Religion in Ancient Etruria (Wisconsin Studies in Classics) - Softcover

Jean-Rene Jannot

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299208443 ISBN 13: 9780299208448

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005

Synopsis

This lively translation of Devins, Dieux et Demons is the first English-language edition of Jean-Rene Jannot's highly informative examination of Etruscan religion. Jannot tackles this elusive subject within three major constructs - death, ritual, and the nature of the gods - and presents recent discoveries in an accessible format. Jane K. Whitehead's translation updates Jannot's innovative text and introduces readers of all types - students, scholars, and the general audience - to this thorough overview of ancient Etruscan beliefs, including the afterlife, funerary customs, and mythology. Provocative insights and thoughtful discussions contribute to an understanding of the prophetic nature of Etruscan culture. Jannot investigates the elaborate systems of defining space and time that so distinctly characterize this ancient society. Jannot offers a unique perspective that illuminates the origins of some of our own ""modern"" religious beliefs. This updated edition includes more than 100 illustrations that depict early temples, statues, mirrors, tablets, and sculptures.

About this title

About the Author

Jean-René Jannot is professor emeritus of history and archaeology at the University of Nantes, France. Jane K. Whitehead is an assistant professor at Valdosta State University and director of the La Piana excavation in Italy.

Excerpt. İ Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Religion in Ancient Etruria

By Jean-Ren Jannot

THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN PRESS

Copyright İ 2005 Jean-Ren Jannot
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-299-20844-8

Contents

Illustrations........................................viiTranslator's Note....................................xiiiPreface..............................................xv1 The Etrusca Disciplina.............................32 Rites of Divination................................183 Sacrificial and Funerary Rites.....................344 The Afterworld.....................................545 Sanctuaries........................................726 The Buildings......................................967 Worshippers........................................1258 Gods...............................................1439 The Divine.........................................171Conclusion...........................................182Notes................................................187Thematic Bibliography................................203Glossary.............................................215Illustration Credits.................................219Index................................................221

Chapter One

The Etrusca Disciplina

The religious knowledge of the Etruscans was contained in a group of texts collected into books and called generically the etrusca disciplina. These texts, known today only from small and out-of-context fragments, are of the utmost importance. They were regarded a posteriori, by the Etruscans themselves, as both the theoretical foundation and the justification for Etruscan civilization as a whole.

KNOWLEDGE REVEALED

The Etruscan religion has often been called a "revealed" religion because it has "prophets" such as Tages and Vegoia. This term is both accurate and ambiguous. What is "revealed" is not the existence of god; it is not even a theology, a mythology, or an explanation of the order of the world. It is exclusively a series of rites and sacred techniques that permit one to enter into contact with the world of the divine, and to receive its signs and its complex cosmology, which defines the space in which the gods act. It is a revelation of cultic and divinatory practices, of religious customs and acts. These were eventually written down and formed a veritable literature.

Tages

Several stories involve supernatural contacts with the world of the gods, the most famous being that of Tages. Cicero and Ovid preserve the story: while he was working his field, a peasant of Tarquinia discovered, to his astonishment, a child with the features of a sage old man, a puer senex, emerging from the earth in the middle of the furrow that the farmer had just plowed. A consecrated place in front of the famous Ara della Regina Temple at Tarquinia may mark this founding event (see chapter 5). This story clearly shows that the Etruscans wanted to present themselves as autochthonous. The child expert in things divine is a very widespread theme, even extending into Christianity.

The farmer could not help but cry out, and at his call came all the inhabitants of Etruria, or, more exactly, "all the peoples"-that is, the Twelve Peoples comprising the nomen etruscum, who thus would appear to be religious dependents of Tarquinia. They then received from the lips of this earthborn child-sage named Tages the immense knowledge of sacred things that would become the religious patrimony of the whole Etruscan people. The words of Tages were collected, transcribed, and disseminated, and they came to form the basis for the religious science of the principes of Etruria: those local kings whose political power was founded in part-probably in great part-on the knowledge of ritual. One might say that from this time on all the kings of Etruria had the same beliefs and the same customs.

In all likelihood it was thus that the Etruscan people was formed and defined: that nomen etruscum whose uniqueness had so impressed the ancients. This, too, is how the most prestigious of the sacred books appeared-the libri tagetici, whose redaction was believed to have been undertaken by Tarchon, the mythical founder of Tarquinia. If one credits the various traditions, only the libri haruspicini can be traced to this source with any certainty, but the libri acherontici are frequently included with them, since they were also part of Tarquinian tradition.

This topographic precision is important. Revealed at Tarquinia and carefully compiled by one of its kings, the precepts of haruspicy seem strongly attached to that city where, at the beginning of the Imperial period and under the stimulus of Roman power, the college of sixty haruspices was later reestablished. A relatively late (end of the fourth or beginning of the third century B.C.) engraved mirror (fig. 1.1), found in a tomb at Tuscania, depicts Tages, called Pava Tarchies, wearing the hat of the haruspex. His left foot is resting on a rock to ensure contact with the earth, the Etruscan goddess Cel, the mother of all revelation. He is holding a liver in his left hand and is bending over it, examining and interpreting signs on its lobes. He is surrounded by gods, among them the famous Veltune, who is identified with the Etruscans' chief or primary deity (deus Etruriae princeps), Voltumna (Varro, Ling. 5.46). Also present is a young man labeled Rathlth, who seems to have some of the attributes of Aplu/ Apollo. Tarchunus, holding the long cane that is the sign of his rank, is centrally placed. He is attentively watching the "lesson" in haruspicy given by the mythical author of the libri tagetici.

