thus appears to be taking place within an architecturally defined space of some sort, and also probably at night, as suggested by the torch. Valenza Mele suggests this assembly of armed men and priests in an enclosed space at night depicts the ritual of the Samnite linen legion vividly described by Livy on the eve of the Samnite defeat to the Romans at the Battle of Aquilonia in 293 (10.38). It is in the context of this ritualistic levy of the linen legion according to practice allegedly employed for the Samnite coup of Capua that we find reference to an old priestly book on linen (libro vetere linteo), the only reference to writing used by Samnites that Salmon could locate in extant literature.58 There are some elements to support her identification, but ultimately linking the painting with our Roman sources proves problematic. We have in the Cumaean fresco an assembled group of warriors inside a structure and in the presence of a priest. Single greaves feature in Samnite military and even gladiatorial equipment but may also be a sign of monosandalism often indicative in ancient culture of a transitional moment in the life of these recruits binding themselves to military service.59 It is very unclear just what the hand at the left of the scene is clutching, but Valenza Mele suggests this may be the clump of turf carried by the priests in charge of declaring war, the fetiales. A chief obstacle to this reconstruction is that Livy’s account of the levy of the linen legion is notoriously fraught and cannot serve as guide for iconographic interpretation.60 The passage is replete with redundant or illogical details. Livy’s repeated use of linen to etymologize the linen legion from both the tent and the ritual book seems overwrought considering he elsewhere notes that Samnite legions typically wore linen armor. The troops unusually swear two oaths, not a single oath, while it is entirely unclear why a vow of secrecy was even necessary when each initiate was subsequently tasked with recruiting more troops to fill the levy up to 16,000 soldiers.



58 Salmon 1967: 118–​19.

59 Cf. Vidal Naquet 1981; Rouveret 1986.

60 Cornell 1974: 200; Oakley 1997–​2005, vol. 4, pp. 392–​406.

Images  245 Moreover, one wonders what relevance a scene of the linen legion would have had at Cumae at all. Where the assembly of the Samnites took place is not precisely known, but in any case, these events happened in Samnium, rather than Campania. As the painting’s style suggests a date around 300, we may also note an apparent celebration of Rome’s enemies at a time when Cumaeans held partial Roman citizenship and were allied with Rome.61 To get around such issues, Valenza Mele proposes this painting comes from the tomb of a philoromaios, a pro-​Roman elite, and exhibits a style directly influenced by painters in Rome itself as evinced by the Esquiline tomb painting, while lost parts of the tomb at Cumae will have shown Roman triumphs over Samnites. All of this is highly imaginative and leaves little room for agency or innovation on the part of the Cumaean workshop, while formal parallels between the Cumaean fragment and the Esquiling tomb painting are less close than Valenza Mele suggests.62 An alternative might be to read the tomb’s reference to the Samnite coup at Capua in the fifth century BCE, which Livy cites as the origin of the secretive ceremony performed before Aquilonia. Tradition held that the Oscan elites of Capua, having seized control of that city, turned a few years later to conquer Cumae, providing a plausible link to Cumae. Secrecy in the case of the Capuan coup is obviously relevant, and Franz Altheim first suggested that Livy mistakenly inserted irrelevant antiquarian information about the Samnites’ entrance into Campania into his account of the lead up to Aquilonia.63 However, this interpretation, too, only imperfectly fits our written sources. It is not clear, for example, why participants of the Capuan coup would be portrayed as armed warriors. Considering the very fragmentary state of the information we can access about this scene, it seems safest to reserve judgment. Given what appear to be specific and unparalleled details in the scene, the impulse to interpret this scene using otherwise known historical data is understandable and may in the end be more important: even if we cannot reach any certainty, this appears to be a narrative or historical tomb painting. The Cumaean scene is not alone in this regard. A handful of painted tombs from Poseidonia-​Paestum (here, Paestum for convenience) present imagery 61 For the connection between Pietrabbondante and this passage, see Coarelli 1996b. 62 Valenza Mele 1996; Benassai 2001: 218; cf. above pp. 241–​42 for the disposition of figures in perspective at Cumae rather than in registers at Rome, the latter arrangement possibly reflecting the Roman tabula triumphalis. 63 Altheim 1961: 201–​7; expanded upon by Cornell 1974: 201–​2; Coarelli 1996b: 10–​11.

246  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 6.9  Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 114, north wall. Battle scene, 330–​320 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​Ministero della Cultura.

that seems specific and likely historical in content.64 Paestum has one of the richest traditions of tomb painting in the region, extending back to the Greek settlement of the early fifth century BCE and the famous Tomb of the Diver. As the enigmatic iconography of the diving scene in that tomb suggests, workshops in the city were not bound to stock images of aristocratic behavior, although the diving scene was painted on that tomb’s lid, while its interior walls were decorated by standard aristocratic fare of a banqueting scene. It is a similar combination of expected and unexpected that draws our attention from fourth-​century BCE painted tombs from the city’s Lucanian necropolis at Andriuolo. The first, tomb 114, is better preserved and has garnered more discussion. The tomb sits at the margin of the Italic burials in the Andriuolo necropolis and is one of the latest, dated to 330–​320 (Figure 6.9).65 The workshop responsible for painting it also painted more traditional tombs, and here, too, they fill three walls of the rectangular tomb with stock images of returning warriors and a scene of youth and women bearing vases.66 The long north wall visually divided the scene in two with an ionic column. To the left, we 64 Pontrandolfo and Rouveret 1992: 67 connect these Paestan tombs with Hellenistic painting traditions, Fabius Pictor, and the Esquiline. 65 Pontrandolfo 2003. 66 Pontrandolfo 2003; Pontrandolfo, Rouveret, and Cipriani 2004: 30.

Images  247 find a youth who belongs to the adjacent slab’s depiction of a returning warrior. To the right of the column, is a more unusual and elaborate scene of battle that occupies the major portion of the south wall. We see two armies facing each other in hoplite formation with tall, pointed helmets and spear tips peeking out from overlapping shields. Above the left army is a large rock formation or mountain range with the head and shoulders of four oxen to the left and above the slope. Between the two armies is a nude figure facing left who wears a shield and crest and plumed helmet of gold, and he raises his arm as if to throw a javelin at the hoplites facing him on the left. Behind him, the five hoplites are not uniform, but the fourth figure’s head emerges entirely above his shield, and he wears an Attic-​style helmet without plumes or crest in contrast to his adjacent soldiers who wear a peaked helmet like the warriors on the left. There is too much specific and frankly unusual detail in this scene to interpret it is a generic depiction of combat, and this argues for reading it as a particular event. Attempts to fix the scene to known battles largely focus on the profile of the rocky hill, which has been related to peaks near Caudium or Paestum.67 Dominique Briquel offers an extended reading of the painting as a depiction of the Samnites’ ambush of the Romans led by C. Junius Bubulcus in a mountain pass at Bovianum in 311. (Coincidentally, it is in the course of this campaign that Junius Bubulcus vowed the Temple of Salus, which hosted paintings by the grandfather of Fabius Pictor.) The sources on this battle reveal a degree of confusion: Livy mentions cattle among the spoils taken by the Romans (9.31), but Zonaras’ epitome of Cassius Dio states that the Samnites used cattle to disguise their path and set the ambush in which they defeated the Romans (8.1). Briquel thus sees the tomb painting as reflecting the true outcome of the battle, a perhaps ambiguous Samnite victory, later retold by the Junian family as a Samnite defeat to Rome. In his view, the nude figure is Mars leading the victorious Samnite army. It is an ingenious proposition, but it is not clear why a scene of warfare against Pentrian Samnites would be celebrated in a Lucanian elite tomb in Campania, and Briquel points to an alliance between some Lucanians and Samnites made in 326 BCE. However, this agreement came about only, we are told, after most Lucanians aligned with Rome, while no specific evidence mentions Lucanians at Bovianum. Again, if the particular question of which battle this scene depicts is not answerable on



