- chapter 43: Food and drink in the Etruscan world –
have carried powerful messages of status and fertility, life and rebirth.^35 Eggs or eggshells
have survived in other Etruscan tombs, for example at Tarquinia, and were just recently
found in a tomb outside Grosseto.^36 For the Etruscans, eggs may have made up an important
component of the funerary feast in the tomb, marked by their inclusion on the walls of
painted tombs from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods. Perhaps they held symbolic
meaning for the elite who are seen holding and passing them on the painted walls of
Tarquinian tombs. We may be able to understand these eggs as part of a small funerary
meal, as well as a symbolic offering for the deceased to take to the afterlife. In fact, the
visual rhetoric of food can now be understood as communicating power and status.
MEAT, CHEESE AND WINEBronze roasting spits, and irons and skewers survived in many of the wealthy Orientalizing
tombs and demonstrate the importance of “meat eating” to the wealthy Etruscans. These
roasting spits appear to have declined in popularity by the Classical period, but their
presence in early tombs speaks clearly of their association with a “meat eating” aristocracy.
But many of the ollae found throughout the Etruscan period and used on cooking stands
to cook vegetables, grains and legumes must have served for stews with meat as well.^37
The production of cheese in ancient Italy predates the Etruscan period. Pottery vessels
with perforations attest to cheese making in the Bronze Age.^38 Pictorial evidence can be
helpful, as seen in the Tomb of the Reliefs at ancient Caere where an item featured on the
wall just may be a wicker ricotta basket.^39 Cheese graters too, add to our knowledge of
the production of cheese by the Etruscans (Fig. 43.6; see also Fig. 6.5). Close to 20 cheese
graters have survived from the Tyrrhenian shores, a good many of them from Orientalizing
tombs in Etruria. D. Ridgway’s recent examination of bronze cheese graters reveals that
many survive in wealthy male or “princely tombs” of the seventh century bc and are
directly related to the cross pollination of goods, culture and ideas coming from abroad.^40
In effect, these graters can be traced to the Euboean Greeks at Lefkandi two centuries
earlier where three have surfaced in warrior graves.^41 The Euboeans were charting the
Tyrrhenian shores in the eighth century bc, best exemplifi ed by one of the most celebrated
Greek artifacts yet to surface in the Mediterranean, namely an imported drinking vessel
found at Pithekoussai (Ischia) and bearing a metrical Greek inscription referring to
Nestor’s cup.^42 Actually, bronze cheese graters appear to be intimately connected to the
material cache that refl ected Homeric cultural identity.^43 Here we are reminded of the
graters used in the preparation of kykeon (a mixture of wine and cheese) perhaps prepared
in Nestor’s cup, used, as Homer tells us, to revive a wounded hero (Hom. Iliad 11.
628–643).^44 One of the earliest graters found in Italy comes from the^ eighth century
bc Tomb of the Warrior in the Polledrara cemetery at Vulci and was discovered with
an Egyptian scarab mounted in silver.^45 In Etruria, cheese graters are commonly found
with fi ne bronze vessels for the pouring and drinking of wine.^46 Their placement in male
or “princely tombs” may symbolize heroic status as practical utensils associated with
the consumption of “aristocratic food” namely, cheese.^47 That these graters symbolized
“status” is hard to deny, as a miniature bronze cheese grater in the form of a pendant,
which hung from a bronze fi bula, has survived from Tomb 23M at Narce (Fig. 43.7).^48 An
important discovery of two bronze graters from Cetamura del Chianti, a humble, inland
Hellenistic site, reveals much about the continued use and perhaps “symbolic” aspects of
these graters. The fi rst specimen survives in fi ve small fragments found in a votive pit –