Romans and Italians 445Figure 29.6 Reverse of 344/1b: Killing of Tarpeia. Courtesy of Rutgers University Libraries,
Special Collections, Badian Coin Collection.
We know more about the Etruscans than any other Italic group except Rome, thanks
largely to their burial habits. Their tombs were fancifully adorned and filled with a great
deal of art, and they took up the epigraphic habit very early on (for Italy) and provide
us with thousands of funerary inscriptions, many in their own language. They also made
an impression on the Greek mind, as trading partners and competitors in the western
Mediterranean, and so we have Greek observations and opinions of these neighbors to
Rome’s north (see Chapter 27 by Nancy de Grummond in this volume).
Those opinions were not very positive, however, and they had a lasting impact upon the
Etruscans’ reputation well into the Roman Empire (Harris 1971: 4–31; Farney 2007:
133–44). To the Greeks, the Etruscans were filled withtruphe(luxury), the enervat-
ing vices of decadence and effeminacy, and their companions: cruelty, sexual deviance,
and a very relaxed attitude toward their women. This was a very old stereotype, going
back at least to the Homeric Hymns. It received support from Aristotle and his fol-
lowers, and was picked up by our Roman sources (e.g., the comments of Pictor and
Alimentus in the preceding text). Herodotus records a Lydian origin for the Etruscans,
which both explained their alien-ness and their reputation, a stereotype that the Lydians
shared. Later, shrewd Etruscans managed to spin this into a Trojan origin (“neigh-
bors” of the Lydians), obviously more in line with the Hellenic sentiments of the rest of
central Italy.
However, balancing this negative image, the Greeks and especially the Romans rec-
ognized Etruscan religious power, particularly in the art of divination by lightning and