CHAPTER 27
Ethnicity and the Etruscans
Nancy T. de Grummond
Introduction
Dialogue on the ethnicity of the Etruscans begins with Herodotos (1.94; ca. 450BCE),
who, through his well-known story of how the Lydians immigrated from Anatolia to
Umbria in Italy and became the Etruscans, basically generated the lines of inquiry about
ethnic identity that would run through accounts of the Etruscans for many centuries. The
story is told in an offhand way as part of Herodotos’ survey of the Lydians, its main pur-
pose evidently being to show how various games were invented by the Lydians to cope
with a famine. In the end, the king sent away half of the population to form a colony
elsewhere; they went down to Smyrna, built ships, and sailed away. When they reached
Italy, they called themselves “Tyrrheni,” after their leader Tyrrhenos (alternate spellings,
Tyrseni and Tyrsenos). In other authors, the group of immigrants may be referred to as
“Pelasgi,” a term used loosely and vaguely, but sometimes implying that the Etruscans
combined with or incorporated another cultural or ethnic group. For example, Thucy-
dides (History of the Peloponnesian War, 4.109) describes the inhabitants of Thessaly:
“The majority are Pelasgian, of the Tyrrhenian race that once settled in Lemnos and
Athens.”
After Herodotos, discussion in antiquity divided into two positions, one affirming or
uncritically accepting Lydian identity for the Etruscans and the other arguing that they
were not Lydian at all. Dionysios of Halikarnassos (Roman Antiquities, 1. 27; ca. 7BCE)
declared that the Etruscans were not from Lydia, since they shared neither language nor
customs or religion with the people from that nation. Rather, he noted, the Etruscans
themselves (of whom there were still some living in Italy in his time) claimed that they
were autochthonous. They called themselves “Rasenna,” after their leader.
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.