The Construction of Etruscan ‘Otherness’ in Latin Literature

Abstract

This paper deals with issues of ethnic representation; it aims at highlighting how Roman authors tend to portray the Etruscans as ‘others’, whose cultural models deeply differ from those proposed by Rome. Several studies, conducted from different disciplinary and methodological positions, have highlighted the existence, in the Greek world, of complex representations of ‘other peoples’, representations that served political, cultural, and economic purposes. Whether the study of alterity is to be set in the context of a Greek response to the Persian wars (as P. Cartledge and others have pointed out, the creation of the barbarian seems to be primarily a Greek ideology opposing the Greeks to all other peoples), or not, it seems clear from scholarly studies that the Romans often drew upon and reworked Greek characterizations, and created specific representations of other peoples. Latin literature, which (as T. N. Habinek has noted), served the interests of Roman power, abounds with examples of ethnographic and literary descriptions of foreign peoples consciously aimed at defining and marginalizing ‘the other’ in relation to Roman founding cultural values, and functional to evolving Roman interests. Outstanding examples are Caesar's Commentarii and Tacitus' ideological and idealized representation of the Germans as an uncorrupted, warlike people in the Germania. In several cases there is evidence of layering in the representation of foreign peoples, since Roman authors often re-craft Greek representations: thus, the biased Roman portrayal of the Near East or of the Sardinians largely draws on Greek representations; in portraying the Samnites, Latin authors reshaped elements already elaborated by the Tarentines.