- chapter 47: Health and medicine in Etruria –
Hippokratic corpus and other literary sources, and also from archaeological sites of the
Bronze Age cultures of the peninsula, and the fi nds from Pompeii and Herculaneum.
Although the Etruscans and their neighbors suffered from a number of diseases, we
may eliminate many others as not having reached the Mediterranean yet (yellow fever,
bubonic plague, cholera; on leprosy, see possibly Mariotti et al. 2005), or as being density-
dependent. When a severe disease fi rst strikes a community, it may kill a large number of
individuals, but usually survivors will develop some immunity, and such infections will
die out without a constant supply of unexposed individuals. A community producing a
steady stream of babies and children, if the population is large enough, can support such
things as the childhood diseases of the twentieth century like measles or chickenpox. But
such a high birth rate occurs only in large groups, and the towns and even cities of Etruria
seldom if ever reached such a size (the populations of Volsinii, Caere, Vulci, or Tarquinia
in the sixth century bc probably did not exceed 25,000–40,000 souls: Cornell 1995:
204–208; Heurgon 1964: 145–148; Rasmussen 2005: 86–88; Perkins 1999).
The density dependence of many diseases, for instance the rhinoviruses that cause
today’s colds, means they would not have been endemic in the Etruscan population,
although a single event could have infected and harmed many people. Since we know
many parasites were present in the Mediterranean and Italian environment, scholars have
assumed that many gastrointestinal infections, such as salmonella, shigella and E. coli,
which have long evolutionary histories, would have affected ancient Etruscan populations
(Nataro et al. 2003). Any serious disease striking a naïve group will be terrifying, and
Roman history records such “plague” events, from the time of Romulus and the morbus
pestifer in the reign of Numa Pompilius, through the Republic and beyond, as recorded
by Livy and epitomized by Julius Obsequens (Schlesinger 1959: passim).
Some other affl ictions such as treponema infection have at times been proposed for
ancient Italian populations, for instance, Classical-era skeletons from the countryside
of the Greek colony of Metaponto, but this diagnosis of endemic syphilis (Henneberg
and Henneberg 1998: 527–537) remains controversial. The presumed lesions found
in many individuals, even young children, may be due to erosion in burial, or to
porotic hyperostosis and anemia produced by different conditions (cf. Aufderheide and
Rodríguez-Martín 1998: 154–171); no syphilis antigen was detected (Jeske-Janicka and
Janicki 1998).
Divination: The Brontoscopic CalendarAnother source on health and disease in Etruria is the Brontoscopic Calendar (Turfa 2012), a
Byzantine Greek translation of a Late-Republican Latin version of an Etruscan divination
text, which cites many different diseases or affl ictions that could occur in the aftermath
of thunder, including cough, diarrhea, skin lesions of various sorts, “spotted diseases”
(which may be cutaneous anthrax, common among sheep-herding groups, cf. Brachman
and Kaufmann 1998; Wilkinson 1993). “Wasting away” is perhaps tuberculosis: on
analogy to modern populations, for every one person with skeletal damage, like the
Neolithic persons buried in the Arene Candide caves (Formicola et al. 1987), or the
Etruscan woman at Pozzuolo (Capasso and Di Tota 1997: 553–554), 100 to 300 people
may have suffered the respiratory effects of tuberculosis. Many times a disease prediction
accompanies other adverse conditions such as famine or war, as might be expected. Such
effects would have been painfully familiar to ancient observers.