- chapter 40: Seafaring –
the various boats and with which all the operations could take place that normally were
performed inside the port basin.
It is a widely held opinion that the main source of the Etruscan thalassocracy should
be identifi ed in Caere, which would be joined by Vulci and Tarquinia, to varying degrees
and in different timeframes, after the setback marked by the battle of Cumae in 474 bc,
fi rst, and by the incursions of Syracuse in 453 bc in the Upper Tyrrhenian, and then, at
the end of the fi fth century bc, Tarquinia seems to assume some sort of leadership on
the sea, leading the expedition, alongside the Athenians, against Syracuse, if we are to
believe a Latin inscription that commemorates the venture of a noble Tarquinian, Velthur
Spurinna, the fi rst Etruscan leader to have crossed the sea with an army, reaching Sicily,
and that gives us, perhaps not without uncertainties, the name of the commander of the
Etruscan contingent that participated in the siege of Syracuse in 413 bc. However, even
the centers of the northern district must have exercised an extensive command of the sea.
Among these certainly Pisa, whose projection into the Tyrrhenian Sea, overshadowed by
the characteristics of the material culture of the center ever since the earliest origins of the
settlement, is confi rmed by the ideology underlying the “royalty” of the princeps for whom,
at the turn of the eighth century bc, or shortly after, the monumental tumulus of via San
Jacopo was erected, or by the spread of artistic products of the city over a wide area of the
north-western sector of the Mediterranean starting from the end of the seventh century bc.
Another center that participates in this reality is Vetulonia: if in the Orientalizing period it
reveals an aristocracy strongly marked by a relationship with the sea, as seems to be shown
in the paradigm of the signs of power revealed by the grave goods of the so-called Circolo del
Tridente (“Circle of the Trident”), then in the course of the Hellenistic era it is ideologically
identifi ed with the personage who has the skin of a ketos (reptilian sea-monster) displayed
on the obverse of the city’s coinage, and with the fi gure holding an oar over his shoulder
with his right hand, the eponymous hero or tutelary deity that is identifi ed with the populus
of the Vetulonienses on the relief of the so-called “Throne of Claudius” discovered during the
excavations of the theater of the Julio-Claudian era at Cerveteri.
Similar to what may be found for the Greek world, in this age of the oldest dominion
over the sea, there were also achievements in the form of piracy, activities closely related
to the modalities of the prexis of the age of the dominant aristocracies; and not without
reason. In a random passage of Ephorus, transmitted by Strabo (6.2.2 C 267), he recounts
how the Greeks, in the years before the fi rst apoikiai (“colonies”), refrained from sailing
for commercial purposes in the waters off Sicily because of the issue of actions by Etruscan
pirates.
The λῃστήρια of the Tyrrhenians is one of the topoi related to the Etruscan world in
Greek and Roman tradition, a topos that has had a very specifi c historical situation and
sees, among other things, during the fi fth century bc the projection by the Greeks into
the dimension of myth the disturbing Etruscan presence in the region of the Straits (of
Messina). Related to the situation to which Dionysios of Phocaea was opposed at the
beginning of the century, and to the Etruscan occupation of Lipari in the years between
485 and 475 bc we should probably also refer the epithet of τυρσηνίς attributed by
Euripides (Medea, 1342 and 1359) to Scylla, the monster with whom the rocky cliffs
above the Strait of Messina were identifi ed, the daughter of Tyrrhenos, according to a
tradition noted by one scholiast of the Republic of Plato (588 c) and, perhaps, from an
uncertain passage of the epitome of Apollodorus (Ep. 7.20), who, in contrast to the more
common version, already attested in Hecataeus, said Scylla was the daughter of Phorcys.