The Buried People
BY PETER QUENNELL EIGHTY-EIGHT years before the birth of Christ, a noise like the hoarse blaring of a brazen war-trumpet is said to have resounded across Central Italy. It pro- claimed to the Etruscan priests and prophets that the eighth, period in the life-span of their people had come to its appointed end, and that the ninth, or penultimate, cycle was even now beginning. Forty-four years later, the conclusion of that period too was announced by the appearance of a comet. Time was rapidly running out; and soon Propertius would describe how the victorious Octavian, when he stormed and sacked Perugia, had 'overturned the hearths of the venerable Etruscan race.' The Etruscans must look forward to complete eclipse; and, in fact, they Were already decadent and had been slowly declining for several hundred years—ever since they had lost their maritime empire and Rome, about the middle of the fourth century, had reduced Etruria to political subjec- tion. Yet Rome venerated the people she crushed, not only as a cultivated and luxurious nation from whom its rustic con- querors had learned many lessons in the art of living, but as a race of priests and magicians and augurs, 'distinguished above all others (wrote Livy) in their devotion to religious practices.' Etruria, indeed, was the genetrix et mater super- stitionum, and, besides her contributions to civic pageantry— the lictors' fasces, the curule chair, the gilded laurel wreath and the purple robe—she added some important details to the complex background of Roman religious beliefs : methods of prophesying the future by lightning flashes and the flight of birds, and of divining the will of the gods from the liver of a slaughtered animal.
* * * 'Yet, in spiritual and social temperament, conquered and conqueror had always been far apart. There was this difference, observed Seneca, between the Roman and the Etruscan mind : 'whereas we believe lightning to be released as the result of the collision of clouds, they believe that the clouds collide so as to release lightning; for, as they attribute all to the deity, they are led to believe not that things have a meaning in so far as they occur, but rather that they occur because they must have a meaning. . . In short, the primitive attitude towards Nature is contrasted with a scientific approach. 'There was in Etruria [according to that eminent Etruscologist Professor Massimo Pallottino] a feeling of the nonentity of man before the divine will, unknown to the Greek . . . and which the Romans tended to resolve in a prevalently juridical conception' of the proper relationship of god and man. By paying due attention to the claims of the supernatural, and conceding to God the things that were God's, the constructive, aggressive Roman could hope to build and rule his own world. Beneath the Etruscan view of life lurked an enervating sense of hope- lessness and loneliness.
Thus the period of Etruscan power and prosperity had already been established by fate; and, when the trumpet sounded and the comet blazed and the still-warm ashes on their ancestral hearth-stones were scattered to the four winds, this proud and gifted people submitted to the decrees of destiny—to the command of the mysterious 'Hidden Ones,' that nameless, unmentionable group of divinities whose ordinances there was no denying—and retreated into an obscurity from which they have not yet wholly re-emerged. The Etruscan problem is among the most difficult provided by any ancient civilisation. Despite the patient efforts of modern scholarship, only some hundred words of their language can be interpreted with complete confidence. Their sepulchral inscriptions often puzzle the student; and their literature—if they had a literature—has disappeared without a trace. But many fragments of their brilliant art remain; and this art, like the other aspects of their genius, tells an unusually puzzling tale.
For their paintings, and most of the splendid objects they fashioned in gold, bronze and earthenware, were created to embellish their tombs—the vast encampments of the dead, constructed on the edge of every large Etruscan city. Few peoples have been more obsessed by death; and yet their preoccupation with the world beyond the grave did not pre- clude a whole-hearted appreciation of the pleasures of the earthly life. Their earliest and finest tomb-chambers are gaily and beautifully decorated with scenes of feasting, dancing, wrestling and hunting. A servant runs in with a cup of wine, followed by a musician playing on the double flute and another carrying a seven-stringed lyre. Dancers and tumblers whirl and bound; and the master and mistress of the feast—the Etruscans horrified the Greeks and Romans by the freedom that they allowed their women—recline side by side upon the same sofa, covered by the same cloak. Garlands droop over their heads; cats, dogs, pigeons and hens consort amicably upon the dining-room floor.
