Tarquinia

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The ridge runs southeast from the modern town, a low spine of soft limestone above the valley of the Marta, and the ground beneath it is hollow. Cut into the rock are some six thousand chambers, opened across more than five centuries, and in roughly two hundred of them the walls were painted. This is Monterozzi, the great necropolis of the city the Etruscans called Tarchna — the painted city of the dead, and by a wide margin the largest body of Etruscan painting to come down from antiquity. A traveler descends a modern stair into the cool dark of a single chamber, the light comes up, and the wall holds banqueters at their feast, a piper in a grove, a boy poised in the air above the sea. The colors are those an Etruscan painter mixed twenty-five centuries ago.

The city of Tarchna

Tarquinia stood among the most ancient and the most powerful of the cities of Etruria, the land between the Arno and the Tiber that the Etruscans made their own. The Etruscan name was Tarchna; the Romans wrote it Tarquinii; the modern town, on a neighboring hill, took back the ancient name in 1922. The site lies in the province of Viterbo, in northern Lazio, a few kilometers inland from the Tyrrhenian coast — close enough to the sea to draw on its trade, high enough above it to command the country around.

The roots reach down into the Iron Age. The ridge of Monterozzi held burials already in the Villanovan period of the ninth century BCE, the early Iron Age culture from which the historical Etruscan cities grew; the necropolis runs continuously from that horizon down into Roman times. By the sixth century BCE Tarquinia had reached its height. A circuit of walls some eight kilometers long enclosed roughly a hundred and thirty-five hectares of inhabited plateau, and the city stood among the leading members of the loose confederation that later writers called the league of the Etruscan towns. Its wealth came from the metal and the grain of its territory and from the sea, and its workshops in terracotta and bronze were among the finest in Etruria.

To this city the Romans attached one of the foundational stories of their own monarchy. The dynasty of the Tarquins — Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, the fifth king of Rome, and Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last, whose expulsion the Roman tradition made the birth of the Republic — was said to have come from Tarquinii, the line traced to an emigrant from Corinth, Demaratus, who settled in the Etruscan city and whose son became king at Rome. This is a Roman tradition, set down centuries after the events it describes and shaped by Rome’s own sense of where its kingship and its sacred lore had come from; it should be held at that distance. What it registers reliably is the standing of Tarquinia in the Roman imagination — a city grand enough, and old enough, to be made the source of Rome’s kings.

The relation between the two powers was not always one of memory and reverence. As Rome expanded northward the cities of southern Etruria fell, one after another, within its reach. Tarquinia fought hard. In 358 BCE, the Roman annalists recorded, the Tarquinians put to death three hundred and seven Roman prisoners; the war that followed closed in 351 BCE with a forty-year truce, renewed in 308 BCE. The exact moment at which Tarquinia passed under Roman control is not fixed in the sources, but over the third and second centuries BCE the independent Etruscan city dwindled into a Roman municipium, its language giving way to Latin, until — as across the rest of Etruria — what remained of Tarchna was the ground and what was buried in it.

Tages and the books of the science

Tarquinia held a place in the sacred geography of Etruria that no other city could claim: it was the place where the disciplina was first revealed. The story is preserved by Roman authors who inherited the lore, above all by Cicero, who set it down in the second book of his treatise on divination. In the fields of Tarquinii, the account runs, a plowman drove a furrow deeper than the rest, and out of the fresh-turned earth there rose a figure with the face of a child and the wisdom of an old man. His name was Tages. The plowman cried out in astonishment; a crowd gathered, and then the whole of Etruria came to that place. To them Tages spoke, and they took down what he said and entrusted it to writing; and when he had finished he sank back into the furrow from which he had come.

What Tages dictated was the disciplina Etrusca — the disciplina, the revealed science of reading the will of the gods. It was a learning of definite parts. There was haruspicy, the inspection of the liver and entrails of the sacrificial victim by the haruspex, who read in the shape and markings of the organ the disposition of the divine powers, each of whom held a region of the liver’s surface. There was the fulgural lore, the science of lightning, by which the diviner read the bolts that the sky-king Tinia hurled from his appointed quarters of the heavens, distinguishing the warning bolt from the bolt of counsel and the bolt of doom. There was the brontoscopic learning of thunder, which read the day and season of a thunderclap as an omen. These were gathered, the later tradition held, in the libri haruspicini, the libri fulgurales, and the libri rituales — the books of the entrails, of the lightning, and of the rites. The revealer was Tages; a second revealer, the nymph Vegoia, was named for the lore of the lightning and of the boundary-stone.

