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Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy
 Historical Culture
in Iron Age Italy
Archaeology, History, and the Use of the Past,
900–​300 BCE

SE T H B E R NA R D
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bernard, Seth (Classicist), author.
Title: Historical culture in Iron Age Italy : archaeology, history, and the
use of the past, 900–300 BCE / Seth Bernard.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023019456 (print) | LCCN 2023019457 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197647462 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197647486 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Iron age—Italy. | Excavations (Archaeology)—Italy. |
Italy—History—To 476—Historiography.
Classification: LCC GN780.22.I8 B47 2023 (print) | LCC GN780.22.I8 (ebook) |
DDC 937—dc23/eng/20230512
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019456
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019457

DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.001.0001

Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America

 Contents

Maps  vii
List of Illustrations  xi
Preface and Acknowledgments  xvii

1. Introduction  1
2. Ancestors  32
3. Cities  87
4. Founders  121
5. Time  167
6. Images  219
7. Conclusions  258

Works Cited  265

Index  297
 Maps

Map 1. The Italian Peninsula showing ancient regions and cultural areas.
Location of Maps 2–​4 indicated by boxes. Drawn by author with base GIS and
hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.
Map 2. Northern Italy and the Po Valley showing location of sites mentioned
in the book. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and
place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.

Map 3. Central Italy and the Tiber Valley. Drawn by author with base GIS and
hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.
Map 4. Southern Italy and Magna Graecia. Drawn by author with base GIS and
hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth.
 Illustrations

Figures

1.1. The sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas. Tarquinia, late third century BCE. Image
adapted from Vianduval on Wikimedia commons, used with the kind
permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia. 5
1.2. Reconstruction of the monument of the Spurinnae family with statues
and descriptive texts (elogia). Tarquinia, first century CE. Image by
Nicola Terrenato based on an original by Mario Torelli, reproduced with
permission of the author and Cambridge University Press. 14
2.1. Early phases of burial (tenth–eighth centuries BCE) in northwest area of
Iron Age necropolis of Osteria dell’Osa, Latium, showing expansion from
initial groupings North and South to other clusters. Drawing by author
based on data in Bietti Sestieri 1992. 40
2.2. Cortona, the stepped altar of the Sodo II tumulus, mid sixth century BCE.
Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons. 47
2.3. Tarquinia (?), conically shaped disc of nenfro with human and animal frieze
in low relief, possibly a tomb-marker. Image after Milani 1909, tb. 6. 51
2.4. Vetulonia, the stele of Avele Feluske, 625–​600 BCE. Photo from Wikimedia
Commons. 52
2.5. Capestrano, monumental statue of a warrior, possibly from a tomb.
Photo from Wikimedia Commons. 54
2.6. Orvieto, tomb marker in the shape of a helmeted head, identified as
Larth Cuperes son of Aaranth by an Etruscan inscription. Photo
from Wikimedia Commons. 55
2.7. Stele with paleosabellic inscription and relief of human face from Penna
Sant’Andrea. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons. 56
2.8. Caere, tumuli in the extensive Banditaccia necropolis. The burial area was
laid out in the early seventh century BCE. Photo by author, used with the
kind permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia. 58
2.9. Architectural evolution of burial in Etruria from ditch grave to
monumental tumulus after Prayon 1975: 14. Adapted from Riva 2010:
­figure 29, reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. 59
xii Illustrations
2.10. Pisa, the cenotaph on via San Jacopo, early seventh century BCE.
Photo adapted from Alecobbe on Wikimedia Commons. 62
2.11. One of four mace-​head-​shaped sceptres of iron and bronze with scene
of the lord of horses found in tomb 8 at Spoleto, seventh century BCE.
Image © Joachim Weidig. 65
2.12. Ivory writing table with alphabetical inscription in Etruscan from a
grave in Marsiliana d’Albegna, ca. 650–​625 BCE, image published by
concession of the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione
regionale Musei della Toscana). 69
2.13. Pithecussae, Rhodian cup with Greek metrical inscription, ca. 740 BCE,
found in the burial of a boy about ten years of age. Photo adapted from
Marcus Cyron on Wikimedia Commons. 71
2.14. Montescudaio, cinerary urn with figural decoration, early seventh century
BCE. Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia commons. 74
2.15. Chiusi, cinerary urn with lid shaped like human head, sixth century BCE,
image © Metropolitan Museum of Art object 96.9.50a–​b. 76
2.16. The facing statues of seated figures from the vestibule of the tomb of the
statues of Ceri. After Tuck 1994, reproduced with permission of the
Licensor through PLSclear. 77
2.17. Reconstruction of the interior of the tomb of the five seats from
Caere (left) with figure seated on throne (right). After Tuck 1994,
reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear. 79
2.18. Statue B of a male figure from the necropolis of Casa Nocera, Casale
Marittimo, early sixth century BCE, image published by concession of the
Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Firenze (Direzione regionale Musei
della Toscana). 81
2.19. Lunigiana, funerary stele found in 1975 at Cavallino di Taponecco. Image
reproduced with permission of the Museo Statue Stele delle Lunigianesi. 82
3.1. Rome, cuttings for an Iron Age hut found beneath later structures on
the southwest Palatine by the scalae Caci. Photo © John N. Hopkins. 93
3.2. Satricum, phases of the temple-​complex of Mater Matuta, showing the
progression from huts to single cella structure to peripteral temple. Photo
copyright of the Satricum Project—University of Amsterdam. 95
3.3. Plan of the fifth-century BCE temple at the locality of Colle della Noce,
Ardea, in Latium, showing the position of several Iron Age huts below
the structure. Drawn by author based on Crescenzi and Tortorici 1984. 96
3.4. Plan of the Etruscan city of Marzabotto. Image © Elisabetta Govi. 105
3.5. Sant’Ilario d’Enza, curved bronze finial of an augural staff or lituus.
Reproduced with the permission of the Musei Civici di Reggio Emilia. 109
 Illustrations xiii
3.6. Populonia, modern reconstruction of the “House of the King” on
acropolis, ninth century BCE. Photo © author. 113
3.7. Populonia, deposit of drinking cups made in the early seventh century BCE
during the destruction of the Casa del Re. Photo © Gilda Bartoloni. 114
3.8. Gabii, the so-​called regia, a tripartite building ritually destroyed and buried
ca. 500 BCE. Photo © Marco Fabbri. 117
4.1. Poseidonia/​Paestum, the heroon and its precinct, ca. 500 BCE. Photo from
Wikimedia Commons, image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​
Ministero della Cultura. 131
4.2. Veii, reconstruction of the funerary chapel on Piazza D’Armi showing small
and larger structures built around an early ninth-century BCE burial.
Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni. 135
4.3. Veii, reconstruction of acroterial terracotta sculpture from the roof of
the funerary chapel of Piazza d’Armi showing a life-​sized depiction of a
standing male figure and a dog. Drawing © Gilda Bartoloni. 137
4.4. Tarquinia, view of the Ara della Regina. Photo © John N. Hopkins,
reproduced courtesy of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e
paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale. 141
4.5. Tarquinia, view from above the foundations of Altar Alpha beside
the Ara della Regina. The stone chest or sarcophagus is visible beneath the
lowest course. Photo © Giovanna Bagnasco Gianni, reproduced courtesy
of the Soprintendenza archeologia belle arti e paesaggio per la provincia
di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale. 142
4.6. Schematic section of the shrine atop a seventh-century BCE burial on the
southwestern Palatine Hill, Rome. Drawing by author, adapted
from Smith 1996. 145
4.7. Remains of the Iron Age burial chamber (foreground) and foundations of
Middle Republican pronaos of the so-​called heroon of Aeneas outside the
walls of Lavinium, Latium. Photo © author. 157
4.8. The two altars in the sanctuary at Castrum Inui (Ardea), Latium, viewed
from the cella of Temple B looking west toward Temple A. Observe the
oblique orientation, possibly corresponding to the description of
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Photo © author. 161
5.1. Pyrgi, the gold tablets on display at the Villa Giulia, late sixth century BCE.
On either side are the gilded nails found deposited along with them.
Photo adapted from Sailko on Wikimedia Commons. 175
5.2. Drawing of the bronze lamina inscribed in Etruscan from the temple of
Tinia at Marzabotto. Drawing © Elisabetta Govi. 178
5.3. Umbrian inscription on a bronze tablet, one of the so-​called Iguvine tables.
Photo adapted from Wikimedia Commons. 181
xiv Illustrations
5.4. Terracotta tile with calendrical inscription from Capua. Image
© Antikensammlung, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin –​Preussicher
Kulturbesitz (Photograph by Johannes Laurentius, inventory
number 30892). 192
5.5. Etruscan inscription on a bronze disc-​like object from Magliano, Tuscany.
Image adapted from Wikimedia commons. 195
5.6. Terracotta iuvilas stele with Oscan inscription from the sanctuary at the
site of Fondo Patturelli, Capua. Image © Trustees of the British Museum. 197
5.7. Bronze tablet from Agnone, Molise, with Oscan inscription on both sides.
Image © Trustees of the British Museum. 207
6.1. Drawing of painted scene from tomb on the Esquiline, Rome, showing
encounter between Samnites and Romans. Image adapted from the Bullettino
della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 17 (1889) tb. 11–​12. 221
6.2. Scene of combat between Italian heroes from the wall of the François tomb,
Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia commons. 224
6.3. Plan and cross-​section of François tomb, Vulci. Adapted from Wikimedia
Commons. 226
6.4. Detail of Vel Saties from the painting of the frescoes of the François tomb.
Adapted from Wikimedia Commons. 229
6.5. Processional scene from the Tomb of the Conference (tomba del convegno),
Tarquinia. Photograph by Gaetano Bellucci, image © by Alessandro Naso. 235
6.6. Drawing of banqueting scene from tomb of the shields, Tarquinia. From
Monumenti inediti pubblicati dall’instituto di corrispondenza archeologica.
Supplemento (Berlin 1891). 236
6.7. Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 12A. The return of the warrior,
380–​370 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​Ministero
della Cultura. 242
6.8. Cumae, painted slab from a tomb, Benassai 2001 no. Cu.13, ca. 300 BCE.
Drawing by author modified from Benassai 2001. 243
6.9. Andriuolo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 114, north wall. Battle scene,
330–​320 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​Ministero
della Cultura. 246
6.10. Spinazzo necropolis, Paestum, Tomb 1, back wall. Older male individual,
ca. 320–​300 BCE. Image © Parco Archeologico di Paestum e Velia /​
Ministero della Cultura. 249
6.11. Terracotta relief probably from a funnel vase, identified as Canosan.
Metropolitan Museum of Art 12.232.10, image in the public domain. 252
 Illustrations xv

Maps

1. The Italian Peninsula showing ancient regions and cultural areas. Location of
Maps 2–​4 indicated by boxes. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade
data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth. vii
2. Northern Italy and the Po Valley showing location of sites mentioned in the
book. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade data from EEA and
place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth. viii
3. Central Italy and the Tiber Valley. Drawn by author with base GIS and
hillshade data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth. viii
4. Southern Italy and Magna Graecia. Drawn by author with base GIS and hillshade
data from EEA and place locations from Pleiades and Google Earth. ix
 Preface and Acknowledgments

I began the groundwork for this book several years ago when researching
a paper on some Campanian tomb paintings. It became clear that not only
those paintings, but a rich corpus of archaeological evidence, revealed a deep
and abiding interest in history on the part of the peoples of pre-​Roman Italy,
and a book-​length study was in order. Recently discovered sites like the “fu-
nerary chapel” at Veii or the “house of the king” at Populonia offered spec-
tacular material of this sort but were so far mostly known to prehistorians,
while it seemed to me that these discoveries merited a broader audience.
My thoughts on the subject came together fairly rapidly in 2020, after the
global pandemic ended the possibility of planned archaeological fieldwork.
Meanwhile, world events were pointing out with greater urgency some very
longstanding issues within the discipline of classical studies, which by tradi-
tion in North American universities houses both archaeology and ancient
history as they apply to the Greco-​Roman Mediterranean. It seems to me that
there is considerable value in telling more ecumenical stories of the many
ways in which ancient people engaged with their pasts. In starting the work
of building a place for our discipline in a more just world, we are confronted
with the traditional centrality to classical studies of the text. There are of
course many illuminating ways one can approach texts as sources of his-
torical information about non-​traditional segments of ancient society, and
much productive work continues in this direction, but in the end the fact
remains that the historiographical tradition with which Roman historians
work is largely an artifact of elite Roman imperial culture, and its study is
often, whether consciously or not, reproductive of that character. Therefore,
a critical discussion of some of the attitudes and ideologies that I feel are im-
plicit in binding ancient history to historiography seems essential and timely.
And because there is little point in mere criticism, I also hope this book opens
up some new paths forward in our understanding of the non-​textual intellec-
tual and cultural histories of Italy and Republican Rome.
Stuck at home like most of us over the last few years, I have been sus-
tained by communications with a community of friends and colleagues. I am
grateful for the generosity of those who took time to share work and ideas,
xviii Preface and Acknowledgments

or offer thoughts, disagreements, and encouragement on the manuscript.

