Etruscan Women

Suzanne Cross © 2001-2005. All Rights Reserved

At the other pole of classical feminine behavior lay the mores of the Etruscan culture of 7th and 6th century Italy. Greek writers, including the fourth-century Theopompus and the later Athenaeus, passed along scandal-ridden tales of the wealth, greed and sensual license of Etruscan women, revealing an implacable hostility to female conduct so foreign to that mandated in Athens at the time. The Romans listened. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans had no narratives of their early history before the third century BC, centuries after the founding of Rome. Thus later Roman sources such as Livy, often drawing on Greek historians, preserved legends of the vanished Etruscan culture and the behavior of its women. From what the Romans preserved, we can see how the Etruscans were viewed by their successors and how their treatment of women was part of Roman propaganda and moral instruction of females in Rome itself.

Etruscan women were permitted to dine with their husbands and male relatives, drinking wine and allegedly engaging in affectionate or sexual behavior in public. Funerary monuments and wall paintings suggest that the importance of married couples and their private relationships took cultural precedence over male relationship and even, in some cases, over the severe authority of the Roman paterfamilias. A noblewoman's lineage was noted alongside famous men’s. Stories tell that several of the early Tarquin kings had wives of great political ambition and effectiveness (although these are usually held up by the Romans as cautionary tales of the disastrous impact of ambitious women). Artifacts, including mirrors and tomb inscriptions, suggest that many Etruscan women of the higher classes were literate. The tombs of women are elaborate and, like men, they are permitted to take status objects with them to the netherworld including familiar items of women’s authority: wool-working equipment, engraved mirrors, toilet boxes, and jewelry, just as men took their fine armor, swords, and guest cups. Poignant tomb objects portray husbands and wives with the affectionate intimacy of the marital bed.

Etruscan women were allegedly permitted wide sexual latitude with multiple partners. Although the Etruscans were later conquered and then absorbed by the culture of Republican Rome, the tales of its more emancipated women must have driven deeply into Rome’s own conceptions of permissible female behavior, both for good and ill. Roman myths as codified by Livy later contrasted the (perceived) shocking sexual freedom permitted Etruscan women with the chaste docility of a Lucretia or Verginia.

In Roman eyes, Etruscan women were also allowed a dangerous taste of political power and ambition. Livy also spotlighted certain Etruscan women such as Tanaquil, wife of Tarquinius Priscus, and Tullia, wife of Tarquinius Superbus, for their ambition and its disastrous results.

Source: Roman Women in Historical Context