- chapter 8: A long twilight –
Rome, which granted it the status of civitas sine suffragio, not only was this a citizenship
that does not include the right to vote, but Caere also saw the confi scation of half of its
territory, including its coastline, whose strategic interest to the Romans was to prove
decisive during the Punic Wars.
A little further north, the fall of Veii placed Roman territory in contact with two
powerful cities, Falerii and Tarquinia, attacked jointly by Rome in 358. To the east, this
largest city of the Faliscans, people with a Latin-like language but whose representatives,
sitting on the annual Etruscan concilium at the Fanum Voltumnae, could take the measure
of the threat from the fi rst quarter of the fourth century, when the two Roman colonies
of Nepi and Sutri were founded in its direct sphere of infl uence. The Romans neutralized
the city with a 40-year truce, signed in 351 followed by a treaty (foedus) from 343, which
opened the access corridor to the Etruscan territory formed by the middle valley of the
Tiber (Fig. 8.3). However, after an attempted uprising in 298, the city was taken and
completely destroyed in 241, on the pretext of a slave revolt, 6,000 of its inhabitants
massacred, its gods displaced to Rome according to the rite of evocatio, and half of its
territory confi scated; a new Falerii was then built on the plain, three miles west of the
ruined city.
A few years after the capture of Veii, in 384–383, the Roman attacks were already
concentrated on Tarchna-Tarquinia, which appears as the real bulwark of all Etruria
because of the position of its territory, which extended from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the
Tiber, the seniority and power of this city, and also of its political weight in the assemblies
of the Fanum Voltumnae. A fi rst major confl ict begun in 353 ended in 351 with the signing
of a truce that was upheld for 40 years, but in contrast to the contemporary situation with
Falerii, this was not transformed into a treaty. So the war began again in 311 with the
Figure 8.3 Datable around the middle of the fourth century, this plate made at Falerii, where the
model enjoyed a great success with the Etruscan workshop of Cerveteri and was exported all over the
western Mediterranean, furnishes an inscription in Latin characters probably referring to the owner of the
ceramic workshop, Poplia Genucilia (Rhode Island, Providence; Beazley 1947, Pl. 38).