Banquet scenes were common in the art of archaic Italy. This drawing reproduces such a scene on a terracotta frieze from the palace at Murlo. The artist shows the guests reclining on couches, as was customary in the Greek world too. A mixing bowl of the kind often found in aristocratic tombs rests on a stand between the two couches. One of the guests plays a lyre.
Beginning in the late eighth century, a number of communities in southern Etruria— Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, and Veii—began to develop rapidly into city-states. By the end of the seventh century, others could be found in northern Etruria, at Populonia, Rusellae, and Volaterrae, as well as inland in the valleys of the Tiber and Arno rivers. These cities possessed a common language, and many features of their government, social organization, and religion were similar; they also had some sense of a shared identity. Yet Etruscan city-states were never united politically, and frequently they were rivals and even enemies.
The major centers of Etruria controlled substantial territories. Political power and public cult were concentrated at the core, reducing other settlements in the territory to a subordinate role, or forcing their abandonment when the inhabitants were moved to the city. The larger cities often spread over several hundred acres, although buildings did not occupy all of this space. Smaller dependent settlements, some as extensive as twenty-five acres (10 ha), could be found toward the fringes of a larger community’s territory, too far away for the land there to be cultivated by people from the center. Villages occupying less than about ten acres (4 ha) surrounded the central city, as did hamlets or isolated farms that covered two to three acres (1 ha) at most. In certain instances some lesser settlements contained a religious structure or elite dwelling, and even fortifications. In addition, a few towns of intermediate size, seldom exceeding one hundred acres (40 ha), preserved a precarious independence in zones that were isolated from major settlements. Most such towns, however, eventually succumbed to their stronger neighbors: Murlo was destroyed twice, first c. 600 and finally c. 530; Acquarossa was eclipsed around 500.
Shrines in the territories of some cities promoted relations both between communities in Italy and with the outside world. In the Orientalizing Period, aristocratic households may have mediated much long-distance trade, but in the sixth century a broader institutional involvement developed in some places. At Graviscae and Pyrgi, the ports of Tarquinii and Caere respectively, elaborate temple complexes received dedications from local notables as well as from Greek, Phoenician, Latin, and Etruscan merchants. In some cases, local gods were identified with foreign ones: At Graviscae, the local Turan was equated with the Greek Aphrodite, while at Pyrgi the Caeretan deity Uni was linked with the Phoenician Astarte. Around 500, in a long inscription in Etruscan and Phoenician, the ruler of Caere recorded a dedication he had made; his choice of languages illustrates the importance of Phoenicians here (coming from Carthage perhaps, or from another western colony). Thus cult places such as these served as centers of interaction between peoples of different origin under the patronage of the host community. Elsewhere in the Mediterranean at this time sanctuary sites are known to have filled the same function.
Traces of Etruscans are not limited to Etruria. In some places, Etruscan settlements followed Villanovan predecessors, just as they did in Etruria itself: Capua and Nola in Campania, as well as Felsina (modern Bologna), across the Apennines, are good examples. New Etruscan centers appeared elsewhere in the Po Valley in the course of the sixth and fifth centuries. Small groups of Etruscans also inhabited places that remained essentially non-Etruscan, because inscriptions in the Etruscan language have been found in many places in Latium (including Rome itself), Campania, and Umbria.
In the Archaic Period, Etruscan elites were among the most active in Italy, but the nature of their interaction with non-Etruscan communities is not always clear. Some scholars suggest that Etruscan practices spread with the movement of elites and their followers, who would come to dominate a preexisting community. Some of the Etruscan centers in the north may have begun in just this way: Hatria, from which the Adriatic Sea received its name, and Spina, a major trading center from the closing decades of the sixth century, may originally have been Greek cities. Roman writers of a later date thought that two of Rome’s last three kings were of Etruscan descent, and they believed that some of Rome’s core institutions and practices were of Etruscan origin. Even so, it is by no means clear how far the emergence of cities in regions such as Latium is to be credited to Etruscans. In the seventh and sixth centuries, the chief Etruscan communities were among Italy’s richest and most powerful urban centers; as such, they would plainly have had marked influence, either imposed directly through the power they exerted over their neighbors, or indirectly through the models they provided for others. The similarity in material culture that many scholars regard as signifying the undoubted presence of an Etruscan elite may rather be due to the formation of an international elite style—one that crossed ethnic boundaries, and was shared by numerous local elites imitating each other to increase their own prestige. By the same token, the presence of Etruscan speakers may indicate only that the newly forming city-states in many regions were for a time open to outsiders. The Romans, it should be noted, thought that Lucius Tarquinius Priscus—the first Etruscan king of Rome, and father of the second—came to Rome from Tarquinii as an immigrant, not as a conqueror.
