Etruscan League (Etruria)

A king on someone else's throne

formationDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

Dennis's own book opens with the problem every historian of the Etruscans has to admit up front: almost nothing of their own internal history survives except what Greek and Roman writers chose to record about them. Tradition held that a hero named Tarchon conquered the land and founded the Twelve Cities of the Etruscan Confederation - a league bound less by any central government than by shared religion, language and a common assembly that met periodically at the shrine of Voltumna. Dennis records the scholarly dispute over the story without resolving it, and is equally cautious about the Etruscans' own origins: whether they migrated from Lydia in Asia Minor, as Herodotus claimed, or grew up natively in Italy, no contemporary Etruscan record settles the question, since what survives of their own writing is almost entirely funerary rather than historical.

Kings from Tarquinii

What is not in serious dispute is that Etruscan power once reached directly into Rome itself. The city of Tarquinii gave Rome a dynasty of kings - the two rulers remembered as Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus - and Dennis records the argument, made by Niebuhr and others, that the Roman tradition of an Etruscan royal house reflects a real period when Rome answered to Tarquinii's own authority, whatever the precise mechanics of the relationship. Roman insignia of power - the fasces, the purple-bordered toga - were, by one ancient account Dennis cites, imports from Etruria by the Tarquins themselves. It was the kind of intimate, asymmetric relationship between one Etruscan city and Rome that would define the whole story of Etruscan-Roman relations for the next two and a half centuries, long after the kings themselves were gone.

Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Unknown · Public domain

Pirates, to the Greeks who feared them

expansionDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

The Twelve Cities did not stay confined to the hill country between the Tiber and the Arno. Dennis records a reach that, at its widest, "embraced the greater part of Italy" - south into Campania and north over the plains of Lombardy to the Alps themselves, a span far beyond anything the later, purely defensive wars against Rome would ever again touch.

Vulturnum, before it was Capua

The clearest evidence of the southern reach is a city. Dennis records that the Etruscans held the land of the Volsci and all Campania as far as the Silarus, on the Gulf of Paestum, and that they themselves founded, around 800 BC, the town they called Vulturnum - the settlement that would later be known, under a different people's name for it, as Capua. A confederation whose surviving history is otherwise dominated by its long losing fight with Rome was, centuries before that fight began, planting cities of its own far south of its own heartland.

Lombardy to the Alps

The northern expansion left an even wider footprint. Etruscan dominion, on Dennis's account, extended over the plains that would become Cisalpine Gaul, reaching the Alps themselves before Gallic incursions from the north eventually pushed the Etruscan cities of that region back out. Corsica and Elba, closer to the Etruscan heartland, were held more directly still.

A reputation earned on the water

That reach was not built on land alone. Dennis notes that Greek writers, hostile to Etruria on principle, described its people bluntly as pirates and robbers - the same accusation, in substance, that Greek writers levelled at more than one rival maritime power of the archaic Mediterranean. The same sources that made the accusation, Dennis is careful to add, also acknowledged what lay behind it: Etruscan power at sea and Etruscan commercial importance across the western Mediterranean, real enough that even an enemy's own hostile testimony ended up confirming it. Rome itself, in Dennis's own account, took real and lasting instruction from this era of Etruscan reach - lessons, as he puts it, in both the conveniences of peace and the tactics and equipment of war, absorbed from a neighbor whose own confederation had, for a time, been the dominant power of the Italian peninsula rather than merely Rome's rival on it.

Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Cecil Torr · Public domain

The tiger of the Arsian Wood

peakDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

When Tarquinius Superbus was thrown out of Rome, he did not simply accept exile. He appealed to his own kinsmen at Tarquinii and to the Veientes on the grounds of shared blood, and both cities answered: Dennis records that "it seemed good to the people of Tarquinii that their race should reign at Rome," and the two cities sent a combined army to put him back on the throne by force. The battle that followed, fought in the Arsian Wood, split down an unexpected line - the Veientes, who had already lost repeatedly to Roman arms, broke and ran, but the Tarquinienses, a "new enemy" the Romans had not faced before, held their ground and even drove the Roman line back. Junius Brutus, Rome's own first consul, and Aruns Tarquinius killed each other in the fighting, and the night after the battle, a voice from the Arsian Wood - attributed by the more credulous ancient sources to the wood-god Silvanus himself - was said to have declared that Rome had won by a single life, settling by omen what the battlefield itself had left too close to call.

Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Sailko · CC BY 3.0

Porsena's siege

The most dramatic act of Etruscan support for the exiled dynasty came not from Tarquinii but from Clusium, whose king Lars Porsena marched on Rome with an army large enough that later Roman writers, uneasy about admitting how close the city had come to falling, wrapped the episode in legend - Horatius holding the bridge, Mucius Scaevola burning his own hand rather than flinch before the enemy king. Whatever actually happened at the gates of Rome, the tradition itself testifies to how seriously later generations remembered Etruscan military power at its height: a single Etruscan king, marching under his own banner rather than the Confederation's combined one, came close enough to retaking Rome that the memory of it needed heroic counter-legends to survive at all.

A single family against a people

peakDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

Porsena's march on Rome did not settle anything permanently between Veii and its neighbor across the Tiber. Dennis counts fourteen separate wars between the two cities in the surviving tradition, and the century after Porsena is where most of them were fought - a running conflict Veii came remarkably close to winning outright more than once.

A war paid for by one family alone

In 479 BC, with Rome pressed simultaneously by the Aequi and Volsci as well as by Veii, the consul Caeso Fabius made an extraordinary offer to the Senate: rather than divert a Roman army to watch the Veientine frontier, his own family would hold it at their own expense. Three hundred and six men of the Fabii, every one of patrician blood, marched out under the consul himself and fortified a camp on a steep hill above the river Cremera, in Veientine territory. For a year they held the position alone, raiding Veii's own lands and routing every force sent against them, until Veii sued for peace.

The peace did not last past the following year. Unable to dislodge the Fabii by open assault, the Veientines turned to a ruse: driving flocks and herds within sight of the Roman camp as bait. The Fabii, seeing easy plunder, sallied out after the animals - and were led into an ambush that killed all three hundred and six men, sparing, by the tradition Dennis records, only a single boy too young to have marched with the rest. Veii followed the slaughter with a real victory, seizing the Janiculum hill within sight of Rome itself and holding it for months before Roman consuls finally drove them off and extracted a forty-year truce.

Fidenae, a client that would not stay one

The truce held only until Veii's own subject town of Fidenae, a onetime Veientine colony on the Tiber, revolted against Roman overlordship and declared for Veii instead. Veii backed the revolt openly enough to have Rome's own ambassadors put to death, and the combined Fidenate-Veientine army met Rome's forces on the riverbank below Fidenae - a battle Rome won, killing the Fidenate king Lars Tolumnius in single combat, but not decisively enough to end the war. Two years later the same allied army marched up to Rome's own gates before being turned back, and the war dragged on for years more before Fidenae itself was finally captured and destroyed, buying Veii a twenty-year truce of its own.

Veii spent that respite as it had spent every earlier one: rebuilding for a war its own fortifications and position made unusually difficult for Rome to finish outright, until Rome, finally free of other fronts, committed the full ten-year siege that would end the city for good.

Overcome by stratagem

contractionDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

Veii, the closest Etruscan city to Rome and by Dennis's own account roughly the size of Athens, spent the better part of a century locked in intermittent war with its neighbour before Rome finally committed to finishing the contest. The siege that followed lasted ten years - long enough that a Roman general, according to the tradition Dennis records, was accused of dragging it out deliberately - and produced one of the most famous engineering feats of early Roman history. Told by a captured Etruscan soothsayer, and then by the oracle at Delphi itself, that Veii would not fall until the waters of the Alban Lake were drained off rather than allowed to reach the sea, the Romans dug a tunnel through solid rock to do exactly that - a project Livy claims was finished within a single year. Camillus, appointed dictator, took the hint the completed tunnel offered and began a second one, driven directly into Veii's own citadel.

Wilt thou go to Rome, Juno?

The stratagem worked where a decade of open siege had not. Roman soldiers emerged from the tunnel inside the city itself, and Veii fell - "though beleaguered for ten long years, with more injury to her foe than to herself, she was at last overcome by stratagem, not by open force," as Dennis puts it, quoting the elder pattern of Etruscan cities that resisted Rome longest through sheer defensive skill rather than open battle. Camillus is said to have asked the statue of Juno, Veii's own patron goddess, whether she would consent to move to Rome - and the image, bystanders swore, nodded and answered in a whisper. Dennis treats the story with the same skepticism he applies to similar tales from every age and religion, but the underlying fact needed no legend to matter: the Confederation had just lost its nearest, most powerful member, and the buffer that had kept Rome's own ambitions in check for generations was gone for good.

