Because of the Women's History Month in Hellas at the Feminalia thread, I decided to devote some space in the ETRVRIA group specifically to Etruscan women. What is known of the position of Etruscan women in general, and what is known of the Etruscan women who are known to us by name, because they have been handed down to us through ancient historiography? This series of posts is a trial to solve some of the riddles, or at least give some information.

The first episode holds some basic information about the position of Etruscan women. The following text and some of the illustrations in this post are from a site made by our own Heraklia Aelius:

Etruscan Women

At the other pole of classical feminine behavior lay the mores of the Etruscan culture of 7th and 6th century Italy. Greek writers, including the fourth-century Theopompus and the later Athenaeus, passed along scandal-ridden tales of the wealth, greed and sensual license of Etruscan women, revealing an implacable hostility to female conduct so foreign to that mandated in Athens at the time. The Romans listened. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans had no narratives of their early history before the third century BC, centuries after the founding of Rome. Thus later Roman sources such as Livy, often drawing on Greek historians, preserved legends of the vanished Etruscan culture and the behavior of its women. From what the Romans preserved, we can see how the Etruscans were viewed by their successors and how their treatment of women was part of Roman propaganda and moral instruction of females in Rome itself.

Etruscan women were permitted to dine with their husbands and male relatives, drinking wine and allegedly engaging in affectionate or sexual behavior in public. Funerary monuments and wall paintings suggest that the importance of married couples and their private relationships took cultural precedence over male relationship and even, in some cases, over the severe authority of the Roman paterfamilias. A noblewoman's lineage was noted alongside famous men’s. Stories tell that several of the early Tarquin kings had wives of great political ambition and effectiveness (although these are usually held up by the Romans as cautionary tales of the disastrous impact of ambitious women). Artifacts, including mirrors and tomb inscriptions, suggest that many Etruscan women of the higher classes were literate. The tombs of women are elaborate and, like men, they are permitted to take status objects with them to the netherworld including familiar items of women’s authority: wool-working equipment, engraved mirrors, toilet boxes, and jewelry, just as men took their fine armor, swords, and guest cups. Poignant tomb objects portray husbands and wives with the affectionate intimacy of the marital bed.

Sharing wives is an established Etruscan custom. Etruscan women take particular care of their bodies and exercise often, sometimes along with the men, and sometimes by themselves. It is not a disgrace for them to be seen naked. Further, they dine, not with their own husbands, but with any men who happen to be present, and they pledge with wine any whom they wish. They are also expert drinkers and are very good looking.

Theopompus of Chios, Histories, 43

Etruscan women were allegedly permitted wide sexual latitude with multiple partners. Although the Etruscans were later conquered and then absorbed by the culture of Republican Rome, the tales of its more emancipated women must have driven deeply into Rome’s own conceptions of permissible female behavior, both for good and ill. Roman myths as codified by Livy later contrasted the (perceived) shocking sexual freedom permitted Etruscan women with the chaste docility of a Lucretia or Verginia.

In Roman eyes, Etruscan women were also allowed a dangerous taste of political power and ambition. Livy also spotlighted certain Etruscan women such as Tanaquil, wife of Tarquinius Priscus, and Tullia, wife of Tarquinius Superbus, for their ambition and its disastrous results.

Tanaquil, daughter of a noble Etruscan family, played upon her husband's weakness to prod him by supposed prophecies to move to Rome, promising him a royal future there. Tanaquil is specifically given knowledge of divination, although it is unknown if Etruscan women were permitted to practice the art of augury. She then persuades her husband to adopt Servius Tullius as his successor. It is largely through Tanaquil that the royal family survived the murder of her husband, whereupon Servius Tullius became king of Rome.

Livy's description of Tullia, with her Lady Macbeth-like ferocity of savage ambition, is far closer to the vision of Shakespeare's Queen of the Goths in Titus Andronicus - Tullia, symbolizing Etruscan rule, is even more cruel and vicious than her husband and unnaturally connived at the murders of both her husband and father. Both these women were obviously nursery horror-stories for later centuries of Roman women who were thus warned against an overt involvement in the male sphere of politics.

Thus as the innate values of Roman society were being codified in the period between the Founding of Rome in 753 and 202 BC (the year of Rome’s victory in her war to the death with the Carthaginian, Hannibal), the cultural identity of feminine Rome was being defined partly by the twin extremes of these influential cultures: by the restrictions of the Greeks and the supposed license of the Etruscans. It was between the two extremes that the Roman woman would find her own unique balance.

Sources:

Quotation from Xenophon from Ancient History Sourcebook. Translation from Lysistrata courtesy of EAWC Anthology. Quote from Theopompus courtesy of Morality and the Etruscans.

Marble head of veiled woman: copy of bronze head of “Aspasia” of c. 460 BCE Paris, Louvre Museum. Credits: Barbara McManus, 1999. Colored reproduction of the Peplos "Kore" from Museum of Classical Archeology/Cambridge. Sketch of Greek woman courtesy of The Costumer's Manifesto. Votive bust of Etruscan woman from Caere, 3rd century BC, Vatican Museum. Etruscan map courtesy of The Mysterious Etruscans. Sarcophagus of Etruscan couple c. 510 BC, courtesy of Artlex on Etruscan Art.

An excellent discussion of Livy's myths of Etruscan women may be found in the Ancient History Bulletin.