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THE HETAERAE
This wall-painting is apparently a faithful copy of a Greek painted representation of a symposium with hetaerae, and this is also Weege’s view of the scene. In his opinion, those who take part in the drinking bouts of the young men are not married or respectable women, but hetaerae. It seems to me that such a representation in a tomb would argue a complete dissolution of family relations in ancient Etruria, whether we choose to interpret the pictures as scenes from life, or as an expression of the wish that the next life might take the form of nothing more or less than a revel with hetaerae. Weege maintains, further, that hetaerae reclined at table, whereas wives sat with their husbands: but this is contrary to the express literary tradition, according to which the Greeks were shocked because the Etruscan women reclined at table with men ‘under the same coverlet’. The earliest authority for this statement is Aristotle[49] and, according to this and other accounts of the fourth century B.C., the free intercourse between men and women gave rise to much immorality, the women abandoning themselves to the strange men with whom they reclined.[50] It would have been absurd for the Greeks to take offence at this if it did not apply to free-born women of good family, but only to hetaerae, who in Hellas did exactly the same. How things were with the Greeks in this respect is made sufficiently clear by a passage in the orator Isaeus[51]: ‘No one would dare to serenade married women, and neither do the married women attend banquets with their husbands, nor do they consider it proper to partake of meals with strangers, especially chance acquaintances’.
With this severe Athenian custom we must compare these scandalized Greek outbursts, and, at the same time, we must remember that in the fourth century B.C. Etruscan civilization and morals were already on the decline, so that an original latitude, which in the beginning of the fifth century was natural and did not affect the morals of domestic life, may at this time have been abused. Incidentally, we are able to ascertain the degree of exaggeration in another Greek account of the same time concerning the luxuriousness of the Etruscans[52]: ‘They reclined on flowered cushions drinking out of sumptuous silver bowls and attended by servants in costly dresses, sometimes by naked women.’ In the Etruscan paintings there are numerous naked pages in attendance, just as in the Greek symposium pictures, but not a single naked handmaid. As to the question whether respectable women reclined or sat at table, invariable rules did not exist in Etruria any more than they existed in ancient Rome, where we know that Jupiter alone reclined at the lectisternia (the sacred banquets given by the state) whereas Juno and Minerva sat; furthermore, in the last century of the republic, respectable women sat with the men at banquets, while brides reclined.[53] The practice of brides reclining can hardly, however, be accounted for except as a case of adherence to an ancient and honourable custom which was superseded by later and severer notions.
Etruscan works of art, however, give sufficient information to confute the whole of Weege’s hetaera theory. Man and woman are often seen reclining together on Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns, and on the face of it it would seem improbable that a man would have himself pictured on his sarcophagus with a hetaera. Dr. S. P. Cortsen kindly informs me that this view is confirmed by the fact that two of these cinerary urns with a pair of figures on the lid have an inscription in which the word tusurthi or tusurthir occurs—one of the few Etruscan words the signification of which is certain: it means ‘spouses’.[54] And if we look at the type of womanhood represented in several of the recumbent couples on the later urns, when realism prevails in Etruscan portrait sculpture, the appellation hetaera becomes as preposterous as that of matrons is certain ([fig. 25]).[55]
Fig. 26. PICTURE FROM THE TOMBA DEGLI SCUDI AT CORNETO
