The Faliscans

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On a high plateau of tufa between two gorges, where the streams that run down from the Sabatine hills cut the rock more than sixty meters deep, stood a city the Romans called Falerii. Its people farmed the good volcanic soil of the middle Tiber, traded down the river toward the sea, and buried their dead in chambers cut into the cliff faces. They spoke a tongue close to Latin and wrote it in letters of their own. They worshiped in the manner of the Etruscans across the water, and they fought beside the Etruscans against Rome until the end. The Romans, and many since, have counted them among the peoples of Etruria. They were not Etruscans. They were the Faliscans, and the seeming contradiction of their position — Italic in speech, Etruscan in cult, set on the border of three worlds — is the whole of their interest.

A people on the right bank

The Faliscan country, the ager Faliscus, lay on the right bank of the Tiber north of Rome, in the volcanic uplands between the Monti Cimini and the Monti Sabatini, with Monte Soratte rising at its southern edge. The land ran from the gorge-country above Grotta Porciosa down toward Capena. It was good ground — well watered, defensible, close enough to the river to share in its trade — and it sat at a crossing of peoples. To the north and west, beyond the Tiber, was Etruria proper; to the south and east were the Latins and the Sabines. The Faliscans lived in the overlap.

Their chief city was Falerii, later called Falerii Veteres, “old Falerii,” to distinguish it from the Roman town that replaced it. It stands today beneath the medieval and modern town of Civita Castellana, in the province of Viterbo, in Lazio, some sixty-five kilometers north of Rome. The ancient settlement occupied a plateau roughly eleven hundred meters long, ringed by ravines and walled in cut tufa, a natural fortress that its history would test. Falerii was reckoned among the duodecim populi, the twelve peoples of Etruria, in the Roman accounting — a sign of how thoroughly the city was woven into the Etruscan league and the Etruscan world, whatever the language of its people. Around it lay lesser centers: Nepete (Nepi), Narce on the Treia, Corchiano, Vignanello, Fescennium — this last remembered by the Romans as the home of the Fescennine verses, the rough wedding-songs they thought had come to them from Faliscan soil.

This was no small or poor country. The settlements of the ager Faliscus together may have held something on the order of twenty thousand people, a population fit for a city-state at the height of central Italy’s archaic prosperity. The Faliscans buried their dead in the cliffs around the towns, and the long sequence of their graves traces the same arc as the rest of Iron Age Italy: cremation in stone cists in the early eighth century, then inhumation, then by the seventh century rock-cut chamber tombs with their multiple loculi closed by tiles, the dead laid out with the goods of their station. Men went to the tomb with spear and sword, sometimes with a ritual axe; women with the tools of the loom — spindle-whorls and distaffs, some of bronze inlaid with amber and gold — and with the amber pendants, the bronze mirrors, the imported vessels that marked a wealthy house. The grave-goods read, across the centuries, as the inventory of a settled and prosperous people, not a marginal one.

What set the Faliscans apart from their Etruscan neighbors, and what the ancients themselves noticed, was their speech. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing under Augustus, recorded that the Falisci were a people with a tongue of their own, not the same as the Etruscans’. He was right in a way he could not have measured. Faliscan was not Etruscan at all. Etruscan stands outside the Indo-European family, a language without close kin, agglutinative in its grammar; Faliscan belonged squarely to the Italic branch of Indo-European, and within it to the same narrow Latino-Faliscan group as Latin itself. It was, of all the recorded ancient tongues, the nearest relative of Latin — so near that a Roman could likely have followed much of it, allowing for the differences. Faliscan kept a medial f where Latin turned it to b, dropped final s in places, and ran ahead of conservative Latin in shedding old case-endings. It was written, all the same, in an alphabet the Faliscans had made their own out of the Etruscan model, complete with a distinctive sign for the f-sound — so that a Latin-cousin language came down in Etruscan-derived letters, the dual citizenship of the people set into their very script.

