- chapter 8: A long twilight –
EPILOGUEIt is paradoxically the time when, around 6 bc, Augustus created the seventh region (Regio
VII-Etruria), thus achieving the fi rst true political and administrative unity of this region,
that can be regarded as the complete integration of the Etruscan civilization with Roman
culture; in the testimony of Pliny (NH 3.8–9), the region had 54 communities, including
27 colonies. But the memory of what the Etruscans had represented did not fade away until
the end of the Empire (Fig. 8.24), thanks to the presence of their descendants in the Roman
elite and the Senate. This included several characters of the fi rst order, such as Maecenas,
descendant of the Cilnii of Arezzo at the time of Augustus from Caere Urgulania the wife
of the “Emperor-Etruscologist” Claudius (author of 20 books of Tyrrhenika), from Caere, or
Otho, the ephemeral emperor born in Ferento, in the Romanized family of the Salvii; the
Caecina of Volterra, for their part, in the fi fth century ad still held an important place in
Roman society. Each year, the games held at the Fanum Voltumnae recreated the atmosphere
of the Etruscan League, restored in the form of the XII, later the XV populi (Fig. 8.25),
and we fi nd still a mention in the time of Constantine, who authorized their relocation to
Hispellum. But it is signifi cantly in the religious sphere, where their skill was universally
acknowledged, that the Romans retained the longest living memory of the Etruscans, as
evidenced by the restoration, from the fi rst century, of the Ordo LX haruspicum: these
divination priests who served the greatest personages of the State reappeared in different
periods of the history of the Roman Empire, right up to the day of 410 ad when they
would make their offer to Pope Innocent I to save Rome from its fall by unleashing the
lightning on the army of Alaric (Zosimus 5.41.1–2). Finally, declining along with the
Empire, Etruscan civilization had to wait ten more centuries to arouse the curiosity of the
fi rst antiquaries and contribute afresh in a signifi cant way to two historical revivals in Italy
(see Chapters 61–63), and thus to the Renaissance of Europe, with the splendor of the
Tuscan Cosimo I and the slow construction of Italian unity during the Risorgimento.
Figure 8.24 The “Corsini throne” is an archaizing marble replica of the thrones of the Orientalizing
era, of which many examples in bronze, terracotta or wood have been found in Etruscan tombs; created
in the fi rst century ad and based on models older by seven centuries it probably decorated the interior
of the aristocratic domus of a rich Roman who was proud of his Etruscan origins (Rome, Palazzo Corsini;
Pallottino 1992, fi g. 106).