67 For sources, see Briquel 2001: 138 n. 8.

248  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy the basis of comparison with our extant sources, we might instead emphasize the more basic fact that it appears to depict a historical episode. Andriuolo Tomb 114 is perhaps not the only painting in that necropolis to exhibit specific and probably historical information. The long northern wall of Tomb 104a shows a battle scene with multiple individuals advancing against each other, while the other sides of the tomb show more traditional fare including a scene of a returning warrior.68 The long battle scene consists of two groups of three fighters each paratactically disposed in the upper margin of the slab. The rightmost figure appears to be wearing a tunic, rather than armor, and shooting a bow, while between the two groups is a bounding white dog, perhaps on a lead. The scene’s particular and unparalleled detail is intriguing, although the very fragmentary state of this painting leaves us unable to say much more except that its pictures are uncanonical. In sum, we find in Campania a handful of scenes that stand apart from the generic depictions of aristocratic behavior otherwise popular in regional tomb painting. Formal aspects or particular attributes of figures depicted in these scenes distinguish them and lead us to think that they depict particular, known episodes, probably ones in which the defunct took part. While the number of examples is not large, the fact that these “historical” paintings employ repeated formal aspects to distinguish themselves from other more typical iconography suggests we may be dealing with a more established phenomenon than the small number of examples might otherwise suggest. It is also interesting that we can contextualize these paintings with rising interest in commemorating civic status and magistrates, similar to what is seen in contemporary Etruria. A very fragmentary panel from a tomb at Nola shows three togate figures walking behind a horse in what may be a depiction of a procession of magistrates. Another painted panel from Capua shows a seated man whose gray beard and hair indicate his advanced age, who displays various items of political rank, including his toga, a staff and crown, and a gold ring on his left hand. As with depictions of magistrates in Etruria, his face seems to reflect an artistic desire to give him individualized and recognizable features. It is possible that another male figure of advanced age who stands togate on the painted wall of another Capuan tomb also intends to represent a specific magistrate or political leader.69



68 Pontrandolfo and Rouveret 1992: 66–​67. 69 Benassai 2001: 210–​15.

Images  249

Figure 6.10  Spinazzo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 1, back wall. Older male individual, ca. 320–​300 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​ Ministero della Cultura.

Otherwise, a panel from tomb 1, the so-​called tomb of the magistrate from Paestum’s Spinazzo necropolis, shows a central scene of two male figures embracing hands while wearing wreaths and togas, and another panel shows an older man with a snub nose, heavy eyelids, and a gray beard who wears a ring (Figure 6.10). Presumably, these individuals’ dress identifies them as magistrates and members of the civic elite, while they are individualized in terms of height, facial features, and age. Without epigraphic assistance,

250  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy we do not know who these people were, but the individualizing detail of their rendering suggests they were known to their communities. How these Paestan figures relate to the broader trend of painterly interest in magistrates, however, is complicated by the necropolis’ date. The Spinazzo necropolis belongs to the period around the creation of a Roman colony at Paestum in 273, and scholars have argued that these painted tombs represent either the final examples of Lucanian painting at the site, or the first painted tombs of the Roman colony, or even that the necropolis spans the colonial foundation. The iconography of Spinazzo’s tombs in some ways continues that of Lucanian painting at Paestum from the earlier period. However, Helle Horsnaes observes how the figures in tomb 1 (the tomb of the magistrate) wear what appear to be Roman-​style togas, whereas a cloaked figure in the earlier Andriuolo 114, whose historical scene we have looked at, wears a Greek himation.70 That these painted trends may have been mirrored in plastic arts from funerary contexts in the region of Campania is suggested by two figures, one wearing a toga and slippers, interpreted as magistrates, who appear on a sculpted relief from a Greek-​period underground chamber tomb beneath the church of Santa Maria Antesaecula in Naples.71

Daunia and Apulia No other region reveals a corpus of tomb paintings as extensive as what we find in Etruria or Oscan Campania, but we can add to this discussion some material from southeastern Italy.72 Here, Greek influence is more immediate with old and powerful colonial cities like Tarentum and Metapontum. Tarentum held the reputation of a rich artistic tradition, and paintings—​but of unknown content—​are mentioned among those objects taken in triumph from the city by the Romans during the Second Punic War.73 From the exiguous remains of painting from the city’s earlier period, we can count almost no figural themes, and what does exist shows exclusively mythological content.74



70 Horsnaes 2015: 310. 71 Mazzei 1995: 209.

72 For an overview of tomb-​painting in South Italy, see Steingräber 1991.

73 Liv 27.16.7; Plut. Fab. 22; the Tarantine poet Leonidas also refers to painting at Anth. Pal. 6.355. 74 Lippolis and Dell’Aglio 2003.