The script, the gods, and the workshops

The Faliscans speak to us in their own hand. Some three hundred and fifty of their inscriptions survive, running from about the seventh century down to roughly 150 BCE, when Latin had all but swallowed the language. The oldest is a dedication to Ceres found at Falerii and dated near 600 BCE, written left to right; among the most quoted is a line painted on a drinking-cup, foied vino pipafo, cra carefo — “today I will drink wine; tomorrow I will go without.” It is a small thing, a toast on a patera, but it is the Faliscans speaking in the first person, in their own words, about their own table. The contrast with the Etruscans is exact and worth holding onto: the Etruscans left no surviving literature, and their religion must be read out of monuments and mirrors and the later Roman authors who inherited their divinatory science. The Faliscans, like their fellow Italic neighbors the Umbrians of the Iguvine bronzes and the Veneti of the Adriatic, more often speak for themselves.

What they speak of, again and again, is their gods — and here they turn toward Etruria. Above all the Faliscans were the people of Juno. Their great goddess was Juno Curritis (also written Curitis or Quiritis), and the Roman poet Ovid, who had married a woman of the country and gone there for her festival, called the Faliscans plainly Iunonicolae, “the Juno-worshipers.” He left a description of her rite: a procession through the town, white heifers and a young bull led to the altar, a sacred way climbing through dark woods to a temple set in a clearing, and at its center a chaste priestess, the canephorus or basket-bearer, carrying the holy things. The temple of Juno Curritis was famous enough that Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Greek historian of early Rome, knew its grandeur; and her worship was still alive in the Faliscan country under the emperor Trajan, four centuries after the city’s first fall, when inscriptions still name her. She is the Faliscan signature. The Romans came to honor a Juno Curritis of their own and connected her, in their etymologizing way, with the curia and with the spear, the curis; but the goddess herself was Faliscan first, and to the Roman reckoning of Juno the Faliscans gave one of her oldest and most distinctive faces.

She did not stand alone. The Faliscans kept the shrines of other powers, and they kept them in the Etruscan manner. Apollo was honored in their country, bound in tradition to the strange priesthood of the Hirpi Sorani, the “wolves of Soranus,” who were said to walk barefoot over burning coals on Monte Soratte at the god’s festival. Minerva was worshiped — her name appears in the inscriptions as menerua — and the Romans, when they took the city, were said to have carried her cult-image back to Rome, where she became Minerva Capta, “the captive Minerva,” a goddess held as a trophy of war. Mercury too had a place; one of the Falerii temples, the sanctuary called Sassi Caduti, “the fallen stones,” bore a dedication that names a Titus Mercus, a Faliscan Mercury. And in the figure of Janus, the two-faced and even four-faced god of doorways and beginnings, the Romans claimed another Faliscan inheritance, the Ianus Quadrifrons said to have come to Rome from the conquered town.

The temples themselves were built and dressed in the way of Etruria — timber-framed, with the gable and the eaves clad in painted terracotta. Faliscan workshops, like the Etruscan, were masters of this architectural sculpture: antefixes with the heads of maenads and satyrs ranged along the roof-line, gorgon-masks, figured pediments in fired and colored clay. The sanctuaries of Falerii — Sassi Caduti, Lo Scasato on the town’s high point, Celle, Vignale — have yielded these roof-decorations by the hundred, and they are of high quality, the equal of any in the region.

Red-figure calyx krater attributed to the Nazzano Painter of the Faliscan school, from Falerii, about 360 BCE — the wealth of a people at the meeting of the Etruscan, Greek, and Latin worlds. Gary Todd, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

From the same wealth and the same craft came the pottery the scholars call Faliscan. In the fourth century BCE the workshops of Falerii Veteres took up the red-figure technique that had reached Italy from Greece — the figures left in the red of the clay against a black ground — and made it their own. A workshop active at Falerii from about 380 BCE supplied vases, especially the large banquet shapes such as the stamnos and the krater, to customers up and down the Tiber valley. Their painters, known by the names modern scholars have given them — the Nazzano Painter, the Villa Giulia Painter, the so-called Captives Group — drew Greek myth and Dionysiac revel, satyrs and maenads, with a precise and complicated line. The Metropolitan Museum’s Faliscan stamnos of the Captives Group is a fair witness: a banquet-vessel made in the Faliscan country, painted with satyrs and maenads in the Attic manner, for a Tiber-valley table. The painted pottery is the surest measure of what the Faliscans were — a prosperous people standing where the Etruscan, the Greek, and the Latin worlds met, and drawing on all three.