Rome, Italy · Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Vulca (?) · CC BY-SA 4.0

Doing battle with fields rather than men

endDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

Veii's fall did not end Etruscan resistance - it only removed the Confederation's own strongest shield. Tarquinii, the city that had once given Rome its kings, spent the following decades as what Dennis calls Rome's most bitter Etruscan enemy, joined by Caere, Falerii, and eventually the whole muster of the Confederation. Cruelty flowed in both directions: after one Roman defeat, three hundred and seven captives were sacrificed in the Forum of Tarquinii; after a later Roman victory, three hundred and fifty-eight captured nobles were flogged or beheaded in the Roman Forum in return. In 358 BC the allied cities gathered the Confederation's full military strength and marched on Rome behind priests carrying torches and serpents - a spectacle that briefly panicked the Roman line before the soldiers were rallied and the Etruscan force routed. It was the last time Dennis's own sources show the Confederation fielding a fully combined army rather than individual cities fighting alone.

Truces bought with fire

What followed was a war of attrition Rome, not Etruria, was built to win. By 351 BC, after the Romans had spent a season laying waste Tarquinii's own farmland - "doing battle," in Livy's phrase that Dennis quotes, "with fields rather than with men" - the exhausted city bought a forty-year truce. When that truce expired, the Confederation tried once more, besieging the Roman-allied town of Sutrium, only to be routed near the Ciminian forest and to watch a Roman army, for the first time, cross the wooded frontier that had long shielded Etruria's own interior. Tarquinii sued for another forty-year truce after a further defeat at the first battle of the Vadimonian Lake; Dennis notes that at what precise point she formally fell under Roman rule is simply not recorded - only that it happened sometime before the century closed.

The final stand

The Confederation's last coordinated attempt to reverse its own fortunes came at the second battle of the Vadimonian Lake in 283 BC - fought, pointedly, on the same ground where an earlier Etruscan army had already been broken. Dennis calls it plainly "the final great struggle for independence." Details of the battle itself are thin; what survived instead is the outcome, an Etruria that never again mustered a Confederation-wide army against Rome. The political entity that had once put a dynasty on the Roman throne and marched a combined army to the gates of Rome itself did not survive the third century BC in any form its own contemporaries would have recognized - though individual cities, and a great deal else besides, outlasted it by centuries.

Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Diego Baglieri · CC BY-SA 4.0

The lore Rome kept

afterlifeDrafted from Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848)

The Confederation that stopped fielding armies in 283 BC did not stop existing. Its cities went on paying taxes, furnishing supplies and, when Rome called on them, fighting under a different flag than their own - Tarquinii, Dennis notes, was still supplying sailcloth to Scipio's own fleet during the war against Hannibal, barely half a century after its last stand at the Vadimonian Lake. Inscriptions Dennis had himself seen show towns of the old Confederation still flourishing, in an ordinary municipal sense, under the Antonine emperors - a political defeat in the third century BC that left the physical cities of Etruria intact for centuries of Roman rule afterward.

A conquered people's own priesthood, kept in business

What the political collapse did not touch was the one export Etruria had that Rome never stopped wanting. Dennis is explicit that Etruscan priests and augurs had once doubled as princes and military commanders, ruling through what he calls a triple sceptre of civil, religious and military power at once - a fusion the Roman state, taking the cities apart politically, still could not bring itself to discard on the religious side. Etruscan diviners read the will of heaven, on Dennis's account, in the entrails of sacrificial victims, in the flight of birds, and in the paths lightning took across the sky - the body of practice later writers called the disciplina Etrusca. Rome had its own augurs, drawing on its own older traditions, but for the specific art of reading entrails and lightning it kept coming back to Etruscan expertise long after Etruscan armies had stopped being a threat worth fearing.

Dennis, The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1848) · Shonagon · CC0

Sons sent to a conquered enemy's own schools

Dennis records the clearest evidence of how seriously that expertise was taken: Roman families sent their own sons into what he calls "the land of their hereditary foes" specifically to study Etruscan literature and language - a conquered people's own learning judged valuable enough that the conquerors kept paying, generation after generation, to have their children taught it. A confederation that had lost every field it ever fought Rome on after Veii kept, for centuries, something no battle could take from it: a body of ritual knowledge Rome's own religious life depended on, taught by descendants of cities whose armies had not mustered together since the third century BC.