Images  251 Figural painting does appear in tombs from the region of Adriatic Italy farther to the north in Daunia.75 Some very fragmentary tomb paintings from Canosa di Puglia contain well-​executed figural motifs, mostly showing mythological scenes, but an intriguing fragment of painting from the hypogeum of Sant’Aloia shows two women standing together wearing himations.76 Nothing identifies this scene as mythological, even if its fragmentary state admittedly allows little understanding of the fuller iconography. Another notable example from the region appears in the architecturally elaborate mid-​third-​century BCE chamber tomb of the Medusa, so called after the sculpture of a gorgon’s head that decorated a false pediment at the tomb’s entrance, in Arpi in Daunia. The city formed an alliance with Rome already in the fourth century BCE, although it maintained autonomy up to the Second Punic War and displays a combination of Greek and local cultural influences. The tomb’s walls hosted a series of paintings, mostly lost. One legible scene of several figures confronting Cerberus suggests that at least some of the content included mythological reference to the underworld. Otherwise, in the vestibule was found a rectangular scene painted on a bright red background and composed in the form of a pinax or an imitation of painting on board known elsewhere in the ancient world. The scene depicts a standing male figure wearing a white tunic with colored hem; his face is faded beyond reconstruction. He is accompanied to his left by a groom leading a horse. This would appear to be another depiction of a magistrate, perhaps even a representation of the defunct buried in the tomb.77 Remarkably, above his head is the painter’s signature, Artos pinave, in the Messapic language. This is presumably the artist and presents the only known name of an artisan responsible for any of these images.78 Another echo of historical painting in other regions in this area of Italy comes in scenes of combat on various media, which through the addition of particularizing details appear to carry specific references. Combat is a frequent theme in artistic production in Apulia in the fourth and third centuries BCE. Scenes of war appear in tomb paintings from Canosa and Salapia, and in sculptural relief in the frieze from the Palmieri hypogeum from Lecce.79 The last case from the mid-​third BCE century presents an extensive and 75 For Daunian tomb-​painting, see Steingräber 2002; Pouzadoux 2008; Colivicchi 2011 emphasizes innovative imagery in the region. 76 Mazzei 1995: 206. 77 Mazzei 1995, esp. 208–​9; Colivicchi (2011: 114–​15) notes the changing iconography and connects it with Rome and Central Italy. 78 De Simone in Mazzei 1995: 211–​12. 79 L’Arab 1991.

252  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 6.11  Terracotta relief probably from a funnel vase, identified as Canosan. Metropolitan Museum of Art 12.232.10, image in the public domain.

significantly detailed scene of battle with no obvious mythological reference, and it may be intended to be understood as a specific event, although we cannot recover any further details. Marina Mazzei, the excavator of the Medusa tomb at Arpi, draws attention to series of large polychromatic volute craters found in the tomb and elsewhere in the region made in the third century BCE and featuring scenes of combat. Since combat does not appear in Apulian red-​figure vases except in mythological contexts such as amazonomachies, she suggests that these painted vases belong to a separate artistic tradition related instead to regional tomb painting or sculptural relief, where battle is more commonly depicted. The battle scenes seem composed with the use of cartoons or models posed in different ways to reproduce several combinations of combatants. However, the warriors are often individualized and sometimes hold Italic armor and weaponry, suggesting to her that these painted vases may have been intended to recall specific military encounters.80 Combat also appears 80 Mazzei 1987; elaborated at Mazzei 1995: 254, where formal comparison is made to Andriuolo tomb 114.

Images  253 on a series of funnel-​shaped vases with plastic relief typical of the area of Canosa. The figures are again characterized by different arms and armor, in some cases holding typical weaponry of Gauls, or Celts, and Greeks. Rather than stock aristocratic warfare, these scenes seem intended to display particular episodes in myth or even possibly historical (or “mythistorical”) narrative (Figure 6.11). Notably, one tomb that contained such funnel vases also contained a complete cuirass and a spectacular Celtic helmet now in the Altes Museum in Berlin. Combat scenes and armor style thus appear to connect the vase and grave goods in ways that served to particularize the deceased buried here.81 Relevant here are some monumental red-​figure Apulian vases found at sites in North Apulia painted in the region produced by the so-​called Darius painter and his workshop, active probably if not certainly at Tarentum in the last quarter of the fourth century BCE.82 Many of these vases depict scenes and figures from the exploits of Alexander the Great. In some cases, as on the painter’s name vase found near Canosa di Puglia, figures are labeled in Greek or distinguished by distinctive Persian and Macedonian dress or armor. On one vase, Alexander pursues the Persian king in a scene familiar from other media and based off of models made during or shortly after his lifetime. These vases by the Darius painter, found in scattered sites in largely wealthy tombs, confirm elite interest in this region of Italy in historical culture, but notably this material stands apart from what we have so far considered as it reflects interest in a non-​local past.83 Better parallels are perhaps later material such as the Alexander mosaic from a Samnite house in Pompeii, which shows how Hellenistic history had become a sort of status symbol for Italian elites.

Hellenization? Especially this material from Daunia and Apulia, where the Greek presence was significant, raises the issue of Hellenization. Already, we have also seen hints of the involvement of Greek models in Etruria, for example, where features drawn from Hellenistic ruler portraits seem to have circulated to local portraiture. The effects of international styles taken from Greece upon

81 Oliver 1968; Colivicchi 2011: 113–​14; For “mythistorical,” see McNeill 1986. 82 Massa-​Pairault 1996; Pouzadoux 2005; Ciancio 2014. 83 Ciancio 2014 on the consumption of these vases.

254  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Italian artistic production is a vast and complex topic. Normally, we can only glimpse the interaction in contour, and rarely do we find a simple narrative of acculturation. Research by Andrew Wallace-​Hadrill, Fabio Colivicchi, and others shows how Greek material culture was often adopted by Italians as a means of mediating local status and Roman imperialism by the third century BCE.84 We can be sure that Greek artisans were traveling westward to Italy, as we find their traces variously, but they often seem involved in production for local markets and local tastes.85 The question, then, is the degree to which we should see the Italian historical imagery we have discussed in this chapter as a product of Hellenizing influences. In keeping with recent scholarship, I am skeptical of this view. To be sure, the practice of commemorating events or people in painted form had a good Greek pedigree by the time it appeared in Italy. Tonio Hölscher details the rise of “political art” in late Archaic Greece, and specifically in terms of painting we can cite Pausanias’ mention of painted depictions of two historical battles won by Athens beside scenes of an Amazonomachy and an Iioupersis or depiction of the sack of Troy in the Painted Stoa at Athens built in the agora in the 460s.86 Three earlier historical paintings of Greeks fighting Persians are known, although somewhat sketchily, from passing reference in our sources.87 In the post-​Alexandrian period, depictions of Hellenistic rulers and major events likewise came into vogue in the Greek world, and we have already noted some examples of this trend with the vases of the Darius Painter. Other examples from the peripheral areas of the Hellenistic world are known, perhaps most famously the painted cupola of the royal tomb at Kazanlak, which dates to the fourth century BCE and shows the buried ruler himself seated at a banquet (in the underworld?). This forms closely contemporary evidence for examples like the tomb of the shields discussed above of the Mediterranean diffusion of stylistic trends.88 At the same time, we need to be alert to the implications of casting Italian cultural trends as a product of external influence. As with most discussions of cultural or artistic influence, as Michael Baxandall already cautioned decades ago, the passive/​active process such views imply, and their

84 Wallace-​Hadrill 2008; Colivicchi 2008, 2011; for critique of Hellenism as applied to Rome in the period, see Padilla Peralta and Bernard 2022. 85 Ferrandes 2018. 86 Hölscher 1973; on the paintings of the Stoa Poikile, see now Palagia 2018. 87 Jefferey 1965: 50–​51. 88 Steingräber 2006: 213–​14.

