CHAPTER THREE

ETRUSCAN ORIGINS AND

THE ANCIENT AUTHORS

Dominique Briquel

O

ne aspect of the Etruscan mystery and the fascination that they evoke in the public, in

addition to the persistent obscurity of their language, is the question of their origins.

Massimo Pallottino designated this as “l’annosa questione delle origini etrusche”^1 (“the age-old

question of Etruscan origins,” see Chapter 2). This is in fact one of the classic issues that

arise concerning the Etruscans: we do not know how this people was formed, or whence its

formative elements and characteristic features were derived; its language, as Dionysius of

Halicarnassus noted (1.30.2), was like no other known. Any treatise on Etruscology will

include a section dealing with the question of origins: one can only note that the debate

remains open and that contradictory theories have been proposed, none of which can claim

to be convincing. Three main theses have been advanced in the history of Etruscan studies

that may be considered to be based on scientifi cally admissible arguments. Two were

inherited from Antiquity: that which maintains that the Etruscans came from the East and

that which considers them an extension of the oldest established populations of the locales

where we know them in historic times, that is to say by making them autochthonous,

natives of Italy. A third was added in modern times, fi rst by the Frenchman Nicolas Fréret,

in his Recherches sur l’origine et l’ancienne histoire des différents peuples de l’Italie (“Researches

on the origin and history of various ancient peoples of Italy”) published in 1753. It was

reprised by the big names of German learning of the nineteenth century, such as B. G.

Niebuhr and T. Mommsen in their histories of Rome, published respectively in 1811 and

1856: this was the requirement that the ancestors of the Etruscans came over the Alps

from the north, in the region where we know the Rhaetians. Their name had appeared to

evoke the name Rasenna that, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the Etruscans gave

themselves in their own language (1.30.3); inscriptions show that the Rhaetians actually

spoke a language related to Etruscan.

This is not the place to resume consideration of the issue or analyze the various theories

advanced. This paper will consider how the “age-old question of Etruscan origins” had

arisen for ancient authors. On this point, modern scholars have only resumed a debate

that already existed in Antiquity: at the time when the Greeks, Etruscans and Romans

rubbed shoulders, they could not but be struck by the singularity of their language, and