I thank Jeremy Armstrong, Maria Cristina Biella, Massimiliano Di Fazio, Lisa
Fentress, Alison Keith, Lisa Mignone, Sarah C. Murray, Dimitri Nakassis,
Dan-​ el Padilla Peralta, Charlotte Potts, Andrew Riggsby, and Angela
Trentacoste. A number of scholars generously helped with images: Giovanna
Bagnasco Gianni, Gilda Bartoloni, Marco Fabbri, Elisabetta Govi, Alessandro
Naso, Silvia Paltineri, Corinna Riva, Nicola Terrenato, Anthony Tuck, and
Joachim Weidig. John Hopkins sent me dense, useful notes on the whole text,
shared thought-​provoking work of his own, and assisted with images. Emlyn
Dodd helped with map-​making. Papers in either manuscript or published
form sent to me by Marco Maiuro and Brian Rose provided important sparks
for my own thinking at various points. It has once again been a pleasure
working with Oxford University Press, and I warmly thank Stefan Vranka.
I single out two people in particular for thanks. To Duncan MacRae, I owe
my initial awareness of the anthropological literature that forms the project’s
critical frame. Duncan was also the first person to look at the project in
draft, and his enthusiastic encouragement carried me through the rest of the
process. And I am especially grateful to Christopher Smith: attentive readers
will see how frequently he is mentioned in the footnotes, as he could have
written this book himself. He has been an unstinting supporter, mentor, and
friend.
I dedicate this book about the social construction of the past, present, and
future to my family, who will always form the sturdiest way for me to anchor
my own place in time: Alexa, Livia, Jonathan.
 1
Introduction

The problem now is to explode the concept of history by the an-

thropological experience of culture. Heretofore obscure histories of
remote islands deserve a place alongside the self-​contemplation of
the European past—​or the history of “civilizations”—​for their own
remarkable contributions to an historical understanding. We thus
multiply our conceptions of history by the diversity of structures.
Suddenly, there are all kinds of new things to consider.
—​Marshall Sahlins (1983: 534)

This book describes the historical culture of Italy from the Early Iron Age to
the Roman conquest, covering a period from roughly 900 to 300 BCE. By his-
torical culture, I refer throughout to a broader concept of social engagement
with the past than is sometimes meant by the word “history.” But this move
permits us, following Sahlins’ suggestion, to consider all kinds of new things.
There exists a substantial corpus of material, much of it archaeological, some
of it newly discovered, that speaks to us about how local communities in
early Italy thought and talked about their history and how they articulated
their past and present. This material has yet to have much impact on the typ-
ical ways in which we reconstruct the process of “becoming historical” in
Italy.1 Instead, the story tends to be told almost exclusively from the Roman
perspective and in a teleology that seeks to explain the emergence of written
history at Rome around 200 BCE, or slightly earlier in the hands of some
Western Greek authors. These are neither unimportant nor uninteresting
developments, but this book intends to show that they can be illuminated
by expansion. The rise of historiography is by no means the only way that
Italians were engaging with their past in this period; and while the one story
is by now well studied, Italians’ own historical interests remain far less so,

1 For the phrase, Purcell 2003.

Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy. Seth Bernard, Oxford University Press. © Oxford University Press 2023.
DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780197647462.003.0001
2 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

aside from select topics like the existence of Etruscan historiography, or the
contribution of Italian precedents to Roman interests in historical imagery.2
I set out here to provide a systematic study that portrays Italians’ historical
interests as a much longer-​term and deeper development.
In the intellectual and cultural history that follows, Rome plays a part, but
not a leading one, and more importance is given to the influence on histor-
ical thought of social structure and urbanization. A driving theme of this
book is how the emergence of urban society in Iron Age Italy prompted new
modes of historical thinking. This is therefore adamantly not a book about
Roman history or Roman historiography, but my hope nevertheless is to
offer some value for those thinking about historical practices at Rome during
the Republican period. Recent research by Denis Feeney among others
emphasizes the unusualness of Romans’ turn, starting in the fourth century,
to Greek models to create their own literary culture, a turn that includes the
initial elaboration of written Roman history.3 There was nothing obvious or
predictable about Romans’ decision to develop a Greek-​style literary culture,
but the move was highly conscious and deliberate, and also highly contin-
gent upon the particular sociopolitical circumstances of that period. This
research has been enormously successful in challenging some longstanding
assumptions about cultural developments in Republican Italy. What remains
to be done, and what this book sets out to do, is to show the richness and
long-​generating characteristics of Italy’s own historical culture on the eve of
such developments. In doing so, my intention is not to argue that Italy’s in-
tellectual developments directly influenced the creation of written history in
the hands of the first Roman historical authors, Fabius Pictor and his peers.
Rather, I seek to cast light upon the extraordinary and dynamic historical
culture that existed among the peoples of Italy for centuries beforehand. The
resulting implication, I think, will be to emphasize what others studying
Roman Republican literary culture now suggest: that Romans’ trajectory of
cultural development and their turn towards written history was anything
but obvious.
Some readers may already be asking the question: what do I mean when
I refer in this book to “history”? As I discuss in detail below, Italians never
seem to have created a robust tradition of written historical narrative of
their own. To insist that Italians also had historical culture thus demands

2 Both these themes are discussed below in Chapter 6; for Etruscan historiography, see Cornell

1976; for Italian influences on Roman artistic style, see Torelli 1997.
3 Feeney 2016; see also Purcell 2003; Goldberg 2005.
 Introduction 3

a different understanding of what constitutes history. For thinking about

these questions, I turn especially to the work of Marshall Sahlins, who
spent considerable effort contemplating one of the cruxes of anthropolog-
ical theory: the relationship between ahistorical structure and historical
events in shaping human experience. In turn, this interest implied Sahlins’
longstanding engagement with history itself, but always from an anthropo-
logical perspective, leading him to consider historical production as to some
extent culturally specific. In 1983, Sahlins influentially coined the phrase the
“anthropology of history” and declared that the “different cultural orders
studied by anthropology have their own historicities.” In subsequent studies,
Sahlins drew attention, for example, to how features of Thucydides’ account
of the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta resembled Fijian ac-
counts of the Polynesian wars of the nineteenth century. Of course, the Greek
historian’s written, narrative account is strikingly different in both medium
and content from High Fijian Genealogy, an orally transmitted tradition
structured around kings and their descendants. Despite their great distance
in time and space and despite very different cultures of history, however, both
societies used the past to construct their respective social orders in surpris-
ingly overlapping ways.4 As I return to later in this chapter, the basic point
is that different cultures have different modes of historical production, and
modes that are perhaps at first glance less familiar to us nevertheless remain
valid and effective forms of history.
These ideas intend to provide some contours to this book’s definition of
historical culture: I doubt that many readers will be surprised to discover
that early Italians were actively interested in their past, but their modes of
historical production studied here can sometimes look different to us. For
that reason, Italian historical culture remains comparatively understudied.
The other implication of this anthropological perspective is to see this histor-
ical culture as closely bound up within the fabric of Italian society. The way
Italians went about articulating past and present thus becomes a reflection
of their developing social structures. One could turn this around: in many
ways this is a book about the history of Italy before Rome, but one told from
the particular perspective of developments in Italians’ sense of their past.
Of course, this limited lens means that I do not claim here to offer a com-
plete cultural history of Pre-​Roman Italy, but this book does intend to take a

4 Sahlins 1983; see also Sahlins 1981, 1985, 2004. For the influence of his work in this area, see

Palmié and Stewart 2016.

4 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

step in that direction. By starting from the recognition that historical culture
is contingent, we can approach Italian societies in part by asking how they
constructed their history.
For the remainder of this introductory chapter, I want to explore in greater
detail some of these aspects: what the practice of history in Italy was like, how
modern scholarship has understood it, and how a broader and anthropologi-
cally inflected concept of historical culture can help challenge in a productive
manner some of our assumptions about Iron Age Italy’s cultural develop-
ment. I have already broached the difference between written and oral his-
tory, and this binary will be important throughout this book. However,
I want to begin discussion by insisting that this book is not simply about
oral modes of historical production; the differences I intend to describe are
more cognitive than simply technological. A fundamental challenge this
book intends to pose is for modern historians to reassess tendencies to un-
derstand ancient historical production primarily as narrative and arranged
according to linear, universal time—​these ideas have become very deeply
rooted in scholarship about ancient Italy and Rome to the extent that they
sometimes color expectations, making otherwise relevant evidence seem less
so. Of course, the use of writing is not unrelated to narrative or particular
temporal arrangement, but written texts can, I think, be historical without
possessing such characteristics. To illustrate this, let us consider an Italian
text: the monumental sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas from late third-​century
BCE Tarquinia depicts on its lid a reclining portrait of the deceased holding
an unrolled scroll filled with a long inscription (Figure 1.1). The sarcophagus
and its inscription was found in 1878 along with almost two dozen other
sarcophagi in Laris Pulenas’ family’s tomb.5
The nine-​ line text, among the lengthier extant Etruscan funerary
inscriptions, begins as follows:

(This is the sarcophagus of) Laris Pulenas, son of Larce son of Larth,
grandson of Velthur, great-​grandson of Laris Pule the Greek—​who wrote
this book on divination. He held the office of creals in this city, Tarquinia . . . 6

5 For the discovery, Helbig 1879: 78–​84. Sordi 1960: 177–​82; Mazzarino 1966: 86–​87; Harris 1971;

Cornell 1976; Cornell 1978; Heurgon 1961: 275 discuss this text in relation to Etruscan sacred, not
historical, writing; Hadas-​Lebel 2016 connects it to other historical inscriptions from Etruria like the
Spurinnae elogia.
6 ET Ta 1.17: l(a)ris. pulenas. larces. clan. larθal. papacs. velθurus. nefts. prums. pules. larisal. creices.

ancn. ziχ. neθσrac. acasce. creals. tarχnalθ. spurem. lucairce. ipa. ruθcva. caθas. hermeri. slicaχem.
aprinθvale. luθcva. caθas. paχanac. alumnaθe. hermu. Mele. crapisces. puts. χim. culsl. leprnal. pσl.
 Introduction 5

Figure 1.1 The sarcophagus of Laris Pulenas. Tarquinia, late third century BCE.
Image adapted from Vianduval on Wikimedia commons, used with the kind
permission of the Parco Archeologico di Cerveteri e Tarquinia.