Here the source-distance that governs all knowledge of Etruscan religion presses hardest. The Etruscans left no surviving literature of their own. Tages and his books are known almost entirely through Roman writers — Cicero, and after him the elder Pliny, Seneca on the lore of lightning, and the lost Tyrrhenika that the emperor Claudius is said to have compiled — men who studied, codified, and preserved the disciplina centuries after it had taken shape, and who saw it from outside and from a Roman vantage. That the science was real, that it was practiced, and that Rome took it seriously enough to consult Etruscan haruspices into the imperial age, is beyond doubt. The exact wording of the books, the original shape of the Tages story, the precise content of the brontoscopic calendar — these survive only as the Romans transmitted them, and can be known only at that remove. The site that the tradition named as the cradle of the whole science was Tarquinia.

The painted dead of Monterozzi

What Tarquinia preserves in its own hand, and preserves more richly than anywhere else in the Etruscan world, is its painting. On the Monterozzi ridge the Etruscans cut chamber tombs into the living rock, single rooms reached by a sloping passage, their gabled ceilings imitating the beams of a house. In a remarkable number of them — close to two hundred, more than in all the rest of Etruria combined — they covered the walls with fresco. The earliest painted chambers belong to the seventh century BCE; the series runs down into the Hellenistic age, so that the tombs of Monterozzi trace the whole arc of Etruscan painting and, with it, the changing Etruscan vision of the feast, the dance, and the world below.

The great tombs of the archaic and early classical centuries are tombs of the living world carried over into death. In the Tomb of the Leopards, painted around 470 BCE and found in 1875, two leopards confront each other across the gable above a banquet: three couples recline on their couches, the men painted dark and the women fair after the old convention, wreathed in myrtle, attended by nude serving boys, while musicians flank them on the side walls, one playing the double pipes, the aulos, another the lyre. It is a funeral feast rendered as a celebration of life, the wine and the music set against the dark of the chamber.

The rear-wall banquet of the Tomb of the Leopards: reclining couples, serving boys, and musicians beneath the confronted leopards of the gable, about 470 BCE. Photo Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

In the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, painted toward the close of the sixth century BCE and discovered in 1873, the world opens onto the sea. Across the walls a flock of birds wheels over the water, fish leap, fishermen work from a small boat, and a naked boy dives from a high rock — caught in the air, still falling — while figures watch from the shore. It is among the earliest paintings anywhere to set human beings as small figures within a wide and living landscape, and the antechamber adds dancers in a grove, moving as if to the pipes. Stephan Steingräber, the historian of Etruscan wall painting, calls it one of the most beautiful and original of all the Tarquinian tombs of the late archaic period.

The sea, the wheeling birds, and the diving boy of the Tomb of Hunting and Fishing, late 6th century BCE. Photo Yann Forget, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (PD-Art).

The Tomb of the Augurs, painted around 530 to 520 BCE, is among the first at Tarquinia to carry figures on all four walls. Its name comes from a figure in a cloak with one arm outstretched, holding the curved lituus, the augur’s crook, who watches two nude wrestlers grapple while a bearded referee looks on and birds fly overhead. On another wall a masked man labeled with the Etruscan word phersu — mask, or masked man — leads by a cord a hooded figure who is set against a dog and bleeds from its bites. The scene has been read as a ritual contest, and later Roman writers traced the gladiatorial games to an Etruscan origin; the prisoner-killing and the phersu game have been drawn into that argument. Much of this is later interpretation, and the reading of the painted scene is not certain. What the wall shows plainly is a funeral observance of games and contest, watched over by the augur with his crook.

The earlier Tomb of the Bulls, dated to the third quarter of the sixth century BCE, carries the oldest large figural scene at Tarquinia and the only clear mythological subject among the archaic tombs — the Greek story of the ambush of Troilus by Achilles at the fountain, the young Trojan on his horse and the warrior crouched in wait. Greek myth, Greek artists, and Greek conventions run all through these chambers: Ionian painters worked at Tarquinia, and the banquet, the aulos, the wrestling, and the diving boy all have their counterparts in the Greek world from which the Etruscan cities drew so much.

