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VIII. BUT FIRST, VEII
You pass through the rather typical modern exurbia, where the circumferential (circum, ‘round’ + ferens, ‘carrying’) highway carries you through high-rise hotels, gas stations, and blocks of apartment buildings. You are soon on the S-2 motorway headed north into heart of ancient Etruria, crawling up into the Sabatine Mountains around Bracciano. "Back there, on the Tiber," Darwin says, "originally was the border between Latium in the south and Etruria in the north. At one time, this whole area was a kind of marshy, scary wilderness. Nobody knows exactly where the ancient Etruscans came from. The Latins were primitive hill folk when the Etruscans already had a civilization with cities, armies, iron-age industry, and quite a burial industry. The Etruscans treated women as equals, and originally were quite relaxed about things both the Romans and we moderns tend to get uptight about—like having sex in public places in broad daylight. They built houses for the dead that resembled the houses of the living, and in time their rituals became more and more involved with the underworld. They disappeared, but they left quite a mark on Roman society."
Amalthea speaks up with a noticeably partisan edge in her voice, to which Darwin reacts rather briskly, and you wonder what that dynamic is all about. She says: "The Etruscans had funeral games in which they made people kill each other, which gave the Romans the idea for their own bloodbath that went on for centuries."
Darwin shoots back: "Funeral games were common throughout the Mediterranean."
"Not what they became under the Romans," she says.
Darwin says to you: "We tend to see Rome not as a sort of island in the middle of nowhere, but that is wrong. The Romans were one city out of many all over the Mediterranean. Some were much older than Rome, like Massilia (Marseilles) which goes back practically to the Bronze Age. The Indo-European language group (of which the mysterious Etruscans were not speakers, but almost everyone else was) spread far and wide during the Bronze Age. The use of bronze goes back to around 3600 B.C. The high points of the Bronze Age included the Egyptian Old Kingdom, Mesopotamia, the Phoenicians (Kana'a, or Canaanites to the Hebrews), and Minoan civilization. It all started to end after the huge volcanic eruption of Thera around 1500 B.C. This caused a terrible earthquakes and tidal waves that wiped out the Minoans on Crete. Bronze Age civilization dragged on for a few more centuries, at the tail end of which is celebrated in Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Then followed a disastrous wave of barbarian invasions that left a 600-year-long dark age. Classical Greece emerged. The Romans ended up dominating the entire show. They destroyed the Carthaginians so thoroughly that they not only killed or sold everyone into slavery, and leveled their cities, but actually plowed salt into the ground at the ruins of Carthage (in North Africa, opposite Spain) so nothing would ever grow there again."
"Very thorough," you agree.
Amalthea asks: "Have you ever been to the Etruscan sites?"
Darwin, ignoring your answer, says: "Good idea. It will help capture perspective."
It is a pleasant drive. Amalthea offers a huge sigh of pleasure in the fresh air and sunny blue sky. The countryside lies flat here, with occasional stands of cypress that add a solitary, somber sort of sentinel look. It is the characteristic look of this ancient countryside, as the English expatriate D. H. Lawrence described in his 1932 classic Etruscan Places. Lawrence’s first stop, like yours today, is Veio (ancient Etruscan city of Veii). "The Etruscans buried their dead in sarcophagi inside imitation houses," Amalthea explains. "By contrast, the Latins cremated their dead and buried them in urns shaped like the primitive huts in which they lived. They were two very different cultures, but they borrowed from each other. You’ll find a mix of the two cultures overlapping in the Tiber valley."
Darwin adds: "The Latins were an upstart bunch, a very determined lot who imitated their betters in the Etruscan cities without giving up their own identity. In the end, the Romans ended up digesting the Etruscans the way a snake eats a duck. The Etruscans vanished, leaving entire cities of the dead, huge cemeteries with round tumulus tombs—almost totally looted, but remarkable stuff sits in museums."
