could stand as evidence of a common origin.
Rome was to establish itself as the successor to the Etruscans, but before it could do so, it first had to extricate itself from their dominance. More permanently, this political transition would lead to the linguistic spread of Latin, as the successor language in Etruria.
The Etruscans were clearly the dominant power in Italy in the period when the Greeks, farther east, were establishing their classical culture. This raises the question why they were so much more outgoing and culturally influential than their local neighbours, who spoke Italic languages: for the Etruscans in their heyday were challenged only by the two seafaring powers, the Carthaginians (who were largely their allies), and the Greeks (who largely opposed them).
This period was largely documented through Greek sources: Greeks were literate and well-travelled in the middle of the first millennium BC. But it was also revealed through the discovery of inscriptions, and the Etruscans’ distinctive black bucchero pottery. In it we can see evidence of the Etruscans expanding their power and commercial reach around what became known as the Tyrrhenian (i.e., Etruscan) Sea, as well as eastward overland from their famed “Twelve Cities.” In the eighth century BC they were colonizing Campania in the southwest, but also northern Italy across to the Adriatic. With Greeks from Euboea they established a trading presence in Ischia. In 540 BC, in alliance with Carthage, they defeated the Phocaean Greeks at the Battle of the Sardinian Sea and established a foothold in Corsica.
Etruscan “forward policy,” 750–475 BC. Etruscan influence extended beyond the “Twelve Cities” of Etruria north into the valley of the Po and south along the Campanian coast.
They suffered a major reverse in 511 at Aricia, just south of Rome, when they lost to an alliance of Cumaean Greeks and Latins; two generations later in 474, they were defeated at Cumae itself by the combined naval forces of Cumae and Syracuse. Thereafter they rapidly lost their southern Italian bases and dependencies. It was the end of the Etruscan “forward policy,” which had lasted for three hundred years. The next two centuries of Etruscan history were taken up with a long, drawn-out series of unsuccessful defences, as one by one each of their cities yielded to the encroaching new power, Rome. The first city to engage Rome, in 477, was Veii, Rome’s close neighbour north of the Tiber; but the struggle continued for eighty-one years, until Veii’s annihilation in 396. The last one, Volsinii, fell in 264, 132 years later.
One clue to Etruscan identity lies in their various names for their nation. Their name for themselves was rasna or rasenna, but this turns out (like so many accepted ethnonyms all over the world) to be just their word for ‘people’. The Greeks, however, were introduced to them as tursānoi.2 In the Ionian Greek accent (which was characteristic of the Euboean and Phocaean colonists active in the area), this comes out as tursēnoi; and in Attic Greek (which, being Athenian, became the standard) as turrēnoi. (This was Romanized as ‘Tyrrheni’, still seen in the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, modern Italian Mare Tirreno, which had once been the Etruscan lake.) Some Greeks knew them as turranoi, perhaps a compromise pronunciation; their own dedication plaque left at Delphi is marked in Greek TURRANO; and Hiero of Syracuse, on helmets taken at the battle of Cumae and dedicated at Olympia, wrote the name TURAN.3 By contrast, the Latin name for them was Etrusci or Tusci. If the final consonant here is an adjectival ending (compare Graii vs. Graeci for Greeks, Poeni vs. Punici for Carthaginians), then the root looks like TRUS or TURS, also seen in tursanoi.4
Now, it is a remarkable fact that apparently this same root underlies the Greek words for Troy (troia) and Trojans (trōes), namely TRŌS.5 So Troia and Etrūria would have the same origin: they are Greek and Etruscan-Latin developments, respectively, of the root TRŌS-IA.6
Coins showing Venus on one side with 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
