THROUGH HAUNTED ETRURIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 2950, 28 September 1910, Page 78

THROUGH HAUNTED ETRURIA.

A NOTE ON THE ANCIENT ETRUSCANS. Who were the Etruscans? Ever since the discovery of art treasures in the ancient soil of Etruria some half century ago archaeologists have been seeking for the origin of this mysterious race that so long viewed with the power of Rome. The Pelasgi, the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Hittites, and the Babylonians have been cited in order to solve this apparently unanswerable question. The Lydians, the Ligurians, the Celts, the Basques, and the Finns have been appealed to equally in vain. It is no wonder, then, that Mr Frederick Seymour in his ''Up Hill and Down Dale in Ancient Etruria' (Unwin; 10s 6d) takes as an accepted maxim these lines of Landor : At last wo all in turn declare Wo know not who the Cyclops were. But the Pala-seinns! those are true? I knew as much of them as yen. The theories in regard to this obscure origin being so contradictory, one naturally regards the Etruscans much as that "übiquitous race known as the Pelaagi," who, supposed to have emigrated from Thessalyj spread themselves over the whole of the south-east of Europe. —Art and Literature. — But the greatness of the Etruscans is proved -by the remains of their great city walls. Sarcophagi, cinerary urns, sculptures and paintings and vases, jewels and metal work and armour—all these speak for the voiceless Etruscans who, artists though they were in music and painting and sculpture, possessed no literature of their own. "We may well ask," writes the author, "what were educated or intellectual Etruscans doing during their thousand years of domination in Italy. When they were not fighting, playing, dancing, banqueting, racing, hunting, had they no intellectual pursuits'' Was no great man deserving of some commemorative pen or stylus, even if they had no Thucycfides among them? Bid the long sieges of Veii produce no great name worthy !of an ode from some native Tyrtseus or Pindar? We do not ask for a Persius, or a Euripides, or a Homer, but we might have expected at least the minute shrill reed-pipe of some native Collins." —Religion.— In religion, however, this people advanced beyond the conceptions of either the Greek or the Roman gods. And even among their inferior deities and fabulous creatures, whether angels or demons, the idea of the struggle between good and evil was clearly discerned. Of these minor deities Signor A. Guerri has written : "Amongst these beneficent or malevolent genii, half-human, half-divine, the Etruscans imagined that there was always proceeding a constant struggle, to benefit or to injure the individual during life, and to conduct him to places of joy or torment after death." In paintings upon the sepulchral urns and upon the walla of their tombs such ideas as these are constantly reproduced. "In no Celtic, Scandinavian, of Gaulish creed," says Mr Seymour, "of which we have any cognisance will anything resembling the Etruscan creed be found. The final tribunal, the awards of happiness or of punishment are ideas quite foreign to those found in Northern or North-western creeds. Ideas so advanced that we marvel to find them allied with the hocus pocus of fortunetellers, magicians, and soothsayers, almost as barbarous as those in African superstitions." The potent deities were all marked by their power of thundering. This power was possessed by nine gods, a fact which 's recalled in Macaulay's familiar line, "Lars Porsena of Clusir.m, by the nine gods he swore." —Lars Porsena. —• liven this Lars Porsena, the leader under whom the Etruscans reached the zenith of their glory, was somewhat cf an enigma. He seems to have exercised, in times of peace at all events, no powers beyond his own territory Clusium. He was not a king, for that was a title unknown among the Etruscans. But Lars Porsena was their one great personality, and it is interesting to note that the citizens of Clusium were not only famous in war, but were also an artistic people who exported the black ware known as "bucchero" to every part of Etruria. The "focolari," or trays of that ware, set out with cups, small pots, dishes, phials, and vases (so very suggestive of "five o'clock tea"), are undoubtedly of Clusian origin. Sometimes round, sometimes rectangular, they are considered to have been toilet services—to have contained all tho>'j things (and more) that are supposed to be necessary for a lady's dressing table. Certainly a satire upon human nature — upon feminine human nature—that such things should have been placed: within reach of the vanished hand in the tomb. One thinks of Hamlet's ad-dress to the hkull : "Tell her to paint- an inch thick, for to this favour must she come." There is a surprising variety of sizes and shapes in this ware. —Prehistoric Blood.— For this author the first stage in Ancient Etruria is Volterra, and he leads us to a little river that- runs below its walls and towers. It is an important river for all its smallness: "For that humble stream is probably the most ancient thing bearing a name in Etruscan history. The Etruscans called it Cecina. Now, that small word gives us, as the French put it, furiously to think. PVjr that name belonged to an Etruscan noble family, perhaps the most ancient, certainly the most enduring, family of which we have record. Whether the river hactised the family or the family gave the name to the river we can never know. But certainly they were coeval and contemporaneous, so far as our knowledge ~ees, for something lika 2000 .years."

A hundred and fifty years ago a bishop, who was the last representative of that family, died in the city of his ances-tors, and his grave iies in the cathedral. "And yet," comments the author, "who can pronounce with certainty that no Cecina may yet be lurking in some sequestered spot in Volterra, in vale or fastness? It seems so improbable that prehistoric blood, such as that of the Oecinas, should have run out. And who knows? The ashes of a stock supposed extinct have before now been suddenly relumed. A few years ago at Florence, in the Church of the Ogni Santi, the frescoes by Ghirlandajo of the Vespucci family (Amerigo included) came to light, having been concealed for years -beneath the plaster. The family was declared to be extinct. The municipality said so, and in Italy the arbitration of the municipality in all things is final. Yet a lady started out of the obscurity and claimed to be a Vespucci." As to whether her claim was or was not allowed the author is uncertain, but undoubtedly so long as the River Cecina flows that ancient Etruscan family will be associated with Volterra. —Dust and Arms. — An Englishman who has recently investigated the haunts of ghosts in this country maintains that "it is always a prehistorical place that is productive of spirits." If this is, indeed, true in rural England, how many ghosts must linger upon the soil of Etruria ! Is it any wonder that peasants say that the ruins of Rosella are crowded with phantoms? The very corpses of the Etruscans suggest the miraculous, so wonderfully are they preserved, merely by the exclusion of air. At a tingle breath of air, however, the preserved corpse that has resisted the centuries crumbks into dust. Mrs Gray in her "Tour to the Sepulchres of Etruria," cites an astonishing instance of this: "Carlo Avolta of Oornelo was conducting an excavation at Tarquinia, when he was rewarded by an enjoyment which he says was the most exquisite of his life —the discovery of an Etruscan monarch with his crown and panoply. He entirely confirmed the account which I had received in Rome of his adventure with the. Lacumo, on whom he gazed for full five of his sepulchre. He saw him crowned minutes from the aperture above the door with gold, clothed in armour, with a shield, spear, and arrows by his side, and extended on his stone bier. But a change soon came over the figure ; it trembled and crumbled and vanished away, and by the time an entrance was effected all that remained was the golden crown and n handful of dust, with some fragments of the arms." For the rest, this portion of Italy is a veritable haunted land, and readers of this fascinating volume will iealise the increasing fame as an archa3o!ogist of the poet Virgil, who was so permeated by the legends and traditions of Etruria.