Only the first few lines of Laris Pulenas’ inscription, about to where my trans-
lation ends, are easily rendered into English. The specific meaning of the re-
mainder is debated, but by all accounts the text continues with a long list of
offices and priesthoods held by the deceased.7 Still, the opening is enough to
signal Laris Pulenas’ interest—​or his descendants’ interest—​in his family’s
past through its commencement with an extensive family tree, which names
four generations of ancestors. The list goes all the way back to a progenitor
who, as Jacques Heurgon first argued, emigrated from Greece to Tarquinia
around the time of Alexander the Great.8
Laris Pulenas’ dress and appearance, as well as reference in the text to his
priestly writings and offices, confirm that he belonged to Tarquinia’s religious

varχti. cerine. pulalumnath. pul. hermu. huzrnatre. psl. tenin[e. . . . .]. meθlumt. pul. hermu. θutuiθi.
mlusna. ranvis. mlamna[. . . . . .]mnaθuras. parniχ. amce. leσe. h(e)rm(e)ri{er}.

7 Morandi 2004: 390–​94; Belfiore 2011; Hadas-​Lebel 2012; Hadas-​Lebel 2016.

8 Heurgon 1957.
6 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

and political elite. The letters of the inscription still show traces of red col-
oring or rubrication, which would have made them visible, and from the
proud way his statue displays the scroll to the viewer, we see how this gene-
alogical past constituted a particular point of pride and source of authority.
Laris Pulenas’ inscription, with its combination of ancestry followed by per-
sonal accomplishments, presents some similarities with well-​known Roman
epigraphic texts on sarcophagi of around the same date, especially the fu-
nerary inscriptions of the Cornelii Scipiones from their family tomb just out-
side the city of Rome. The earliest two Latin inscriptions (elogia) from the
tomb of the Scipios may have been composed around the same time as the
Laris Pulenas inscription and reveal a similar textual structure of personal
name followed by filiation then civic achievements. Compare the earliest fu-
nerary text (elogium) of Lucius Cornelius Scipio Barbatus:

Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, born to his father Gnaeus, a brave and
wise man whose appearance was equal to his virtue, who was consul, censor,
aedile among you; he took Taurasia and Cisauna in Samnium, conquered
all Lucania, and led away hostages.9

There are important differences of content between this document and that
of Laris Pulenas, some of which can be ascribed to local artistic and cul-
tural habits, or to differing historical circumstances. Still, the basic structure
of both inscriptions bears noticeable resemblance. Both documents start
with names and lineage and then follow with local accomplishments. Both
display conscious interest in recording the past as a vehicle for prolonging
the memory of the individuals to whom they refer, and both use that past
to stake claims about the deceased’s role in the continuing social orders of
their communities. In scholarship, the Scipio Barbatus text is regularly cited
as background to the emergence of Roman historical writing, while Laris
Pulenas’ text receives far less attention as such.10 What might be the cause of
this imbalance?
I would identify two responsible methodological issues, one broad and one
narrow. The first concerns a scholarly opinion, prominent especially among
influential thinkers of the last century, that genealogy is not history. In a 1966

9 CIL VI 1284: Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus, Gnaivod patre prognatus, fortis vir sapiensque

quoius forma virtutei parisuma fuit, consul censor aidilis quei fuit apud vos, Taurasia Cisauna Samnio
cepit, subigit omne Loucana, opsidesque abdoucit.
10 But see now Hadas Lebel 2016.
 Introduction 7

paper on time in ancient historiography, Arnaldo Momigliano dismissed bi-

ographical or genealogical time as inappropriate for ancient history. Greek
and Roman historians were concerned with events and their reliability, and
consequently the ability to test historical schema through synchronization
was especially important.11 Based as it was upon the non-​universal units of
family generations, in his view, genealogy could not withstand the scrutiny
required by proper history. His opinion shares, unconsciously so far as I can
tell, a great deal with E. E. Evans-​Pritchard’s classic anthropological expo-
sition of the Nuer people of Sudan, published in 1940, in which he argued
that genealogy was not history because it was “less a means of co-​ordinating
events than of co-​ordinating relationships.”12 By extension of this sort of
logic, we might surmise that the reason that historians remain interested in
the epitaphs of the Cornelii Scipiones is not for their inclusion of ancestry,
but for their proximity to the first written Roman histories of Fabius Pictor
and his successors, who are assumed to have transformed this sort of mate-
rial into historiography. If there is “no history without archives,”13 then these
epigraphic texts might reveal what archival material may have looked like at
a key moment in the development of Roman historiography. Following the
same logic, in Etruria, where we are less certain how or when written histori-
ography developed, if it ever did, what archival material we possess becomes
less interesting.
There has recently started to be pushback to the opinion that genealogy is
distinct from history as properly conceived, however, and we would do well
to join such challenges.14 The view of earlier scholars like that of Momigliano
or Evans-​Pritchard reveals a notion of history as something distinct from
other ways of engaging with the past because it is constructed upon a spe-
cific conception of time that is not measured in terms of human relationships
but is instead “statistical . . . oriented and non-​reversible.”15 But why must
history always display such qualities?16 For one thing, ancient peoples of
the Central Mediterranean do not seem to have prioritized them in their
own engagements with the past. Instead, a surplus of material would sug-
gest that genealogy was one of the more common ways in which people

11 Momigliano 1966, esp. 14.

12 Evans-​Pritchard 1940: 108.
13 Goody 1977: 147.
14 For response to Momigliano, see Clarke 2008: 15–​ 16; for response to Evans-​Pritchard, see
Shryock 1997: 21.
15 Lévi-​Strauss 1958/​1972: 286.
16 Provocatively, Tanaka 2015 argues for divorcing the concepts of history and chronology.
8 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

negotiated their places in time. Designations of ancestry are commonplace

not only in the inscriptions we have thus far looked at, but more broadly in
Etruscan, Roman Republican, and other Central Mediterranean epigraphic
documents. We can cite a Punic gravestone from Olbia on Sardinia of third
century BCE date, which recounts a lineage going back an astonishing sev-
enteen generations.17 This material has everything to do with the articulation
of past and present in these local cases, and we might reflect on what we lose
if we draw a hard line between what counts as genealogy and what counts as
history.
The second methodological issue relates to a specific way in which Laris
Pulenas’ text, including its genealogical interest, has been interpreted. By
and large, earlier scholarship on the inscription tended to read it for signs
of external influence. Because the inscription dated to the period after
Tarquinia’s conquest by Rome, Massimo Pallottino suggested that the text
reflected Roman cultural influences visible in the slightly earlier inscriptions
of the Cornelii Scipiones. That is, he connects the two texts I have cited here,
but only in order to identify in the Etruscan document centrifugal cultural
pressures accompanying Roman expansion.18 Above all, a dominant ap-
proach to the inscription has been to see it as reflective of Greek influences,
as emphasized by what is still the most influential treatment in a 1957 paper
by Heurgon.19 Heurgon cleverly recognized that Laris Pulenas’ earliest pred-
ecessor named in his text, Laris Pule, was a Greek immigrant named Polles,
who integrated himself into Tarquinian society by taking an Etruscan prae-
nomen paired with the ethnic nickname “Creice,” Etruscan for “Greek.”
Heurgon expanded further on this point, noting that Polles was a name asso-
ciated with famous divinatory figures in Hellenistic Greece and on this basis
suggesting that Laris Pulenas took the time to trace his ancestry back to his
great-​grandfather because the name’s association with mantic fame lent pres-
tige to his own authorship of the book of divinatory writings to which his
inscription refers. Viewed in this light, the inscription contributes to debates
over Hellenization in Italy, but at the same time Laris Pulenas’ interests tend
to be sealed off from Tarquinia’s own intellectual history. Instead, Pulenas’
ancestry becomes a sort of particularized claim to external authority.

17 KAI no. 68; Quinn Crawley 2018: 38; Campus 2004 for this and other genealogical inscriptions

from Punic Sardinia.

18 Pallottino 1936: 75, even speculating that the Etruscan text was in some Latin meter similar to

Saturnians.
19 Heurgon 1957.
 Introduction 9

Romans and Italians Writing History

Until very recently, the study of ancient interests in history has cleaved to
these ideas—​that historical interests were primarily expressed in written
form and based upon a particular construction of time, and that they were
predominantly Greco-​ Roman—​ not only in the interpretation of Laris
Pulenas’ inscription, but in the more general study of the early develop-
ment of history in Italy, which has focused almost exclusively on Rome.
Again, interest in Greco-​Roman written history is neither uninteresting nor
irrelevant to Italian historical culture, but my argument is that it forms an
incomplete way of understanding ancient interest in the past. Positively, re-
cent scholarship on early Roman historiography starts to expand beyond
the boundaries of earlier views. This literature contends with the canonical
story of how Romans became historical: in the traditional account, emphasis
is placed upon the first generation of authors and especially the primogen-
itor Fabius Pictor, who around the time of the Second Punic War took the
then-​unprecedented step of writing a full-​scale Roman history in Greek.20
His audience was fellow Roman elites but also Western Greeks, who were fa-
miliar with history as historiography.21 Pictor’s debt to Greek historiograph-
ical models is often noted, although he and successors are thought to have
turned for the core of their information to a corpus of Roman para-​historical
material like family archives and pontifical annals going back to the earliest
years of the Republic.22 Each successive generation of “annalist” historians
contributed to expanding this into a sprawling account of Rome’s origins and
subsequent history. In this way, the traditional story of early Roman histor-
ical interest thus becomes the transposition of information from one type
of written document (archival) to another (literary) with the help of Greek
models.23 This rendition, in which history at Rome emerged from “docu-
mentary origins”24 holds the advantage of ancient pedigree, as it resembles

20 Badian 1966.
21 Cf. SEG 26.1123 from Taormina, an epigraphic record of a library collection containing Fabius
Pictor’s work; for Western Greek historiography, see vol. III of Jacoby’s Die Fragmente der griechischen
Historiker; Pearson 1987; Baron 2013.
22 Flower 1996; Oakley 1997–​ 2005, vol. I; for the pontifical tables, see Rich 2017 with earlier
bibliography.
23 Cf. Feeney 2016: 174–​75, however, for a more nuanced view of Fabius’ relationship to his source

material.
24 Syme Tacitus 1958: 132.
10 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

the potted history of the origins of Roman historiography given to us by

Cicero, who also stresses the role of the pontifical annals.25
Significant challenges to this orthodoxy over the last three decades have
come especially in accounting for the non-​historiographical or non-​archival
background to the efforts of the first Roman historians. Two influential re-
cent theories have championed the role of oral traditions or of popular histor-
ical dramas; I will have more to say about these theses momentarily. Another
important strand of current research studies the historical dimensions of
literary genres not considered primarily historical, such as Latin epic or an-
tiquarian scholarship, and their interaction with historical works more tra-
ditionally defined.26 A further productive approach has been to look at how
Roman historiographers relied on Rome’s landscape of buildings or impor-
tant places as transmitters of information in the construction of their written
narratives.27
All of this work enriches our understanding of how Roman culture de-
veloped to the point of written history. Still, we may note that it has yet to
displace an ultimately Rome-​centric view, and the central concern remains
that of explaining how we arrive at the point of written Roman history,
and this creates the opportunity of some unexplored paths. Thus, consider
Nicholas Purcell’s excellent paper of Romans “becoming historical,” in
many ways an emblematic study for my own in its intention to expand the
limits of what we understand to be historical production.28 Purcell draws
attention to signs of historical interest in early Republican Rome well prior
to the start of written history. He focuses on chronological interests sur-
rounding the Capitoline temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, founded ac-
cording to tradition in the first year of the Republican state (509 BCE). The
temple’s creation served for constructions of Republican time and history,
from the appearance of an era measured out “from the foundation of the
Capitolium” to an annual ceremony recorded by the Roman historian Livy
of marking the passage of each year by hammering a nail into the temple.29
As Purcell observes, the nail ceremony finds no corollary in the Greek

25 Cic. Orat. 2.51–​52.

26 Especially Ennius and Varro, on whose historicity see now respectively Damon and Farrell 2020;
MacRae 2017.
27 A good example is Roller 2010, applying an explicitly “sociocultural” approach; topography

as substitute for text: Edwards 1996: 30; on monuments and annalists, Wiseman 1994; several
contributions in Sandberg and Smith 2017 are relevant as well.
28 Purcell 2003.
29 For more expansive discussion of these topics, see Chapter 5.
 Introduction 11

world, and he argues therefore that it seems more autonomously Roman.

