The Veneti

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At the head of the Adriatic, where the rivers of the northern plain — the Adige, the Brenta, the Piave — run down from the Alps to a coast of lagoons, a people lived who called themselves, in their own tongue, the Venetkens. The country still carries their name. It is the Veneto, and the city of the lagoons that grew up long after them took the name as well. But the Veneti of antiquity were a people of the firm ground inland: of the towns of the plain, of the horse-pastures, of a goddess who held the letters of the alphabet in her keeping. They spoke a language of their own, neither Etruscan nor Latin nor Celtic, and they wrote it in a script they had borrowed from their western neighbors and bent to fit their speech.

A people of the Adriatic plain

The Veneti were settled in the northeastern corner of Italy from at least the middle of the second millennium BCE, and by the early Iron Age they had developed a distinct material culture — the one archaeologists name for its chief town, the culture of Este. Their territory ran from the Po northward to the foothills of the Carnic Alps and eastward toward Istria, the plain that the Romans would later organize as the tenth region of Italy and call Venetia et Histria. The ancient writers list their towns: Ateste, Patavium, Acelum, Opitergium, Vicetia, Belunum — Este, Padua, Asolo, Oderzo, Vicenza, Belluno. In the earliest centuries the foremost of them was Ateste, the place now called Este, a town set on the southern edge of the plain below the Euganean Hills.

To set the Veneti among their neighbors is the first task, because the ancient confusions are old and the modern ones are easy. They were not the Gaulish Veneti of the Atlantic coast — the seafaring people of Armorica, in what is now Brittany, whom Caesar fought at sea in 56 BCE. Those were a Celtic nation far to the west; the sameness of the name is a coincidence the sources themselves remark on. Nor were the Adriatic Veneti Etruscans, though the Etruscans lay just across the Po to the southwest and shaped much of what the Veneti made. Nor were they Latins. They were an Indo-European people of their own line, and the evidence for that lies in their language.

The genealogy the ancients themselves gave them ran back to Troy. Homer, in the catalog of the allies of the Trojans, names the Eneti of Paphlagonia, a people of the southern Black Sea coast, as breeders of wild mules; and later writers — Strabo above all — built on the slender thread of the name and the horses. Strabo reports that some held the Adriatic Veneti to be descended from those Paphlagonian Eneti, who came west with Antenor after the fall of Troy and settled at the head of the Adriatic, and he offers the breeding of horses as the proof of the descent. Livy told the same story of Antenor’s exiles founding Patavium. This is a tradition of the Greeks and Romans, reaching for a Homeric pedigree, not a thing the Veneti are known to have said of themselves; the modern verdict on Venetic origins reads the language and the archaeology instead, and finds a people long native to the plain. What is solid in the old story is the horses. The reputation for fine horses was real, and it lasted: Strabo records that Dionysius the elder, tyrant of Syracuse in the early fourth century BCE, founded trading stations on the Adriatic coast precisely to come at the famous horses of the Veneti.

The language they spoke, scholars call Venetic, after the people. It survives in roughly three hundred inscriptions, running from the sixth century BCE down to the first, and they are nearly all of two kinds — short epitaphs over the dead and short dedications to the gods. Most come from two great sanctuary sites, Este in the south and Làgole di Calalzo in the mountains of Cadore. Venetic is an Indo-European language, classed by most students with the Italic group that includes Latin, though it keeps features that have led others to set it nearer the Celtic and Germanic branches, and the question of its exact place is genuinely unsettled. What is not in doubt is the script. The Veneti took their alphabet from the Etruscans — from a northern variety of the Etruscan letters, one that had already dropped the signs for sounds Etruscan did not use, the b, d, g, and o — and adapted it to a tongue that needed those sounds back. To mark how the letters worked they devised a system found in few other scripts: a syllabic punctuation that set dots around the letters according to the syllable, so that the writing carried within it a kind of running grammar of itself. That a borrowed script should be reworked so thoroughly, and the reworking made a matter of careful rule, is the first sign of how much the Veneti cared for the written letter.

A Venetic bronze votive figure of a high-ranking worshiper, from Adria, c. 500–480 BCE. Such bronzetti were among the offerings left at Venetic sanctuaries. Francesco Bini (Sailko), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Reitia, and the gift of the letters

The great deity of the Veneti was Reitia. She is the best-attested of their gods, and what she was can be read from the offerings made to her and from the words inscribed on them. She was a goddess of healing, called in Venetic by the epithet Śahnate, the Healer; and, on the evidence of her cult and of the company the Romans later set her in, a goddess of fertility and of the thresholds of life, standing, as such goddesses often do, at the boundary between the worlds. The Romans, when they came, set her beside their own Diana and the Greek Artemis, the huntress and the lady of wild things and of childbed — and in the inscriptions of the Roman north the figure of Artemis took over Reitia’s old work of healing, a regional turn found there and almost nowhere else. The interpretatio is a comparison the conquerors reached for, a way of fitting a strange goddess into a familiar shape; it is not a statement of identity, and the Reitia of the Veneti kept domains the Roman pairing only partly catches.

The domain that sets her apart belonged to writing itself. Reitia was a patroness of the written letter, a thing found among few of the gods of the ancient Mediterranean. To her were dedicated the instruments and the exercises of the script: bronze writing styluses, by the hundred; small inscribed bronze tablets and plaques; and what scholars call abecedaria — the letters of the alphabet set out in order, the alphabet itself offered up as a gift. One reading of her very name takes it to mean the one who writes, drawing it toward an old Indo-European root for the act of writing. Whether or not the name carries that sense, the offerings make the matter plain: at her sanctuary the act of writing, and the learning of it, were brought to the goddess as worship. To set down the letters in their order, to inscribe a tablet and lay it before her, was to honor the keeper of the script — as though literacy were a sacred thing held in trust, and the goddess its warden.

