- chapter 20: Mothers and children –
Figure 20.3 Limestone relief from Chiusi. Wedding procession, with priest, musician, and attendants
preceding the wedding party – bride, priest, and bridegroom – standing under a fringed cover. Chiusi,
Museo Archeologico Nazionale. (Soprintendenza alle Antichità d’Etruria).In the necropoleis, gender differences are emphasized by the shapes of the beds, by the
grave markers placed outside the tomb, even by the women’s breasts modeled along the
lower edge of the house-shaped ash urns. In all these cases, women’s burials are associated
with the house shape.^22 Women’s domain was the family, its prestige and continuity,
but women were by no means confi ned to the house, or to private religious ceremonies.
Their prominence in a public role may be shown by a group of inscriptions from a tomb
at Vulci that identify women with the title of hatrencu. A recent study convincingly
suggests that this is a civic rather than a religious, priestly title, perhaps even an offi cial
magistracy, assumed by Etruscan women in particular historical circumstances.^23 The
way the women dressed, with shorter skirts and more outerwear, shows that they did in
fact live a more public life than Greek women.^24
We have seen that funerary art, which is the principal form of evidence we have for
Etruscan customs and beliefs, regularly shows husband and wife reclining together at the
banquet and symposium. Roman women, unlike Greek women, also accompanied their
husbands to parties and banquets – an orator asks, “What Roman would be ashamed to
take his wife to a dinner party?”^25 But unlike Etruscan women, Roman wives sat primly
beside their husbands’ couches, they did not lie down beside them.
In the grave and beyond, women were accorded wealth and honors (Fig. 20.4). In
real life, they enjoyed considerable freedom and autonomy both within and outside the
marriage. The importance of the married couple, the fact that an Etruscan woman had
her own name, the use of the matronymic implying her importance and that of her family
and the possibility that she could provide status and perhaps even citizenship all point to
the important role women played in Etruscan society. But there was no matriarchy – the
husband was the head of the family, which is why we know the word for “wife,” puia, but
not the word for “husband.”^26
In Etruscan iconography, mythological scenes emphasize the marriage and family
bonds of divinities and heroes,^27 often choosing obscure alternate forms of the Greek
myth represented or transforming the story radically. Such scenes were incised on the
backs of the engraved bronze mirrors that brides received on their wedding day, and that
they took to their graves with them when they died.^28 One mirror shows Admetus and