However, as he notes, Livy’s description of the ceremony reveals that the
ritual did in fact find precedent in an Italian context, in a ritual undertaken
at the Etruscan city of Volsinii.30 The topic is not explored by Purcell, but
we are led to ask what more can be known about time-​keeping and histor-
ical production in Etruscan cities.
These and other Italian possibilities appear to us as unexplored paths
in a body of scholarship that has otherwise mostly focused on intellectual
developments at Rome. And indeed, if we seek simply to pursue these paths
without first modifying our expectations for what history is, they do not take
us very far. Direct attestation of historical writing among those Italian peo-
ples conquered by Rome are nearly nonexistent. Some oblique references to
written works on Etruscan history have attracted notice, but the wholesale
loss of Etruscan historiography itself has left some unconvinced that it ever
formed a substantial literary tradition.31 Other Italian peoples fare worse: the
Oscan-​speaking Samnites are thought to exhibit general lack of interest in
literature, not only historiography, while Oscan literary achievements like
Atellane farce can be argued away as products of exposure to Greek literary
influences.32 Beyond this, when evaluated according to certain conceptions
of historical production, many other peoples of Italy simply seem unhis-
torical, at least if we assess them by their apparent disinterest in historical
writing.
In a real sense, this unproductive inquiry into Italian historical culture
might be seen to inherit some of the Romans’ own views. In a fragment of
his grand and groundbreaking, but now mostly lost, Latin historical work on
the Origins of Rome and the peoples of Italy, the Roman statesman and cul-
tural figure Cato described the Ligurians who occupied the coastal region of
northwest Italy around the area of modern Genoa as follows:33

30 Liv. 7.3.5–​7.
31 Cornell 1976; Briquel 2016; see below pp. 230–​31; for scepticism, see Harris 1971; Poucet
1985: 61–​62.
32 Salmon 1967: 118–​ 19; Scopacasa 2015: 30; however, compare Mommsen 1850: 116–​ 18;
Crawford et al. 2011: 1 for more charitable views on Oscan literary culture. Mazzarino 1966: 87 raises
the idea in passing of indigenous Sabine history, but this has not to my knowledge found any fol-
lowing. Dench 1995: 211 identifies a certain Alfius as a third-​or second-​century BCE Oscan histo-
rian, but see Smith and Cornell in FRH I.488.
33 For this fragment, see Smith 2018: 2.
12 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Cato in the Origins when speaking of Ligurians: but they, having lost all
memory of their origins, are illiterate and liars and by no means recall the
truth.34

Given the very fragmentary nature of his surviving work, we know little
about the specific context in which Cato made this statement.35 However, it is
easy to imagine his sentiment functioning within familiar Roman discourses
about the barbarian Italian other. Such constructs are well known from
Roman descriptions of rustic Sabines and Samnites, whose different cultural
practices were ascribed to an uncivilized nature, and elsewhere we see that
Ligurians were placed by Roman authors within similar categories of “bar-
barian” groups.36 The trope that barbarians, who relied on unwritten modes
of transmitting information, were therefore dispossessed of history appears
elsewhere in Latin literature.37 It seems therefore that Cato considered lit-
eracy alongside the ability to recall the past as two connected markers of
civilization.

Empire and Historiography in Republican Italy

Another important dimension to Cato’s link between writing and civilization

is that of empire. As Tim Cornell has observed, Cato’s entire project to write
the origins of Italian peoples served the purpose of describing the basis and
effects of Roman power: these were conquered Italian communities, now part
of Rome’s empire.38 The specific imperialist dimensions of Cato’s unhistor-
ical (because illiterate) Ligurians are further amplified by the fact that Cato
was no impartial observer. As the author of the first Latin historical work,
Cato was a major early player in elaborating history in written form at Rome.
His sentiment may be understood as relating the failure of Ligurian tribes,

34 FRH 5 Cato F34b =​Serv. Aen. 11.715–​17: Cato originum cum de Liguribus loqueretur: sed ipsi,

unde oriundi sunt exacta memoria, inliterati mendacesque sunt et vera minus meminere.
35 For Cato in Servius, see Smith 2017; Cornell in FRH I.203 suggests reasonably that this fragment

belonged to his larger account of the Gallic wars.

36 Cf. Cic. De leg. Agrarian 2.95 for Ligures duri atque agrestes, the same sort of language applied

to Sabines and Samnites, on which see Dench 1995. For literary accounts of Ligurians, see Bourdin
2012: 78–​81.
37 Cf. Tac. Agr. 11.1; Bickerman 1952 suggests two schools of approach, one exemplified by Cato,

and the other, perhaps created by Caesar, which reported native traditions in Gaul and Britain, e.g.
BG 6.18.1.
38 FRH I 5. M. Porcius Cato p. 212; cf. Chassignet 1987.
 Introduction 13

whom he probably met and interacted with during his military career, to
conform to his own ideas about what constituted historical culture.39 Unlike
the Romans or some other Italians described in his Origins, the Ligurians
had not followed a progression of interest in the past, which at Rome had
resulted in Cato’s own impulse to write down history in the Roman language.
While Cato’s decision to use Latin as a language for historical writing was
without precedent, recent research also demonstrates the influence on his
work of Greek historiography.40 As this confirms, Cato was fully participa-
tory in the project to create Latin literature from Greek models during the
third and second centuries BCE. As I have noted, recent study confirms that
there was nothing inevitable about the trajectory of Roman literary culture’s
emergence in this period.41 Nothing insists that Rome create a written cul-
ture or that it be based upon the translation of Greek models into Latin.
Within this reframing of Roman cultural developments, the elaboration of
historiography also needs to be seen as exceptional. I would argue that this
makes Roman sentiments about literary history all the more inappropriate
as a measuring stick for assessing other societies. What Cato blames the
Ligurians for lacking, then, was not historical consciousness full stop, but
rather historical consciousness as the Romans understood it—​that is a funda-
mental difference. If we search for this particular brand of historical culture
among non-​Romans, we may be unlikely to find it, but this absence does not
necessarily make those peoples unhistorical or uninterested in their past.
This discussion intends to reinforce the importance of allowing for other
forms of history, as Cato’s combination of unhistorical and illiterate should
be recognized as intimately connected to his larger imperialist perspec-
tive. This same link between empire and written history not only appears in
Republican Rome, but also applies to some other, highly exceptional Italian
evidence from around the same period. By way of an example, let us return
to Tarquinia to consider one of the most remarkable and frequently cited
indications of Etruscans’ vernacular historiography consisting of a series of
Latin inscriptions recording the accomplishments of the Spurinnae family,
known as the elogia Tarquiniensia (Figure 1.2).
These texts were inscribed on marble plaques placed on a monument
erected in the Early Empire in the precinct of Tarquinia’s largest Archaic

39 For Cato in Liguria, see Smith 2017.

40 Krebs 2006; cf. Cornell in FRH I, esp. p. 191–​95.
41 Feeney 2016.
14 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Figure 1.2 Reconstruction of the monument of the Spurinnae family with

statues and descriptive texts (elogia). Tarquinia, first century CE. Image by
Nicola Terrenato based on an original by Mario Torelli, reproduced with
permission of the author and Cambridge University Press.

temple, the so-​called Ara della Regina or “Queen’s Altar” (cf. Figure 4.4).
They record Etruscan versions of much earlier events from the sixth and fifth
centuries BCE. While their very fragmentary preservation leaves doubt over
some details, the events seem to pertain to international military exploits led
by Tarquinia, and possibly by members of the local Spurinnae family. Mario
Torelli, who favors the idea that these fragmentary inscriptions related a co-
herent family history of the Spurinnae, argues that the ensemble adorned
their victory monument at the culmination of Tarquinia’s triumphal route.42
Whatever the case, the texts’ clear focus on Tarquinian military success
confirms their distinctly imperial tone. Because their information is held to

42 Torelli 1975; Torelli 2019; also Cornell 1978; I deal in greater detail with the sanctuary in

Chapter 4.
 Introduction 15

derive from archival sources going back to some earlier point in the city’s
history, these inscriptions frequently feature in debates over the existence of
local written archives in Tarquinia and other Etruscan cities. This is a rea-
sonable interpretation; however, it is important to point out that this means
that the historical material upon which these inscriptions were based was
generated in close relationship to a context of Tarquinian expansion.43 So far
as we know, this impulse to commit events to written record in this Etruscan
city was evanescent: once Roman power eclipsed Tarquinia’s in the fourth
and third centuries BCE, the Etruscan city’s impulse toward written history
disappears, or at least it has left no other traces in our evidence.
Rather than revealing a more a chronologically and culturally exten-
sive, but lost, interest in archival and written history, then, these Etruscan
texts may be seen as exceptional artifacts of Tarquinian imperialism, much
like Roman Republican historiography reflects Rome’s own drive to em-
pire. Indeed, the cultural contingency of connections between particular
modes of historical production and imperial power has been a focal interest
of the anthropology of history. One result of this work has been to dem-
onstrate how written history following linear time, with its academic and
“citationary nature,” is characteristic of Western culture as inheritor of the
Greco-​Roman tradition.44 This observation is often made about the modern
world: Benedict Anderson influentially argued that historiography formed
an essential shaping strategy of the Western nation-​state.45 However, it goes
without saying that the modern academic discipline of history has been
strongly shaped through its engagement with Greek and Roman literature,
making these ideas applicable also in the field of ancient history.46 In his
dismissal of the unhistorical Ligurians, Cato’s hitching of written history to
Rome’s civilizing power reveals a similar nexus of writing, archival practice,
and the imperial state. Certainly, there is an undeniable temporal conver-
gence between the extension of Roman rule and Fabius Pictor’s decision to
write down Rome’s history, and I am not the first to link the two processes.47

43 For the rise and fall of Tarquinian state formation, see Terrenato 2019: 96–​102.
44 Sahlins 1983; Palmié and Stewart 2016: 209–​10; for linearity, see Rowlands 1993: 149; for the
citationary nature of Western history, see Said 1978: 176–​77. For some moves in this direction by
Romanists, see Beard 1987; Laurence and Smith 1995–​96.
45 Anderson 1991.
46 Sahlins (1983: 526; 2004) makes a good claim in this regard with respect to the legacy of

Thucydides; for Thucydides’ influence on modern historical study, see Harloe and Morley 2012.
47 Badian 1966: 6.
16 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

Might we allow ourselves to take these observations even further? It could

be argued that, by looking for historical culture in Italy as written, narra-
tive history, or as preliminary stages leading up to historical culture of this
sort, we ourselves adhere to a viewpoint that is essentially imperialist. That
is, we proceed by expecting the cultural production of the conquered to re-
semble that of the conquerors. In so doing, we run the risk of overlooking
what I hope to show was an abundant and lively indigenous tradition of his-
torical culture among Italians prior to Roman expansion. It is possible that
the loss of this richness and its replacement by the narrower evolution of his-
toriography pertains to a process, which Dan-​el Padilla Peralta justly calls
“epistemicide,” in reference to empire-​making’s attendant destruction not
only of human lives, but also of local systems of knowledge and modes of
cultural production.48 Owing to the nature of our evidence, it is enormously
difficult to locate positive proof that Rome was actively replacing indige-
nous modes of historical culture. Still, we have no reason to assume a benign
process of acculturation in Italy, and we may certainly point to other global
historical examples of conquering powers asserting their own form of histor-
ical production upon the conquered.49

Monumenta

If we think that Italians possessed a richer historical culture than traditional

approaches have been able to capture, the next question becomes how to ac-
cess it. I want to propose two intersecting ways of widening our perspective
to incorporate the fuller range of Italian historical thought. The first involves
treating archaeology as a primary and independent means of understanding
a community’s engagement with its past, and the second relates to the con-
cept I have called historical culture. Both approaches have much to do with
how we understand the ability of objects and material culture (and not just
texts) to encode history.
That we need to look not only at texts to understand how ancient Romans
and Italians understood their past is not a new idea in modern scholarship

48 Padilla Peralta 2020a, developing Santos 2014.

49 Cf. Trouillot 1995; Shryock 1997. There is intense recent debate about the degree and nature of
violence involved in the Roman conquest of Italy, inspired by Terrenato 2019 and critics, as see Harris
2021; Maschek 2021.
 Introduction 17

nor, in fact, in ancient thought.50 Alongside Cato’s opinion discussed above,

another significant strand of Roman intellectual discourse considered his-
tory not as exclusively historiography or even textual in nature. Key is the
semantic range attached to the Latin word monumentum, which is only par-
tially translated by the narrower English word “monument.” Here is a defini-
tion of the term from an Imperial Latin glossary:51

A monimentum52 is anything both built on account of a dead person or any-

thing done on account of their memory such as temples, porticoes, writing
and song (scripta et carmina). But though a monimentum is made for the
sake of a dead person, the word does not mean that anyone is buried there.

