A good idea of the different sort of athletic contests at the great Etruscan funerals is given by the wall-paintings in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni at Corneto, described and copied by Stackelberg and Kestner in 1827,17 and represented in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek by facsimiles and coloured drawings executed in 1907, after a chemical treatment of the plaster stucco, which brought out a number of details more plainly. The pictures are of the same period as those of the Augur tomb, and of similar style. The numerous inscriptions from which the tomb has derived its title seem to be mostly proper names. Each of the three wall-surfaces of this tomb, which contains only one chamber, has a false painted door in the middle. Of the first figures on the left main wall, two pugilists, only very little is preserved (fig. 7). They are contending, like the two wrestlers to the right of them, one of whom has lifted the other from the ground, to the accompaniment of the flute-player who is standing between the two groups. This and many other Etruscan paintings confirm the statement of Aristotle18 that the Etruscans made their boxers perform to the sound of the flute. Flute-playing was so popular that masters scourged their slaves and caused their cooks to work in the kitchen to the sound of the flute; and here again the Romans adopted the Etruscan tradition and gave their flute-players a recognized position in the community, as is shown by the amusing story about the strike of the Roman flute-players19: the flute-players left Rome in disgust and went in a body to Tibur, and the only device the Romans could think of was to make the excellent fellows drunk and cart them back to Rome, where the citizens made haste to confirm the ancient privileges of the flute-players and to add several new ones in order to make the awakening more pleasant.

On the other side of the false door the equestrian procession begins and is continued on the back wall to the central false door (fig. 8). Four young naked horsemen, some of them with staves in their hands, are received by a naked youth who carries a palm-branch over his shoulder. Apart from the nakedness, which must be attributed to the influence of Greek art, this equestrian procession is genuinely Etruscan. Appian derives the festive processions at triumphs and funerals from Etruscan prototypes, while Dionysius of Halicarnassus finds their prototypes in Hellas. But it cannot be denied that Dionysius’s description of these pompae in early Rome20 suggests Etruria: first came young horsemen, then foot-soldiers; after these, athletes with their sexual organs covered (in contrast to Greek custom), then the tripartite chorus of dancers in purple cloaks and bronze belts, then the grotesque dancers, flute-players, lyre-players, and thurifers, and finally the procession of chariots with the images of the gods. In the following pages we shall make acquaintance with all these groups in the Etruscan world of art.

The equestrian procession is presumably the preliminary to a horse-race. The nobles of Etruria were celebrated for their race-horses and often sent their chariot-teams to the games in early Rome.21 It is a characteristic fact that one of the few Etruscan words given by the Greek lexicographer Hesychius is no other than the word for horse, d???? according to the Greek version.22

To the right of the false door in the back wall three jolly dancers are seen: the first has his brow wreathed, carries a drinking-bowl in hand, and wears boots, red skirt, and blue neckerchief. The figure is shown by the flesh tint to be male, not female as stated in Carl Jacobsen’s catalogue. After him dances the flute-player, with red boots, blue loin-cloth, and red chaplet, and last comes a naked dancing youth with boots, necklace, and chaplet.

Dancers appear in a number of Etruscan tomb-paintings, and abandon themselves to their gambols with a frenzy which might seem incompatible with death and entombment. In the Tomba del Morto at Corneto, dating from the same period, we find traces of a pirouetting dancer close to the couch of the dead and the lamenting mourners; the dance was thus as important as the funeral lament (fig. 9). The finest representations of Etruscan mourning dancers are found in the Tomba del Triclinio, which dates from the beginning of the fifth century B.C.: the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek contains several earlier, inferior facsimiles, made from the copies in the Museo Gregoriano and only touched up at Corneto by the painter Mariani;23 and some more recent ones carefully executed on the spot (fig. 10). On each wall three female and two male dancers are seen among trees; fillets and singing-birds appear in the foliage. The male dancers play on lyre and flute; the dancing-girls have castanets and the foremost a strap or chaplet with bells over her shoulder. Similar chaplets with bells are often seen hanging on the walls in pictures representing the symposia in honour of the dead (see below), and bear witness to the childish predilection of the Etruscans for gipsy-like noise and merry-making. The most beautiful dancing-girl, however, in any Etruscan tomb is the already mentioned ‘bella ballerina di Corneto’, discovered on a wall in the Tomba Francesca Giustiniani. We give this figure, which has never been reproduced, after the facsimile in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek which arrived there shortly before the death of Carl Jacobsen and gave him one of the last pleasures in his life (fig. 11).

