- chapter 9: The last Etruscans –
All these types of urns were less expensive and so anonymous that inscriptions were
necessary for identifi cation.^9
The inscriptions are a goldmine of information. We can see that the range of names
in this late period (from late second to late fi rst century bc) was very mixed indeed. The
common opinion attributes these kinds of tombs in small necropoleis to small farmers,
former serfs, who were enfranchised through class struggles. However, the Chiusine
aristocracy was still thriving (but less keen on spending money for burials), while the
new, economic possibilities must have contributed to make the “lower classes” visible
in the archaeological record. The “new” social strata were as keen to leave behind an
epigraphic memory of themselves as the elite.^10
The next step on the ladder of “breaking down the family-based burial customs” in the
Chiusine countryside was corridor tombs with rows of one-person niches, loculi, along the
walls, without any dominating family.^11 Related and seemingly unrelated persons were
buried in the niches without regard to the family ties. Here we meet persons of high-
and middle rank Etruscan ancestry, their ex-slaves of foreign origin, Romans married
to Etruscan women: i.e. different social classes side by side, but in individual niches.
Advanced Romanization and with that, increased mobility, may have scattered the families
apart, and burials were probably laid in the hands of “egalitarian” burial associations.
VOLTERRA – AN ETRUSCAN STRONGHOLDSuch “mixed” tombs are not known from Volterra, which preserved the Etruscan traditions
down to the Augustan period, and even beyond – and this in spite of the fact that the
Volterrans had systematically sided with the loser in every possible Roman political
struggle during the fi rst century bc. At Volterra, the inscriptions are very unevenly
divided, and therefore our knowledge of the social structure has great gaps. From the late
fourth to the middle of the second century inscriptions are very rare, and continued to be
so on the more modest tufa ash-chests. This does not prove a low rate of literacy: perhaps
the name of the family was written outside the tomb, and the images helped posterity
to remember who was who. Or, perhaps the place of the individual within the family
community was not considered an important issue.
In the course of the second century bc, however, there was a big boom of producing
decorated ash-chests and lids in large workshops, which furnished ready-made “portraits”
with generic images, characterized only by gender and age. The tombs grew larger and
the number of “monuments” increased considerably, which must have created the need
for inscriptions to identify the deceased.
Many tombs had already been excavated by the eighteenth century when the scholars
were keen on documenting the inscriptions. Since these were written on the lids, we
know the provenance of many lid fi gures, while lids without inscriptions and all the
chests are diffi cult to connect to any context.
This is also the case with the two large tombs of the family Ceicna/Caecina (already
known from Roman literary sources), discovered in 1739 and 1785.^12 In the tomb
discovered fi rst, several inscriptions are written in Latin, in the second and therefore,
older one, they are only in Etruscan. Nothing is known of the earliest phases of the
tombs, not to mention the chests. Drawings of the situation at the discovery show that
everything was thoroughly mixed up on the fl oor, whether due to robbers or natural
damage.