This wall-painting is apparently a faithful copy of a Greek painted representation of a symposium with hetaerae, and this is also Weege’s view of the scene. In his opinion, those who take part in the drinking bouts of the young men are not married or respectable women, but hetaerae. It seems to me that such a representation in a tomb would argue a complete dissolution of family relations in ancient Etruria, whether we choose to interpret the pictures as scenes from life, or as an expression of the wish that the next life might take the form of nothing more or less than a revel with hetaerae. Weege maintains, further, that hetaerae reclined at table, whereas wives sat with their husbands: but this is contrary to the express literary tradition, according to which the Greeks were shocked because the Etruscan women reclined at table with men ‘under the same coverlet’. The earliest authority for this statement is Aristotle49 and, according to this and other accounts of the fourth century B.C., the free intercourse between men and women gave rise to much immorality, the women abandoning themselves to the strange men with whom they reclined.50 It would have been absurd for the Greeks to take offence at this if it did not apply to free-born women of good family, but only to hetaerae, who in Hellas did exactly the same. How things were with the Greeks in this respect is made sufficiently clear by a passage in the orator Isaeus51: ‘No one would dare to serenade married women, and neither do the married women attend banquets with their husbands, nor do they consider it proper to partake of meals with strangers, especially chance acquaintances’.

With this severe Athenian custom we must compare these scandalized Greek outbursts, and, at the same time, we must remember that in the fourth century B.C. Etruscan civilization and morals were already on the decline, so that an original latitude, which in the beginning of the fifth century was natural and did not affect the morals of domestic life, may at this time have been abused. Incidentally, we are able to ascertain the degree of exaggeration in another Greek account of the same time concerning the luxuriousness of the Etruscans52: ‘They reclined on flowered cushions drinking out of sumptuous silver bowls and attended by servants in costly dresses, sometimes by naked women.’ In the Etruscan paintings there are numerous naked pages in attendance, just as in the Greek symposium pictures, but not a single naked handmaid. As to the question whether respectable women reclined or sat at table, invariable rules did not exist in Etruria any more than they existed in ancient Rome, where we know that Jupiter alone reclined at the lectisternia (the sacred banquets given by the state) whereas Juno and Minerva sat; furthermore, in the last century of the republic, respectable women sat with the men at banquets, while brides reclined.53 The practice of brides reclining can hardly, however, be accounted for except as a case of adherence to an ancient and honourable custom which was superseded by later and severer notions.

Etruscan works of art, however, give sufficient information to confute the whole of Weege’s hetaera theory. Man and woman are often seen reclining together on Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns, and on the face of it it would seem improbable that a man would have himself pictured on his sarcophagus with a hetaera. Dr. S. P. Cortsen kindly informs me that this view is confirmed by the fact that two of these cinerary urns with a pair of figures on the lid have an inscription in which the word tusurthi or tusurthir occurs—one of the few Etruscan words the signification of which is certain: it means ‘spouses’.54 And if we look at the type of womanhood represented in several of the recumbent couples on the later urns, when realism prevails in Etruscan portrait sculpture, the appellation hetaera becomes as preposterous as that of matrons is certain (fig. 25).55

But proof is furnished by the tomb-paintings themselves. In the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto, discovered in 1870, and, to judge by the style, dating from the end of the fifth century B. C., the wife (as might be expected) is pictured sitting with her husband, who is reclining on the couch with a drinking-bowl in his left hand, his right resting on the woman’s shoulder (fig. 26). According to the inscription the man’s name is Velthur Velcha, that of the woman Ravnthu Aprthnai (the family name is in the nominative and is a woman’s name, the Latin Abortennia; so the family of the mother was the more distinguished). The figure and the diadem of the woman recall those of the Hera Borghese and determine the date of the tomb. On the table in front of the couch are a bowl, a cake (pyramis), and a heap of fruits: or they may be the ‘ball-cakes’ (spirae or spaeritae) referred to by Cato (De agricultura 82). At the foot of the couch a lyre-player and a flute-player accompany the meal with music, recalling a statement of Cicero’s56 that at banquets in early Rome the sound of stringed instruments and flutes was deemed indispensable. On the whole, it might perhaps be as well to abandon all theories of the austere morals of early Rome. The patrician families of the first centuries of the republic undoubtedly lived a life which in pomp and luxury vied with the life of the nobility of the Etruscan towns. Again, in the painting on the back wall of this tomb, where the recumbent man is a priest (cechaneri), the wife is seated with her husband (fig. 27). As to the priesthood, it must be borne in mind that the priestly office was hereditary in the Etruscan noble families. The statue of Juno at Veii, for instance, might only be touched by a priest of a certain family.57 It was especially the art of divination, however, which was reserved for the noblemen and their wives.58 Even when the Romans had conquered Etruria they continued to support the efforts of the Etruscans to confine initiation into the art of divination to the nobility. Even Cicero, in his book on the ideal State, maintains that omens and presages must be submitted to haruspices, and the nobles of Etruria must teach the ‘disciplina’.

In the pictures of the Scudi tomb the wife, as we have seen, is sitting. But in the Tomba dei Vasi Dipinti, besides a man and a woman, two children are present at the symposium, which would be inconceivable in a hetaera picture; and in a picture in the front chamber of the Tomba dell’Orco at Corneto, discovered in 1868 and dating from the same period as the Scudi tomb, there are traces of a man and a woman reclining together, and the inscription informs us that the woman is a free-born woman named Velia—the family name has unfortunately been destroyed—and that she is married to Arnth Velchas, a descendant of one of the noblest families in Etruria (fig. 28). With this, then, the last and final proof of the untenability of the hetaera theory has been adduced: this woman, whose head is one of the most beautiful in the sepulchral chambers of Etruria (fig. 29), reclines with her husband on the couch in the picture in the tomb, even as she was buried with him in the tomb itself. A failure to appreciate this fact would imply a complete denial of Etruscan family feeling and pride of race.

The dancing women, on the other hand, for instance, the woman in the Tomba delle Leonesse already cited above, and another, still more wanton, who in the Tomba degli Bacchanti foots it with a fat dancer, must be interpreted as hetaerae. They illustrate the phrase of Plautus: ‘prostibile est tandem? stantem stanti savium dare amicum amicae?’ To the same category of hired dancers belongs the man to the left of the one who is dancing with inverted cithara.59

Generally speaking, what has made doubt or error possible in the matter is the fact that the pictures, as we have already said, in form suggest Greek pictures of hetaerae; symposia of any other kind between men and women were unknown in Hellas. And to what extent the influence of Greek art has prevailed is shown by the picture of a momentary phase of emotion in the Tomba Querciola, where a couple reclining on the couch are kissing each other, a motive as suitable to a Greek hetaera picture as it is incongruous in a picture representing family life after death.60 Another source of error is the pronounced sensualism of these pictures; in a sepulchral painting as early as the sixth century, the main picture of the Tomba del Vecchio, we see on a banqueting-couch, under the wreaths and chaplets with bells hanging on the wall, a hoary old rouÉ in vivacious conversation with his beautiful young wife who holds a garland, a hypothymis, under his nose (fig. 30).61 This picture is typically Etruscan in its combination of wine and love. ‘As soon as we had eaten,’ sings the Greek poet Dromon,62 ‘the slave girl removed the tables; one brought us water for washing, and we washed ourselves; then we seized again the wreaths of violets and bound our brows with garlands.’ The Etruscans seem to have followed the Greek rules minutely, but like the Egyptians they let the free-born women partake of the festivity of the symposium itself.