CHAPTER FORTY

SEAFARING: SHIP BUILDING, HARBORS,

THE ISSUE OF PIRACY

Stefano Bruni

T

he historical importance of the relationship between the Etruscan world and the
sea was cultivated by the ancients themselves, and became one of the recurrent
themes in the discussions of Greco-Roman ethnography concerning the Etruscans. From
Poseidonius, quoted by Diodorus (5.40.2), Late Hellenistic historiography has repeatedly
emphasized the intimate connection of the Etruscans with the sea, noting that the district
of the Mediterranean, which according to its geographical orientation the Greeks called
θάλασσα νότια and the Romans mare inferum (cf. Pliny NH 3.75) more commonly took on
the name of τυρρηνικόν πέλαγος/mare tuscum not because it washed the coast of Etruria,
but because the Etruscans had exercised a lasting dominion over that sea, such that a late
tradition also attributed the name of the hero Tyrrhenos to the Ionian Sea (Isid., Etym.
13.16, derived from Serv. Ad Aeneid. 3.211) and the island of Malta would itself be εν τῷ
τυρρηνικῷ πελάγαι (Schol.Clem.Alex. 337.26). Equally, the sea from the other side of the
Peninsula, the mare superum, has assumed for its northern mirror, namely that area facing
the Gulf of Trieste and the area of the Po delta, the name Adriatic from Adria, Tuscorum
colonia, as Livy noted also in a famous passage which summarizes the earlier traditions
(5.33.7–8). If, in regard to this last district, a passage in Hecataeus (fr. 99 Nenci) dates
the use of this name back at least to the end of the sixth century bc, and in the advanced
fourth century bc, it will extend to the entire middle Adriatic coast, all the way to the
Gargano, then the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea seems to boast a tradition just as old, as
indicated by a famous fragment of the Triptolemos of Sophocles quoted by Dionysius of
Halicarnassus (1.12.2), which records the τυρσενικός κόλπος, the “gulf,” or better the sea,
(cf. Thuc. 6.62) “of the Tyrrhenians.”
Inasmuch as the name of the Etruscans does not appear in the list of thalassocracies
handed down by Eusebius (Chronikon 1.225) and recorded by Diodorus (7.11), who had
perhaps derived it from an historian of the fi fth century bc, the ancient literature recalls
several times how the Etruscans had exercised dominion over the sea for a long time
(Diod. 5.40.2; 11.51; Dion. Hal. 1.11; Strabo 5.2.5 C 222; Livy 5.33.7).
However, it remains diffi cult to determine the coordinates of the complex map of
this thalassocracy, also an echo of the Etruscans as thalassokrátores, “rulers of the seas,”