Vegoia

These sources chiefly rely on Tarquinian traditions. But other cities had their prophets and their revelation, too. At Chiusi, a prophetess named Vegoia (or Vegoe), whom some describe as a Muse, revealed the laws and practices relative to hydraulic works, surveying, and delimiting property, and transmitted these rules to Arruns Veltymnus. Also attributed to her were the most important texts on the interpretation of lightning.

It is tempting to believe that this tradition of a revelation at Chiusi was part of the religious patrimony of a local royal family and contributed to its prestige. The fragments that have come down to us evoke a sort of cosmology and mention the calculation of the Etruscan saecula. Ten of these time measurements were supposed to enfold the whole of Etruscan history. These texts became important; Augustus in fact had a copy transferred to the Temple of Palatine Apollo, where they lay next to the Sibylline Books and the Books of the Marsi. The prophetess Vegoia calls to mind the nymph Egeria, who similarly counseled King Numa at Rome.

SACRED TEXTS AND GREAT FAMILIES

Thus it seems that the great families who ruled the city-states at their foundation enjoyed privileged relations with the world of the divine, and the prestige of this relationship reinforced their power. Several representations, difficult to interpret, depict the two Vibenna brothers, Aulus and Caelius, fierce opponents of the Roman regime of Tarquin. They are shown capturing or holding prisoner a certain Cacu, who was a bard, soothsayer, or prophet, and who probably served the Etruscan tyrant of Rome. One such scene occurs on an engraved mirror from the end of the fourth century B.C., found at Bolsena and now in the British Museum (fig. 1.2). Here one can easily discern the preoccupied soothsayer, prisoner of the Vibenna brothers. His prophetic discourse is being transcribed onto tablets by an assistant named Artile. To control a soothsayer or a prophet, to possess the sacred books, to have access to the etrusca disciplina: this is to exercise the greatest and the only real power.

When the Etruscan cities lost their independence, when they became simple federated cities (civitates foederatae), or worse, municipia, the great families who continued to live there dutifully guarded these sacred texts, which were the sign of their nobility and the gauge of their former power. Augustus, wishing to restore the religions of a pacified Italy, sought to gather up these texts and collect them in Rome under his authority. By so doing, he would appropriate to himself the same sacerdotal and scriptural authority that was the property, and no doubt one of the bases of power, of the Etruscan aristocracy.

But the traditional texts of Tages, Vegoia, or Cacu were not the only properties that the unifying Roman power wanted to possess. All the priests, magistrates, or important people pursued studies that we would term "theological." They wrote treatises on rites and liturgy and greatly increased the volume of exegeses and speculations. On a beautiful late third-century sarcophagus from Tarquinia (fig. 1.3), L(a)ris Pulenas, wreathed in a garland, reclines on the cushions of his luxurious couch and unrolls a volumen inscribed with nine lines. The deceased seems prouder of his writings on sacred subjects than of his magisterial or priestly duties, and he makes it known: an cn nethsrac, "He compiled this book [of haruspicy]" (fig. 1.4).

In fact, the initial texts were continually modified and enriched with multiple additions. Cicero (De div. 2.50) mentions these, and Latin writers at the end of the Republic may reveal traces of them. The most significant borrowings seem to have had two origins. One certainly comes from southern Italy, where late Pythagorean influences produced a new image of the Afterworld and a kind of philosophical-mystical speculation; the other, which may evoke ancient Anatolian and Mesopotamian connections, deals with divination and seems to derive from an oriental current of thought most commonly associated with Apollonios of Mende. These late additions are superposed, which makes it particularly difficult to interpret the fragments of text that have come down to us.

There was a moment, between the first century B.C. and the end of the first century A.C., when the etrusca disciplina was widely fashionable. Tarquitius Priscus was the author of De rebus divinis, in which he describes omens, ostentaria. Aulus Caecina from Volterra, a friend of Cicero and the son of the defendant in the Pro Caecina, was especially interested in the interpretation of lightning, a skill he learned from his father. Nigidius Figulus and Julius Aquila translated from the Etruscan several books that were still accessible to them. Their translations, unfortunately almost completely lost, were known to the antiquarian Varro, "the most learned of Romans" (as Quintilian called him). They were also known to Cicero, who often alluded to them in the De divinatione, and to encyclopedists such as Pliny the Elder.