When I examined the original in the tomb at Corneto I made the following notes: the drapery (chiton), which is ornamented with a pattern of dotted rosettes, is distinctly preserved from the hips down to the elegant fluttering edge. Much of the middle part of the body has been destroyed; the fluttering ends of the red scarf across the shoulders are visible to right and left. The upper part of the body and the shoulders are also well preserved. The right arm is raised, and visible from shoulder to elbow; a faint outline of the left arm is also visible.24 Of the head, the brow, the beginning of the nose, the ear, the green fluttering head-dress, the red hair with a loosened tress in front of the ear have been preserved. To the spectator the picture still conveys an impression of joy, of graceful movement, and of filmy fluttering draperies.

Here also we find Etruscan tradition continued on Roman soil, not only in the dancers of the festival processions, but in the tradition that Etruscan dancers, ludii or ludiones, were imported to Rome to dance at the great festivals. The Greeks compared the Roman reel to the Dionysiac ‘cancan’, s???????, while its Roman name is tripudium; it was danced at every period of Roman history by the Salii, the ancient priesthood of the Roman war-god, on the chief festival of the god, March 19. According to Livy (vii. 2. 4-7) the earliest Roman poetry, the coarse Fescennines, originated in the text which accompanied the dance of the ludiones, and the fact that the dancers during the Fescennines daubed their faces with minium supports the theory of Etruscan influence, which also makes itself felt in the custom observed by the Roman triumphators, who in the earliest times daubed their whole bodies with minium. For we know that the Etruscans coated the images of their gods with minium at their festivals, and that the Romans gave the ancient terracotta statue of the Capitoline Jupiter a similar coat of ‘war paint’ at the high festivals, a task which it fell to the censors to superintend.25 The red minium was meant to heighten the natural red-brown hue of the men; it produced an artificial virile complexion, just as white lead and chalk served to emphasize the pale feminine hue.26

The primitive nature of the verses connected with these dances is shown by the song of the Salii, the burden of which is the five times repeated ‘triumpe’ (jump!) and the text of which runs: ‘Help us, lares, let not the evil disease fall upon any more of us, Mars! Be satisfied, cruel Mars! Jump on to the threshold. Cease jumping. Help us, Mars!’ At the triumphs also, ‘carmina incondita’, as Livy tells us, were sung (iv. 20. 2), and we venture to think that Etruscan poetry was no better than this, and that the disappearance of the texts, which accompanied the dances, is no great loss. Varro mentions tragedies in the Etruscan language, but they were undoubtedly versions of the Greek ones, even worse than those made for the Romans by Livius Andronicus. Apart from some religious and a little historical literature, and a number of recipes for the gathering of simples, capable of rousing the admiration of the Greeks for ‘the descendants of the Tyrrhenians, the people skilled in medical lore’,27 no tradition of any Etruscan intellectual life in writing or poetry has been handed down to posterity.

We pass on to the right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12) where dancers in a row with drinking-bowls in their hands alternate with servants carrying wine in large bowls. That the funeral dance was animated by free indulgence in wine is often exemplified in the tombs. In the Tomba delle Leonesse, named after the beasts of prey in the pediment, which are really hunting leopards, a red-brown lad to the right is dancing with a girl; to the left is a woman with castanets, and in the centre, flanked by a flute-player and a lyre-player, stands the wine-bowl wreathed with fresh leaves (fig. 13), ‘the wine-bowl filled with joy,’ in Xenophanes’ words. Evidently the Etruscans drank heavily to celebrate the memory of their dead, as Xenophon relates of another barbarian tribe, the Odrysians.28 To the right of the false door of the same main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12), a man in a loin-cloth with a laurel branch in each hand is greeting another man, who carries chaplets and rests one leg on the cushions of a couch. Laurel branches constantly recur in the reliefs of the Etruscan cinerary urns, where the death lament round the bier of the deceased is reproduced, and it seems probable that laurel branches were carried round the house and used for wall decoration in the house of the deceased on the funeral day, for the purpose of purification. This decoration of the walls, then, would be the subject of our picture, together with the other preparations for the funeral, as shown by the paintings.29 Perhaps it was a general custom of the Etruscans to decorate their walls on festival days with laurel branches, just as the Egyptians decorated theirs with lotus, and this would often account for all the foliage which appears in the backgrounds of the paintings alternating with suspended chaplets, even where the action—the death lament (fig. 9) or the symposium—takes place indoors. In other cases, however, as in the Tomba dei Tori (fig. 2) and in the Tomba del Triclinio (fig. 10), there is no doubt that real trees and open-air scenes are represented, but even there the chaplets are often seen hanging—on the wall. Again a proof of the want of clarity in Etruscan art! Trees, however, in the background of scenes with figures are also found on South Italian vases of the same time, and thus seem to be a common Italic trait.