the world (ancora ‘anchor’, antemna ‘yardarm’, aplustra ‘stern figurehead’, guberna ‘steering oars’, guberniō ‘helmsman’, prōra/prōris ‘prow’).
The Etruscans also had some effect even on Roman military language. Some of the central terms appear to be Etruscan: mīles ‘soldier’, vēles ‘light infantryman’, satelles ‘bodyguard’, clipeus ‘round shield’, tīrō ‘raw recruit’. But there are also loans for other realities of military life: cācula ‘batman’, lixa ‘camp follower’. The gruma too (an Etruscan deformation of the Greek word gnōmōn) was the key tool for Roman surveyors, for roads and other developments.
The Etruscans were great purveyors of entertainment, whether onstage (scaena) or in the arēna. The Romans derived their taste both for comic theatre and the spectacle of gladiatorial shows from them, though no doubt they took them to new heights, or depths.* Certainly many of the stock characters (dossennus ‘hunchback’, miriō ‘ugly man’, mōriō ‘dolt’) and some styles of gladiator (murmillō ‘fish-crested’) had Etruscan names; musicians too (subulō ‘flautist’) were typical of their arts.
The Etruscan roots of Rome’s performing arts were recognized by the doyens of Roman literature. Livy, the historian of the city’s early years, who wrote in the first century BC, recalled the story that stage peformances were first introduced around 365 BC, which would place them a century after the height of Etruscan influence. A pestilence was then racking the city, and one might have imagined the innovation would have been intended as a diversion. But no: according to Livy, they were introduced as CAELESTIS IRAE PLACAMINA ‘appeasements of heaven’s wrath’. Livy observed:
They are said to have introduced stage plays [LVDI SCENICI], something of a revolution for this warlike people; before that, they had known only the spectacle of the circus.† But the plays were small, as is usual when something is new, and were in fact of foreign origin. Players who performed without songs or actions to mime them were called in from Etruria: they danced to the strains of a piper and performed quite decorously in the Etruscan manner. Later young people began to copy them, putting in funny business in rough verse; and their gestures were no better than the words suggested. So the practice was taken up and grew through frequent repetition. The country artistes were given the name histriōnes, because ister was the Tuscan word for ‘player’ [Latin ludiō]. They did not, as before, swap rough and ready Fescennine verses, but whole medleys [saturae] set to flute music, with movements timed to match.13
This even suggests an Etruscan source for the one known Latin literary form with no Greek model, namely the satire. But indeed early satires are called sermōnes ‘talks’, and some have suggested that this is the meaning of the Etruscan word satri. Their scurrilous content would certainly befit an Etruscan cultural import.
Another aspect of Etruscan culture showing them to be city folk was their names.
The Indo-European system, found all over from Iceland to India, but notably retained by the Greeks despite their highly urban lifestyle, allotted each person an individual name, made more specific if necessary by referring to the name of the father: Snorri Sturluson, Rāmo Dāśarathis ‘Rama son of Dasharatha’, Aineiās Ankhīsiadēs ‘Aeneas son of Anchises’. Powerful clans distinguished themselves from time to time, perhaps as royal or tyrannical dynasties such as the Greek Atreidai and Peisistratidai, but there were never enough of them—existing in parallel in the one society—nor did they last long enough, to become reflected in a naming system.
The Etruscan system, by contrast, gave an individual a first name (Latin praenōmen ‘forename’), but added a distinct ‘gentile’ name (nōmen ‘name’ or gentilicium) for the clan to which he or she belonged: Vel Tlesna, Thefarie Veliana, Marce Caliathe; or in Latin, Gaius Marius, Marcus Antonius.* To this could be added a third, more specific name, referring to a family within a clan: Aule Titi Nurziu, Vel Tutna Tumu; or in Latin, Marcus Tullius Cicerō. The Romans called this last the cognōmen, translatable as ‘eke-name’ or ‘nickname’. Both these latter names were soon inherited by birth, like a modern surname. Overall, this was a system designed for higher urban densities, where there were just too many people to distinguish by the traditional name and patronymic.
The Romans, or at least those who came from more distinguished families, adopted this system in the seventh century BC. Its bourgeois convenience was perhaps less significant than the snobbish implications that it made possible. As well as serving as a more discriminating name-pattern, the possession of a gentile name showed that an individual belonged to a free family of Roman citizens. (Slaves and provincials, such as Greeks, would have just one individual name.) And the possession of tria nōmina ‘the three names’ was in the early days a badge of coming from a clan that had been distinguished long enough for different branches to have been singled out.
Curiously, but presumably for reasons that made sense at the time, this system never applied to women of good family, each of whom had as her official name just the gentile nōmen, marked with the feminine ending -a. By this token, all women in a clan were interchangeable. Evidently this was impractical for everyday life, so pet names abounded. But these had no more status as badges of identity than the arbitrary name given to a slave.*
Romans adopted more than just the system. For praenōmina, they adopted pretty much the whole set of Etruscan names: in the table, we see the list of Etruscan forenames with their Roman equivalents. Most made no sense in Latin, but Tiberius clearly referred to the local river, and Marcus probably honoured the god Mars.14
As the table on the next page shows, many other names too were of Etruscan origin, often of the most famous individuals in Roman history. But whereas anyone could be given an Etruscan praenōmen, the possession of an Etruscan-derived nōmen or cognōmen must actually have said something about the remote lineage of the man who bore it. The name Caesar, for example, suggests that some remote ancestor (possibly Lucius Julius, who fought in the First Punic War around 250 BC) had had a significant link with the Etruscan city of Caere (called in Etruscan Caisr-).15
* The only surviving Roman praenomen for a woman was Gaia. Quintilian says that the abbreviation for it was ɔ, C reversed (Inst., i.7.28). It was only used at weddings, where the newlyweds were hailed as GAIVS ET GAIA. But GAIVSQVE LVCIVSQVE was the Latin equivalent of ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry’ (e.g., Martial, v.14.5).
This system was to die out in later antiquity, as social hierarchies changed. The ancient families lost power and influence (and their gentile names became widely diffused after AD 212 when all provincials became citizens). Praenōmina and nōmina were increasingly dropped for practical purposes: there were too few of them, so people too often had the same name. By contrast, cognōmina were more and more used as distinguishers, assigned to individuals and no longer inherited. The upending of the social order in the German invasions of the fifth century AD would reinstate the prestige of the old Indo-European system, which the Germans had never lost, as well as break up the social world into smaller units. And by then the general scatter of cognōmina among individuals meant that there was little left of the traditional
