Veii

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A dozen miles up the right bank of the Tiber, on a plateau of soft volcanic tufa cut on every side by stream-gorges, the ground still carries the outline of a city. Cart-ruts are worn into the rock where the gates stood. Beneath the plateau run cuniculi, the channels the inhabitants drove through the tufa to lead water off and to lead it where they wanted it. On the western shoulder, outside the line of the walls, at a place the modern maps call Portonaccio, a rectangular platform of tufa blocks holds the footings of a temple and, beside it, a pool lined with clay. From this pool’s surround, in the spring of 1916, came up out of the earth a striding figure of painted clay, larger than a man, smiling. The city was Veii. The figure was its god.

The plateau and its rivalry

The Etruscans who held the place called it Vei; the Romans wrote it Veii, and the modern town below the ridge is Isola Farnese, in the metropolitan city of Rome. The plateau lies roughly sixteen kilometers north-northwest of Rome itself — close enough that on a clear day the two cities looked across the same river country at each other. Of the great cities of the Etruscan dodecapolis, the loose league of twelve that the later tradition counted, Veii was the southernmost, the one whose territory ran down to the Tiber and very nearly to Rome’s own fields. That nearness made it, across the whole early history of Rome, the chief rival.

The quarrel was over the river and what the river carried. The Tiber was the boundary between Etruscan country and Latin, and its crossings — the fords and, in time, the bridges — were the points where trade and armies passed. Near the river’s mouth lay the salt-flats, and salt was a commodity no inland community could do without; the road that later Rome called the Via Salaria, the salt-road, ran up from those flats into the Sabine hills, and Veii sat athwart the country it crossed. For control of the lower Tiber and the salt of its mouth, the Roman annalists record, Rome and Veii were by turns at war and in alliance across some three centuries. The figures and the episodes in that long account belong to the Roman memory of its own beginnings, set down by writers many generations later, and they carry the shaping of a national epic; the broad fact of a protracted border struggle between two neighboring powers is what the archaeology of the territory bears out, and it is on that footing that the rivalry is best held.

The plateau had been settled long before either city counted years against the other. Beneath the Etruscan town lay the villages of the Iron Age culture that archaeologists name Villanovan, the early phase of the same population, whose cremation-urns and huts cluster on the same heights; the great Etruscan cities of southern Etruria grew, through the seventh and sixth centuries, out of the coalescence of such villages into single fortified communities. Veii was among the largest of them. The plateau it occupied is wide — one of the most extensive of any Etruscan city — and the cuniculi that drained and watered it are themselves a monument to the engineering of a people who knew how to work the soft tufa, the same skill the Roman tradition would later turn against the city in the story of its fall.

The struggle ends, in the Roman telling, with a siege. War was declared, the tradition has it, in 406 before the common era, and the city held out for the better part of a decade behind walls that the tufa cliffs made nearly unassailable. The deadlock was broken, the annalists relate, by the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus, who about the year 396 drove a tunnel — a cuniculus, of the same kind the Veientines had themselves cut through the soft rock for their drains — beneath the citadel, distracting the defenders with assaults on the walls while his men came up through the city’s own drainage into its heart. Veii fell. Its population was killed or sold, its territory taken into Roman land, and the closest of the powerful Etruscan towns passed out of the Etruscan world. Livy gives the fullest version of this account in the fifth book of his history, written some four centuries after the event, and it is shot through with the marvelous — a portent of a rising lake, a captured diviner made to speak against his own city. The drained tunnel is the kind of detail that a real feature of the site, the cuniculi that genuinely honeycomb the plateau, could equally have generated after the fact. What is firm is the outcome: by the early fourth century Veii was Roman, and the way north into Etruria lay open.

The sanctuary of Menrva and the striding gods

What the spade has recovered at Veii is less the city of the siege than the city of the gods, and above all one sanctuary. On the western edge of the plateau, just beyond the walls at Portonaccio, stood an enclosure given to a goddess. The Etruscans named her Menrva — the armed wisdom of their reckoning, the figure later Latin would call Minerva and the Greeks set beside Athena. Within a boundary wall the precinct held a temple raised on a low podium of tufa, an altar standing free, a stone channel down which libations were poured, and a great rectangular pool lined with clay, fed and drained by a tunnel cut into the rock. The building work belongs to the closing decades of the sixth century before the common era, around 510, in the years when Veii stood near the height of its power.

The temple was of the broad, low Etruscan kind, almost square in plan, its sides running near eighteen meters, with a deep porch of columns at the front and chambers behind. Such a roof was not finished, in central Italy, with marble figures in a pediment, as a Greek temple would be. The Etruscans built in wood and fired clay, and they carried their sculpture up onto the ridge of the roof — the acroterion, the line of the roof-tree — where painted terracotta statues stood out against the sky. At Veii a row of these figures was set along the ridgepole, twelve meters above the ground, larger than life, and they did not stand still: they strode. They were caught in a single moment of a story. The scene was the contest, known from Greek myth, of Apollo and Heracles over the Ceryneian hind, the golden-horned deer that Heracles had taken and the god moved to reclaim — the Etruscan Apulu and Hercle disputing the creature between them, with other powers attending. A figure of Heracles with the doe survives in part; so do fragments of a Hermes, the Etruscan Turms; and a female head identified with Leto, the mother who in the myth comes to her son’s side.

