- Vincent Jolivet –
PRESSURE FROM THE MIDDLE AND LOWER CLASSESThe other levels of Hellenistic Etruscan society are much less well known to us, whether
by text or through archaeology, and it is reasonable to assume, again, signifi cant disparities
between the different cities, as well as between town and countryside. There was clearly
a large middle class of small and medium landowners, traders, producers, as witnessed
by the series of standardized urns of Volterra or Chiusi, and in which the gender balance
appears to have been better observed than among the aristocrats.
At the lowest level of society, Etruria does not seem to have known a slave system
directly comparable with those of Greece or Rome (see Chapter 21) – and the latter
was introduced by force into the Etruscan territory with the creation, from the second
century, of two types of slave domains: large villas, like Settefi nestre (Fig. 8.14), built by
the Sextii in the territory confi scated from Vulci, where wine was produced and exported
in large quantities; and the small, “Catonian” sorts of farms where slaves were part of a
small family. Our sources mention another particular category of dependents known in
Etruscan as lautni, that the Greeks called therapontoi, and the Latins servi. They appear in
the texts with the revolts attested twice in Arezzo (the mid-fourth century and 302), and
at Volsinii in 264 – having resulted in the complete destruction of the last city, by the
massacre of its people and by the deportation of the survivors.
Figure 8.14 Profoundly foreign to the mentality of the Etruscan landowners, the construction of the
great villae on land confi scated from conquered cities, as here that of Settefi nestre constructed in the
territory of Vulci around the middle of the fi rst century by Lucius Sestius who was consul in 23 bc, will
allow the diffusion of new models for exploitation of the land, but also of the ideology of chattel-slavery
in an Etruria that until now only knew other forms of dependence.