Amalthea drives through a pleasant little town that was, at the end of the Bronze Age, one of the major trading centers in this part of the Mediterranean. Following narrower roads, she finally pulls over in a sun-dappled grove by the roadside, and you get out. You stretch your legs, marveling that you are barely 15 miles from Rome and it’s another world. Sensing your thoughts, Amalthea says: "Get used to the countryside. Most of old Rome wasn’t all bleached pillars and sightless statues."
"None of those existed," Darwin says with a bit of a scoff. "The ancient Mediterranean people wouldn’t have been caught dead creating a temple or a statue the color of dead plaster. Either they used gorgeous marble, whether the color of sugar or a deep black or cocoa, or red swirling with yellows and ambers—all the many hues nature provides, that glow when the rock is polished to a glass-like finish, or if they used a baser stone, they most likely stuccoed it or at least whitewashed it."
"Sort of a riot of colors, eh?" you say.
"Absolutely," Darwin says. "The idea was to imitate life as closely as possible, to preserve the image of life through the natural wasting caused by time and death. Come, let’s take a short walk." You follow him into the necropolis, or the city of the dead, which accompanied every self-respecting Etruscan town. In many cases, the necropolis was larger even in those days than the city of the living. "The Romans had a love-hate relationship with the Etruscans," Darwin says as you walk along a little modern asphalt road to the outskirts of the first streets in the necropolis. You inhale the scent of flowers. You hear the drone of bees and the flutter of birds’ wings. The wind sighs pleasantly in the trees and glades, and you can well imagine how the ancients liked to get away from noisy, crowded Rome if they had the money, and spend time in a country villa, in any house no matter how small, just to enjoy this peaceful atmosphere.
"The Romans admired the Etruscans, who were masters at iron smelting, sculpture, medicine, and many arts. The Etruscans taught the Romans much about their special art, hydrology, the draining of marshes and the maintenance of irrigation systems. Since Rome originally consisted of nothing more than several low hills sitting in the middle of swamps (the Tiber being a classic Meander, a type of river named after the original in Greece, that winds back and forth, or meanders, like a snake), such information would have been most useful to the Romans. Equally useful to the Romans was the Etruscans’ fame in divining omens in nature, like the signs in how a flight of birds cut through the sky overhead, or how an animal’s liver and guts looked when slaughtered in a divine ceremony. The Romans were pretty good at divination (to prophecy, from the Latin dis, divis, or deus, ‘god,’ related to the Greek theos).
"Most of what we know about the Etruscans we know from the Romans," Darwin says, "and of course they had to somewhat put the Etruscans down. In fact, the first kings of Rome after the legendary founding in 753 B.C. were Etruscan, and the Romans overthrew the last Etruscan king in 509 B.C. to set up the Republic. The Romans were very sensitive (until the Empire) about their sort of early democracy, their division of powers, and a number of other features that helped the Founders of the United States in thinking how the world’s first modern democracy should be organized. The Romans were touchy about the Etruscans, therefore, thinking of them as happy-go-lucky, lazy people who didn’t have a care in the world, while the Romans were just frantic about building, conquering, ruling, and so forth. The Romans were either giant liars or filled with self-delusion, for the Etruscans taught them how to drain marshes, build aqueducts. They taught them how to run a road from A to Z with stones so straight and tight they can take a merrily droning Vespa 2,500 years later without spilling its rider. The Etruscans are always shown in their tomb paintings and statues, particularly in funerary statues in their tombs, as smiling a famous mysterious smile as intriguing as the Mona Lisa’s. You never see a Roman statue with that happy, lazy smile—the Romans always look constipated, like they have barely finished eating and must rush off to conquer another nation."
Amalthea adds: "There was a dark side to that Etruscan smile."
"Yes," Darwin says. "As Lawrence and others pointed out, the Etruscan world became half sunshine and half unbridled hell as their civilization came to an end."
