The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• chapter 34: The science of the Etruscans –

wondering whether they were injured because of disease or because of spoiled fodder.

When they had tested many animals and demonstrated the whole and solid nature

of the livers [that resulted from good] water and fodder, there they established their

fortifi cations; if however they found [the livers] tainted they thus confi rmed the

judgment that a future pestilence would grow in the bodies of humans in these places

even though there was ample food and water, and so they would move elsewhere and

change area, seeking good health in all particulars. (De architectura 1.4.9).^4

The expertise gained by the ancestors in observation of entrails, especially the liver, led
to the observation of anomalies or what we now defi ne as a “biological indicator,” and
relating them to the relationship between the environment and the health of animals
is an appropriate course of science, just as it is proper for science to affect the outcome
of such a course for the benefi t of man. Some may object that we are faced with an
interpretation gained from Vitruvius on a practice that the Etruscans followed without
their having understood its “scientifi c” value; but this is possible, just as it is possible
that the technical-empirical Vitruvius actually passed on a genuine Etruscan document,
without the fi lter of philosophy by which his contemporary Seneca opposes the Etruscan
religion to Greek and Roman rationalism, a fi lter that perhaps also continues to infl uence
the way we see that civilization.
Let us revisit the famous passage of Seneca:

This is the difference between us and the Etruscans, with whom resides the utmost

learning for interpreting lightning: we believe that lightning is caused by clouds

colliding, whereas they believe that clouds collide in order to create lightning. Since

they attribute everything to the divine, they are led to believe not that events have

a meaning because they have happened, but that they happen in order to express a

meaning.^5

I note that here there have also surfaced the stages of a scientifi c process: the Etruscans
see a god as the cause of the movement of the clouds – and this is a religious matter –
but they have nevertheless established a relationship of cause and effect between clouds
that collide and the generating of lightning. This is a scientifi c acquisition, caused by a
series of observations of a specifi c natural phenomenon, which is cataloged in its different
manifestations, in a corpus (the Libri Fulgurales, Books of Lightning Divination) that will
enable all specialists to recognize elements – form, direction etc. – that are identifi ed as
signifi cant, unique responses from which to draw. Roman thought is generally considered
to be more rational, but Seneca speaks in the fi rst century ad, when the Latin culture has
been secularized, while the Etruscan wisdom-tradition to which he refers is centuries old:
it is now fi xed by the time of written texts, but its fi rst formation precedes the advent of
writing, given that even in the fully historical period, its transmission was entrusted to
the ancestral mnemonic technique of verse.^6 The image of Etruria as haunted by religion
is – at least in part – due to a stereotypical judgment that, during the Roman Empire,
was attributed to a culture of centuries earlier, a culture that was particularly based on
those observations that gradually led to the concept of “natural philosophy” formulated
by Newton, and from there to modern science.
These observations never really matured into a true science, even if they have
consolidated an empirical approach and awareness of a whole series of relations of