This textual information comes to us here through a complex route, from a

Carolingian-​period abridgment of an Imperial lexicon by an author named
Festus, about whom little else is known, who in turn abridged an even earlier
etymological work by the Late Republican scholar Verrius Flaccus. However,
the abridged version I cite above represents the fullest of several very similar
etymologies of the same word found in other Latin authors, from Varro in
the Late Republic to Isidore of Sevilla in the seventh century CE.53
The word monumentum is especially significant because Roman historians
sometimes use it to describe their written works. Considering Cato’s opinion
of the illiterate and therefore history-​less Ligurians, it is striking to find
the same Roman author using monumentum to refer to written as well as
non-​written modes of transmitting history elsewhere in his Origines, in a
well-​known fragment relating the Greeks’ broadcasting of the fame of the
Spartan king Leonidas with “monuments to his exceptional glory: portraits,
statues, inscriptions, histories, and other media.”54 This usage confirms that

50 Fundamental for the interaction between material and history in Republican Roman thought is

Wiseman 1994; for Greece, see Clarke 2008: 12–​13; generally, one might compare Assmann’s concept
of “material memory,” although see my criticism of this sort of approach below.
51 Paul. Fest. 123L: monimentum est, quod est mortui causa aedificatum est et quicquid ob memo-

riam alicuius factum est, ut fana, porticus, scripta et carmina. Sed monimentum quamvis mortui causa
sit factum, non tamen significat ibi sepultum. I thank Andrew Riggsby for help with this translation.
52 Monumentum is more common orthography than monimentum, which appears in Festus

and Varro.
53 Varr. Ling. 6.49; Isid. Etym. 15.11; Varro may ultimately be Festus’ source, although the use of

Varro as a source by Verrius Flaccus is debated, as see Glinister 2007; for monumentum in Roman
authors, see Häusle 1980: 29–​40; Baroin 2010: 33–​37; Miano 2011.
54 FRH 5 F76; it is likely Cato has Herodotus in mind, as see Krebs 2006. Cato’s references to the

relationship between writing and history should not be taken as contradictory, but likely reveal the
Roman views of the different civilized statuses of Ligurians and Greeks.
18 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

the definition of the term goes back to the earliest Latin historical prose.
The word’s application to historiography is also apparent in later historians
such as Livy, who refers to his own written work in his preface as an “illus-
trious monument,” and later describes his predecessors’ works collectively
as a “monument of all the annals” (omnium monumentum annalium).55
Elsewhere, he uses the word to refer to physical traces that stand as proof
of historical claims.56 Thus, the word monumentum encompasses a wide se-
mantic range pertaining really to anything done with the memory of a dead
individual in mind, including but not limited to written histories. That is,
Festus’ definition suggests that any human-​made structure or action referring
to the deceased could be understood as historical. What matters was not me-
dium, but message, and especially the mnemonic or sepulchral character of
that message, functioning to extend remembrance of an individual’s life be-
yond death. No doubt drawing on these antiquarian definitions, Pomponius
Porphyrio, the later imperial commentator on the poet Horace, puts it es-
pecially well: “monumentum does not only mean the tomb, but everything
about it that bears witness to memory.”57
This idea that the transmission of the past could be achieved by mate-
rial objects is not particular to Romans. Greeks had a similar and probably
cognate word μνῆμα, which applied both to abstract qualities of remem-
brance as well as to physical monuments, especially tombs. While we can
be less certain, it would appear that Italian peoples used similar words, too.
Etruscans appear to have had an equivalent term, manim, which appears
on some gravestones.58 Italic languages have several words for tomb or me-
morial, but perhaps the closest in meaning to Roman monumentum is the
word múfqlúm, which appears in the early Sabellic text of one of the Penna
Sant’Andrea stelai, where it seems to stand both for the object of dedication
and in self-​reference to the stele’s status as a memorial to the deceased.59 In
sum, there seems to be nothing particularly Roman about a complex under-
standing of monumenta and cognate words, which describe the encoding
and transmitting of the past.

55 Praef. 10; 7.21.6; see also 6.1.2 and 38.57.8: monumenta litterarum; Livy’s possible reference to

his work as a monumentum has attracted considerable attention, as see Jaeger 1997: 15–​29; Feldherr
1998: 31.
56 E.g., 1.13.6.
57 Porphyr. ad Hor. Od. 1.2.15: monumentum non sepulcrum tantum dicitur, sed omne quicquid me-

moriam testatur.
58 Colonna 2015a: 13 n. 37, following the suggestion of Pfiffig 1969: 273–​75. The word occurs as

such in CIE 216, 304, 3326.

59 Imag.Ital. Praetuttii/​INTERAMNIA PRAETVTTIORVM 1; see further p. 53.
 Introduction 19

The conceptual range of monumentum and cognate words encourages

us to look at how various media, including but by no means limited to
texts, could independently generate historical thought. To be fair, scholars
looking at the development of historical thought in Roman antiquity have
often confronted the ways in which material objects served to transmit the
past. But this work often tends, even if implicitly, to envision a develop-
mental hierarchy in which such material forms of historical transmission
form background material for written histories. The aim is rarely to dem-
onstrate how monuments communicate historical meaning in their own
right, but rather to show how they could function in relation to written
history, and especially how physical monuments might have informed his-
torical writing. However, Festus’ definition of monumentum presents no
sign of any hierarchical relationship between material and text in terms of
their functional ability to transmit the past.60 His list of things that work
as monuments seems broad and unstructured, with the possible excep-
tion of the final scripta et carmina, writing and song, perhaps relaying a
basic distinction between textuality and orality. Overall, the point seems
to be that all these media form independent ways of extending a person’s
achievements beyond the span of a human life.
In his study of historical transmission in modern Jordanian society, the
anthropologist Andrew Shryock critiques academic approaches to history
that are too closely predetermined by existing notions of what history should
look like: if we presume a template before we start our analysis, we tend to
authorize only histories that conform to this type. Shryock concentrates on
how, in his field of anthropology and ethnography, an assumption that his-
tory is documentary and linear has tended to admit oral histories as “codes
to be broken,” requiring translation into written form before being analyzed
and understood.61 We might say similarly that ancient historians of the
Roman world have often treated non-​textual historical practices primarily as
codes to be broken for what information they might shed upon texts. What
I hope this discussion of monumenta shows, by contrast, is that the primacy
of written vis-​à-​vis other modes of constructing historical knowledge is

60 There has been considerable debate about the ability of objects in the Roman world to transmit

information unmediated by texts, while I believe Verrius Flaccus suggests at least that Romans
considered it possible; for contrasting opinion, see Hölkeskamp 2014; Wiseman 2014; amid a very
large corpus of art historical research into this question, see Smith 2002.
61 Shryock 1997: 28; I am grateful to Duncan MacRae for pointing me to Shryock’s work.
20 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

incongruous with ancient thought, which instead encourages us to take se-

riously the idea that objects worked autonomously to encode and transmit
the past.

Archaeology and/​as History

Meanwhile, archaeological theory has for some time recognized that

materials uncovered through excavation can convey how communities un-
derstood and interacted with their past. Generally, like many fields in the
humanities and social sciences, archaeology has experienced a memory-​
turn; I will have more to say about the concept of memory below, but its re-
lationship to history seems clear enough.62 While ancient historians have
also readily embraced memory studies, they have less often employed ar-
chaeological approaches that treat objects as bearers of mnemonic meaning
truly independent from texts or textuality. Thus, the historian Karl-​Joachim
Hölkeskamp, whose work has made crucial inroads against a narrow philo-
logical focus to the history of Republican Rome, recently develops a highly
flexible concept of “intersignification” for understanding the varied media of
Roman storytelling. However, Hölkeskamp admits that mnemonic messages
carried by statues, monuments, and tombs mostly remain legible to us
when they intersect with the written tradition either literally in the sense of
tituli and inscriptions placed beside objects, or in terms of our reading of
them based upon textual sources, and he tellingly compares the method to
intertextuality.63
Otherwise, ancient history has often employed archaeological material
in two ways, either teleologically as a means to understand the pre-​written
background to the emergence of written history, or as a means to verify or
falsify facts found in ancient sources.64 In relating ancient history and ar-
chaeology to each other in these ways, as two approaches to the past that
are distinct but sometimes useful in combination, we might see ourselves as
inheritors of disciplinary boundaries that developed during the formative