Images  255 subsequent tendency to deprive the receiving culture of agency, are to be avoided.89 In more specific terms, we risk losing sight of the characteristic distinctiveness of the Italian city-​state when we try to understand it as a sort of weaker form of the Greek polis.90 I have elsewhere in this book employed recent discussions of the unique character of the early Italian city in both topographical and political terms, aspects that continued into this period to make it a different physical and sociopolitical landscape than what we find in contemporary Greece. Recent art-​historical work has also granted much greater agency to Italians in this period with regard to the stylistic choices involved in their cultural production.91 When it comes specifically to these Italian tomb paintings, we should bear in mind that often the same qualities that made these images historical made their meaning highly specific to the communities that produced them. That we can no longer decisively recognize the battle portrayed in Andriuolo tomb 114, for example, or recount the accomplishments of magistrates painted on the walls of various Italian tombs, is itself an argument for grounding our understanding of these images in very locally specific contexts. There is another reason for rejecting concepts of Hellenization and the influence of Greek precedents on Italian historical pictures, this time having to do with larger arguments about the nature of Italian historical culture. In Greek examples like the depiction of the battle of Marathon in the Painted Stoa at Athens, or in Alexander’s alleged desire for commemoration across various media, there is a close relationship between representing events in painting and in writing. Events that were famous enough to be depicted in painting in the Greek world of classical Athens or Hellenistic Macedonia were also famous enough to catch the attention of historical authors. However, in Italy we obviously do not see this other side of the coin. If we follow a model that understands Italian historical imagery as primarily a Greek import, then we are more likely to assess the general absence of historiography in Italy other than Rome as a sort of failure, or as a terminated development. A different approach, more profitable to my mind, would be to attribute greater local ingenuity to the developing impulse toward pictorial commemorative practices. If we seek for conceptual precedents in terms of Italian historical culture, we find ample material in the previous chapters of this book. 89 Baxandall 1985; for much the same reasons, recent work on Middle Republican Rome has been resistant to the explanatory power of the concept, as see Bernard 2018: 9–​10; Padilla Peralta 2020b: 6. 90 Smith 2019b: 86, with specific reference to polis religion, but more widely applicable. 91 De Angelis 2008; Hopkins 2023b.

256  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy I return to Prayon’s idea that some painted processions in Etruscan tomb painting intend to show the defunct joining his ancestors in the grave. This fits with what was a very longstanding way of articulating present to past in Central Italian culture and religion. In this sense, these tomb paintings have a historical meaning, but one that owes as much to very long-​term local trends as to any sort of external cultural influence.

Conclusions What I would like to emphasize in concluding this chapter’s review of historical imagery in Italian societies is how, in the various regions examined, historical pictures were a new phenomenon around the time of the fourth century BCE. The feeling of invention is apparent first of all in the François tomb, where we recognize thanks to Coarelli’s analysis formal differences between Greek scenes of the Trojan War and differently staged scenes of Italian exploits. More generally, it is in a moment of iconographical change that we first find historical images. In fourth-​century BCE Etruria, it is within a new repertoire of very different iconography in tomb painting that newfound interest in processions of individualized magistrates and related epigraphic documentation of civic rank appear. Similarly, in Campania or Apulia, including indications of local political leadership in the pictorial decoration of tombs marks a break from previous generic scenes of aristocratic behavior, even as it does not necessarily supplant this earlier imagery. The novelty of these pictorial interests around the same moment in various parts of Italy raises the idea that we might view them as contingent upon external factors, but I have downplayed the role of such factors and cast them instead as part of long-​developing Italian cultural practices. New links with Hellenistic styles, especially in the wake of the campaigns of Alexander, may have played a part in shaping Italy’s historical culture, but for reasons laid out in the last section, these should not be taken as primarily responsible for what we see across Italy. In terms of more locally specific trends, the widespread interest in depicting local political leadership from Etruria to Campania, and even Daunian Arpi, holds an interpretive key. Clearly civic participation had taken on great importance in granting status in communities around Italy. We see here the continuation of the long-​term shift from family-​to city-​based political structures as it played out in representational forms of historical culture. I return to some of the changes addressed in the previous

Images  257 chapter’s discussion of calendrical time. I have connected historical imagery to eponymous dating systems in Etruscan epigraphy, as I would emphasize that new, different modes of constructing time were a part of these wider sociopolitical transformations and their associated political culture. In the fourth century BCE, many of the urban communities of Italy and the Central Mediterranean were beginning to act more like states, in that they were using organized warfare to pursue expansionist territorial ambitions.92 Indeed, combat plays an important role in many Italian images we might term historical, and the magistrative titles found in Etruscan tombs often refer to positions of military leadership. As noted in introducing this chapter, war and victory have been accorded central place in interpretations of Middle Republican historical painting at Rome. However, by no means were war-​making and territorial ambitions exclusive to Roman society in this period, just as historical painting in Italy was not only a Roman phenomenon linked to conquest and the eventual rise of Roman historiography.

92 Terrenato 2019; for warfare’s transformation in this period, see Armstrong 2016, with reference to Rome.

7 Conclusions As the last chapter explicitly noted, this book’s version of the development of historical culture in Italy is different from the canonical story of Fabius Pictor and the birth of Roman historical writing. It is not only that I have focused on Italy as a whole, rather than specifically on Rome, but I have also allowed for a much broader definition of history-​making than one mainly interested in explaining the move to written history. Throughout this book, the governing property of Italian historical culture is that it is contingent upon and constructive of society. This book has covered a large variety of material, and one might ask what a tomb from the Early Iron Age has to do with a priestly calendar from Archaic Capua, or with later paintings of magistrates. My answer to that question is that these are all in some sense attempts to structure the relationship between past and present. All are subsumable under the rubric of historical culture. What changes between these disparate pieces of evidence is the structure of society responsible for their creation, and by focusing on how these and other modes of cultural practice constitute forms of historical culture, we are granted a new lens on Italy’s sociopolitical transformations. The result of my approach has been to assert a deeper history of historical consciousness in Italian society. I remain insistent that this deep history better recognizes the contributions of Italians to the peninsula’s intellectual and cultural formation and that such recognition is important. It helps us realize in turn that some of the ways we have traditionally told the story of historical culture in Italy are incomplete and not inclusive to the wider richness of the evidence. It was never inevitable that an Italian society like Rome would develop history as historiography, as written and linear narrative, but this development was an extension of the power structures of Roman imperialism. In this brief concluding chapter, I would like to tie things together by bringing some further specificity to the sociopolitical transformations we have seen in the preceding chapters. Let us focus our attention on two intersecting themes—​the contingency of historical time, and the role of the

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0007

Conclusions  259 city—​which have emerged time and again throughout this book and may therefore serve to draw analysis together. I close by raising some questions which I hope might stimulate further work of this sort.

