The experience! cried Lawrence. Theexperience—that was what mattered. Live! Empathize! Feel!
When he visited Tuscany in 1927, three years before he died, he was quite sick; yet the book gives no hint of it, except indirectly. “Ease, naturalness, and an abundance of life,” he wrote. “The things they did, in their easy centuries, are as natural and easy as breathing.” No need to twist the mind or soul. Death was simply a pleasant continuance of life, with jewels and wine and flutes playing for the dance. Neither an ecstasy of bliss, a heaven, nor a purgatory of torment.
“From the shadow of the prehistoric world emerge dying religions that have not yet invented gods or goddesses, but live by the mystery of the elemental powers in the Universe, the complex vitalities of what we feebly call Nature.”
“The goat says: let me breed for ever, till the world is one reeking goat. But then the lion roars from the other blood-stream, which is also in man, and he lifts his paw to strike. . . .”
This sort of thing annoys Pallottino, who has no time for mystics. Painted tombs littered with jewelry and elegant vases have created around his specialty “a peculiar aura of romantic suggestion, which the books of Dennis and Noël des Vergers helped to spread, never to disappear again. Scholarly uncertainties and polemics on the interpretation of Etruscan inscriptions, on the classification of the language, on the problem of Etruscan origins, gave birth to the notion of an ‘Etruscan mystery’; and this notion, rather than describing, more or less aptly, a scientific situation . . .”
On and on he goes in his oddly dry, convincing prose—much less gratifying than the rainbows whipped up by Lawrence. And what he is insisting is that these people twenty-five centuries ago were neither more nor less enigmatic than you and I; which is to say that they are interesting by themselves, never mind the blather.
Physically they were small, judged by skeletal remains. The men averaged five feet, four inches, the women just above five feet. On the basis of tomb information their life expectancy was about forty.
Early historians denounced them as decadent and drunken, promiscuous lovers intoxicated by comfort, a reputation they shared with the Sybarites. Theopompus wrote in the fourth century B.C. that they copulated publicly and did not consider it shameful. “They all do the thing, some watching one another. . . . The men approach the women with great delight, but obtain as much pleasure from young men and adolescents. They grow up, in fact, to be very beautiful, for they live luxuriously and shave their bodies. . . .”
Posidonius, a Stoic author of the second century B.C., after observing that the Etruscans once were valorous, attributes their degeneration to the richness of the land—its minerals, timber, and so on. Later critics explained the decline with equal facility. Victorians, for example, thought they collapsed because of a perverse religion. Our twentieth century is less positive: we aren’t sure just what happened to their world. From our balcony they appear to be at once naive and sophisticated, artistic and materialistic, radical, conservative, industrious, indolent, foolish, clever, ad infinitum. That is to say, a disorganized bellowing parade of contradictory mortals.
Despite meager evidence we do know a little about their activities and concerns.
Etruscan women liked to bleach their hair—a fancy that has been entertained, it seems, from the female prototype to the latest model. And depilatories were popular. Try this: boil a yellow tree frog until it has shrunk to half its natural size, then rub the shriveled frog on the unsightly area. Now, it’s too bad we have no testimonials from satisfied beauties of Vetluna or Caere, but that does not mean the treatment is useless. These people sometimes equaled or surpassed us in the most unexpected ways.
Etruscan hunters understood the compelling power of music far better than we do. Aelian, who wrote in the third century, reveals that after the nets and traps had been set a piper would come forth playing his sweetest tunes. Wild pigs, stags, and other beasts at first would be terrified. But after a while, seduced, they draw closer, bewitched by these dulcet sounds, “until they fall, overpowered, into the snares.” And we have the word of Polybius, five centuries earlier, who asserts that Etruscan swineherds walk their charges up and down the beach, not driving them as we would expect, but leading them by blowing a trumpet.
In dentistry, too, one must salute these creative sons of Villanova. Skulls found at Tarquinia contain teeth neatly bridged and capped with gold.
Insecticides, which we regard as a small miracle of our century, were commonplace. The agronomist Saserna recommends an aromatic vine called serpentaria. Soak the root of this vine in a tub of water, then empty the tub on the infested earth. Or let’s say you become conscious of ravenous little guests in your bed at night. Should that be the case, dampen your bed with a potion of ox gall and vinegar.
Take an ordinary business such as the production of cheese. Here again the Etruscan surprises us. Do