62 Alcock 2002; Van Dyke and Alcock 2003; Williams 2003.

63 Hölkeskamp 2014: 196; Hölkeskamp 2017; his use of the term “intersignification” follows Roller
2013: 119, whose aims are primarily concerned with literary analysis; note Hölkeskamp (2010; 125–​
26) explicitly sets his work against the field’s traditional “methodological fixation upon a comparative
classical philology”; cf. similarly Wiseman 2014: 48.
64 Exceptionally, see Gabba 1993: 23; for excellent study showing the limitations of using objects to

affirm textual information, see Di Fazio 2017a; on the topic, see Padilla Peralta and Bernard 2022.
 Introduction 21

years of these disciplines. Fundamental to the separation of the two fields

of archaeology and history was the nineteenth-​century “discovery” of deep
time.65 The late 1850s saw a number of critical developments in the under-
standing of the human past, perhaps most of all the publication of Charles
Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), while Darwin’s ideas also influenced
contemporary advances in geology and stratigraphic archaeological method.
Around the same time, archaeologists in France and England confirmed
the existence of Paleolithic artefacts in excavated layers also containing the
skeletons of extinct animal species. These discoveries revealed the longer his-
tory of the human past and periods then referred to as “pre-​Adamite” time
along a continuum extending well before ancient history, biblical origins,
or the existence of written records of any sort. The result of these advances
had remarkable effects on the disciplines then engaged in looking at the past,
and foremost among them was the move to separate historical time from
earlier periods of human existence only accessible through material remains.
Subsequently, the field of “pre-​history” was invented—​the name was used for
the first time simultaneously in the title of works published in 1865 by John
Lubbock and David Wilson—​to encompass the study of the human past be-
fore texts. Archaeology became the main tool of the new “prehistorian” and
situated itself in between history and geology, an adjacent field bridging the
two disciplines but equivalent to neither.
We may emphasize how the presence or absence of texts served from
this moment onward to draw the boundary between history and archae-
ology as separate disciplines. In their influential and popular 1898 manual,
Introduction aux études historiques, Charles Langlois and Charles Seignobos
declare succinctly, “Nothing can take the place of documents. No documents
means no history.”66 Around the same time, historians of early Rome and
Italy were working to move philology and text-​based methodologies to the
center of their own analyses. Major debate on the intellectual history of early
Rome centered, for example, on whether a lost ballad tradition underpinned
our extant source accounts of early Rome, as Barthold Niebuhr thought, or
whether they derived from a stable core of early constitutional and legal ma-
terial extractable through careful source-​critical analysis, as was the view of
Theodor Mommsen.67 Pioneering historical works covering the history of
65 For the following, see Shryock and Smail 2011; Smail and Shryock 2013.
66 Langlois and Seignobos 1898: 2, “Car rien ne supplée aux documents: pas de documents, pas
d’histoire.”
67 This debate is deftly recounted by Momigliano 1957; part of the issue was that these historians

predated the pioneering work of Giacomo Boni in the Roman Forum, which exposed for the first
22 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

early Rome by Niebuhr (1812), Albert Schwegler (1853–​58), or Mommsen

(1854), or on Pre-​Roman Italy by Giuseppe Micali (1810) and Karl Ottfried
Müller (1828), paid little attention to archaeology except where it furnished
epigraphic documents. Early Etruscan archaeology also reveals the influence
of the pioneering analyses of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who denigrated
Etruscan art as exotic and derivative of the higher-​quality arts of Greece.68
As a result of this background, even as archaeological material began
to accumulate rapidly starting in the early twentieth century, historians
confronted an already existing framework for understanding the early
Italian and Roman past based upon textual source-​criticism and philolog-
ical inquiry. Material that did not fit this framework could be relegated to the
field of prehistory as distinct and apart, as was the case following Giovanni
Gozzadini’s discovery of Villanovan culture near Bologna, or the spectacular
discoveries of Isidoro Falchi and Antonio Minto in North Etruria. Instead,
the aim was chiefly to integrate newly discovered material into existing ac-
counts. Giacomo Boni’s uncovering of Early Iron Age layers in the forum
starting in 1898 represented the most significant gains up to that date for
our understanding of early Roman society. However, attempts to depart
from texts entirely and tell Roman history starting first from this material
record were often quickly dismissed by historians, as was the case with Einar
Gjerstad’s monumental archaeological study of Early Rome (1953–​73).
In his justly classic critique of Gjerstad’s work, Arnaldo Momigliano
suggested that early Roman history formed an ideal laboratory for generating
a historical method that combined text with archaeology. On the surface,
this forms a welcome attempt to reconcile a disciplinary split that was by
then over a century old. However, in its finer details, Momigliano’s proposal
reveals a clear hierarchy, and the same desire to limit the meaning of history
we have scrutinized above in his other writings:

The pure archaeologist cannot rely on the living memory: he has to guess
and to infer, very often by analogy. He has to deduce the thoughts from
the objects, the individuals from the collective products. This procedure is
ultimately far more open to arbitrary suggestions than the analysis of a lit-
erary tradition. Where there is a literary tradition, it is a safer guide to a past

time important Iron Age material; for the impact of Boni’s work on the historical study of early Rome,
see Ammerman 2016; the topic would repay further study.

68 De Francesco 2013; see chapters by M. Harari and G. Della Fine in Naso, ed. 2018.
 Introduction 23

civilization than archaeology alone. But of course archaeology can act as

an excellent control of a literary tradition. The archaeologists can check the
truth of many stories by a direct approach which by definition is denied to
the critic of literary texts.69

One might reply that language is also in its essence an analogous system of
knowledge, although I take Momigliano’s point here to do with the different
densities of linguistic and archaeological evidence with which to pursue an-
alogical reasoning. Nonetheless, history built upon the literary tradition
comes out on top, while archaeology is ancillary and possesses little autono-
mous ability to communicate historical information. Certainly many current
scholars have moved on from this position; however, Momigliano’s judg-
ment on the roles of archaeology and history continues to have profound
influence, and over the last decades, as one recent discussion puts it, the re-
lationship between historians and archaeologists of early Rome has been at
times adversarial.70 Over the same period, owing probably to the simple fact
that we possess far less textual evidence, the study of early Italy has shown a
certain progressive interest in drawing history from archaeology, although
some of the better recent syntheses remain works of prehistory.71
As I hope this discussion has shown, the disciplinary division between ar-
chaeology and history is a longstanding artifact of an intellectual history that
begins in the mid-​nineteenth century. That being the case, we might ask if
the division remains useful today. My impression is that outside the study of
early Rome and Italy this disciplinary siloing between (textual) history and
(archaeological) prehistory matters less and less.72 Both disciplines aim to
reconstruct the past, and, especially as history’s interests become more egali-
tarian, they increasingly overlapped with those of archaeology and vice versa.
One of the most durable contributions of processual archaeology of the last

69 Momigliano 1963: 108. Momigliano was, of course, first and foremost a historian of historiog-

raphy, so his view cannot be entirely surprising, but he knew the archaeology well; for Momigliano’s
influence, see Bickerman 1969: 400; the exact passage I have cited remains a touchstone for Wiseman
2020: 527.
70 Maiuro 2016: 175–​76; the best synthesis of early Rome remains that of Momigliano’s student,

Cornell 1995, although his effort to argue for the veracity of elements of the historical sources on the
basis of archaeology drew its own criticism.
71 For an exceptional work of early Italian history from archaeology, see Terrenato 2019, frequently

employed here. Historical overviews feature commonly in recent handbooks, as see Bradley, Isayev,
and Riva 2007; Bradley and Farney 2017; Naso 2018; there remains no synthetic historical treat-
ment of all Italy in English since Pallottino 1991, although there have been several specfically on the
Etruscans: Smith 2014; Shipley 2017; Riva 2020.
72 Feinman 1997; cf. Morris 1991; Sauer 2004.
24 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

century was its interest in socioeconomic structures.73 The two disciplines

may employ their own methodologies, but perhaps we might allow that the
biggest differences between history and archaeology as currently practiced
are ultimately temporal resolution and scale, with archaeology offering a sort
of “long-​term history,” and the two disciplines being more complementary
than oppositional.74
Seeing archaeological inquiry as similar, at least in its goals, to ancient his-
tory can open up new avenues for understanding the development of human
behaviors and practices in deep time.75 While for obvious reasons it lies be-
yond the scope of the present book, one could go so far as to consider how
conscious engagement with the past has distinguished humans for almost the
entire timespan of their existence. Here we can take a step very far backward
in time to consider the spectacular archaeological discoveries at the Spanish
site of Sima de los Heusos, which suggest something resembling symbolic or
commemorative practices among humans living in the Middle Pleistocene,
around 400,000 years before present. This is a cave site that shows no sign
of long-​term habitation but contained over two dozen articulated human
skeletons suggesting repeated and deliberate deposition of dead individuals.
The demographic profile of these individuals suggests they did not die in a
single event, but rather those responsible for depositing them here returned
over a period of time to this same place for this same function—​somehow,
meanings specifically associated with the site were transmitted through time.
The further possibility of symbolic activity has been proposed on the basis
of an Acheulean hand-​axe associated with the bodies.76 Archaeology in this
case presents an expedient way to recover traces of what might be recognized
as historical culture in deep time, in a context far removed from the presence
of writing, but in which remembering and transmitting information about
the past was clearly important. This discussion takes us a long way away from
early Italy, but we might locate the evidence of Sima de los Heusos upon an
enormously long spectrum of human behavior interested in articulating past
and present, a spectrum upon which we might also place Italian monumenta
(and, one should add, Roman written history).

73 For processual archaeology’s debts to Braudelian concepts of history, see Johnson 2009: 78.
74 Hodder 1987; cf. Roth 2019: 12.
75 For the idea of “deep history” pursued through the dissolution of the disciplinary barriers be-

tween archaeology and history, see Smail 2008; Shryock and Smail 2011; Smail and Shryock 2013.
76 Carbonell and Mosquera 2006.
 Introduction 25

Historical Culture

We come now to give some further definition to this book’s theoretical ap-
paratus for the concept of historical culture.77 As noted, the intended defini-
tion is very broad: I use historical culture to stand as convenient shorthand
for those various modes of cultural production that facilitated a society’s
engagement with its past. This concept of historical culture has a pedigree
in modern historical sciences. To the extent that the phrase has been used
by historians, historical culture is employed as an umbrella term to refer
to popular, as opposed to academic, often written history.78 The phrase has
been more rigorously theorized in the fields of the philosophy and the his-
tory of education in Germany, where historical culture (Geschichtskultur)
designates the social, as opposed to personal, means of constructing histor-
ical knowledge.79 This is a very wide rubric comprising all the ways societies
construct historical consciousness. Importantly, this concept of historical
culture includes both academic history taught in schools, which are seen to
reflect societal attitudes toward history, as well as historically inclined cul-
tural outputs, commemorations, mass media, and other institutions.
This concept of Geschichtskultur thus brings together on the same spec-
trum both professional and popular institutions, which contributed to the
circulation of historical knowledge, and it also extends across medium and
cultural genre.80 It is not just, as Sahlin’s anthropology of history begins by
observing, that different societies have their own modes of historical con-
sciousness, but it is that they often possess multiple ways of engaging with
the past at once, and we can profitably see these as subspecies of the same
genus of historical culture.81 For the purposes of this study, what is most
useful is the implication that historiographical products, which have thus far
received the most attention from scholars, belong to the same genre as other
forms of historical culture, and not in a way that reveals hierarchy or domi-
nation of one over the other. In this way, we find something resembling the
Roman monumentum in the sense that medium does not constrain the ways

77 Cf. Lanieri 2011: 3 n. 3 on “historical thought.”

78 Guenée 1980; Woolf 1997; id. 2003: 8–​10.
79 Rüsen 1991; Rüsen 1997; Schönemann 2000; Grever and Adriaansen 2017.
80 Grever and Adriaansen 2017: 75. Cf. Woolf 2003: 9, “A historical culture gives rise to, nurtures,

and is itself ultimately influenced by the formal historical writing of an era.” His historical culture
is closely bound to written history, but remains different from it, whereas the concept I employ
encompasses all forms of historical production, including textual.
81 Sahlins 1983: 518.
26 Historical Culture in Iron Age Italy

in which a society engages with its past. The concept therefore can help build
a more egalitarian approach to historical interest not only in the sense of re-
vealing subaltern historical interests, but in linking historiography to other
forms of historical culture in a way that does not make one subsidiary to the
other. A second important aspect of this concept of historical culture for my
purposes is that it concentrates attention upon history as a social concern. To
return to Evans-​Pritchard’s differentiation between genealogy’s coordination
of relationships and history’s coordination of events, viewed as historical cul-
ture his distinction becomes artificial, as the interpretation and arrangement
of past events is itself a social and socially constitutive practice.
Throughout this book, there is a close relationship between historical
culture and memory, particularly concepts of social or collective memory.
Memory is often held up as an important way of analyzing Italian as well as
Roman thinking about the past in less formal or exclusively elite ways, par-
ticularly in a situation of low or socially specific literacy.82 However, it is im-
portant to distinguish between historical culture and concepts of cultural or
collective memory, which I find less helpful for two reasons.
First, it is not clear that Maurice Halbwach’s theory of collective memory is
fully applicable to ancient Rome and Italy, not to mention the debate over its
usefulness for modernity.83 One of the greatest issues with memory studies
is the hinge between remembering as an individual action and the asser-
tion of collective or social practice. All of these aspects and their interaction
seem to some degree contingent.84 Thus, the distinction between individual
and collective, and the way individual remembrance might have fed into or
been shaped by broader social action, often seems different in antiquity. It
is worth bearing in mind the degree to which those pioneering interests of
Pierre Nora and others in collective memory have been generated as means
of understanding modern collectives and especially nation-​states. Wiseman
argues that literary evidence sometimes taken as proof of cultural and col-
lective memory in Republican Rome more often recalls the memories of
individual Roman aristocrats.85 Perhaps this critique understates the fluid

82 Di Fazio 2012; Di Fazio 2019; for preliminary critique of memory as applicable to the period

studied here, see Smith 2015.