From Ancestral Time to Civic Time Chapter 2 looked closely at the ways in which kinship groups, however understood, constructed their relationship with the past through burial, by maintaining spatial links with particular graves and eventually by monumentalizing and marking graves to facilitate their use as destinations for the recurrent placement of the dead and their commemoration by the living. This world reveals the use of a past measured out by real or fictive descent and by ancestral time with successive generations placed within monumental tumuli, or with images of ancestors found depicted on grave-​goods or tomb markers. Writing was important as an index of this sort of construction of the past as it could communicate the filiation and belonging, or in some instances even ethnicity, through which kinship relations were understood to work. The complex development of historical culture from this dominant framework of ancestral time toward new temporally constructed modes of articulating the past forms the topic of much of the rest of the book. Chapters 3 and 4 look at how Italy’s first urban communities marked themselves as either continuous to or distinct from the pre-​urban pasts. We have seen some sensational examples of such engagement, from the remarkable findings at Piazza d’Armi at Veii to the obliteration of an Iron Age aristocratic hut at Populonia. While both sites are in many ways unique, we catch glimpses of similar features elsewhere, and this suggests that neither practice was conceptually isolated in its day. All of this speaks to the ways in which Italians themselves were thinking about their past in the early moments of urbanization. The Greek situation of oikist cult seems different in important ways, and even in Greek colonial sites like Poseidonia material does not exactly conform to practices evident in core Greek poleis. The concluding half of Chapter 4 turned to the figure of Aeneas to look at the mechanisms by which an “invented tradition” of Greek founders legible in ancient sources was applied to an existing landscape of cult in Central Italy.

260  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy Chapter 5 looked more closely at the sort of temporal constructions prevalent in early cities, particularly focusing on the use of natural as opposed to biological phenomena to mark time. While festivals and rituals were probably from some very early point calibrated to the cycles of the sun and moon, I do not think it is coincidental that our earliest firm evidence for the application of calendrical time to ritual in Italy overlaps chronologically with the establishment of the Archaic city. It is likely that a considerable investment in civic religion, particularly visible in temple construction, promoted new ways of constructing time as well. In the case of the ritual use of nails to mark passing years, we see just this overlap between temple-​based religion and the construction of time. Calendrical time was not ancestral time, even as it was not necessarily identical to the temporal framework of linear history. But more expansive ways of articulating past and present will have opened up new modes of history-​making. And indeed, that is just what we saw in Chapter 6, as the fourth century BCE witnessed the rise of historical imagery around Italy. Important to this discussion was the role of the magistrate both as reflective of the new political forms and ideas of civic authority of the time, and in terms of the rise of “magistrative time,” which facilitated synchronization and intercommunity historical thinking.

The Historical Culture of the Italian City The relationship between historical culture and the Italian city seems crucial and merits emphasis. Among other reasons, this is what makes the geographical scope of this study so important. As Chapter 2 showed, the recourse to ancestral time at the grave seems to characterize burial patterns across all of Italy. The sort of civic time that later chapters describe, however, happens in the more restricted ambit of urbanizing areas. We find most of our calendrical information, for example, from Etruria and parts of Campania, which displayed an accelerated urbanization process already by the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. By the same token, Chapter 5 considered the use at a much later date of calendrical time to frame ritual in the Iguvine tables, in texts that have traditionally been connected with the rise of state-​and city-​based entities in that region, perhaps in response to encroaching Roman imperialism.1 This same discussion of geography, cities, and historical culture also seems pertinent to 1 Malone and Stoddart 1994.

Conclusions  261 the historical imagery in Chapter 6, in which the geographical scope expands again to encompass communities around the peninsula, but at a later date by which point settlement patterns were changing more globally around Italy. Cities, I think we may conclude, were an important intensifier of historical culture and served as catalysts for the elaboration of new ways of understanding the relationship with the past. At the same time, this link between cities and history as it emerges in this book was not straightforward. Throughout this study, I have frequently made use of Nicola Terrenato’s recent work, building from the archaeological synthesis of Marco Pacciarelli, who views the Italian urbanization process as characterized by the considerable durability of pre-​urban society.2 The roots of Italian urban society extend back in time to the Early Iron Age or even in some regions to the Bronze Age, when certain forms of political complexity first emerge. Most cities, especially in Central Tyrrhenian Italy, arose in places of longstanding settlement continuity.3 As Terrenato argues, within this scenario the aristocratic leadership of pre-​urban society did not simply disappear, but the continuing power of elite family groups left traces in the political and sociocultural world of the early Italian city. If we extend these arguments to historical culture, we discover a tension between elite kinship-​based society and new urban collectives carried out in their respective modes of constructing of the past. Cities provoked rupture or continuity, while it remains remarkable that we continue to see family groups and elite individuals emerging variously in, for example, early calendars, which were constructed on the basis of natural, rather than ancestral time. As Chapter 5 pointed out, personal names are not something we find in our first direct evidence of Roman calendars starting in the Late Republic. The difference seems meaningful and may throw light on the distinctive character of historical culture and constructions of time in early Italian cities, serving further to underscore how historical practice was everywhere contingent upon local social structure.

Looking Forward This book’s discussion of historical culture ends in the fourth and third centuries BCE, in the opening of what would be the final stages of the Roman 2 Terrenato 2019. 3 Pacciarelli 1991, 2009.

262  Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy conquest and the incorporation of all Italy, what was referred to as tota Italia, into the imperial Roman state. The making of Roman Imperial Italy forms no less complex a stage of history than that described here, but it is worth briefly reflecting in closing on how the creation of this state as a larger political collective even than the city affected historical culture. What did Roman Republican state-​formation ultimately mean for Italian historical culture? One answer is obviously the appearance of written history as a feature of the ancient state. We might speculate that this trend, as it attended Roman imperial expansion, was accompanied also by the “epistemicidal” loss of other forms and possibilities of making history, not only in Italy but elsewhere. Proof of this epistemological imperialism is hard to find, but perhaps that is to be expected considering the effacing effects of the process. Other Mediterranean regions conquered by Rome would make for productive avenues of future study of historical culture through the period of imperial state formation. Here, I want to return to some of the theoretical discussion of the introductory chapter, where I invoked the anthropological work of Andrew Shryock on historical culture and state formation in modern Jordan. Shryock’s study does well to dissolve the links in the teleology toward historiography by pointing out that there was in fact a significant tension between oral and written modes of historical discourse. Among the Jordanian Bedouin, the orality of tribal genealogy was so essential that “this mode of history-​making is not only textless, it is avowedly antitextual,” and “tribal history, in its spoken forms, simply refuses to become historiography.” When in the mid-​twentieth century there was a first concerted effort to write down tribal histories, this was only accomplished out of a political bargain between tribal leaders and the Jordanian state.4 This scenario may be instructive for thinking about Italian historical culture as well. It is telling that we have seen how writing certainly existed and was even prized among elite grave goods in the Early Iron Age. It therefore seems that Italians’ failure to produce history in written form was less a technological failing and more an epistemological choice, a deliberate decision to deploy modes of constructing ancestral history, which were perhaps antithetical to writing. At the same time, we are led to wonder about the sorts of bargains between Italian and Roman elites, or among Rome’s own ruling families, which eventually allowed historiography to emerge. If the making of Roman imperial Italy emerged out of 4 Shryock 1997: 34.