One of the striding gods came up almost whole. He is the Apollo of Veii — Apulu, the Etruscan Apollo — and he is among the masterworks of the art of ancient Italy. He is modeled in terracotta, fired and then painted: reddish on the flesh, the clay polished over with a yellow slip, his long hair drawn back in spiraling locks bound with a fillet. He moves forward, one leg driving, the heavy drapery pressed back against the body by the motion, and on his face is the archaic smile — that fixed, inward expression the sixth century gave its gods and athletes alike, neither welcome nor warning but a kind of charged composure.

The Apollo of Veii (the Etruscan Apulu), painted terracotta acroterion from the roof-group of the Portonaccio sanctuary of Menrva, c. 510–500 BCE, now in the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Photograph by Waterborough, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The roof-group is referred, by a chain of inference that scholars hold with care, to a single hand: Vulca of Veii. Vulca is the only Etruscan sculptor whose name the ancient record preserves, and the record is Roman: Pliny the Elder, in his Natural History, writes that Vulca of Veii was the master summoned to Rome — in the tradition, by one of the Tarquin kings, under whose reign Veii’s own great temple was rising — to model in terracotta the cult-statue of Jupiter for the temple on the Capitoline, the chief sanctuary of the Roman state, together with a four-horse chariot of clay to crown its roof. Pliny calls such images the finest of their age, more admired, he says, than gold. That a master of Veii made the image of Rome’s own supreme god, in the Roman telling, is itself a measure of where the art of fired clay stood highest in central Italy. The attribution of the surviving Apollo to Vulca’s own hand is a reasonable conjecture rather than a documented fact — the Portonaccio statues are the work of his city and his generation, and may be his — and the careful sources mark the uncertainty rather than dissolve it.

Around the temple lay the offerings. The pool served ritual washing, and the open square within the precinct held the ex-votos that worshipers brought to the goddess. Among them were anatomical votives — small terracotta models of parts of the body: a hand, an eye, a foot, the inner organs — left by those who had come to Menrva afflicted and went away cured, or hoping to be. The same kind of offering attended this goddess elsewhere in central Italy, where her power was reckoned to reach into health and into the safe passage of the young to adulthood; a long series of votive statues of boys, found in the deposit, points to a cult that watched over that threshold. The healing reach of the goddess, the votive bodies of the cured, and the role she held in the rites of growing up are the sanctuary’s own testimony, read from what the faithful buried in her ground. Within the world this precinct served, Menrva was no figure of speech: she was the power who answered, and the broken clay limbs in her deposit are the record of the answering.

The Etruscan religion that this sanctuary served left no literature of its own; the Etruscans wrote, and a great deal of their writing survives in inscriptions, but no book, no hymn, no telling of their gods in their own connected words has come down. What Veii holds instead is a religion in its objects — the temple plan, the votive bodies, the gods on the roof — and what is known of the divinatory science the Etruscans were famous for, the reading of lightning and the liver of the sacrifice, comes largely through later Roman writers who inherited and codified it. The sanctuary of Portonaccio speaks in the first of these two voices: it is the thing itself, the cult in its own ground, and not a Roman report of it.

The lifting of the god and the city’s afterlife

Veii after its fall slid into the territory of Rome and, in time, out of memory; a small Roman municipium occupied part of the plateau under the empire and then dwindled, and the great sanctuary lay under the fields. The recovery of the city is a story of the modern age. Excavation at Portonaccio began in 1914, and on the nineteenth of May 1916 the diggers reached the votive deposit into which the temple’s roof-statues had been thrown down, broken, in antiquity. Out of it, in pieces that could be set together, came the Apollo. Lifted from the ground, cleaned, and reassembled, the striding god became at once one of the celebrated images of Etruscan art — proof, after centuries in which the Etruscans were known mostly through what Greeks and Romans said of them, that their sculptors in fired clay had stood at the front rank of the archaic Mediterranean. The Apollo and the surviving members of his roof-group passed to the national collection of Etruscan antiquities in Rome, the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, where they remain.

Terracotta acroterion of Apollo from the Portonaccio sanctuary of Menrva at Veii, c. 510–500 BCE, Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome. Photograph by Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The site today is an archaeological area open above Isola Farnese, the Portonaccio sanctuary its most visible monument, the temple footings and the pool and the line of the cuniculi traceable on the plateau where the wars were fought. The full account of the sanctuary and its finds is set out in the modern excavation literature; the World History Encyclopedia’s survey of Veii gathers the history and the art for a general reader, and the archaeological area is documented by the city of Rome among its heritage sites.

In the long memory two figures of Veii survive. One is the city itself as Rome’s great early rival — the neighbor across the river whose fall, in the Roman reckoning, opened central Italy to Rome and whose siege under Camillus became one of the founding episodes of the Republic’s story of itself, carried by writers like Livy at four centuries’ remove and to be weighed as such. The other is the city of Menrva and of Vulca: the sanctuary at Portonaccio where the votive bodies were buried and the painted gods stood on the roof, and the one named sculptor of the whole Etruscan world, the master of Veii whom Rome itself called on to make the image of its highest god. The striding Apollo, smiling, is the surviving proof of what that workshop could do. Its kindred among the Etruscan cities — the painted-tomb necropolis of Tarquinia, the city-of-the-dead at Cerveteri, the port-sanctuary of Pyrgi with its gold tablets, the figures of the gods themselves drawn on the engraved bronze mirrors — make up the world that Veii belonged to, and that its fall began to close. The god of fired clay came back up out of the ground long after the city that made him was gone, still in mid-stride.

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