- chapter 8: A long twilight –
It seems in any case that there existed in most of the Etruscan cities at the turn of the
fourth century, increased pressure on the part of that class whose demands the Romans, for
whom the plebs represented a fundamental element of the social and political order, had to
consider while seeking to safeguard the interests of an Etruscan aristocracy increasingly
well represented in the Senate. The Etruscan dependents probably formed the majority
of the members of Bacchic thiasoi that were particularly numerous and organized in the
southern part of Etruria, and whose disturbing success and seditious potential provoked,
in 186, the intervention of the Roman senate who ordered the destruction of places of
worship of Bacchus throughout Italy (Fig. 8.15).
AGRICULTURE AND METALLURGY,
HANDICRAFT AND ARTIt is to the activity of the middle or lower classes that the “obese Etruscan” (Fig. 8.16),
associated with the idle aristocrat of the Hellenistic period, and a symbol of wealth in the
region, owed his prosperity. An extraordinarily fertile land and rich in metals, Etruria
offers, here too, a wide variety of situations because of the morphology of the sites, their
geology and their position relative to major communication routes – main and secondary
roads, the Tiber, the Tyrrhenian Sea. The only really concrete ancient evidence of this
diversity is the inventory of contributions made – enthusiastically, according to Livy
(28.45.13–21) – by Etruscan cities for the various military preparations of Scipio in
- This text distinguishes two different types of production: metallurgy (Populonia,
Arezzo) was apparently less developed than agriculture and forestry, with their products
(Caere, Tarquinia, Perugia, Chiusi, Roselle, Volterra), comparable to the level of
Etruscan expertise recognized in relation to drainage and land reclamation. Campaigns
of archaeological survey have also revealed very different situations: in the region nearest
Figure 8.15 The extraordinary Dionysiac throne in terracotta of the beginning of the second century,
found in the peristyle of a domus at Poggio Moscini in Bolsena demonstrates the success of Bacchic
religion in southern Etruria, repressed as seditious by the Roman senate in 186 (Bolsena, Museo
Archeologico; École française de Rome; picture M. Benedetti, Archivio SBAEM).