century (starting, as it happened, in northern Italy), as the growing fluidity of population in urban centres, and trade links among them, made unworkable the system of simple name and father’s name, even when reinforced with a place of origin. But the fact that Latin had adopted, and sustained for a millennium, a form of the surname system fifteen hundred years ahead of its time speaks for the large-scale civic stability of Roman society from the seventh century BC to the third century AD, though—admittedly—no less for its conservatism and class consciousness.
But Etruria’s most important influence on Latin, ultimately, lay in having shown the Romans how to make Latin a written language. This is amply attested in the technical vocabulary for writing that became established in Latin. Scrībere ‘write’ itself seems to be a native word originally meaning ‘scratch’ or ‘incise’ (cf Russian skrebú, Lithuanian skrabu, Old English sćeorpan ‘scrape’), and legere ‘read’ originally meant just ‘pick up’; but much of the rest has come through Etruscan. Titulus ‘label’, hence ‘title’ and elementum ‘letter’ (apparently derived from L-M-N) seem to be Etruscan innovations. Most often the ultimate source is (unsurprisingly) in Greek. The key word littera ‘letter’ seems to be a reworking of the Greek diphthera ‘leather, parchment’. In cēra ‘wax’, the material on which many messages were scratched, the change of gender shows that the word was not borrowed directly from Greek kēros; an Etruscan intermediary is likely. Likewise, stilus, the implement for scratching, has no etymology and has also been proposed as a loan from Etruscan.16
The Etruscan and Latin alphabets show by their form that the Etruscans had acquired theirs from the (Euboean) Greeks of Italy, and the Romans from the Etruscans. The Euboean origin shows in the values of certain letters: notably F and Q survive, H represents [h] and X [ks] (although some early Latin inscriptions use Φ instead for this last). But the details of the transmission remain obscure: the earliest known Etruscan inscriptions are not found around the most likely point of contact, the island of Ischia, where the Euboeans had their emporium; and they include some letters (C instead of Γ, Μ in addition to Σ to represent the [s] sound) that came from the Corinthian, not the Euboean, alphabet. (But Syracuse, the most powerful of the Greek colonies in Italy, had been founded by Corinth; so this is not wholly surprising.)
Mirror of Volterra. This picture, from the back of a lady’s mirror, shows the goddess Juno formally accepting Hercules as her (adopted) son.
As in many cases of early literacy, the offer of writing to the Romans was not taken up as a chance to begin a literature; for them, as for their Etruscan tutors, the first writing seems to have been a means of making spells or formulas effective by setting them down on a permanent medium. The word zich, meaning ‘writing’ or ‘book’, is common in the Etruscan religious or legal documents that have survived. The boundary stone known as Cippus Perusinus ends with the phrase cecha zichuche ‘as has been written’. And likewise the Tabula Cortonensis, probably a land contract, contains the phrase cen zic zichuche ‘this writ was written’. In the depiction on a bronze mirror, found at Volterra, of the goddess Uni (Juno) being formally reconciled with Hercle (Hercules) by suckling him, a written plaque is held up by an attendant character, who by his trident must be Neptune. The plaque reads in Etruscan, eca sren tva ichnac hercle unial clan thrasce, which would be translated (word for word): “this picture shows how Hercules Juno’s son became.”
It is another example of a written statement being used formally to characterize something, in this case the point of a mythical situation. Early writing, such as the Etruscans knew, and such as they transmitted to the Romans, was for records.
Cui bono?—Rome’s Winning Ways
QVIS, QVID, VBI, QVIBVS AVXILIIS, CVR, QVOMODO, QVANDO?
Who, what, where, by what means, why, how, when?
Traditional hexameter line, setting out lines of analysis
IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BC the many cities of Greece’s classical era yielded to the single dominating power of Macedon: Athens, Thebes, and Sparta were among them, but even they were powerless to organize resistance. In that same century, as we have seen, the many cultured cities of Etruria too lost their independence: one by one, they succumbed to the gathering might of Rome. The demolition of leagues of city-states by single, centralized powers—powers that had previously seemed rather backward—was a feature of this century in Italy as in Greece.
Before this happened, could the Latin language have been endangered? To the north and to the south, there were Etruscan-speaking communities; and as we know, in the fifth century Rome itself was heavily influenced, if not actually ruled, by noble Etruscan families. One can speculate that the situation, linguistically, might have been rather like that of England after the Norman conquests, a foreign-language ruling class living self-indulgently in the city while the indigenous farmers toiled in the fields to support them.
However, looking at the elite technical vocabulary of the period, there is little reason to believe that Latin speakers were being excluded. The names given to the tribes to which Romans were assigned for voting purposes are all, admittedly, words of Etruscan origin: Luceres, Ramnes, Tities. And it is argued—still inconclusively—that an important word such as populus, which came to mean ‘the people’, Rome’s ultimate source of authority, was originally an Etruscan word for ‘army’.1 But besides these, all the mechanisms of government were couched in Latin terminology. Rome had a senate (senātus, literally ‘elder-dom’, related to senex ‘old man’), whose members were addressed as patrēs conscriptī ‘conscript fathers’ and met in the cūria (< co-viria ‘men together’). Its elected officers (magistrātūs) were consulēs ‘advisers’, praetōrēs < prae-itōrēs ‘leaders’, aedilēs ‘buildings men’, and quaestōres ‘inquirers’. Its elections were called comitia ‘goings-together’, decided by suffrāgia ‘votes’. In emergencies, the supreme power would be vested in a single dictātor ‘prescriber’, supported by a magister equitum ‘master of cavalry’. From time to time cēnsōrēs ‘assessors’ would review the senatorial rolls. All these crucial terms are transparently native to Latin. Other ancient constitutional words existed, with more obscure etymology: classis ‘levy’ (an income-based electoral division), tribus ‘tribe’ (an electoral division based on lineage), plēbs or plēbēs ‘masses, lower orders’, pūbēs ‘body of citizens that are of age’. These could have been borrowed, but they could just as well have been ancient Latin terms; in any case, they tended to apply to the opposite end of society from the aristocracy, where we may assume that Etruscan influence would have predominated.
Whatever the degree of intimacy between Etruscans and Romans, this period left Rome in a position to expand like no other Italian power: within 250 years of its independence, just ten generations, it had moved to dominate not only the rest of Latium and Etruria, but also the whole extent of the peninsula beyond, both northward and southward. Militarily and politically, by 400 BC Rome had secured alliances with all of Latium and defeated the surrounding hostile mountain peoples, the Aequi and the Volsci. The next century and a half saw a hardening of Roman control in Latium, and a simultaneous spread of Roman power in three directions: over