Conclusions  263 negotiation between Roman and Italian elites, as recently suggested, then we might ask how a historiographical tradition came about that largely occluded the accomplishments of the latter group except where they overlapped with the histories of the former.5 Suffice it to say, a lot more was at stake than simple elaboration from archival or unwritten sources to Roman historiography, and the process of becoming historical at Rome, too, might profitably be reconsidered in this light. Returning to contexts beyond Rome, I continue to wonder whether, if we study Italian historical culture merely as background to historical writing, we risk imposing our own form of epistemicide, to borrow again from Dan-​el Padilla Peralta’s discussion, by retrospectively and teleologically taking for granted the shape of a cultural process, which was driven specifically by empire and was in fact never obvious.6 My hope is that this study has cast new light on earlier forms of Italian historical culture as an independent and rich tradition in their own right.

5 For Roman Italy as the result of elite negotiation, see Terrenato 2019. 6 Padilla Peralta 2020b.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Acqua Acetosa di Laurentina, 42 Aeneas, 154–​55 cult-​sites of, 155–​62 introduction to Italy, 162–​65 Agnone, Oscan inscription from, 206–​8 Alexander the Great, 253 Alfedena, 44–​45 Allumiere, 38 Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, 222–​23 Anagni, 98 ancestor masks, 72–​73 ancestral time. See time: ancestral time Anderson, Benedict, 15 anthropology of history, 2–​3 anthropomorphic history, 35 Aosta, 151 Ardea, 94–​95 Castrum Inui, 160–​62 aristocratic culture, 77, 102–​3, 113, 241–​42 hereditary nature of, 34–​35, 69–​70 Aristodemus, 110 Arpi, tomb of the Medusa, 251 Asciano, 78 Aveia, Oscan stele from, 208–​9 Avele Feluske, 50–​51, 70 Bantia, 107 Bartoloni, Gilda, 112–​13, 134, 138 battle of Alalia, 123–​24 battle scenes, 252–​53 Battos I of Cyrene, 129–​30 Baxandall, Michael, 254–​55 Bazzano, 45 Bietti Sestieri, Anna Maria, 41–​42 Blera, 48, 60–​61 Bologna, 48, 52–​53, 66–​67, 105–​6 Bonghi Jovino, Maria, 142–​44

Boni, Giacomo, 22 brontoscopic calendar, 209–​12 burial, 32 and ancestry, 72–​​83 archaeology of, 32–​33, 49 architecture of (see tumuli) Bronze Age, 37–​39 clustering of, 39, 42–​46 cult (see cult: funerary) of dogs, 151 and gender, 48, 63–​64, 139–​40 goods, 63–​64 of infants and children, 49, 64, 71–​ 72, 140–​41 intramural, 133–​34, 139–​40 lamentation, 49 “princely,” 38–​39, 42, 43, 45, 64 and property, 32–​33 recursivity of, 36, 39 and social authority, 36 temporality of, 84–​85 visiblity of, 49–​50 Caere, 69–​70, 78, 122–​27 Banditaccia, 57, 60 Montetosto, 124–​27 Sant’ Antonio, 98, 177–​78 tomb of the Cinque Sedie, 78 Vigna Parrocchiale, 98, 116 calendars and aristocratic culture, 214–​15 as chronography, 215–​16 early Italian, 188–​209, 212–​15 early Roman, 183–​87 fasti, 185 as historical culture, 215 local character of, 214

298 Index calendars (cont.) month-​names, 187–​88, 202–​3 year-​length, 184, 193, 203–​4 See also time: calendrical Campania, 60, 241–​50 Campassini. See Monteriggioni Capestrano warrior, 52–​53, 80 Capitoline. See Rome: Capitoline Capua tile from, 191–​94 iuvilas stelai from, 196–​200 Capua, 245 Caracupa, 139–​40 Carandini, Andrea, 28, 91, 146 Casale Marittimo, 78–​79, 80–​82 Castellina del Marangone, 238 Cato, 11–​13, 15, 17–​18 Celtic culture, 151 Ceri, 64–​65, 77–​78 Chiavari, 44 Chiusi, 64–​65, 75 chronography, 169–​70, 215–​16 cinerary urns, 75–​76 cities. See urbanization citywalls, 108–​10 Colle Ciglio, 44–​45 collective memory. See memory Colonna, Giovanni, 125, 175–​76 Cornelii Scipiones, 6, 220–​22 Cortona, Sodo II Tumulus, 47, 60 Corvaro, 60–​61 Crostoletto del Lamone, 37 Crustumerium, 60 cult, 75–​76, 97 agricultural, 186 ancestors, 72–​73 fertility, 49 foundation (see foundation, of cities) funerary 46–​49 hero-​cult, 127–​29, 138, 153–​54 poliadic, 134 and temples, 101–​2, 167, 185–​86 Cumae, 67–​68, 110, 242–​45 Hyperochus’ Cumaica, 169–​70 Darius painter, 253 Darwin, Charles, 20–​21 Daunia, 251

deep history, 24 De Polignac, François, 128 descent, biological, 34–​35 disciplinarity, 20–​21, 23–​24 Egyptian objects, 66–​67 Elba, 57–​58 Empire, 12–​13, 16, 223 Ennius, 184–​85 epistemicide, 16, 261–​62, 263 eponymous dating. See time: magistrative time ethnonyms, 70–​71 Etruria, 46–​47, 56–​57, 73, 107, 170 Etruscan, 70, 105–​6 Evans-​Pritchard, E.E. 6–​7 Fabius Pictor, 9–​10, 88, 219–​20 Falchi, Isidoro, 22 Falerii Veteres, 70, 150–​51 Faliscans, 67, 70 feasting, 113 Feeney, Denis, 2, 168–​69, 210–​11 Festus, 16–​17 Ficana, 42 Fiji, 2–​3 foundation, of cities 104–​11 founders definition of, 121 Greek, 127–​30 Francavilla Marittima, 43–​44, 66–​67, 99 François tomb. See Vulci: François tomb funerary chapel. See Veii: Piazza d’Armi Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, 32–​33 Gabii, 66–​67, 116–​17 regia of, 95–​97, 116–​17 See also Osteria dell’Osa geneology, 25–​26, 34–​35 See also history: geneology as gens, 33, 60, 69–​70 Geschichtskultur. See historical culture gift exchange, 66–​67 Gjerstad, Einar, 22 Golasecca culture, 44 Gozzadini, Giovanni, 22 grave markers, 50–​55 in figural form, 50–​51

