- Larissa Bonfante –
described by the Greek author. Their animated, colorful atmosphere pictures the joie
de vivre of the banqueters, husbands and wives reclining together on elegant couches
covered in bright textiles, while youthful slaves bustle around them serving wine from
huge containers, or sit nearby preparing fresh garlands (Fig. 20.1).^3 It was the sight of
Etruscan men and women reclining on the same couch that most shocked Theopompus.
Respectable Greek women did not attend dinners or drinking parties; only party girls
reclined together with the men.^4 The authors making charges of Etruscan sexual license
interpreted the social situation and the behavior of the women in the light of the far
different Greek customs of the classical period, and in particular from the point of view
of the stricter Greek moral attitude of the fourth century bc.^5
There is more that can be said about two specifi c passages. The author’s remarks on
the great care the women take of their bodies, and their custom of exercising naked,
“exposing their bodies even before men, and among themselves, for it is not shameful for
them to appear almost naked,” may refer to Sparta, where the women exercised like the
men, and thus joined them in an exclusively male context. To an Athenian, the custom
appeared strange and even perverse. Plato advocated adopting it – but only in theory.^6
The statement that women can raise any children they have, on the other hand, may
well be based on a real difference between Greek and Etruscan attitudes to the exposure of
children at birth. Jews and Egyptians were said to rear every child that was born to them.
The Germans did not limit the number of children, and considered it shameful to expose
them to die.^7 Etruscan wealth and resources would also have allowed them to indulge a
love of children and avoid resorting to exposure of newborn babies, as was the custom for
ancient Greeks during most of their history.
The passage might also refer to the legal situation of Etruscan women, who could
perhaps bring up their own children no matter what the status of the father, a situation
Greek laws did not permit. In Greece and Rome, the father decided whether a child
should be brought up or exposed. An Etruscan upper class woman, in contrast, could pass
on her status, and perhaps her property, to her children.^8 This would agree with the use
of the matronymics that appeared in Etruscan epitaphs, though far less frequently than
patronymics. Etruscan women also had their own names – Tanaquil, Ramtha, Thana – in
contrast to their neighbors the Romans, where daughters simply took their father’s name,
Cornelia, Lucretia, Julia.^9
Figure 20.1 Tomb of the Painted Vases, Tarquinia, rear wall. Married couple attending a
banquet reclining on the same couch. To the right, a naked cupbearer, on the left, seated, their
children. C. 500 bc. (MonInst 1869–73, pl. 13).