"Not hell like modern hell," she says. "Originally it was all sunshine, and later it descended more and more into that infernal hell of monsters and terrible omens, as they saw their culture disappear, their beautiful pale women married off to Roman businessmen, their strong red men driven off their farms and chased into the city for the bread and games of the circus. That must have been living hell for them, much like mission life for native North Americans or Australians or New Zealanders under white people."
"Avernus," you contribute, still working on that thought. "The lake where the birds drop dead."
"Yes," Amalthea says. "Inferno doesn’t actually mean ‘hot,’ like in the Italian word forno, ‘oven,’ like in furnace. Inferno refers to underneath, the underworld, below, inferior, which the Greeks called Hades, and which the Romans called Avernus or Infernus. It wasn’t so much hot, but dark and scary."
Darwin adds: "In Dante’s Inferno, in fact, the innermost circle of Hell is not hot at all, but freezing cold beyond the imagination. To a guy in sunny Italy, that would have been about the most dreadful thing he could imagine, like the world’s worst ice cream headache."
The three of you saunter along the quiet road, where shade alternates with sunshine. Amalthea has a slight, satisfied look, almost like that sort of smile, as she ambles along with her hands in her pockets and her dark hair flying, while her sunglasses gleam. The day is quite warm, and Darwin has his hat in his hand while he mops his forehead and neck. It’s not the sweat of sickness, but the good perspiration of a walk in the hot sun. Now you enter among the tombs, and the ancient walls seem mute with secrets. Black doorways beckon, that might long ago have been respectfully sealed.
D. H. Lawrence, in a beautiful turn of phrase, says "the Etruscan cities vanished as completely as flowers." You take a deep breath of the thick summer air, listening to the cicadas rasping in a big tree here or there, but generally a balmy silence. You note the carpet of white and yellow, red and green, on the open meadows on hilltops all around, and you can appreciate how short and breathtaking is the life of a flower, and how totally it vanishes. That was perhaps how the Etruscans saw life, and therefore the universe: short, sunny, happy, and full of sex and song and wine. They were an unbridled people, apt to give way to their urges in public, or so the prim, austere Romans tell us. These are the same Romans who refer to the generative organs as pudenda, ‘shameful,’ and yet their custom was to sit in a public latrine without dividers, while entertained by singers and entertaining each other with gossip, and do their business for all the world to smell. Que puzzo! What a stink, from forty people sitting side by side, and pity the poor slaves who had to clean their behinds with a vinegar-soaked sponge on a stick and keep the flow going. Flow was not a problem in later architecture near huge baths like those of Diocletian and Caracalla, where rivers of warm wastewater from the bathing pools thundered through subterranean tunnels and into the Tiber, and took all the human excrementa along; but woe in some poor neighborhood near a tenement! Anyway, these same Romans who could crap en masse commented in puritanical horror at the alleged sight of Etruscan men and women "doing the thing" (facere) on the edge of a public fountain or in a park beside the town’s main temple. Veii (modern Veio), just 12 miles from Rome, might as well have been in a different universe.
Amalthea, reading your thoughts, utters a sharp, worldly laugh. "The Etruscans didn’t conquer the world, not because they couldn’t, but because they couldn’t be bothered. Too busy enjoying life."
Darwin for once agreed. "The Romans, for all their great points, were hard on themselves and harsher with the rest of the world. Somehow it all fell apart, got rotten, with the emperors, but an efficient army and navy and bureaucracy kept it going centuries after it should have turned brown and fallen from the tree. It’s another of the mysteries I’d like to explore by seeing it first-hand."
"And yet," Amalthea says, "if you get too close, you may not understand the forest because you will be blinded by too many trees."
