Curiously, but presumably for reasons that made sense at the time, this system never applied to women of good family, each of whom had as her official name just the gentile nōmen, marked with the feminine ending -a. By this token, all women in a clan were interchangeable. Evidently this was impractical for everyday life, so pet names abounded. But these had no more status as badges of identity than the arbitrary name given to a slave.*
Romans adopted more than just the system. For praenōmina, they adopted pretty much the whole set of Etruscan names: in the table, we see the list of Etruscan forenames with their Roman equivalents. Most made no sense in Latin, but Tiberius clearly referred to the local river, and Marcus probably honoured the god Mars.14
As the table on the next page shows, many other names too were of Etruscan origin, often of the most famous individuals in Roman history. But whereas anyone could be given an Etruscan praenōmen, the possession of an Etruscan-derived nōmen or cognōmen must actually have said something about the remote lineage of the man who bore it. The name Caesar, for example, suggests that some remote ancestor (possibly Lucius Julius, who fought in the First Punic War around 250 BC) had had a significant link with the Etruscan city of Caere (called in Etruscan Caisr-).15
* The only surviving Roman praenomen for a woman was Gaia. Quintilian says that the abbreviation for it was ɔ, C reversed (Inst., i.7.28). It was only used at weddings, where the newlyweds were hailed as GAIVS ET GAIA. But GAIVSQVE LVCIVSQVE was the Latin equivalent of ‘Tom, Dick, and Harry’ (e.g., Martial, v.14.5).
This system was to die out in later antiquity, as social hierarchies changed. The ancient families lost power and influence (and their gentile names became widely diffused after AD 212 when all provincials became citizens). Praenōmina and nōmina were increasingly dropped for practical purposes: there were too few of them, so people too often had the same name. By contrast, cognōmina were more and more used as distinguishers, assigned to individuals and no longer inherited. The upending of the social order in the German invasions of the fifth century AD would reinstate the prestige of the old Indo-European system, which the Germans had never lost, as well as break up the social world into smaller units. And by then the general scatter of cognōmina among individuals meant that there was little left of the traditional system.
Surnames (the equivalent of Roman nōmina) would only make their reappearance across Europe gradually from the tenth century (starting, as it happened, in northern Italy), as the growing fluidity of population in urban centres, and trade links among them, made unworkable the system of simple name and father’s name, even when reinforced with a place of origin. But the fact that Latin had adopted, and sustained for a millennium, a form of the surname system fifteen hundred years ahead of its time speaks for the large-scale civic stability of Roman society from the seventh century BC to the third century AD, though—admittedly—no less for its conservatism and class consciousness.
But Etruria’s most important influence on Latin, ultimately, lay in having shown the Romans how to make Latin a written language. This is amply attested in the technical vocabulary for writing that became established in Latin. Scrībere ‘write’ itself seems to be a native word originally meaning ‘scratch’ or ‘incise’ (cf Russian skrebú, Lithuanian skrabu, Old English sćeorpan ‘scrape’), and legere ‘read’ originally meant just ‘pick up’; but much of the rest has come through Etruscan. Titulus ‘label’, hence ‘title’ and elementum ‘letter’ (apparently derived from L-M-N) seem to be Etruscan innovations. Most often the ultimate source is (unsurprisingly) in Greek. The key word littera ‘letter’ seems to be a reworking of the Greek diphthera ‘leather, parchment’. In cēra ‘wax’, the material on which many messages were scratched, the change of gender shows that the word was not borrowed directly from Greek kēros; an Etruscan intermediary is likely. Likewise, stilus, the implement for scratching, has no etymology and has also been proposed as a loan from Etruscan.16
The Etruscan and Latin alphabets show by their form that the Etruscans had acquired theirs from the (Euboean) Greeks of Italy, and the Romans from the Etruscans. The Euboean origin shows in the values of certain letters: notably F and Q survive, H represents [h] and X [ks] (although some early Latin inscriptions use Φ instead for this last). But the details of the transmission remain obscure: the earliest known Etruscan inscriptions are not found around the most likely point of contact, the island of Ischia, where the Euboeans had their emporium; and they include some letters (C instead of Γ, Μ in addition to Σ to represent the [s] sound) that came from the Corinthian, not the Euboean, alphabet. (But Syracuse, the most powerful of the Greek colonies in Italy, had been founded by Corinth; so this is not wholly surprising.)
Mirror of Volterra. This picture, from the back of a lady’s mirror, shows the goddess Juno formally accepting Hercules as her (adopted) son.
As in many cases of early literacy, the offer of writing to the Romans was not taken up as a chance to begin a literature; for them, as for their Etruscan tutors, the first writing seems to have been a means of making spells or formulas effective by setting them down on a permanent medium. The word zich, meaning ‘writing’ or ‘book’, is common in the Etruscan religious or legal documents that have survived. The boundary stone known as Cippus Perusinus ends with the phrase cecha zichuche ‘as has been written’. And likewise the Tabula Cortonensis, probably a land contract, contains the phrase cen zic zichuche ‘this writ was written’. In the depiction on a bronze mirror, found at Volterra, of the goddess Uni (Juno) being formally reconciled with Hercle (Hercules) by suckling him, a written plaque is held up by an attendant character, who by his trident must be Neptune. The plaque reads in Etruscan, eca sren tva ichnac hercle unial clan thrasce, which would be translated (word for word): “this picture shows how Hercules Juno’s son became.”
It is another example of a written statement being used formally to characterize something, in this case the point of a mythical situation. Early writing, such as the Etruscans knew, and such as they transmitted to the Romans, was for records.
Cui bono?—Rome’s Winning Ways
QVIS, QVID, VBI, QVIBVS AVXILIIS, CVR, QVOMODO, QVANDO?
Who, what, where, by what means, why, how, when?
Traditional hexameter line, setting out lines of analysis
IN THE FOURTH CENTURY BC the many cities of Greece’s classical era yielded to the single dominating power of Macedon: Athens, Thebes, and Sparta were among them, but even they were powerless to organize resistance. In that same century, as we have seen, the many cultured cities of Etruria too lost their independence: one by one, they succumbed to the gathering might of Rome. The demolition of leagues of city-states by single, centralized powers—powers that had previously seemed rather backward—was