Ad Infinitum: A Biography of Latin - Nicholas Ostler

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Aeneas carrying his father to safety on the reverse, and a votive statue of Aeneas and his father. Aeneas, the Trojan refugee to Italy, was a cultural hero of the Etruscans before the Romans.

      For this, the cultural background turns out to fit pretty well. Not only is there a story in Herodotus7 that the Tyrsēnoi migrated from Asia Minor (admittedly it is a story that they came from Lydia, about two hundred kilometres south of Troy),* but Hellanicus, a contemporary historian whose works have not survived, also apparently related that the Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians (i.e., pre-Greek inhabitants of the Aegean) who had migrated to Italy when driven out by the Greeks.8 It was also a persistent theme of ancient folklore that some Trojans at least had escaped from the destruction of their city and headed west. Virgil, Rome’s national poet, of course employed this as the basis for his Aeneid, with Aeneas leading a party of escaped Trojans ultimately to settle in Latium, there allying with the native Latini (specifically against the Etruscans) to found the race of Romans. And in the previous generation Julius Caesar himself had liked to trace his family’s ancestry back to Aeneas’ son Iulus: during his dictatorship he struck a coin that showed Venus on the front and Aeneas leaving Troy on the reverse.

      But it is clear from votive statues found in the city of Veii (dated to 515–490 BC), and a score of vases (525–470) found farther north, especially in Vulci, all depicting Aeneas dutifully carrying his father to safety, that Aeneas the heroic Trojan survivor was already a cult figure, and a putative founding father, among the Etruscans themselves before the Romans appropriated him.9

      Pursuing the origins of the Etruscans any further would not enhance an understanding of their impact on Latin. But the mystery remains, if anything, deeper today than ever before. Suffice it to say that trails of evidence lead in two apparently incompatible directions: one to the island of Lemnos, not far from Troy, where an epitaph from the late sixth century BC in a language closely related to Etruscan has been found, and even read; but the other to the eastern reaches of the Alps, where another language, clearly but more distantly related to Etruscan, and known as Rhaetic, survives in inscriptions from 500 to 50 BC. Clearly Etruscan had some link with the eastern Mediterranean; but rather than being an import from Asia Minor, the language may have been a remnant from Europe’s pre-Indo-European past.10

      The Etruscans left abundant evidence of how luxurious a life their aristocrats were able to lead—and perhaps hoped to continue in the afterlife. Some of their tombs were decorated with exquisite, brightly coloured wall paintings, which show much feasting, juggling, lyre and flute music and dancing, wrestling and game playing, enjoyment of gardens, hunting, and fishing. The coffins themselves were often elaborate statues, showing the deceased reclining as in life, occasionally as devoted couples lying down to dinner. Pottery and the engravings on the backs of mirrors show much of the same, but add more sober themes: sacrifice of animals, consultation of entrails, soldiers with crested helmets, warships, battle elephants, sea creatures including seals and octopuses.

      The only work to match them at the time came from Greece or the Near East, and this again underlines how advanced the Etruscans were in the Italy of the sixth century BC. The city that was to become modern Bologna began as an Etruscan foundation of this period, Felsina. They had by then expanded beyond their cities in Etruria to control the full extent of the Po’s drainage in northeastern Italy and were also influential along the southwestern coast of Italy, well to the south of Rome. How was it that this political and cultural advantage did not translate into a permanent empire? And if this had happened, is there a chance that Etruscan might have supplanted all the Italic languages, including the then rather insignificant Latin?

       Urn of the Spouses. This funerary image, now in the Museo Guarnacci, shows an ideal picture of Etruscan marital harmony.

      Rome was the immediate neighbour to the south of their northern domains, which they seem to have dominated for a time, but then lost. The direct evidence that they controlled Rome was the Etruscan name (properly spelled Tarchunies) that was borne by two of Rome’s latter kings, Tarquinius Priscus (‘the Ancient’) and Tarquinius Superbus (‘the Proud’). The emperor Claudius (himself a serious Etruscologist, but writing six centuries after the events) added that according to Etruscan sources the intervening king Servius Tullius had also been an Etruscan, whose name in that language was Mastarna.11 Yet a fourth example of an Etruscan ruler of Rome exists in the person of Lars Porsena of Clusium, who (according to a poorly kept secret)* conquered Rome and imposed disarmament on her, in the aftermath of the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus.*

      So Rome must have been dominated by Etruscan aristocrats or kings for at least a century. Whatever the precise political arrangement,† it was from Etruscans that they derived their tradition that kings, and hence magistrates, should wear purple. And from Etruscans came the symbol of their authority, the fascēs, a bundle of rods surrounding an ax, showing the right to give out corporal, and capital, punishment. Beyond politics, it is quite clear that the Etruscan language too had considerable influence on Latin.

      Etymology and lexicography were not skills that flourished in the ancient world, so there is no full statement by Romans of the Latin vocabulary’s debt to Etruscan. Nevertheless, it is possible to use modern methods on ancient materials. If we class together all the words that Roman authors tell us are of Etruscan origin, adding others whose origin is clear from their use in Etruscan inscriptions, a family resemblance emerges among them. Then, with an idea of what it is about a word that makes it look Etruscan, we can look for other such words.12 The outcome is a substantial harvest, and we can see that the effect of Etruscan on Latin was quite comparable to the effects on medieval English of French after the Norman conquest of 1066—a major cultural infusion, essentially of an early urban culture on a more countrified society.‡

      One first linguistic point of note—which has implications for the cultural history of the period—is that the words borrowed are overwhelmingly nouns. The only verbs we can find are, in fact, derived from nouns, and this is why they are all stems ending in ā-, referring to actions performed with some newfangled Etruscan item: gubernāre ‘to steer’ (a ship), from guberna ‘steering oars’; iduāre ‘to divide’, from idūs ‘the Ides, halfway through a month’, laniāre ‘to butcher’ (meat), from lanius ‘butcher’, triumphāre ‘to celebrate victory’, from the Etruscan victory shout triumphe, and fascināre ‘to charm’, originally using a strange phallic object, the fascinus. This preference for nouns suggests that Etruscan words came in as names for unfamiliar objects; it does not show (as later, when Greek words flooded into Latin) that an important segment of the population was bilingual.* These are not the signs of a Roman elite who spoke (or thought) in Etruscan, but of Romans coming to terms with Etruscan practices, and (to some extent) Etruscan institutions.

      The keynote is above all urban. It shows Etruscans leading the way in the architecture (atrium ‘forecourt’, columna, fenestra ‘window’, fornix ‘arch’, grunda ‘gutter’, turris ‘tower’, mundus ‘crypt’), particularly temple architecture with attendant waterworks (favisa ‘tank’, cisterna). Domestic conveniences were often named from this source: lanterna ‘lantern’, catēna ‘bracket’ or ‘chain’, verna, a slave not bought but born and bred in the family. City trades tended to have Etruscan names: the word for a shop or tavern is taberna, the original

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