- Vincent Jolivet –
to Rome, just beyond its suburbium, the fi elds were entirely at the service of provisioning
the city; they are found depopulated, however, to the advantage of the towns, in areas
such as the Tyrrhenian coast, devastated by malaria, as described by Tiberius Gracchus in
125; and so they were still organized in capillary fashion, without fundamental changes
seeming to have occurred in the size and distribution of rural sites, as at Volterra. The
foundation of the colonies did not necessarily have a signifi cant impact on the subdivision
of land before the conquest: the 300 settlers of Gravisca each received only fi ve jugera
(1.26 hectares), less than 400 hectares for the entire population – but the 2,000 settlers
of Saturnia received ten jugera each, or 2.5 ha, and those of Luni 51.5 jugera, about 13 ha
each. Etruscan peasants and Roman colonists had to rub shoulders everywhere, in varying
numbers, as evidenced perhaps in the votive healing-cults of the third-second centuries
found in the rural sanctuaries they attended together: each culture seems to be represented
according to its own customs (tunic and bareheaded for the Etruscans, toga, sacrifi cial veil,
and children’s bullae for Romans) (Fig. 8.17). The scarcity of large slave-villas in Etruria,
except along the coastal strip and some main roads, seems, more generally, to testify
the prudent policy of Rome in this region, as long as their management was left to the
Etruscan aristocracy. Early in the fi rst century there was probably a latent state of agrarian
crisis, which caused the exile, all the way to Tunisia, of a group of inhabitants of Chiusi,
as evidenced by the inscribed boundary cippi of Oued Miliane (Fig. 8.18).
Formerly highly developed in the mountain region of Tolfa, extraction and processing of
metals are concentrated thereafter, until the depletion of deposits in the mid-fi rst century
on the exploitation of iron ore from Elba, controlled by the Romans after the conquest
and elaborated in Populonia, situated opposite the island. Clay, stone and metal are the
basis of the principal productions of this period, in terms of both art and craft, but in very
different ways; for most object classes, local production is generally preferred to imports:
only amphorae, imported in great quantities from across the Mediterranean as early as the
third century, testify, with the export of wine and ceramics produced in central Italy, the
existence of a maritime trade probably still managed partly by Etruscan ships.
Fig. 8.16 Over the course of the entire Hellenistic period, Etruscan sarcophagi, especially those
of Tarquinia, offer an image of an aristocracy quite remote from Greek ideals, for whom opulence of
forms is a sign of richness, of prestige and of power – above all when, as here, it is accompanied by the
authority of a long written text relating the cursus honorum of the deceased: the decoration of the chest of
the sarcophagus of Laris Pulena, dated to the middle of the third century, demonstrates a tragic vision of
death (Tarquinia, Museo Archeologico Nazionale ; Torelli 2000, p. 481).