- Ingela M. B. Wiman –
dress of the dancing lady from the tomb of the Lionesses.^55 The delicate transparent fabric
of the dresses of the two attendants to Malavish, depicted on a famous mirror in the British
Museum (inv. no. BM 626), demonstrates that the Etruscans were master weavers (see
Chapter 42 for a survey of textile manufacture). We can speculate that the dye for coloring
was traded from the Milesian Greeks, famous for their linen fabrics and purple dye. In
return the Greeks may have bought manufactured bronzes, lamps, mirrors, or incense
burners, thymiateria, for which the Etruscans were famous across the Mediterranean.^56
A GLIMPSE OF IMAGES AND MYTHS CONNECTED TO
THE ETRUSCAN LANDSCAPEHow can we estimate the interplay between man and nature in Etruria when no written
material on this issue has survived? To understand a cultural system it is important to
consider the ideological explanation that culture is the glue that maintains societal order.
Did the Etruscans know they were Etruscans and to what degree did they feel united as
a people? Did people living in the rich southern cities feel primarily like Etruscans or as
Tarquinians, Caeretans, or Vulcians, were they rivals in power and goods? Did the tufo
plateaus of southern Etruria instill in them the idea of limit, tular, so that the habitat
of the living had to be separated from those of the dead? (See also Chapter 18.) To what
extent did such ideas permeate the whole of the land of the Rasenna/Rasna?
Small fragments of original narrations appear in Etruscan imagery, such as those about
the Vipenas or Vibenna brothers. Sometimes these images are older than the accounts by
Roman writers but most of these pictorial narrations, however, are from later periods,
beginning in the late fourth century, possibly as a result of dealings with a specifi c
“other” who had conquering intents.^57 On a mirror we see the Vipenas brothers in a
landscape consisting of rocks and two trees (Fig. 1.2). A human-like creature, using his
left hand to heave himself up onto the highest cliff, gazes out of the scene towards the
spectator. His right hand is almost hidden by the branches of a tree. He is crowned with
a diadem from which two hornlike spikes protrude. It seems a fair guess that he is a satyr,
a faun, a borderline fi gure that is part-nature part-culture. Surrounding the scene is a
vine-garland with ripe grapes and a small boy with a vine-cutting tool is depicted on
the extension. Thus, the scene refl ects a nature that is composed of elements of humans,
wilderness, cultivated grapes, and a harvester. The main scene shows a narrative of the
Vipenas brethren who seem to have arrived to capture or kill the torque-wearing Cacu. The
lyre player Cacu is a prophet or a seer in late Etruscan images.^58 In the Roman myths he is
a bandit who dwells in a cave close to the Palatine in Rome to which he brings the cattle
he stole from Hercules/Hercle in Erythiea, the red island of the setting sun.^59 Almost all
later histories of Hercules are tied to Italy and the cattle he overcame by slaying Geryon
on the island of the setting sun. From very early on, Heracles was established as a fi gure
of central importance in all of “Italy” – a name Varro said was derived from its cattle
(Varro, RR 2.5.3).^ In the Etrusco-Italic cultural sphere, Hercle seems to have enjoyed
a special status, more elevated than the one he had in Greece, a hero-god approaching
divine status. The Etruscan Hercle thus seems to have differed in signifi cant respects from
the Greek Heracles. He appears as one of few recognizable divinities on sixth-century
terracotta slabs from central Etruscan settlements, as mastering the bull or the lion,^60
and also together with Geryon on the so-called Gobbi crater from Cerveteri, dated to c.
590/580 bc (or 560, according to some).^61 Italy was a land of pastoralists and Heracles