During the early Empire, the philetruscan emperor Claudius, thanks in part to his knowledge of the language, was still able to write lengthy Tuscae historiae in which the information drawn from religious writings was probably considerable. That is no longer possible for us. We do not even really know what subjects the sacred books addressed. This dilemma can be illustrated by the works of Attalus, a Greek author who was very probably from Pergamon. Seneca preserves some of his ideas and expresses a certain admiration for him. By utilizing fragments from the Etruscan scriptural tradition and mingling them with Hellenistic additions, Attalus, and other essayists who followed his example, built a theological and cosmological system that had only tenuous connections to the original Etruscan sources.

This sacred knowledge, however, survived for a long time after the other components of Etruscan culture had disappeared. In the middle of the fourth century A.C., if one believes Ammianus Marcellinus, Etruscan haruspices, claiming the authority of Tarquitius Priscus, interpreted the passage of a comet as having a military-political meaning; and in 633 the Council of Toledo forbade the clergy to employ the services of haruspices! Some of these texts had not yet been lost. Evidence of this is the work of John Lydos, who wrote at Byzantium toward the middle of the sixth century A.C. and still remains one of our best sources for Etruscan religion. It is difficult, as one may imagine, to reconstruct Etruscan religious literature on the basis of fragments that have only survived through later reworkings.

A SACRED LITERATURE

What has come down to us directly is very limited and always fragmentary. It seems that Etruscan literary texts in general and the sacred texts in particular were written on perishable surfaces: papyrus scrolls and fabric books (libri lintei). Of the former nothing remains, only sculptural representations such as the one that L(a)ris Pulenas unrolls on his sarcophagus, mentioned above. Another image of a papyrus scroll, decorated with a scene of a hunt, is perused by a book-loving banqueter in a lost painting from Tarquinia. On mirrors, vase paintings, and stone sarcophagi, the underworld goddess Vanth, and sometimes even Lasa, are frequently shown holding the papyrus scroll of fate. Of the fabric books, which seem to have been intended mostly for religious use, only fragments of the Zagreb mummy book remain (fig. 1.5). This is a long band of woven linen inscribed with an Etruscan ritual calendar, whose contents we shall discuss later. It had been used in Egypt for wrapping the corpse of a young woman, perhaps of Etruscan origin.

Sculptural representations in stone, however, such as those on an ash urn in Berlin, on a sarcophagus in the Vatican, and in the Caeretan Tomb of the Reliefs, illustrate the importance of these texts written on fabric. There must have been veritable libraries composed of books of this type. The prominent place they hold on some funerary monuments is evidence that they both held great value and conferred value on their owner. On the Berlin ash urn, the liber linteus is folded beside the deceased and topped by a priest's hat, while on the Vatican sarcophagus, the linen book lies almost in contact with the deceased's head (fig. 1.6). The books were probably considered to be useful in facing the afterlife.

Fortunately, several fragments of religious writings were inscribed on nonperishable surfaces: for example, the gold dedicatory and commemorative plaques excavated at Pyrgi (fig. 1.7), and the "liturgical" calendar written on the Capua tablet (fig. 1.8), the tabula capuana (formerly called the "Capua Tile"). The latter was probably associated with a whole series of revelations by the Etruscan prophets collected in the libri rituales.

Etruscan "revelation" is highly unusual because it deals not with the nature of the divine but with the relationship between mortals and that which is not mortal. It concerns space (how the world is perceived, measured, and organized); time (how it flows and is divided); and the establishment of communication with the world of the divine. The relations between mortals and gods are in large part determined by the questions the worshippers pose and the answers they expect, whether ethical, theological, practical, or ritual. Similarly, the authority of the oracle at Delphi, at least in the Archaic and Classical periods, was almost exclusively religious: one consulted Apollo on rites and sacrifices, on cults and sanctuaries. Apollo was perceived as an organizer of cult practices, the legislator of divine matters. The importance of the god of Delphi also illustrates the profoundly ritualistic character of Greek religious life in the Archaic period.

In Etruria, the revealed truths concern the order and functioning of the universe, its history and its future-that which determines the destiny of individuals as well as that of cities. The revelations of the prophets, like the responses of the haruspices, presuppose a cosmic structure in which the universe is dominated by an all-powerful, invisible divine world. The visible world is merely its language. The entire scope of Etruscan religion can be illustrated by a comment of Seneca the Elder, who stated that, for the Etruscans, events (such as the occurrence of lightning) "do not have a meaning because they happen, but rather they happen in order to express a meaning" (QNat. 2.32.2).

As a result, every occurrence is the reflection of a hidden truth in the divine order. The science consists in reading and interpreting that apparently incomprehensible message. The Etruscans subjected every natural event to rigorous observation and careful description, from exceptional occurrences, called ostenta in Latin, which were regarded as specific signs from the gods, to the more ordinary, everyday phenomena, such as lightning or movements of birds, which were regarded merely as signs of current happenings in the divine world. They compared all the signs to the events that followed them and thus generated a veritable research field of interpretations, to which the late authors attest. These observations took place within a model of the world whose initial form, though refined over the centuries, originated in the legendary times of Tages or Vegoia. Likewise, the more simplified quadripartition of the sky used by the Roman augurs must date back to King Numa.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0299208443
• ISBN 13: 9780299208448
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Patricia A. Rosenmeyer