Who brought these offerings can in part be read from the inscriptions, for many of the dedications to Reitia carry the names of women. The writing-cult of Este, then, is among the earliest and clearest evidence anywhere in ancient Italy that women took part in letters — not as a thing imagined of them but as a thing recorded in their own dedications, in their own hand or made in their name. The styluses and the alphabet-tablets are, by the same token, among the oldest traces of how writing was taught in Italy, the abecedarium serving at once as a school exercise and as an act of devotion.

The Veneti held, too, a cult of the horse — the animal of their wealth and their fame, the beast that gave them their Homeric pedigree and drew the tyrant of Syracuse to their coast. Horse-gear is among the oldest of the finds at Este: bronze harness and a horse’s muzzle, laid up like the other offerings. The horse ran through their religion as it ran through their economy, the creature on which a great part of their standing in the ancient world rested.

Bronze horse caparison of the Veneti, c. 650–600 BCE, from Este and now in the Museo Nazionale Atestino. The Veneti were famed among ancient writers as breeders of fine horses. Francesco Bini (Sailko), via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0.

The deposit at Baratella

The richest record of the Venetic religion, and of the Venetic language, came out of the ground at Este. South of the modern town, at a place called Baratella, lay the sanctuary of Reitia, and within it a votive deposit of extraordinary scale. The offerings number in the thousands — by one count something on the order of fourteen thousand pieces. There are the thousands of bronze plaques, many of them figured; some hundred and eighty small bronze figures, the bronzetti, of worshipers and warriors; pottery in quantity, animal bones, ornaments, tools, and — running on into the Roman centuries — coins. And among them, the offerings that make the sanctuary unique: the bronze styluses, the writing-tablets, the alphabet-plaques, dedicated to the goddess of the written letter, the body of them dating roughly from the middle of the fourth century to the middle of the second BCE.

These inscribed offerings are the chief source for the Venetic tongue. The dedications to Reitia, with their formulae and their abecedaria, give the scholars who study the language much of what they have to work with; the goddess of writing is, fittingly, the keeper of the writing by which her people are known at all. The deposit is the standing case for treating the Veneti as a nation of their own speech rather than a fold of the Etruscan or the Roman world — for here, in the bronze laid up at Baratella, the people speak in their own hand and to their own goddess. The contrast is worth marking. The Etruscans to the west left behind a religion that has to be reconstructed at one remove — from their painted tombs and their engraved bronze mirrors, and beyond those from the later Roman authors who inherited and wrote down the Etruscan divinatory science. The Veneti, by the offerings of Reitia, speak nearer to first hand; the votive tablet, the dedication scratched on bronze, is the thing itself, not a Roman report of it. Where the load-bearing word survives, it survives in Venetic.

Even so, the limits are real and should be stated. The inscriptions are short — names, dedications, the letters of the alphabet — and they tell little of myth, of the order of the gods, of what the Veneti said the world was. Reitia stands out because the offerings to her are many and legible; of the rest of the Venetic pantheon far less is sure, and much that might be guessed cannot be confirmed. The religion of the Veneti is known chiefly through its acts — the styluses laid down, the horse-gear, the bronze figures of worshipers — and far less through its words. What can be said of the goddess of writing is well grounded; beyond her the record thins quickly, and it is better to say so than to fill the gap.

The passing of a people into Rome

The end of the Venetic nation as a thing apart came not by conquest but by absorption, and the absorption was largely willing. The Veneti, pressed on the west by the Celtic peoples who had spilled across the Po, found in Rome the one power able to shield them, and through the third century BCE they drew toward the Roman side. They stood with Rome against the Gauls and through the long agony of the war with Hannibal. The alliance held, and over the following generations the plain of the Veneti became, by degrees, a part of Roman Italy. In 49 BCE the lex Roscia, carried for Julius Caesar, extended Roman citizenship to the peoples of Cisalpine Gaul north of the Po, the Veneti among them; under Augustus their land was made the tenth region of Italy, Venetia et Histria. The political passage was complete by the turn of the era.

The language followed the politics. From the second century BCE the inscriptions show Venetic and Latin side by side — bilingual dedications, Venetic written now in Roman letters, Venetic flooded with Latin words. By the first century the shift from the old tongue to Latin was well advanced, and before long Venetic ceased to be written and then to be spoken. The script that Reitia had kept gave way to the script of Rome. Of the religion, the cult at Este went on into the Roman period — the coins in the deposit prove the offerings did not stop at once — but Reitia was drawn toward Diana, and the distinct shape of the Venetic gods faded into the general religion of Roman Italy.

What was recovered came back through the ground. The excavation of the sanctuary at Baratella and of the cemeteries of Este, and the reading of the Venetic inscriptions, restored to the modern world a people who had vanished into Rome — their tongue, their script, the name and the worship of their healing goddess. The bronzes are gathered now in the Museo Nazionale Atestino at Este, the museum named, like the town, for old Ateste. Among the Italic neighbors of the Etruscans, the Veneti hold a particular place: not Etruscan, not Latin, a nation of the Adriatic corner who spoke and wrote a speech of their own, and whose great goddess, alone among the powers of that world, held the letters of the alphabet as her gift. The styluses laid before her at Baratella are the clearest sign of what they valued — the written letter brought as an offering, and the goddess set to keep it. As Katherine McDonald has argued from the dedications themselves, the writing left at Este is some of the earliest evidence we have for how writing was taught, and learned, and held holy in ancient Italy (Cambridge Core).

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