Painted terracotta from the pediment of the Sassi Caduti sanctuary at Falerii, the shrine that named a Faliscan Mercury, fourth century BCE, now in the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The Etruscan alliance and the fall of Falerii

If cult and craft tied the Faliscans to Etruria, so did war. Their nearest great neighbor across the Tiber was Veii, the southernmost of the Etruscan cities and Rome’s closest and most dangerous rival; and through the long fifth-century struggle between Veii and Rome, Falerii stood with Veii. The Faliscans took the field against Rome in the wars over the river and the salt-roads, allies in the Etruscan cause. When Rome at last took and destroyed Veii — by the Roman count, after a famous ten-year siege ended by the dictator Camillus around 396 BCE — the Faliscans lost their shield. The fall of Veii left Falerii exposed on the Roman side of the Tiber, the last considerable resistance in that quarter.

To this period belongs the story the Romans liked best to tell about the Faliscans, set down by Livy. A schoolmaster of Falerii, it was said, led the children of the city’s leading families out beyond the walls and into the Roman camp, offering them to Camillus as hostages who would force the city to surrender. The Roman general refused the treachery. He had the schoolmaster stripped and bound and given over to his own pupils, who drove him back to the city beating him with rods; and the Faliscans, moved by Roman honor, were said to have opened their gates of their own will. The tale is Roman through and through — a parable of Roman fides against barbarian bad faith, told from the conqueror’s side — and it should be read as such, at the conqueror’s distance, rather than as a record of what the Faliscans did or thought.

Whatever the truth of that episode, the resistance was not finished. Through the fourth century the Faliscans rose again — when Tarquinia revolted, and again afterward — and Rome answered each time, until by the middle of the century the city had a Roman garrison and the country was bound to Rome. The end came in 241 BCE. In the last year of the First Punic War, the Faliscans revolted once more. The Roman response was swift and total. The army stormed the country; the ancient account puts the Faliscan dead at some fifteen thousand; and Falerii Veteres, the fortress on the plateau, was taken and destroyed. Rome confiscated the city’s arms and horses and half of its territory. Then, in a stroke that says much about how Rome dealt with a fortress it could not trust, the surviving Faliscans were brought down from their cliffs and resettled a few kilometers away on open, lower, indefensible ground — the new city, Falerii Novi, “new Falerii,” a planned Roman town with no gorges to hold against an army. The strong site was abandoned by command. Within a century the Faliscan language, already retreating before Latin, fell out of use altogether.

Reading the Faliscans again

The Faliscans were recovered, like so much of pre-Roman Italy, out of the ground and out of their own writing. Their inscriptions — those three hundred and fifty texts, on stone and bronze and painted on clay — are what keep their language alive, and modern philology has used them to place Faliscan exactly: not a dialect of Etruscan, as a glance at the script might suggest, but the closest cousin of Latin, an independent witness to the early shape of the Italic tongues. The excavation of Falerii and its sanctuaries — Sassi Caduti, Lo Scasato, Celle, the temple ground of Juno — recovered the painted terracottas and the votive deposits, the axes and spear-heads and the bronze warrior-statuettes left for the goddess, much of it now in the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome and in the local museum at Civita Castellana. The painted vases, scattered across the world’s collections, carry the Faliscan name into every catalog of ancient pottery. And the two cities themselves — the abandoned plateau of Falerii Veteres under Civita Castellana, and the long-walled ghost of Falerii Novi on its open plain, where a buried Roman town has been mapped in our own day from the surface without a spade turned — remain on the land as the before and after of 241 BCE.

What the Faliscans hold, in the end, is a particular place at the seam of ancient Italy. They were not a minor branch of the Etruscans, nor a backward tribe on Rome’s frontier. They were a people with their own speech, the very nearest kin of Latin, who chose — over centuries, in their temples and their workshops and their wars — to live inside the sacred and material world of Etruria, and to keep at the center of it a goddess, Juno Curritis, who was theirs before she was anyone’s. To set the Faliscans beside the gods of their neighbors — Etruscan Uni the sovereign queen, Menrva the armed wisdom of the Veientine sanctuary, Tinia the sky-king of the three lightnings — is to see how porous the borders of belief could be in that country, and how a people might speak one tongue and pray in another world. The Faliscans did exactly that, and went down with the world they had chosen, leaving their goddess, their letters, and their painted clay to say who they had been.

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