- Jean-Paul Thuillier –
Figure 45.3 Tomba degli Auguri, right wall, scene with Phersu, man and dog, Tarquinia, circa 520
bce. Photo courtesy of Stephan Steingräber.Other questions remain: the runners of the Tomb of the Olympic Games are going to
sprint, but will they run a stade-race? Are they at the end of a long distance race? What
was the distance of this dolichos (usually just under 5000 m), and was there also in Etruria
a diaulos-competition (a double stade)? The images certainly allow us to see that the
Etruscan long jumper usually used jumping weights to improve his performance; the
javelin thrower propelled his instrument with a strap called the amentum in Latin (and we
see a beautiful representation of it in the frescoes in the Tomb of the Monkey at Chiusi).
To see the awkwardness with which Etruscan artists often portray the gesture of the discus
thrower, one can assume that the latter exercise was not very popular in Etruria. But it is
also true that from around the mid-fi fth century bce, especially in Etruria Padana (the Po
Valley), many bronzes or fi nials for votive candelabra for example, represent a pentathlon
athlete. A small bronze from Bologna seems to depict a shot putter but the competition
was rarely attested in Antiquity, so did it actually exist in Etruria?
Greek infl uences were important, but the Etruscan athletic games are not a simple
copy of the Hellenic agones. On this point as on others, Etruscan originality is not to
be underestimated, as we have seen with the musical environment of Tuscan boxing.
Beyond the technical details, other signifi cant differences should be highlighted. The
issue of nudity might be at fi rst an essential criterion, because the Greeks themselves
claimed athletic nudity as a trait that radically distinguished them from the Barbarians.
In fact, on this point there is not a problem regarding Etruscan society, since Etruscan
wrestlers appear entirely nude, as in the Tomb of the Augurs at Tarquinia (Thuillier
1988). The realism of Etruscan art, at least in the late sixth and early fi fth centuries bce,
allows increased understanding of certain practices that the idealization of the athlete
in contemporary Attic art has almost completely hidden. Thus do we see, for example,
that some Etruscan athletes are provided with an “athletic support”: genitals are held
in by a small cord itself attached to a belt. The frescoes in the Tomb of the Monkey at
Chiusi offer particularly clear examples of this practice. Indeed, the Greeks cannot have
done otherwise: in fact, some very rare vase-paintings, among them a beautiful krater
by Euphronios, actually confi rm this. The Etruscans were not “true barbarians”: we have