CHAPTER SIXTY ONE

ANNIUS OF VITERBO

Ingrid D. Rowland

T

he history of Etruscan studies has always featured an unusually large number of
forgers, and for good reason. In the fi rst place, there was the matter of patriotism: long
after the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the descendants of the Etruscans, well aware
of their heritage, were tempted to embellish any ancestral story that glorifi ed a culture
conquered, but never entirely eradicated, by Rome. Furthermore, because the written
Etruscan language largely disappeared from Italy at the time of the early Roman Empire,
scholars from later periods were faced with a frustrating lack of fi rst-hand information
about one of the peninsula’s most important ancient populations. Their hunger for
knowledge, however far-fetched, often overruled their skepticism. Needless to say, people
who traced their ancestry back to Etruscan forebears were especially eager to grasp at any
trace of their heritage, in any form: object or text, real, embroidered, or invented. And
because the line between a vivid historical imagination and a vivid imagination is not
always an easy one to draw, fi ctions about the Etruscans have ultimately been as plentiful
as facts, from the tall tales told by medieval chroniclers to the lyrical prose of a dying
D. H. Lawrence in Etruscan Places.
The fi rst serious student of Etruscan language, history, and culture was particularly
good at mixing fact and fi ction. The Dominican friar Annius of Viterbo (1432–1502;
Fig. 61.1) was certainly a scholar of vivid imagination and defi nite talent, but from the
outset he also acquired a reputation as a serious rogue. His contemporaries accused him of
being a charlatan, a religious apostate, a forger, and a madman, and he may well have been
all of these things, but he also rose to the third highest position in his large, important
order, and distinguished himself, before his death in a Renaissance straitjacket, as a highly
intelligent scholar, a real pioneer of Etruscan studies, and an acute observer of the world
around him. Dismissing him as no more than a forger and a spinner of implausible tales
means missing the real insights he has to offer, for the Viterbo of Annius of Viterbo was
a city on which the Etruscan imprint was much fresher than it is today – fresher by 500
years. If his surroundings inspired him to leap to wild conclusions about past and present,
they were still real surroundings, and some of his thoughts about his city’s history were
genuinely insightful. The more we know about Viterbo as it was in earlier times, the more