- Stefano Bruni –
that remain in the memory of numerous ventures throughout the Mediterranean basin.
In addition to the episode of the epic confrontation in the waters of the Sardinian Sea
shortly after the middle of the sixth century bc (Herodotus 1.163–167; Justin 18.7.11
and 43.5.2; and also Strabo 6.1.1 C 252; Paus. 10.8.6–7 and 18.7), or that of the battle
off the promontory of Cumae in 474 bc (Diod. 11.51), or again the participation, on the
side of the Athenians, in the summer of 414/413 bc in the siege of Syracuse by sending
three pentekonters (Thuc. 6.103.2), the sources recall the presence of Etruscans who were
driven to Lipari (Callimac. Frg. 93 Pfeiffer; Strabo 6.2.10 C 275) and were in the waters of
the Strait of Sicily, where in the fi rst decades of the fi fth century bc, the tyrant of Rhegion,
Anaxilaos, fortifi ed the Isthmus of Skyllation in order to protect the zone against the
Tyrrhenians (Strabo 6.1.5 C 257). Etruscans were also in Sardinia (Strabo 5.2.7 C 225),
in Corsica (Diod. 5.13), in the Balaeric Islands and the Iberian Peninsula (Steph. s.v.
Banaurides; Auson. Epist. 27.88–89), all the way to the far west, beyond the Pillars of
Heracles, where they had tried to settle on an Atlantic island in the region of Cadiz (Diod.
5.20), to which the recent news of an exceptional discovery of a large deposit of Etruscan
material of the First Iron Age at Huelva, the main port of Tartessos, provides an important
historical perspective. The fame of the seapower of the Etruscans had to have been very
great, however, if in the fourth century bc (if not a century earlier), there were attributed
to the Tyrrhenoi some ventures such as the kidnapping of the statue of Hera from Samos
(Menodot. FGrHist 541 F 1 = Athen. 15.671e – 674a), or the raids on Attica with which
was associated the establishment of the cult of Aphrodite Koltas (Suid., s.v. Κώλτας), or
even the abduction of young girls from Brauron (Philoc. FGrHist 328 F 100, and also
FGrHist 328 F 101 [= schol. Hom. Il. 1.594]; Plut. Mul.virt. 8 and Aetia gr. 21), which
the oldest tradition unanimously referred to the Pelasgians, as evidenced, in this last case,
by the lost tragedies, the Hypsipyle of Aeschylus and the Lemniai of Sophocles, as well as
Herodotus (6.138.1 and also 4.145.2). The phenomenon is undoubtedly complex and
seems to be related to piracy, the activities practiced by the descendants of the Pelasgians
who inhabited the Chalcidice region and Lemnos. The presence of the Etruscans in the
eastern basin of the Mediterranean, however, need not have been episodic or limited to the
network of trade routes. This is confi rmed by an inscription of 299 bc, which mentions
that the inhabitants of Delos were forced to borrow fi ve thousand drachmas from the
temple treasury to prepare defenses against the “Tyrrhenoi” (IG 11, 2, 148, 73 – 74).
In the Greek and Latin sources, the Etruscan world seems to be a blurred reality, in
any case, inasmuch as it is complex, and it is not always easy to recognize the various
components in their actual historical dimension; Etruria was a limited geographical
reality, yet full of particular connotations where, as is natural, the various voices that refer
to the entire area give glimpses of distinct and different events, and also the phenomenon
of thalassocracy will be measured on the scale of these individual entities at the cost of
compromised understanding – or at least of a merely generic view of its history.
The participants in this adventure are, of course, the poleis (“city-states”) of the
Tyrrhenian paralia (“shore”), and, on the Adriatic coast, the centers of Adria and Spina,
to which will be added, at the end of the fourth century bc, Ravenna. However, the
case of Vel Kaikna, who was buried in Felsina (Bologna) but who was in all likelihood a
navarch (commander of a warship) at Spina, in a complex and highly-organized territorial
political system that sees that center as a civil and military port at the mouth of the Po
serving the entire sector of Etruria padana (“Etruria of the Po region”: Sassatelli 2009; see
Chapter 15), gives a glimpse of a situation that is much more complicated.