Index  299 Gravisca, 106–​7 Greek colonization, 133–​34, 152–​53 historical painting, 254 and Italian practices compared, 75–​76, 88–​90, 127, 138, 152–​54, 169–​70, 227 origin stories in Italy, 122–​23, 154–​ 55, 164 grid plans, 104 Grotta Porcina, 46 Gubbio. See Iguvium Halbwachs, Maurice, 26–​27 heirlooms, 65–​68 Hellenization, 8, 253–​56 Heraclea, 133–​34 Hernician culture, 98, 179–​80 Herodotus, 122–​27 Heurgon, Jacques, 8 historia, Latin word 28–​29 historical culture, 56–​57 definition of, 25 and memory, 26 social dimension of, 25–​26 and state formation, 257 historical dramas, 28 historiography, 15, 88, 217–​18, 255 Etruscan 11, 231–​33 Greek, 122–​23 Roman, 9–​10 Samnite, 11 history and anthropology (see anthropology of history) and archaeology, 20–​24, 89–​90 definition of, 2–​3 geneology as, 6–​8 of Italian archaeology, 22 and memory (see memory: and history) and mythology, 28, 89–​90, 154–​55, 166, 252–​53 and texts, 21–​23, 172, 216–​17, 262–​63 Hölkeskamp, Karl-​Joachim 20 Homer, 49–​50, 64–​65 Horatius Cocles, 53–​54 human sacrifice, 140–​41 huts, Iron Age, 112–​15 burial inside of, 101–​2

function of, 101–​2 relationship to temples (see huts-​to-​ temple phenomenon) huts-​to-​temple phenomenon, 90–​ 91, 99–​102 in Etruria, 98–​99 in Latium, 94–​98 in Rome, 91–​94 Iguvine tablets, 107, 180–​82, 204–​6 Iguvium. See Iguvine tablets imperialism. See Empire infant burial. See burial: infant invented tradition, 28–​29 Iron Age chronology, 36–​37 Italic languages, 170–​71 Italy as a subject of inquiry, 30 Kainua. See Marzabotto keimelia. See heirloom kinship, 34, 46 and filiation, 69–​70 Lanuvium, 97 Laris Pulenas, 4–​6, 236–​37 Latin, 70 Lavinium, 94 sanctuary of Sol Indiges, 106–​7, 158–​60 tomb of Aeneas, 108, 155–​58 Lecce, Palmieri hypogeum, 251–​52 Lefkandi, 49–​50, 128–​29 Leonidas of Sparta, 17–​18 Liguria, 12, 44, 79–​80 linen book from Zagreb, 200–​4 linen legion, 244 lituus, 77, 108, 233–​34 Lucanians, 247–​48 Lunigiana, stelai of, 79–​80 Lydus. See brontoscopic calendar Macchiabate, 99 magistrates in tomb paintings, 233–​ 34, 249–​50 Magliano, lead from, 194–​96 Marsiliana d’Albegna, 68–​69 Marzabotto, 104, 107, 178–​79 Mastarna, 227–​28

300 Index Matelica, 45 memory, 26, 35 and history, 27–​28 deficiency of, 26–​28 Messapic, 251 Micali, Giuseppe 21–​22 Minto, Antonio, 22 Minturnae, sanctuary of Marica, 179–​80 Momigliano, Arnaldo, 6–​7, 22–​23, 168–​69 Mommsen, Theodor, 21–​22 Monteriggioni, 115–​16 Montescudaio urn, 75 monumentum, 16, 25–​26, 28–​29, 126, 240 definition of, 16–​17 and Greek μνῆμα, 18 in Italic languages, 18 in Roman historians, 17–​18 Müller, Karl Ottfried, 21–​22, 170 Murlo, 64–​65, 78 mythology. See history: and mythology nails, 10–​11, 179–​80 ceremony at Rome, 171–​74 ceremony at Volsinii, 174 at Iguvium, 180–​82 at Marzabotto, 178–​79 at Pyrgi, 174–​77 at Vulci, 177–​78 names, 69–​70 Naples, 249–​50 narrative in sculpture, 222–​23 near-​eastern objects, 66–​68 Niebuhr, Barthold, 21–​22, 232–​33 Nora, Pierra 26–​27 Novilara, 45 obliteration. See ritual destruction Oenotrian culture, 43–​44, 99 Olbia, 7–​8 oral traditions, 28 Oria, 151 Orvieto. See Volsinii Oscan culture, 241 Osteria dell’Osa, 40–​42, 66–​67 Padilla Peralta, Dan-​el, 16, 263 Padua, 105–​6 Paestum. See Poseidonia

painting and narrative, 222–​23 Pallottino, Massimo, 8 Penna Sant’Andrea, 18, 52–​53 Phalanthus of Tarentum, 133 Phoenician, 7–​8, 176–​77, 188–​90 Picenum, 52–​53 Pisa, tumulus on via San Jacopo, 61–​63 Pithecussae, 66–​67 Nestor’s cup, 68, 71–​72 Poggio Colla, 98–​99 Pontecagnano, 43, 48, 70, 85, 99, 110 Populonia, 108–​9, 112 Casone necropolis, 46–​47 House of the King, 112–​15 Piano and Poggio delle Granate necropolis, 57–​58 Poseidonia, 130–​32, 152–​53 Andriuolo necropolis, 245–​48 Spinazzo necropolis, 249–​50 tomb of the diver 245–​46 Po Valley, 50, 52–​53, 105–​6 prehistory, 20–​21 princely tombs. See burial: “princely” Punic. See Phoenician Purcell, Nicholas, 10–​11, 172 Pydna monument, 222–​23 Pyrgi gold tablets, 102–​3, 175–​76, 188–​ 91, 239 nails (see nails: at Pyrgi) Rasna. See Etruscan realism, 249–​50 ritual destruction, 108–​9 Roman exceptionalism, 223 Rome, 116–​18 Arieti tomb, 222 Capitoline, 10–​11, 172 comitium, 53–​54, 108, 147–​48 early burial at, 42 Esquiline, 42 Esquiline painting, 220–​22 Forum, 22, 42, 117–​18, 147–​49 Forum Boarium, 117–​18 foundation of, 104–​5, 145 Lacus Curtius, 28–​29 Palatine, 92, 107–​8, 145–​47 pomerium, 108–​9

