Warren, “The Women of Etruria”
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90 Dorothea Wender to being dragged out "into the light," and he was right. Many women do object to it, even now. THE WOMEN OF ETRUR!A He did not like or admire us. But he felt it would be just and LARISSA BONFANTE WARREN expedient to give us a chance. Xenophon liked us, and felt that it was Important to keep us just the way he liked us. It is a difficult choice for many women. It is hard to give up being liked. OvER A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, J. J. Bachofen publisheQ his book on "Mother-right," and The Myth of Tanaquil,' with which, like his friend Wheaton College Nietzsche, he revolutionized the world of classical scholarship. The case was overstated - the "tyranny of women" never happened. Bachofen's "matriarchy" must be carefully distinguished from equality. Yet he understood and described a historical fact: that the status of NOTES Etruscan women, in the archaic period at least - seventh to fifth 1 century B.C. - was surprisingly high in comparison to that of' Greek In his introduction to an episode of the National Educational Television production of the "Six Wives of Henry tho VI lith." and Roman women. 2 Since then archaeology, by studying direct material evidence, 'I'he fullest treatments. I have found are in Ronald B. L"v'"' 1·nson , In D e f ense PI (c o r ato, . ambndgc, Harvard • 1953) , pp . 125 ~ 138 ( and e.sewwre1 1 1 and such as tomb paintings and inscriptions, has told us more of the Jo-:vett s five-volume Plato, which has a delightful discussion of Plato's Etruscans' luxurious style of life, and the considerable role played by attitude. toward women, in the introduction on the (volume 111). Republi~ the women. 2 Accounts of Greek and Roman writers give further evidence Intcrestmg relevant. material can be found also in A E T 1 PI h . · · um, mo: t e Man. and hts Work (N. Y., Meridiun, 1956), pp. 277-278 (and elsewhere), for these facts - more importantly, they show how the Etruscan way of A. D. Wwspear, The Genesis of Plato's Thought (New York, Dryden, 1940), life differed from their own, and how this difference frightened them. PP· 241 ff., Rupert Lodge, The Philosophy of Plato (London RouU d They experienced it as a conflict in civilization, and expressed it in and . Kegan p au I • 1956 ), pp. 270-271, and Paul Shorey, What ' Plato e Saidge terms of relations between men and women, and different attitudes to (Chicago, U. of Chicago Press, 1933) passim But it is · · h . · surpnsmg ow sex. many ma)or books on Plato hardly consider the topic at all· fore 1 Paul F ne· dl''an d er, PI ato ( Pr.mceton, Bollingen, 1969). • xamp' e Bachofen saw the great difference between the early Roman 3 See, for example, Alfred Zimmern, T/te Greek C ommonwealth (Oxford, system of the pater familias with legal powers of life and death, and Clarendon, 1924) Part II chapters 2 and 12. 4 the type of' society implied by tales of the Etruscan queens. I would After I wrote ·this I discovered that Warner File (The Platon: Legend, like to suggest that Rome's contact with the civilization which con Now York, S~ribners, 1934, p. 178) had used precisely the SUI~: example fronted her across the Tiber, from whom she took so much external t~ make prec~scly Lhe same point. Generally, I find Fite's tone unfair and .h1s scholo.rship deplorable . culture - letters, the arts, symbols of royalty, so that eventually For e.xample at the end ~f Xenophon 's Symposium, a pair of dancers (boy Rome looked like an Etruscan city too - represented Rome's first and girl) portray the passwnate love of Dionysus and Ariadne so eff t' 1 that ''th · d ec Ive y "cultural shock." Making her conscious of her own "moral" identity e u_nmarne spectators vowed that they would marry, and the Rome never gave up her language, religion or customs - it perhaps a lready married mounted their horses and galloped home to their wives " <X,1 71. ' foreshadowed, on a vastly different scale, the later Hellenistic ex Op. cit., p. 632. plosion, when two different cultures met, and long continued to live 7 Op. cit., pp. 116-118. 8 in an uneasy proximity. The Etruscm1s were for the Romans from the Hans Kelsen, "Platonic Love " • A · <~ , 10 mencan 1mago 3 (April 1942). 3-110. first, and always remained, "the others." The foreignness of their Fragments 110, 111, 214. 273, 274. 10 Taylor, op. cit., p. 278. language encouraged, true or not, the story of their Oriental origin. 