Walker - 1967 - A geography of Italy

PART l: SOME GEOGRAPHY AND HISTORY
their Sabellian kindred by the practice o f cremating their dead, concentrated in
southern Etruria and Latium, while the Sabellians, with whom the Latins mixed
to some extent, penetrated south along the Apennine backbone as far as Sicily.
These two Indo-European farming peoples, who provided the bulk o f the
population o f the Peninsula long before the traditional date o f the foimding of
Rome (753), had much in common, and although much strife lay ahead, there
was an underlying imity which was to become a political reality under Rome.
Before that time arrived, however, Italy was to come under the influence o f three
civilizations, much more advanced and o f a character difierent from anything so
far experienced. These were the Etruscan, the Greek and the Carthaginian.
The Etruscans remain something o f a mystery, but whether their origin is to
be sought in Italy or beyond the Alps or in Asia Minor, it seems likely that,
despite their distinctive racial contribution to the Italian population, they represented
even in Etruria an aristocratic minority ruling over a subject native
majority. A t its maximum extent (c. 550) the Etruscan sphere extended southwards
through Latium to northern Campania, northwards into the Po Valley,
where they founded Felsina (Bologna), Parma, Mutina, Brescia and Verona, and
overseas to the coastlands o f Corsica. The Etruscans must have made considerable
inroads into the original forest; apart from clearing for their serf-run agriculture,
timber was vital for their trade and shipbuilding, and for the smelting o f the
copper o f Volterrae, the tin o f M . Amiata and M . Catini and the iron o f Elba
which together provided their main commercial asset. In contrast to the Romans,
who despite their proximity to the sea were essentially ‘land-minded’, the
Etruscans were metal workers, traders and pirates with their eyes fixed seawards
to the Tyrrhenian. In the three-cornered struggle for the domination o f that area,
the Etruscans and Carthaginians frequently made common cause against the
Greeks whose colonization north o f Campania was consequently confined to the
Massilian coast. Oddly enough, their mutual hostility did not prevent trading
contacts, as the numerous Greek and Greek-inspired objects foimd on Etruscan
sites testify.^
About 400 BC the Gauls overran the thiifiy held Po Valley and soon after
Etruria itself. When the tide o f invasion turned, the Etruscan cities, much
weakened, fell more and more within the expanding Roman sphere, and by the
beginning o f the third century Etruria was virtually aimexed and later so
thoroughly Romanized that even the Etruscan language died out.
The Phoenicians, whose interests took them as far afield as the Atlantic coasts,
were the first to appreciate the importance to a seafaring people o f the waist of
the Mediterranean in linking the complementary trading areas o f the Eastern and
Western Basins. Before the foundation o f Carthage itself they had aimexed Malta,
Lampedusa and Pantelleria, and although many o f their early trading posts on
the Sicilian coasts disappeared in the face o f the more systematic Greek coloniza-
* Recent excavations at Spina, near Comacchio, show that it was an important centre for
the importation of Greek wares into the Etruscan territories by the Adriatic ‘back door’.
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