Etruscan Civilization

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Etruscan Civilization

CHAPTER I Life Governed by Religion

1. INTRODUCTION

BETWEEN Florence and Rome lies the inviting land of Tuscany. This was in ancient times the home of a civilized

people who possessed the art of enjoying life to the full yet at the same time were perpetually conscious of fate,

death and change, and showed a strangely submissive attitude towards the powers of the underworld. The Romans

called the people who created and maintained this civilization Tusci and Etrusci, but the Greeks knew them as

T??????? or T???????, i.e. Tyrrhenians or Tyrsenians. The name they themselves used-Rásna, Rasenna -- was

not adopted either by ancient or modern languages. Hesiod, writing about 700 B.C., speaks of the T??????????

???????????? 'the renowned Tyrsenians', whereas Thucydides, writing in the second half of the fifth century B.C.,

classes them with 'barbarians'. 'Tuscan' to the Romans of later date frequently meant the same as did 'Italic' in

ancient times. Finally, about A.D. 300 Arnobius was to describe Etruria from the early Christian point of view as

genetrix et mater superstitionis, 'originator and mother of all superstition'.

Etruscan civilization had its beginnings in the ninth and eighth centuries B.C. and reached its zenith in the sixth

century. Its end, or rather its assimilation into the pan-Italic civilization established by Rome, coincided with the end

of the Roman Republic in the last century B.C. In 44 B.C., after Caesar's death, an Etruscan seer announced the

beginning of the end of Etruscan greatness. Thus its history corresponds in time to that phase of Greece's

development which had such a great influence on the intellectual and soc...

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... their familiar

trails, from which they would normally be so unwilling to stray. Thus are the wild beasts of the Tyrrhenian forests

gradually attracted by a powerful magic, and they draw near, bewitched by the sounds, till they fall, overpowered by

the music, into the snares.' (De natura animalium XII, 46.)

From tombstones and urns, and above all from the gay wallpaintings of the underground burial places of Tarquinii we

can learn of the lively round dances of the women, the weapon dance of the men and the passionate dance-game of

youths and maidens who move and turn in couples or singly to the sound of pipes and zithers. These dances are full

of dark sensual pleasure, yet at the same time restrained in a melancholy way, in spite of all their excitement and

tenseness. They are the expression of a deep musicality which needs no words.

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