The later tombs turn toward the world below. As the centuries pass the bright feast gives way to the painted underworld, and into the chambers come the demons of death — Charun with his hammer, the winged Vanth, the leopards of the gable replaced by the powers that keep the dead. In the Tomb of Orcus, painted in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the banquet survives but darkens, and the figures of the underworld appear: the lord of the dead and his queen, the realm over which, in the Etruscan reckoning, the wolf-capped Aita presides. The same shift runs through the painted tombs of the neighboring Cerveteri and across late Etruria; at Tarquinia it can be watched, tomb by tomb, against the older brightness it displaced.

Above ground, on the height called the Civita where the city itself stood, rose the Ara della Regina, the largest known Etruscan temple, built in the fourth century BCE on the site of an archaic predecessor and measuring roughly forty-four by twenty-five meters. From its decoration survives the masterpiece of Tarquinian terracotta: the Cavalli Alati, the winged horses, a high-relief pair of harnessed steeds in red and cream, made about the end of the fifth or the beginning of the fourth century BCE, found in fragments in 1938 and now the emblem of the town. They are among the great surviving works of Etruscan terracotta sculpture, kin to the roof-statues of nearby Veii.

The recovery of the painted city

Tarquinia returned to the world through the spade. The painted tombs of Monterozzi were opened across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — Hunting and Fishing in 1873, the Leopards in 1875, and many more before and since — and copied, photographed, and studied as the fullest record that exists of Etruscan painting and of the Etruscan way of seeing the feast, the dance, and the dead. The frescoes are also the fullest record of Etruscan everyday life: the dress and the furniture, the music and the games, the gestures of a people whose own books were lost. Where the disciplina survives only through Roman eyes, the walls of Monterozzi speak in the Etruscans’ own hand — and what they show is not the gloom that later writers fixed onto the Etruscan name, but a world of color, of wine and pipes and the open sea.

The tombs that gave up their paintings have also given their fragility. Sealed for two and a half thousand years, the frescoes began to decay once the chambers were opened to air and damp and breath; conservation has meant closing many tombs, sealing them again behind glass, and admitting visitors only to a rotation of chambers under controlled climate. The National Archaeological Museum of Tarquinia, in a Renaissance palace within the modern town, holds the winged horses and the sarcophagi and the painted slabs lifted from tombs too far gone to be left in place.

In 2004 the necropolis of Monterozzi was inscribed on the World Heritage list, jointly with the Banditaccia necropolis of Cerveteri, as the Etruscan Necropolises of Cerveteri and Tarquinia. The two sites were honored together as a unique and exceptional testimony to the vanished Etruscan culture — the one a city of the dead laid out in streets of tumuli, the other a city of painted chambers whose frescoes are, in the words of the inscription, a singular witness to a daily life and a religion otherwise lost. The two cities had been linked in antiquity as neighbors and rivals of the southern Etruscan coast; the heritage of the world joined them again.

Tarquinia is read today on three registers that are best held apart. The necropolis, the paintings, the temple and its winged horses, the dated excavations, and the World Heritage inscription are matters of the archaeological record, exact and verifiable. The Tarquin dynasty of Rome is a Roman tradition about the city, valuable as Roman memory rather than as Etruscan fact, and held at that distance. And Tages — the child of the furrow, the revealer of the disciplina, the prophet whose science Tarquinia gave to Etruria — belongs to the sacred world of the Etruscans themselves, transmitted to us only through the Romans who inherited it. Of the three, it is the paintings that hold most. On the soft rock of Monterozzi, behind glass and in the dark, the banqueters still recline, the boy still hangs above the water, and the colors of a world that left no books are still there to be read.

→ Related: Etruscans · Cerveteri · Veii · Pyrgi · Aita · Tinia · Uni Goddess · Menrva · Turan Goddess · The Faliscans · The Umbrians · The Veneti · Villanovan · Divination · Tages · Jupiter · Juno · Apollo · Dionysus