83 For general critique, see Confino 1997; Kansteiner 2002; for critique of its applicability to Rome,

see Walter 2004: 18–​26. One issue is that, while memories may be shaped by social collectives, the act
of remembering is more often than not individual; for this reason, if I can be so bold, I might ven-
ture to think that historical culture is more readily understood as a social or collective exercise than
memory.
84 Thus, see Fentress and Wickham 1992 on “social memory.”
85 Wiseman 2014: 48.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
“Those brothers in the northwest took my deer from me,—a large, fat
one,” said Kéis, and he kept on making the medicine.

“You must have gone to their snares,” said the boy. “They couldn’t
cut the deer up there in the woods.”

Kéis didn’t answer, and Snoútiss thought: “I will go and find out what
has made Kéis so mad.” When he got to the house of the three
brothers, they said: “Come in, little boy. What is the trouble with your
brother?”

“All his teeth are out, but two, and with those he is making bad
medicine. He is mad; he says that you took a deer away from him.”

“We took our own deer. We told him to come and get [62]some of the
meat, but he wouldn’t; he went away without saying a word.”

The brothers gave Snoútiss meat; he took it and started for home.
When he got to the house he looked in at the smoke hole and he
was frightened. His brother was hard at work; the whole house was
dripping with sores; there were aches and pains of all kinds, and
terrible sickness.

“I can’t come in,” cried the little boy. “You have made those things
and now they will be here always, and will make trouble. You got
mad for nothing. I can’t stay with you; I will go to my uncle.”

When Snoútiss came in sight of Wéwenkee’s house, a little boy saw

him, and called to his father: “A boy is coming!”

“That is Snoútiss,” said Wéwenkee. “He has never been here before;
he wouldn’t come now if he wasn’t in trouble.”

When Snoútiss got to the house, he stood outside, crying.

“Tell him to come in,” said Wéwenkee to his son. Snoútiss went in.
“What is the matter? Why do you cry?” asked his uncle.

“My brother is mad. He has made all kinds of terrible sores and
sickness. I feel badly, for those things can never be got rid of; they
will live always to trouble the people who are to come. It looks badly
and smells badly in our house. My brother got mad for nothing.”

“Those Gletcówas brothers are mean men,” said Wéwenkee, “but if

Kéis wanted meat he should have gone to their house. I am stronger
than your brother; I have a wildcat skin blanket, all painted. I will go
home with you. How far away is your house?”

“On the other side of a flat there are big rocks, our home is under
those rocks. I don’t want to go there. I can’t go in the house, it smells
so badly.”

“I will go alone,” said his uncle.

When Wéwenkee got to the house, he crawled in through a crack in

the wall. His nephew didn’t see him, didn’t know that he was there.
There was such a terrible smell in the house that Wéwenkee couldn’t
stay; so he got out quickly. The only way he could look in was by
painting red stripes across [63]his forehead and around his wrists.
When he got home, he said to Snoútiss: “You told me the truth.
Hereafter there will be all kinds of sickness. Sickness will spread
everywhere. Does Kéis think he is more powerful than I am? I can do
all that he can do. I know that what he has made will live always. Will
you go home now?” asked Wéwenkee.

“I don’t want to go,” said Snoútiss.

Wéwenkee started off again. After he had gone, his wife said to
Snoútiss: “You should have gone with your uncle. Do you think that
he has only one blanket? His blankets are doubled around his body,
one over another, and one is worse than another. They are blankets
of sickness and sores. Wéwenkee is chief of those things; he can
make more bad medicine than your brother can. When he is mad, he
can raise a terrible whirlwind. That is the kind of man he is. You
should have gone with him.”

Snoútiss went out then and followed his uncle, but Wéwenkee didn’t
see him. As the old man traveled, sores came out all over him. He
cried, and his tears were drops of matter. When he went into his
nephew’s house, he said: “You have done wrong; now all this bad
stuff will soak into the earth and make great trouble.”

Wéwenkee made a big ball of soft bark, rolled it around and

gathered on it all the sores and sickness that were on the top and
sides of the house, and on the ground. “Don’t you wink again and let
that stuff fall,” said he to his nephew.

He rolled the bark ball over Kéis’ body, cleaned him of sores, and
then he squeezed the ball over his own head and said: “This is mine.
How did you dare to let this out? Sickness belongs to Nébăks. It is
only loaned to us; we had no right to let it out till he told us to. Now it
has gone from us; I have saved some, but a great deal has scattered
and gone through the world. You have frightened your brother so he
won’t come back to you”—Wéwenkee didn’t know that Snoútiss was
on top of the house listening to what he said.

“Will you change skins with me?” asked Wéwenkee.

“No,” said Kéis, “I want my own skin.”

“It is too bad I can’t get up all this sickness,” said Wéwenkee,[64]—he
was still rolling the bark ball,— “it has soaked into the ground, and in
hot weather and in winter it will come out.”
Kéis didn’t say much, for he didn’t want Wéwenkee to see that his
teeth were gone.

“The Gletcówas brothers are bad men, but you should have asked
them for meat, not tried to steal it,” said Wéwenkee.

“They wanted to kill me.”

“How many teeth have you?” asked Wéwenkee.

“Two.”

“Let me have them for a little while.”

“No, I want them myself; people will always hate me, these teeth will
defend me. If I want to kill any one I can do it with my teeth. I can
throw medicine at them and kill them. I shall keep poison medicine in
the ends of my teeth; I will be as bad as others are.”

“I will always be good, unless somebody makes me mad,” said

Wéwenkee. “In later times people will like my skin and want to take
it. Maybe they will throw dirt at me so they can hide my face and
eyes from them, but they can do me no harm. I will not be a servant
to any one; but those who go to the swimming ponds on the
mountains, and those who are willing to travel at night, I will like. I
will give them my skin, and the earth will give me another. 1 I shall
never appear to any one, who is not a doctor.”

“I will do just as I have done,” said Kéis. “If I get mad, I will kill people
by throwing out sickness.”

“If you do, you will be hated, and you will always be in trouble,” said
Wéwenkee. And he begged hard for Kéis to put away sickness. “You
are my nephew,” said he; “you should do as I say. I am a chief, too. I
am sorry for the people who are to come, and you ought to think of
them. Let us put sickness back in our bodies, and never use it unless
this earth tells us to. It won’t be long that we shall be persons; soon
we shall live under rocks and in holes in the ground. When the
people to come take our places, they will hate you. I am sorry for
your little brother. I would go away now, but [65]I don’t want to be
changed till some one comes to tell me what I shall be.”

So Wéwenkee talked to his nephew, and at last Kéis took off all his
sicknesses and tied them up in a bundle. He put the bundle in his
quiver, and said: “I will only take these out when people abuse me.”
Then he told his brother to come in.

“My little nephew,” said Wéwenkee, “those Gletcówas can turn to

anything; sometimes they are fish and sometimes they are bugs or
ticks. You might catch one of them and think that you were holding
him in your hand, but he would be gone. You can remember better
than Kéis; that is why I tell you about those brothers. Sometimes
they are large animals, sometimes they are a straw on a trail, or a
stump of burnt wood, or lice. Often, in the night, they are wind; or
they are mole hills for men to fall over. I can’t tell you all that they
turn to. I know they are going to kill your brother, for he has tried to
kill them.” Then he said to Kéis: “Stand up.” When his nephew stood
up, Wéwenkee turned him around, looked at him on every side, and
said: “I don’t like any part of your skin, and your mind is mean. What
part of my skin do you like?”

Kéis said: “I like the spots on your breast and the gloss on your
body.”

“Lie down,” said Wéwenkee, “and cover yourself up and sleep all
day; then maybe your mind will be better and you won’t get mad so
easily.” He told him over and over not to open the bundle of
sickness, then he told Snoútiss to watch Kéis, and if he started to
untie the bundle to come and tell him. He said: “Nobody will be able
to kill sickness; your brother has spoiled the world. In later times we
may have no mind, but we may want to go near houses. People will
hate Kéis, but they will say: ‘His uncle was chief before we came,’
and they will know that I won’t hurt them.”

Kéis slept till night, then he woke up and sent his brother for water. “I
wonder why he sent me for water when there was water in the
house,” thought Snoútiss, and he hurried back and looked in at the
smoke hole. Kéis was sitting by the fire, untying his bundle. When he
heard Snoútiss on the [66]top of the house, he tied up the bundle and
pulled his blanket around him.

“What were you doing?” asked Snoútiss.

“I was covering myself up.”

“I know what you were doing,” said the boy; “you were letting out
sickness. Our uncle told you never to untie that bundle.”

Snoútiss ran off to his uncle’s house and told him what Kéis had
done. Wéwenkee was so mad at his nephew that he stretched
himself out full length; then he made a circle around the world and
pressed everything together, but Kéis went in among rocks and
Wéwenkee couldn’t press hard enough to break them.

“What are you doing?” asked Wéwenkee.

“What I want to,” said Kéis.

“If you want to be great of your own strength, I will leave you,” said
Wéwenkee, and he started for home.

Now Kéis began to sing like a doctor; the three Gletcówas brothers
heard his song, and wondered who was around among the rocks
singing.
“I will find out,” said the eldest brother, and he went toward the rocks.

The second brother followed him. When near they smelt smoke,—
Kéis was smoking Indian tobacco,—and they knew who was singing.
“I wonder what that man is doing,” said one of the brothers; “we must
think how to kill him.”

Now Wéwenkee sent Snoútiss to see what Kéis was doing; he came
back, and said: “My brother is among the rocks, singing.”

Wéwenkee rubbed himself around in the dirt, and said: “This is what
I knew would happen when he went by his own strength. All that I
have talked to your brother I will take off and give to the dirt. I will rub
off all that I promised to help him, and give it back to the ground. We
will no longer be living persons. You will remember me in later times,
for I have been a great chief. You will be near me always, for you will
be my brother. Hereafter you will be only a little snake and blow with
your mouth.” Right away Snoútiss [67]became a common little snake.
Then Wéwenkee turned himself into a whipsnake.

The youngest of the Gletcówas brothers listened to Kéis’ song and

watched for him to come out from among the rocks. As he ran back
and forth he called: “Gletcówas! Gletcówas!”

“What is the matter?” asked his brothers.

“I have no father or mother; that is why I cry all the time.”

The brothers said to one another: “Kéis is the man who killed our
father and mother; we must kill him.”

As Gletcówas went toward the rocks, he hit against a mole hill and
fell; then he talked to the earth, and said: “You shouldn’t treat me in
this way. I have no father or mother; you should carry me safely.”
As Gletcówas fell, Kéis came out from among the rocks. He had
grown so tall that he almost touched the sky. His song was loud and
nice.

The brothers hid behind rocks and tied cross sticks to their arrows.
“Go up to the sky,” called they to their youngest brother, for Kéis was
just going to throw his medicine at him.

The brothers shot their arrows and hit Kéis. He fell, but he kept
singing. The eldest brother pulled up a tree stump and pounded him
on the head till he died. They cut Kéis into small pieces, threw the
pieces over the rocks, and said: “You will no longer be great; even
old women will kill you.” The pieces became rattlesnakes.

