- chapter 45: Etruscan spectacles: theater and sport –
The importance of boxing in the sporting customs of the Etruscans is also seen on
the Archaic Chiusine relief already cited, which illustrates a ballet of boxing, with three
athletes boxing and dancing rhythmically under the direction, even more necessary here,
of a fl autist (Jannot 1984: 329 ff.; Jannot 1985). Such choreography is not ignored today,
either. But in Chiusi, a relief with a classic boxing scene was recently discovered and it
shows great enthusiasm for wrestling (Thuillier 1997: 243–260): on both the reliefs and
the frescoes of Chiusi, a wrestling hold is taken to a spectacular level and one can see that
one of the adversaries actually seems to hover in the air over another competitor. This
particular move would end one round of the game – if the Etruscans did take on the
Greek rule of three “falls” – in any case, it appears as a signature of the artists of Chiusi.
Other athletic eventsWe can see on one of the two main walls of the Tomba degli Olimpiadi (“Tomb of the
Olympic Games”) of Tarquinia a set of three events: runners on foot, a long jumper and
a discus thrower (Fig. 45.2). This wall also offers the typically Etruscan Phersu-game:
we see a hooded man armed with a club who is being attacked by a vicious dog, spurred
on by a masked executioner. The last is called Phersu, that is to say, the “Mask” (a word
that corresponds to the Latin persona). (See Fig. 45.3, Phersu in the Tomba degli Auguri.)
Some would wrongly see in this the prefi guring of the Roman gladiatorial combats that
seem to fi nd their source not in Etruria but actually in Campania/Lucania, as shown in
many tomb paintings of Paestum (Pontrandolfo-Rouveret 1992). The combination of
the three athletic events mentioned above might suggest that the Etruscans were also
familiar with the Greek pentathlon, which included wrestling and javelin throwing. At
the same time, on some Panathenaic amphorae are depicted a set of games (also including
wrestling and javelin throwing) that indicate an athlete’s victory in the pentathlon. And
this is confi rmed by other documents such as the British Museum amphora (BM 64) by
the Micali Painter, where one can see a discus thrower and a javelin thrower side by side,
and on an Archaic Chiusine relief preserved in Palermo, on which the same athlete holds
both a discus and a javelin at the time of the awards. However, uncertainty remains on
this point, because of the lack of literary texts or inscriptions.
Figure 45.2 Tomba degli Olimpiadi, right wall, Greek athletic games, Tarquinia, circa 510 bce.
Photo courtesy of Stephan Steingräber.