Index  301 regia, 91–​92 Sant’ Omobono, 117–​18 temple of Aesculapius, 219–​20 temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 10–​11, 171 temple of Libertas, 219–​20 temple of Salus, 219–​20 temple of the Vestals, 91 Romulus, 92, 145–​50 Roselle, 51–​52, 107 Sabellic, 18 Sabines and Sabine culture, 12, 44–​45 saeculum, 210–​11, 230 Sahlins, Marshall, 2–​3, 35 Samnium and Samnites, 44–​45, 100, 206–​ 8, 241–​45 Sant’Ilario d’Enza, 108 Satricum, 42, 67–​68, 85–​86, 94–​95, 106–​7, 119, 177–​78 sceptres, 64–​65 sculpture, 50–​53, 64–​65, 77–​82 Selinunte, 129 sema, 49–​50 Shryock, Andrew, 19–​20, 262–​63 Sima de los Heusos, 24 Smith, Christopher, 153 società gentilizia. See gens Spina, 105–​6 Spoleto, 64–​65 Spurinnae, 13–​15 statuary. See sculpture Tages. See Tarquinia: origin story of Tarchon, see Tarquinia: origin story of Tarentum, 250 Tarquinia, 4, 13–​15, 42–​43, 50–​51, 233, 238 Ara della Regina, 141–​38 Bruschi tomb, 234 elogia of, 13 origin story of, 89, 142–​44, 211 Pian di Civita, 107–​8, 140–​41 Poggio di Selciatello Sopra, 50, 66–​67 tomb of Orcus I, 235–​36, 239 tomb of the conference, 234 tomb of the pygmies, 234 tomb of the shields, 235–​37, 239

tomb of Typhon, 234 Terrenato, Nicola, 261 Thefarie Velianas. See Pyrgi: gold tablets Thucydides, 2–​3 Thurii, 133–​34 time, 39, 173, 229–​30 and academic disciplines, 20–​21 ancestral Time, 31, 168 calendrical time, 167–​69, 173–​74 deep time, 20–​21 eternal time, 189–​90 event-​based time, 215–​16 magistrative time, 189, 237–​40 and religion, 169–​70 temple time, 173–​74, 183, 216–​17 and state formation, 183 Timpone della Motta. See Francavilla Marittima Tomb of the Scipios. See Cornelii Scipiones Torelli, Mario 13–​15, 125, 143 Tornareccio, 48 Torre Santa Sabina, 37–​38, 50 triumphal painting, 219–​20, 228–​29 Trojan myth, 154–​55, 225–​27, 254 tumuli, 46–​48, 56–​61 evolution of, 58–​60 as historical culture, 61 Umbrian urbanization, 87–​88, 90, 119–​20, 261 city foundation (see foundation, of cities) distinctiveness in Italy, 87–​88, 103 and hero-​cult, 128, 138 Varro, 28–​29 Vaste, 50 Veii, 42–​43, 46–​47, 85–​86 Piazza d’Armi, 108–​9, 134–​38 Portonaccio, 98, 118–​19, 228 Quattro Fontanili, 50 Velletri, 95–​97, 118–​19 Venetic culture, 151 Verucchio, 115–​16 Vetulonia, 50–​51, 58–​60, 78 Vibennae brothers, 227–​28 Villanovan culture, 22 Volscan culture, 118–​19

302 Index Volsinii, 10–​11, 52–​53, 233–​34 Fanum Voltumnae, 174 Volterra, 98–​99, 115–​16 Vulci, 177–​78, 225 François tomb, 224–​33

walls. See citywalls warrior culture, 63–​64 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 21–​22 Wiseman, T. Peter, 28 writing, 68–​72, 172, 216–​17, 237

is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and the author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy.

Advance praise for

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy “Deftly navigating between text-driven Romanocentric narratives and the world of memory studies, Bernard offers an original and revealing study of Italian historical culture. We meet ancestors and founders, cities in the making, and innovative descriptions of time. This is a book that rewrites the way the people of Italy in the first millennium bce thought about their past and, in so doing, refreshes our notion of history itself.” —C H R I S TO P H E R S M I T H , University of St Andrews “Far from being peoples without history, early Italians lived among a multitude of textual and material markers that spoke volumes about their own past. For the first time, this book gives a rich and resonant voice to non-Latin speakers throughout the peninsula, emphasizing the role of their historical narratives, typically overshadowed by those of the Romans.” —N I C T E R R E NATO, University of Michigan

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

SETH BERNARD

Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900-300 

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

BERNARD

The prevailing mode of historical culture in Italy develops alongside the wider structures of society, from the Early Iron Age and the early stages of urbanization to the first encounters with Rome. Throughout the period, Italy’s many communities possessed a far more extensive interest in history than scholarship has previously acknowledged. The book’s fresh account of this historical culture also includes accessible presentation of several recent and important archaeological discoveries. Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy will be of wide interest to historians and archaeologists of Early Rome and Italy, as well as all those thinking broadly about modes of historical transmission, and the intersections between archaeology and history.

Cover image: © Emma Engström 2021

ISBN 978-0-19-764746-2

www.oup.com

9780197647462_EST_CVRmech.indd 1

9 780197 647462

L

ong before the emergence of Roman historical writing, the societies of Iron Age Italy were actively engaged in transmitting and using their past. The first account of this early historical interest, this book provides a sort of prehistory of historical thought in Italy leading down to the first encounters with Roman expansion. From the Early Iron Age to the fifth and fourth centuries bce, Italian communities can be seen actively using burial practices, images, special objects, calendars, and various other media to record and transmit history. Drawing from current anthropological and archaeological theory, the book argues for collecting this material together under the broad rubric of “historical culture,” as the socialized mode of engagement with the past.

SETH BERNARD 06-May-23 16:54:29

is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto and the author of Building Mid-Republican Rome: Labor, Architecture, and the Urban Economy.

Advance praise for

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy “Deftly navigating between text-driven Romanocentric narratives and the world of memory studies, Bernard offers an original and revealing study of Italian historical culture. We meet ancestors and founders, cities in the making, and innovative descriptions of time. This is a book that rewrites the way the people of Italy in the first millennium bce thought about their past and, in so doing, refreshes our notion of history itself.” —C H R I S TO P H E R S M I T H , University of St Andrews “Far from being peoples without history, early Italians lived among a multitude of textual and material markers that spoke volumes about their own past. For the first time, this book gives a rich and resonant voice to non-Latin speakers throughout the peninsula, emphasizing the role of their historical narratives, typically overshadowed by those of the Romans.” —N I C T E R R E NATO, University of Michigan

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

SETH BERNARD

Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past, 900-300 

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

BERNARD

The prevailing mode of historical culture in Italy develops alongside the wider structures of society, from the Early Iron Age and the early stages of urbanization to the first encounters with Rome. Throughout the period, Italy’s many communities possessed a far more extensive interest in history than scholarship has previously acknowledged. The book’s fresh account of this historical culture also includes accessible presentation of several recent and important archaeological discoveries. Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy will be of wide interest to historians and archaeologists of Early Rome and Italy, as well as all those thinking broadly about modes of historical transmission, and the intersections between archaeology and history.

Cover image: © Emma Engström 2021

ISBN 978-0-19-764746-2

www.oup.com

9780197647462_EST_CVRmech.indd 1

9 780197 647462

L

ong before the emergence of Roman historical writing, the societies of Iron Age Italy were actively engaged in transmitting and using their past. The first account of this early historical interest, this book provides a sort of prehistory of historical thought in Italy leading down to the first encounters with Roman expansion. From the Early Iron Age to the fifth and fourth centuries bce, Italian communities can be seen actively using burial practices, images, special objects, calendars, and various other media to record and transmit history. Drawing from current anthropological and archaeological theory, the book argues for collecting this material together under the broad rubric of “historical culture,” as the socialized mode of engagement with the past.

SETH BERNARD 06-May-23 16:54:29