11 Ibid. What we know best about them is their art, and the importance 12 F ·r Y l ty ~ars (And Twelve) of Classical Scholarship <Oxford BaRil Bl k 11 of the women in society. The art puts us in direct _contact with this 1968), p. J70. • - ac we rich and cultured people, who brought art and letters to Italy and to 91 ARETHUSA VoL. 6 (1973) 1. Larissa Bon(ante Warren The Women of Etruria 93 Rome. Literary evidence, as we shall see, speaks of the freedom temporary Greek vase paintings of symposia which served as models and power of Etruscan women. How much of this is true? And how are for pictures of Etruscan banquets, wives are conspicuous by their the wealth and women's freedom connected? absence.' Men recline with men, or with pretty flute girls whose Roman sources, chief among them Livy, mostly belong to the nakedness shows them to be slave girls, not respectable women. Augustan period, which had its own concerns and ideals,' and for A sensational recent discovery, the painted tomb from Paestum whom Etruscan contacts with early Rome lay in a distant past, re with scenes from a symposium, imitating Etruscan tomb paintings in created rather than remembered. For the facts of the archaic period technique, but with Greek subject matter, points out this contrast. The and contemporary reactions we must start with the Greeks. South Italian scene shows men courting a handsome young boy wrth Differences between Etruscan and Greek women were striking. bright red lips and cheeks. No women appear, not even as dancers Theopompus, the Greek historian of the fourth century B.C., was or attendants. In striking contrast, Etruscan art seems to show a world startled by them, and drew the worst possible conclusion from of married couples: see for example the justly famous and aptly named what he saw and heard about Etruscan women.' According to his report, sarcophagus of the Bride and Groom - "Sposi" is a better word - in they took great care of their bodies, often exercising in the nude with the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome.' men and with each other; it was not considered shameful for women to To Theopompus, seeing husbands and wives so unexpectedly show themselves naked. They were very beautiful. At dinner, he tells together must have seemed a serious breach of culture and good taste, us, they reclined publicly with men other than their husbands. They leading him to draw further conclusions of lasciviousness. He 1magmes even took part in the toasting - traditionally reserved for men and that women joined men in another traditionally male place, the gym regulated by strict formalities at Greek symposia. Etruscan women nasium, where Greek men, by definition, exercised naked. That women liked to drink (so, by the way, did Greek women, according to Aris exercised together with men in the nude, in either Athens or in any tophanes and others; this is the most familiar accusation of immorality). Etruscan city, is patently untrue. Etruscan women did join men pub 9 Most shocking of all, they raised all their children, according to licly in watching sports, a custom most un-Greek - they are so repre Theopompus, whether or not they knew who the fathers were. sented on funerary paintings and reliefs.'' They apparently were not, Theopompus' mistmderstanding of the real situation is compara ... however, particularly fond of such strenuous exercise as Spartan ble to the misconceptions regarding Swedish girls current among men women practiced; nor do they ever appear naked. As for exercising in in Italy today. His account of Etruscan society, with what seems to the nude, even Etruscan men normally wore shorts, heroic nudity being us today to be sexual freedom for women - incomprehensible, accord a peculiarly Greek invention in the ancient Mediterranean world. It was ing to Greek standards, as anything other than immorality -resembles practiced by Greeks alone - and even then only after Homeric times - Herodotus' description of the Lydians (!, 93-94), among whom, we are constituting, a~ much as language did, the chief distinction between told, women give themselves up to prostitution before marriage, Even Greeks and barbarians, including Etruscans.'' more striking is the resemblance to the account Herodotus gives of the Other observations of Theopompus, after due allowance has Lycians, whose family structure was different from that of the Greeks. been made for his difficulty in understanding something foreigu to him There, descent was reckoned through the female line, the matronymic and threatening, are supported by evidence. Etruscan funerary inscrip took the place of the patronymic, and free women married to slaves tions identifying the deceased by means of the matronymic as well as could pass their status on to their children.' the patronymic show the greater legal and social importance of women, Yet, although Theopompus' account distorts the truth, much of though they deny, at the same time, Bachofen's theory of the survival 12 what he says is in fact confirmed by archaeological evidence.