Then the three brothers went north. Kéis had made them lose their
minds. They crossed the Shasta River and became birds. [68]

1 Doctors often rub a whipsnake in dust and pull off his skin, then he gets a new
skin, so what Wéwenkee said was true. ↑
[Contents]
 HOW OLD AGE CAME INTO THE WORLD

CHARACTERS

Komúchass Old Age

Nébăks Sickness

Five brothers and their sister lived alone on a mountain; the brothers
had killed a great many people in the country around.

The sister gathered the wood and cooked the meat. When it was
time for her maturity dance, she asked: “How can I dance when
there is nobody to sing for me?”

“Walk around all the time,” said her eldest brother; “pile stones, and
don’t sleep for five nights.”

The girl kept awake four nights, then she was so tired that she fell
asleep. She dreamed that her brothers were covered with sores and
were starving. When she woke up, she cried and said: “I wish I had
died long ago, then I shouldn’t have brought trouble on my brothers.
I have done this by not dancing and by going to sleep.”

When she got home, she found that Sickness had been in the
house. Sickness came every day for five days. Then each one of the
five brothers had great sores on his body. There was nobody to hunt
for deer, or rabbits, and soon the brothers were starving. The sister
brought wood and kept the fire, but she couldn’t find anything to eat.
Everybody was glad that the brothers were sick and hoped they
would die.
One of the brothers saw two swans on a pond near the house, and
when the sister came with a load of wood on her back, he said: “I
wish we could kill one of those swans.”

“Maybe I can kill one,” said the sister. She got her brothers’ bows
and tried the strings to see which string was the strongest. She put
down one bow after another, saying: [69]“That isn’t strong.” The
strings had been strong enough for her brothers, but for her they
were weak. She took the bow that belonged to her youngest brother,
pulled the string, and said: “This will do.”

When she started for the pond, one of the brothers watched her, he
said: “Now she is near the pond; now she is sitting down on the
bank!” She drew the bow, and when he thought she had missed the
swan, he nearly fell, he was so sorry. He didn’t look out again. The
arrow went through both swans.

The sister brought the swans home and left them outside; she took
the bow and arrow in and put them away. Her brothers felt badly;
they were disappointed. When she asked: “Shall I cook them in the
house?” they were glad. They tried to get up, but they couldn’t stand
on their feet, they were so weak.

The girl cooked the swans and gave her brothers some of the meat.
She said: “Eat a little at a time, so it will last longer.” She saved the
fat and rubbed her brothers with it, to heal their sores.

“Now I am stronger,” said the eldest brother. “Give me my bow; I feel

as if I could shoot something.” Each brother said the same.

When the people at the foot of the mountain heard that the five
brothers were sick, they were glad and sent a young man to find if it
were true. He came back, and said: “They are sick and are going to
die.”
When the sister had gone for wood, the eldest brother said: “I know
that somebody is coming; I want to be strong.” They all had the
same feeling, and each one tried his bowstring. When the sister
came back, the eldest brother said: “You must roll us up in our
blankets, and tie them around us as though we were dead. Put our
bows and arrows and beads near us.”

When she had done that, she went off to the mountains, for she felt
badly and didn’t want to stay with her brothers; she didn’t want to live
any longer.

The brothers waited for her, and when it was dark and she [70]didn’t
come, one said: “Our sister is always talking about dying; maybe she
is dead.”

Now the people at the foot of the mountain sent a little boy to see if
the five brothers were alive. He crossed the pond in a canoe; he
rowed the canoe by saying: “Peldack! Peldack!” (Go fast). When the
boy saw the men tied up in their blankets, he went back, and said:
“They are dead. In their house there are bows and arrows and nice
beads. You must go and get them.”

The chief said: “Get ready; we will go and scalp those men, and take
their things.”

When the brothers saw the men coming, they said: “We will lie here
as if we were dead, and when they pack up our things and start
away, we will spring up and fight them with knives.”

The men came into the house. They unrolled the brothers and kicked
them around; they took their blankets, bows, arrows and beads, took
everything they could find, and started off.
Then the five brothers jumped up and ran at them with knives. They
killed every man, threw the bodies into the pond, and started off to
hunt for their sister. They hunted a long time. At last they found her
body and burned it; then the eldest brother said: “Let us leave this
country and kill every man we can find.”

They started and traveled toward the west. They killed every man or
woman they met. When people saw them coming they ran and hid,
they were so afraid of them. The brothers traveled a long time, and
killed a great many people. At last they came to a big lake. They
made a canoe and started to cross it, but before they got to land, the
canoe sank. It went under the water and under a mountain and out
into another lake. There they met Storm.

He was a man then and could kill anybody he could catch and draw
into the water. He tried to kill the five brothers, but the youngest
brother fought with him, cut him to pieces with his knife, and said:
“You will be a person no longer; you will only be something to scare
[71]people,” and he drove him away. All the people under the water
hid, for they were afraid of the brothers.

When the brothers couldn’t find any one to kill, they turned toward
the east and traveled till they came to a country where they found a
very old man and a very old woman. They said: “We have come to
fight you.”

“I don’t want to fight,” said the old man. “We have always lived here,
this is our place; nobody ever came here before to trouble us. We
don’t bother any one. Go away and leave us.”

“You must fight,” said the brothers. “If you don’t, we will kill you; we
kill every one we meet.”
“You can’t kill us or harm us, no matter what you do,” said the old
man. “We are Komúchass (Old Age). We shall live always.”

The five brothers were mad; they didn’t listen to the old man, but
shot at him with arrows, and pounded him with clubs; then they built
a fire and tried to burn him. When they couldn’t kill him in any way,
they got scared and ran off.

The old man called to them to stop, but they didn’t listen; then he
said: “We shall follow you; you cannot get away; wherever you go we
shall go. You will never get home.”

The old man and old woman followed the brothers for a long time,
and at last they caught up with the eldest brother. Right away he was
old and weak. He stumbled along for a little way, then fell to the
ground and died.

They overtook the second brother; he also grew old and weak, fell to
the ground and died. The third brother reached the lake; he was
running on the ice when Komúchass overtook him; he grew weak
and fell; the ice broke and he was drowned. The fourth brother died
in the same manner. The youngest brother thought he was going to
get away from the old man; he was only a few steps from home
when Komúchass overtook him. Right off he was an old man; he
stumbled along a step or two, then fell to the ground and died.

This is how old age came into our world. If the five brothers had let
the old man and his wife alone, they would have [72]stayed in their
own country, and there would have been no such thing as old age.

Komúchass turned the bodies of the five brothers into five rocks, and
those rocks are still to be seen in the Klamath country. [73]
[Contents]
 LEMÉIS AND NUL-WE

CHARACTERS

Kókolaileyas The Necklace (Kŏko means bone)

Leméis or Limālimáas Thunder
Nul-we

Old Limālimáas was a man-eater. He lived among big rocks at one

end of a long, swampy flat. At the other end of the swamp lived an
old woman and her little grandson. Limālimáas had killed all the old
woman’s kin, except the boy. He had strung their elbow and ankle
bones on a grass rope and he wore them for a necklace. People
called him Kókolaileyas, (Bone Necklace).

The grandmother was too old to dig roots, so the little boy dug them
for her. One day Limālimáas saw the boy digging; he crept up and
lay down near him, and when the boy’s basket was full of nice, white
roots, he ate them all at a mouthful. After that, he came every day.
No matter where the boy went to dig, Limālimáas followed him. If the
boy ate a root while he was digging, Limālimáas struck him on the
forehead with his hammer. He listened and knew when he took a
root. The little boy felt badly; he wanted to carry roots to his
grandmother, for he knew she was hungry. He cried all the time he
was digging, cried “Nul-we! Nul-we!” (that was his name). He always
went home at sundown.

One day he cried on the way home. His grandmother heard him, and
said: “My grandson, you mustn’t cry so loud. A bad man lives among
the big rocks. He will hear you and come where you are digging.
Maybe he will kill you; he has killed your father and your mother and
all your kin.”

The next morning, when Nul-we went to dig roots, Limālimáas came,
and said: “Little Nul-we, I am waiting for you; I am hungry. I want you
to grow fast and get big, then I will [74]kill you and eat you. I will put
your bones in my necklace, between the bones of your father and
the bones of your mother, and they will make my necklace nice and
long.”

That evening, when Nul-we went home without any roots, his
grandmother said: “When you were a little fellow, you brought your
basket full of roots. Now it is always empty. I am hungry. I have only
dry, old roots to eat.”

“I eat all the roots I dig,” said Nul-we; then he cried, he was so sorry
for his grandmother. He didn’t want to tell her about Limālimáas.

The next morning, as soon as Nul-we began digging, Limālimáas

came, rattling his bone necklace as he traveled. He lay down right by
Nul-we, and said: “Little boy, I am tired; peel me some nice, white
roots.” When he had eaten the roots, he took hold of his necklace,
rattled it, and said, as he divided the bones: “These are your father’s
bones; these are your mother’s bones; these are your sister’s bones;
these are your brother’s bones; these are your grandfather’s bones.
Now dig away, little boy; when you are big enough, your bones will
be in my necklace.”

That day Nul-we dug four basketfuls, and Limālimáas ate them all.
Then he said: “Little boy, you should kill me, for I have eaten your
father and your mother and all your kin.” Then Nul-we thought:
“Maybe I could kill this bad old man; I will get a bow and arrow and
try.”
The next day, when Limālimáas had eaten all the roots, he said:
“Little boy, you should kill me; I have killed all your kin. You must
shoot me in the body; that is where I keep my heart.”

That night the grandmother asked: “Why don’t you bring me roots? I
am hungry; you shouldn’t eat them all.”

“I dig roots early in the morning,” said Nul-we, “then I eat them and
lie down and sleep all day.”

“That isn’t true,” said his grandmother, “you don’t deceive me;
somebody takes your roots away from you.”

“I want you to make me a bow and arrow,” said Nul-we, “and put
poison in the end of the arrow. I miss all the birds I shoot at with
sticks.” [75]

In the morning Limālimáas said to him: “I think you are about big
enough to eat.”

That night Nul-we said to his grandmother: “I dig a great many roots,
but a bad man comes and eats them all. He wears a necklace made
of bones. He says they are the bones of my father and of my mother
and of all my kin; and that my bones will make the necklace nice and
long.”

The grandmother was frightened, for she knew it was old

Limālimáas, the man who lived among the rocks. She gave Nul-we
his father’s strong bow and put fresh points on the arrows; then she
made the bow and arrows look like a little boy’s first bow and arrows,
and said: “That man’s heart isn’t in his body; it’s in the end of his first
finger; you must shoot him there.”

When Limālimáas came, the boy fed him lots of roots. He dug fast
and gave the old man all he could eat. Then Limālimáas lay down to
sleep. Usually he lay with his head on his hands, but that time he lay
with his face up and his hands spread out. Nul-we got his arrow
ready, and made up his mind which way to run; then, when he saw
something moving in Limālimáas’ finger, he shot. The heart came out
on the end of the arrow.

Limālimáas sprang up and ran after the boy. Ever so many times he
almost caught him, but each time Nul-we dodged and got away. At
last they came to a dried up river-bed where there were big rocks
and deep holes. Limālimáas was getting weak; he stumbled and fell
into a hole. Nul-we ran across the river-bed; then he turned and
called to Limālimáas: “You shall not live in this world and kill people.
Hereafter you will make a great noise, but you will not have the
power to harm anybody. When another strikes, you will shout for
him; that is all you will be able to do.”

Nul-we took the heart off the end of his arrow, blew it up into the sky,
and said: “You can go up there and live; you can’t live down here any
longer.”

Now Nul-we could dig roots and carry them to his grandmother; he
was glad, and he didn’t cry any more.

The old man-eater became Thunder. [76]

[Contents]