You listen to their chatter, but your thoughts fly back to D. H. Lawrence. He wrote about the constant, instant flitting back and forth between light and shadow, between this world and that other. Lawrence would have sensed, literally ‘in his bones,’ being severely tubercular and declining, that he was within 24 months of death when during the 1920s he wrote his thoughts about the Etruscans. Born in 1885, he died in 1930 at age 45. He was not a trite, conventional Classicist, but a keen observer, an original. His writing was forbidden in the Victorian straight-jacketed English speaking world—in the United States until well into the 1950s it could mean jail time to bring a copy across the border. For a small, frail man he explored with great courage the worlds of love between men and women. Just so, he was not afraid to reach out to the truths he felt among these wind-blown mounds overgrown with wild wheat (where he says there were no flowers, but you see a riot of white and yellow today). What shocked the conventional English, and their anglophile clones from the American upper crust, was not only the sunny idolatry they perceived among the descendants of those red-skinned Etruscans, but the Indus Valley-style phallic and vulval symbols—huge priapic stones proudly standing outside the entrances of the tombs. To the Victorians, who felt for modesty’s sake they must even put paper pants on the Christmas goose or the Thanksgiving turkey, this was more than they could endure without blushing, although it was most likely part of the unspoken lure that drew them here on their Grand Tours (like Henry James’ Daisy Miller, who sickens and dies in the unhealthy air of sexually dangerous Rome). The Italian poor, you think, were surely no more barefoot nor less moral than the dwellers in London or New York’s infernal slums and Hell’s Kitchens, right under the lofted noses of the self-righteous. This was the Italy to which the austere Anglicans (let alone a Calvinist!) of E. M. Forester’s A Room With A View came, to risk their souls in the unbridled Mediterranean sunshine, perhaps eating a baccala and drinking a few glasses too many of dark red paisano (‘pagan’ or country wine) while reciting memorized lines of The Aenead. Their species found it titillating to return to the safety and drizzle of Buttonhole-on-Gravyboat and secretly gloat at the gossip following them like a cloud of insects.
Here’s the story often told, of the Etruscan tomb opened in modern times. It was the tomb of a well-off man and woman (and in other variations it is a warrior in full, archaic armor resembling not at all that of the Romans but more that of Homer’s Trojans and Achaeans). For a moment, the warrior lies before you as lifelike as if he were asleep (or the Etruscan woman in arms of her old man, who lies behind her, holding her shoulders lovingly while smiling that intriguing smile of inner radiance), and in the next instant the long-dead flesh crumbles away into atoms. One moment you see even the blush on their cheeks, and the sclera of their half-closed eyes, and the next moment they are gone, like the cities, like the flowers, like life itself. All that remains in the dusty air is a brief golden glow, which then fades like a light going out.
In this pre-Christian chthonic (Gk khthon, ‘earth,’ khthonios, ‘in the earth’) world, perhaps death itself is light as life and can be blown away by a gust of air so delicate it can barely make a candle gutter for an instant. You find it hard to pull away, so drawn in are you by faded wall paintings of feasting, of hunting, of dancing, and yes, of fighting. These funeral games, involving a few heroes or a few criminals, maybe both, prefigure the grim games the Romans staged for centuries long after Etruscan times. The dying Lawrence has it that the old religion of the Etruscans was later squashed by Greek and Roman mythology to work not with nature and within nature, seamlessly and effortlessly as that contented smile, but against nature to create a religion in which the defeat of nature leads to an afterlife of hell and purgatory, nothingness. The paradise from which you are thus expelled remains forever closed, except to censorious postmasters and customs officials who seize and burn his books, and arrest those trying to carry, say, James Joyce’s Ulysses into the U.S. to Harvard. (That this occurred almost contemporaneously with Prohibition and the Monkey Trial does not surprise us—given, for example, the Roaring Twenties, we’d expect to find the Romans in some somber Bible-hall, but the Etruscans laughing it up in a speakeasy).
At the urging of Darwin and Amalthea, you pick up your pace, remembering where you will be by nightfall. Before you know it, you are back in the car, hurtling along under a constant fall of sunlight through leaves, like a golden sunshine, swept along with the wind and flying blossoms loosened by your passage.
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