Etruscan kings in Rome: history or legend?
Roman writers told the story themselves. A man called Lucumo, son of Demaratus, a Corinthian who had settled at Tarquinia and married a local woman, moved to Rome, became a friend of King Ancus Marcius and was made king himself under the name Lucius Tarquinius Priscus. The dynasty ended with Tarquinius Superbus, “the Proud”, expelled in 509 BCE when Rome became a republic. By tradition it had ruled since 616 BCE.
How much of this is true? The details, with their dates and family plots, were written down centuries later and are partly legend. But the core holds. Before this phase Rome was a small group of villages; a great deal of evidence from the Etruscan period has come to light around the Capitol, and the name Tarquin may well be linked to the Etruscan family Tarchu, known from inscriptions. Rome grew up with its Etruscan neighbours just across the Tiber.
A drain and a temple
The first works that turned the villages into a city are credited to the Tarquins. Roman tradition says the elder Tarquin drained the low ground round the Forum, where water could not escape, with channels emptying into the Tiber, and that the younger one, after calling in workmen from all over Etruria for his temple, set the Roman commons to dig a tunnel under the city to carry its waste: the Cloaca Maxima, the “greatest sewer”. In practice, wet ground between the hills became the square at the centre of Roman life.
On the Capitol they raised the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, shared with Juno and Minerva. It was huge, about 53 by 63 metres, the largest temple ever built on the plan of Etruscan temples: a high podium with steps at the front, three rows of columns across the façade and three cellae side by side under one roof. Its terracotta statues came from Veii, the great centre of Etruscan terracotta, made by a sculptor called Vulca. The temple was dedicated in 509 BCE, the first year of the Republic, so the new Rome began its life under an Etruscan roof.
Reading the will of the gods
The Etruscans were famous in antiquity for divination, that is, the reading of signs sent by the gods. Their specialists, the haruspices, read the entrails of sacrificed sheep, above all the liver and gall bladder, and interpreted lightning; Etruscan religion divided the sky into regions, each ruled by a god. A bronze model of a sheep’s liver found near Piacenza, divided into fields with the names of the gods, shows how methodical the practice was.
Rome adopted the whole system. Cicero wrote that the Romans had brought the art in from Etruria and that the Senate, to keep it in good hands, had ordered sons of leading families to be sent to the Etruscan peoples to learn it. The Romans could also take Etruscan gods. When Veii fell in 396 BCE, one of the young Romans chosen to move the statue of Juno asked her whether she was willing to go to Rome; the story goes that she let herself be carried easily to the Aventine hill, where Camillus later dedicated a temple to her.
The look of power
Roman magistrates walked through the city surrounded by signs of office, and the Romans themselves believed these came from Etruria. The twelve lictors, the attendants who walked before the king, carried the fasces, bundles of rods. Livy thought the number twelve came from the twelve Etruscan peoples, each of which gave one lictor to the king they elected together; the same people, he says, gave Rome the sella curulis, the folding chair of high officials, and the toga praetexta with its purple border. Another ancient tradition went further and traced to Tarquinia the dress of triumphs and consuls, the fasces and axes, the trumpets, the sacrifices, divination and the music of Roman public ceremonies.
Rome went on to conquer the Etruscan cities one by one, as the rest of the Etruscan period shows, but its magistrates kept their fasces and its Senate kept having the art of the haruspices taught to the sons of its leading families.
Where to see it
In Rome, the foundations of the Capitoline temple are on display in the Palazzo dei Conservatori of the Musei Capitolini, and the terracotta sculptures made by the last generation of Vulca’s workshop for the sanctuary of Portonaccio at Veii are at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia. The Liver of Piacenza is in the civic museums of Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza.
Sources
- Livy, History of Rome 1.8, 1.38, 1.56, 5.22; Strabo, Geography 5.2.2; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 4.61; Cicero, On Divination 1.3 and 1.92.
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Etruscan”, “Etruscan religion”, “Veii”.
- Musei Capitolini, “Foundations of the temple of Jove Capitoline”; Turismo Roma, “Temple of Capitoline Jupiter”.
- Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, record of the Apollo of Veii.
- VisitPiacenza, “The Etruscan Liver”.
.jpg){kind=link}