Elsewhere young patricians are jogging home from the hunt, and boatmen fish with line and trident, while dolphin leap from the dark-blue waves and coveys of water-birds, all of them brightly plumaged, flutter hither and thither across the stuccoed walls. Evidently the Etruscans were conscious of the pride of life and susceptible to the influence of the wine god, whom they had pleasantly entitled Fufluns. But even here, in the decorations of the earliest tombs, there are frequent reminders of the omnipresence of death. A masked demon. whose name is Phersu—from which the Romans seem to have taken their word for a mask, persona—casts his sling around the legs of a doomed contestant at the funeral games; and a beautiful girl, attending the funeral banquet, is confronted by Charu, the messenger of death—no doubt a direct ancestor of the Graeco-Roman Charon—who has the pointed ears of a wild animal, a mottled green skin and a vulturine beak.
As the Etruscans grew older, and their sense of doom became more oppressive, the symbols of gaiety disappear, and images of terror and death recur more and more insistently. Even the physical type seems to have undergone a change; and the eagerly smiling, wide-browed and sharp-nosed figures, looking out from the frescoed walls of their tombs or stretched in three-dimensional state upon the lids of the earlier sarco- phagi, are replaced by a portrait-gallery of obese degenerate businessmen. Such was the rapid decline of a people that had once controlled Italy from coast to coast. Where they had originated we cannot tell—whether they were an indigenous race or their original homeland (as they themselves believed) had been among the mountains of Asia Minor. The Etruscan problem remains largely unsolved; and each historian approaches it from a somewhat different point of view, empha- sising or minimising the element of mystery according to his personal bent. Frau Sibylle von Cles-Reden, for instance, authoress of a lively and stimulating volume which she calls The Buried People,* stresses the mysterious aspect of ancient Etruscan civilisation; while Professor Pallottino (whose book in the illustrated Penguin series should be studied simul- taneously as a useful corrective) feels confident that twentieth- century scholarship will gradually disperse our doubts. But Pallottino himself is sometimes obliged to agree that this historical sphinx still wears a peculiarly enigmatic expression; • and the traveller who enters an Etruscan tomb and, by the uncertain light of the custodian's lamp, sees the ruddy figures of wrestlers and runners, and the dim shapes of household animals and strange mythological beasts, glistening upon the damp walls—the beaded dampness of the volcanic stone gives them an exquisitely luminous glow—has the sensation of * THE BURIED PEOPLE. A Study of the Etruscan World. By Sibylle von Cles-Reden. Translated by C. M. Woodhouse. (Hart-Davis, 35s.) exploring another world and disturbing the private existence of a huge, secretive subterranean family.
For the uninstructed traveller, as distinct from the archwo- logist. Frau von Cles-Reden will make an admirable guide. True, her descriptive passages are, here and there, perhaps a shade too richly coloured, and she is a little too fond of such words as 'sombre.' voluptuous,"sensual,"cruer; but she has produced an absorbing account of the discoveries at the various tombs, and describes the chief Etruscan sites in a fluent and attractive style. Her book may be compared with D. H. Lawrence's Etruscan Places. Both writers were strongly attracted by the 'vivid feeling' of the earlier frescoes. `To the Etruscan [declared Lawrence] all was alive; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the huge wandering vitalities of the world . . . But one radical thing the Etruscan people never forgot . . . and that was the mystery of the journey out of life, and into death; the death-journey, and the sojourn in the after-life.' The decline of Etruscan vitality Lawrence attributes partly to their contact with the materialistic Romans, partly to the deadening influence of the 'Greeks and Greek rationalism.' Like everything that Lawrence published. Etruscan Places is full of brilliantly suggestive writing, inspired by somewhat slipshod thinking. The weaknesses to which the Etruscans owed their fall seem to have been inherent in the primitive Etruscan character. They had always planned their tomb-cities on a far more magnificent scale than the cities of the living: the latter were built of -mud and thatch, the former constructed of solid stone.
The Buried People is half a travel-book—Frau von Cles- Reden is at her best when she is describing the melancholy Etrurian landscapes: Caere, with its immense assemblage of lonely grass-grown funeral-mounds: Tarquinia, motherland of the Etruscan nation, perched upon its desolate hill : Vulci, once a busy centre of commerce, now lost in a malarial waste, where 'only thistles defy the heat' and 'the heat-haze veils the sky as if with tenuous spiders' webs.' But it also contains a fascinating picture of the growth and decay of a noble civilisation which, having reached a certain point in its career, suddenly faltered and began to decline. The illustrations— eighty-one of them, uniformly well-chosen and well-reproduced —show how far the Etruscans had ascended before they took the downward road.
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