- Armando Cherici –
Posidonius of Apamea, who lived between the second and fi rst centuries bc, while
direct information on the Etruscan culture was still available, informs us how letters,
natural science, theology were maintained (in Diodorus 5.40.2): it is certainly possible
that these areas interpenetrated – even if our sources differentiate them – and that certain
topics were handed down in dogmatic form, as also in the Pythagorean school; moreover,
as in any ancient culture, it is possible to imagine that religious knowledge and scientifi c
knowledge would mingle and converge in the same person: the priest or the king (who
was originally also a priest, as witnessed in Rome in the survival of the institution of
the rex sacrorum). The soothsayer of Veii who interpreted the fl ooding of Lake Albano
(Livy 5.15.12), thus demonstrates that technology and religion are mingled. Pliny in his
Naturalis Historia (2.140) recalls how Porsenna dispatched – by evoking a lightning-bolt –
the monster Olta, who threatened the city of Volsinii after having ravaged the countryside:
the passage is complicated, in part because Porsenna is known as king, not at Orvieto, but
at Chiusi. The myth that Pliny seems to speak of involves one of the many “monsters”
that were devouring the fi elds, with which the ancient world associated malaria and the
uncertainty of life around the marshes, and this is possible, given that between Chiusi
and Orvieto is located the southern edge of the marshes of the Chiana, synonymous in the
Middle Ages with a hostile and unhealthy environment:^13 a land destined to be swampy,
if regimentation of water works would not allow water to fl ow into the Tiber, and Pliny
(3.53) places here a river – the Clanis – that was regulated by dams. It is not impossible to
see behind the myth the outcome of a lengthy procedure of hydraulic works, the memory
of which came to be attributed to a prominent fi gure such as Porsenna, in the role of a
powerful priest-king:^14 religion, technical skills, history and myth, may be conjoined in
ancient times, but modern research can perhaps isolate individual elements, with great
caution and the awareness that we are operating in a “marshy” land.
Some aspects of the Etruscan world – as in the ancient world in general – still elude
us because of an imperfect synergy between “humanistic” and “scientifi c” disciplines,
disciplines which struggle to communicate. In modern archaeological publications, the
orientation of temples, altars and tombs is always referenced to magnetic north, and
entrusted to a graphic symbol that is too small, making it impossible to assess the exact
degrees of a structure’s orientation: it offers a notion of orientation, but is not suffi cient
to interpret it. Our cardinal points are not the same as those prevailing in the mental
geography of Antiquity, and, at least in the Roman world, any map would have placed
our East at the top, as indicated by the Tabula Peutingeriana and as evidenced by the names
of the Adriatic Sea (Mare Superum, the “Upper Sea”) and the Tyrrhenian Sea (Mare Inferum,
“Lower Sea”). Since the Etruscan templum (a sacred enclosure for augury/divination) was
based on points determined by the rising and setting of the sun (aequinoctialem exortum,
aequinoctialem occasum: Pliny, Hist. nat. 2.143), in order to document and interpret the
orientation of a structure properly, we need to detect the point on the structure itself
where the rising and setting of the sun is perceived on certain dates, such as the solstices.
These points should be on the visible horizon, in fact, and not astronomical reference
points: if we are to the east and there are mountains nearby, then the sun will appear late
over the horizon, and then will move southward in winter, north in summer; the opposite
happens if the temple is on top of a hill.
Also, in the latitudes of Etruria, in the six months between the two equinoxes the
point where the sun rises every day moves southward or northward: between the two
solstices the points of dawn and sunset (Fig. 34.1) describe an arc of about 66 degrees!