- chapter 20: Mothers and children –
will hatch.^42 Paris [Elachsantre] is seated like a good father at the bedside of Elina, who
is in bed nursing the baby Ermania, while Turan, goddess of love, visits the happy family
(see Chapter 24, Fig. 24.13).^43
Birth scenes in general are much more popular in Etruscan than in Greek art.^44 While
the divine conceptions and births in Greek myth are uniformly unnatural, Etruscan
renderings often bring out their more practical, normal aspects. Tinia is shown on a mirror
giving birth to a large, fully armed Menerva with two beautifully dressed midwives at
his side, comforting him and bandaging his aching head.^45 Elsewhere we see the baby
Dionysos, wearing protective amulets, emerging from Tinia’s thigh, where he has been
incubated; a female attendant nurse, Mean, holds an unguent jar and dipstick: is it to
assuage the birth pangs of Tinia, the new father, or to anoint the new-born baby?^46 An
Etruscan scene shows the conception of a god as an actual sexual union, as Semla lifts up
her skirt in an anasyrma gesture to have intercourse with the great god: a satyr shows that
the conception of the god Fufl uns/Dionysos will be the result.^47
Scenes of the nuclear family, father, mother and child together, appear in Etruscan art,
but it is not always easy to distinguish the children, the Roman liberi, from the servi. On
the seventh-century bc Tragliatella urn, a man and a woman stand facing each other with
a small fi gure between them. The inspiration for the group could be Theseus and Ariadne
with Ariadne’s nurse. But the fi gures are given Etruscan names, so that the smaller fi gure
represents a real child (Fig. 20.9).^48 Young boys and girls shown serving at banquets on
tomb paintings seem to be servants, but a unique scene on the wall of the Tomba del
Barone, may represent a formal family portrait of father and mother with their son. In
the fourth-century bc François Tomb, Arnza, “little Arnth,” stands next to Vel Saties and
releases the birds from which the seer reads the omens; is Arnza his attendant or his son?^49
Images of many stages of the lives of children, from birth to adolescence, appear in
Etruscan art and material culture. Most prominent are the babies, perhaps related to the
fact that the Etruscans were among a number of non-Greek cultures that did not practice
child infanticide, or abandonment – expositio in Latin. They, like the Egyptians, the Jews,
the Germans, but unlike the Greeks of classical and Hellenistic times, valued all their
children and raised them.^50
Figure 20.9 Urn from Tragliatella (Cerveteri). Nuclear family, military parade, erotic symplegma and
other scenes. C. 600 bc. Rome Capitoline Museum. (Giglioli 1929, pl. 26).