- chapter 20: Mothers and children –
They share women in common and display a total lack of shame or modesty, showing
themselves naked and speaking openly about sexual intercourse. Etruscan women are
beautiful, powerful and promiscuous, mingle freely with men, recline with them on the
same couch, and even offer toasts at the banquets and drinking parties that were for the
Greeks traditionally all-male events. These banquets, because of their sexual license and
lack of restraint, were orgies rather than normal social occasions. Here is the passage:
Among the Etruscans, who were extraordinarily pleasure-loving, Timaeus says...
that the slave girls wait on the men naked. Theopompus, in the forty-third book of
his Histories, also says that it is normal for the Etruscans to share their women in
common. These women take great care of their bodies and exercise bare, exposing
their bodies even before men, and among themselves: for it is not shameful for them
to appear almost naked. He also says they dine not with their husbands, but with any
man who happens to be present; and they toast anyone they want to.
And the Etruscans raise all the children that are born, not knowing who the father
is of each one.
It is no shame for the Etruscans to be seen having sexual experiences...for this too is
normal: it is the local custom there. And so far are they from considering it shameful
that they even say, when the master of the house is making love, and someone asks
for him, that he is “involved in such and such,” shamelessly calling out the thing by
name. When they come together in parties with their relations, this is what they do:
fi rst, when they stop drinking and are ready to go to bed, the servants bring in to
them – with the lights left on! – either hetairai, party girls, or very beautiful boys, or
even their wives.
When they have enjoyed these, they then bring in young boys in bloom, who in
turn consort with themselves. And they make love sometimes within sight of each
other, but mostly with screens set up around the beds; these screens are made of woven
reeds, and they throw blankets over them. And indeed they like to keep company with
women: but they enjoy the company of boys and young men even more.
And their own appearance is also very good-looking, because they live luxuriously
and smooth their bodies; for all the barbarians in the West shave their bodies smooth...
They have many barber shops.Athenaeus also quotes the remark of Aristotle, that “Etruscans eat with their wives,
reclining at table with them under the same blanket, and that Etruscan slaves are very
beautiful and dress better than is the custom of slaves.”^2
There are all the standard charges and clichés of Greek truphe or Roman luxuria – the
love of ease and pleasure of an exotic people, the lust and luxury characteristic of the
barbarian way of life, the fancy barbers and emphasis on physical beauty, the promiscuity,
the wild parties and lack of modesty – Etruscans allegedly are not even ashamed to have
intercourse with the lights on.
Yet a comparison of this description with the picture derived from archaeological
discoveries and Etruscan art allows us to distinguish some of the reality behind the scandal-
mongering gossip. Sixth-century bc archaic tomb paintings of Tarquinia illustrate the
ideals, realities and conspicuous consumption of aristocratic ceremonies, and the life of
the members of the noble families who set up these tombs as monuments to their wealth
and prestige. The banquet scenes painted on their walls offer striking parallels to those