A considerable group of Etruscan tomb-paintings, dating from the middle of the sixth century, show in their composition close connexion with Ionic vase-painting, especially with the so-called Caeretan hydriae, while their main pictures tell us something about the Etruscans themselves and their conceptions of Life and Death and Eternity. Only in the animal friezes beneath the painted roof-supports does the old decorative conception of the human and animal figure still linger; elsewhere the pictures now have content and meaning.

We may take the Tomba degli Auguri in Corneto, discovered in 1878, as our starting-point. There are coloured drawings as well as full-sized facsimiles of its pictures in the Helbig Museum.

The middle of the back wall of this tomb is occupied by a painted door flanked by two men in white chitons and short black cloaks lined with red; on their feet are peaked shoes. They raise both arms in a gesture of lament, ‘beating their foreheads’ as the ancient texts have it.10 With this scene (fig. 3) the key-note is struck: the living stand at the door of the tomb and moan for the dead, a subject specially appropriate to the decoration of the walls of a tomb.

The scenes on the main walls are also associated with the funeral ceremonies. On the right-hand main wall (fig. 4) a boy is seen to the left in a white tunic with black dots, carrying a stool and raising one arm and his face to a man who, dressed in a red and brown cloak and brown shoes, seems to beckon to the boy with his right hand, gesticulating at the same time with his left. Between them a small figure is seated who reminds one of the small boys in the Greek tomb reliefs ‘weeping on their cold knees’. To the right is another man clad in chiton and mantle, gesticulating violently with his left hand, and carrying a crook in his right. Above him, and above the excited man to the right, runs the inscription: ‘Tevarath’, probably meaning umpire (?ae?t??, ???????t??). For now follow representations of athletic contests: two wrestlers engaging in the initial grips, the elder bearded, the younger beardless: between them are seen the prizes—metal bowls; these are supposed to be arranged in the background, but owing to the lack of perspective they seem to be in the way of the combatants. This scene throws light on the preceding one: the man with the crook is evidently not an augur, as originally conjectured because of the staff and the flying birds, but the umpire who has to see that no unfair tricks are used; the other man is the spectator who has not yet seated himself, but beckons to the slave-boy to bring him the stool on which he will sit down like the Roman knights of later times who brought their own stools into the orchestra of the theatre. On the other hand, the mourning, crouching slave-boy seems to repeat the death lament of the back wall. Here already, then, we can observe the curious fragmentariness of the scenes in Etruscan art: they look as if they had been cut out of more comprehensive wholes, and put together without logical sequence. Clarity and unity are wanting. There is not the sustained composition or the pleasure in detailed narrative which are regular in Greek and Egyptian art. The Etruscan artist is content with hints and fragments.

To the right of the wrestlers, on the same main wall, is a particularly interesting representation: beneath the inscription Phersu, a man, dressed and masked like a punchinello, is leading a dog in a long leash which is wound round his antagonist and ends in a wooden collar round the neck of the dog. The ferocious blood-hound has inflicted bleeding wounds on the legs and thighs of the antagonist, and the antagonist, whose head is muffled in a sack, is vainly trying to disentangle himself from the leash and to hit the dog with a club. The explanation of this exciting and brutal contest, to which no parallel can be found in Greek art, is evidently that Phersu tries to make his dog bite his antagonist to death before the latter can get his head out of the sack and hit man and dog with his club. If the club-bearer succeeds in freeing himself from the sack and the dog, Phersu has only one chance: to run away. As runner, he has his legs stiffened with thongs, and in the much damaged fresco on the left main wall of the tomb we see the flight of Phersu (fig. 5) and (not reproduced) the club-bearer pursuing him. They are separated by a pair of pugilists who are boxing to the accompaniment of flutes, again an evidence of Etruscan indifference to incongruities in the composition. The escaping Phersu is painted alone in another tomb at Corneto, the Tomba del Pulcinella, the name of which is derived from this figure, but here he is placed beside a horseman (fig. 6), who represents the equestrian processions at funerals, to which we shall turn our attention later. The Tomba del Pulcinella, which was discovered in 1872, also dates from the sixth century B.C., and like the Tomb of the Augur it bears the stamp of Ionic art, especially in the receding contours of the crown of the head and in the plump forms of the body.

In these two sepulchres, then, we are confronted with representations which are associated not only with death and the tomb, but also with Etruscan local customs and national character. It is true that prize-fights and wrestling contests in connexion with obsequies are known in the Greek civilized world as well, for instance from the description in the Iliad of the funeral of Patroclus, and lingered for a long time especially in the outskirts of the Greek world—thus King Nicocles of Cyprus, in the beginning of the fourth century B.C., honoured his deceased father with choral dancing, athletic games, horse-races, trireme races.11 But we know of no example from Hellas of a fight like that between Phersu, accompanied by his blood-hound, and the muffled club-bearer: a fight the attraction of which, apart from its sanguinary character, evidently depended on the disparity of the weapons, as it did in the combat between gladiator and retiarius, the man armed with net and trident, in the Roman arenas of a later day.12

From the Greek author Athenaeus,13 we learn that the gladiatorial games originated in Campania, where they were introduced as entertainments at banquets, but that the Romans adopted them from the Etruscans. This tradition is confirmed by the facts that the name applied to the leader and trainer of the Roman gladiatorial school, lanista, is of Etruscan origin, and that the person, who even in late Rome14 dragged the corpses from the arena, the so-called Dispater, was furnished with satyr-ears and a mask with savage features, and carried a hammer, thus being a faithful copy of the Etruscan death-god, Charun.15 Moreover, as the Etruscans in the heyday of their glory, in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., also ruled over Campania, it is most natural to attribute to them, and not to the Campanian Graeculi, the doubtful honour of being the actual ‘inventors’ of gladiatorial combats. These combats were a piquant and exciting substitute for actual human sacrifices in honour of the deceased noble or the gods, and as one of the parties was given a chance to save his life the practice may even be considered an advance in humanity.

Etruscan obscurity and inconsistency lead to curious confusion in the transition from mythological pictures to funereal scenes. Thus we find on the front of an early archaic Etruscan terracotta sarcophagus, now in the British Museum,16 a representation in relief, manifestly inspired by Greek mythology, of a battle scene with men and women as spectators; at one end of the sarcophagus, the left, leave-taking before marching out to battle; on the back, a banqueting-scene, evidently representing the funeral feast, since the relief on the other end of the sarcophagus shows four mourning women, two of them holding drinking-bowls in their hands.