We find it in possession of a treaty with Rome, similar to that of the Camertes Umbri; and in 167 B.C. it was used as a place of safe custody for the Illyrian King Gentius and his sons (Livy xlv. 43). After the Social War, in which it took no part, it received Roman citizenship. At that epoch it must have received full citizen rights since it was included in the tribus Clustumina (C.I.L. xi. e.g. 5838). In 49 B.C. it was occupied by Minucius Thermus on behalf of Pompey, but he abandoned the town. Under the empire we hear almost nothing of it. Silius Italicus mentions it as subject to fogs. A bishop of Iguvium is mentioned as early as A.D. 413. It was taken and destroyed by the Goths in 552, but rebuilt with the help of Narses. The Umbrian town had three gates only, and probably lay on the steep mountain side as the present town does, while the Roman city lay in the lower ground. Here is the theatre, which, as an inscription records, was restored by Cn. Satrius Rufus in the time of Augustus. The diameter of the orchestra is 76½ ft. and of the whole 230 ft., so that it is a building of considerable size; the stage is well preserved and so are parts of the external arcades of the auditorium. Not far off are ruins probably of ancient baths, and the concrete core of a large tomb with a vaulted chamber within.
(T. As.)
Of Latin inscriptions (C.I.L. xi. 5803-5926) found at Iguvium two or three are of Augustan date, but none seem to be earlier. A Latin inscription of Iguvium (C.I.L. xi. 5824) mentions a priest whose functions are characteristic of the place “L. Veturius Rufio avispex extispecus, sacerdos publicus et privatus.”
The ancient town is chiefly celebrated for the famous Iguvine (less correctly Eugubine) Tables, which were discovered there in 1444, bought by the municipality in 1456, and are still preserved in the town hall. A Dominican, Leandro Alberti (Descrizione d’Italia, 1550), states that they were originally nine in number, and an independent authority, Antonio Concioli (Statuta civitatis Eugubii, 1673), states that two of the nine were taken to Venice in 1540 and never reappeared. The existing seven were first published in a careful but largely mistaken transcript by Buonarotti in 1724, as an appendix to Dempster’s De Etruria Regali.[1]
The first real advance towards their interpretation was made by Otfried Müller (Die Etrusker, 1828), who pointed out that though their alphabet was akin to the Etruscan their language was Italic. Lepsius, in his essay De tabulis Eugubinis (1833), finally determined the value of the Umbrian signs and the received order of the Tables, pointing out that those in Latin alphabet were the latest. He subsequently published what may be called the editio princeps in 1841. The first edition, with a full commentary based on scientific principles, was that of Aufrecht and Kirchhoff in 1849-1851, and on this all subsequent interpretations are based (Bréal, Paris, 1875; Bücheler, Umbrica, Bonn, 1883, a reprint and enlargement of articles in Fleckeisen’s Jahrbuch, 1875, pp. 127 and 313). The text is everywhere perfectly legible, and is excellently represented in photographs by the marquis Ranghiasci-Brancaleone, published with Bréal’s edition.
Language.—The dialect in which this ancient set of liturgies is written is usually known as Umbrian, as it is the only monument we possess of any length of the tongue spoken in the Umbrian district before it was latinized (see [Umbria]). The name, however, is certainly too wide, since an inscription from Tuder of, probably, the 3rd century B.C. (R. S. Conway, The Italic Dialects, 352) shows a final -s and a medial -d-, both apparently preserved from the changes which befell these sounds, as we shall see, in the dialect of Iguvium. On the other hand, inscriptions of Fulginia and Assisium (ibid. 354-355) agree very well, so far as they go, with Iguvine. It is especially necessary to make clear that the language known as Umbrian is that of a certain limited area, which cannot yet be shown to have extended very far beyond the eastern half of the Tiber valley (from Interamna Nahartium to Urvinum Mataurense), because the term is often used by archaeologists with a far wider connotation to include all the Italic, pre-Etruscan inhabitants of upper Italy; Professor Ridgeway, for instance, in his Early Age of Greece, frequently speaks of the “Umbrians” as the race to which belonged the Villanova culture of the Early Iron age. It is now one of the most urgent problems in the history of Italy to determine the actual historical relation (see further [Rome]: History, ad. init.) between the Ὀμβροί of, say, Herodotus and the language of Iguvium, of which we may now offer some description, using the term Umbrian strictly in this sense.
Under the headings [Latin Language] and [Osca Lingua] there have been collected (1) the points which separate all the Italic languages from their nearest congeners, and (2) those which separate Osco-Umbrian from Latin. We have now to notice (3) the points in which Umbrian has diverged from Oscan. The first of them antedates by six or seven centuries the similar change in the Romance languages (see [Romance Languages]).
(1) The palatalization of k and g before a following i or e, or consonant i as in tiçit (i.e. diçit) = Lat. decet; muieto past part. passive (pronounced as though the i were an English or French j) beside Umb. imperative mugatu, Lat. mugire.
(2) The loss of final -d, e.g. in the abl. sing. fem. Umb. tōtā = Osc. toutād.
(3) The change of d between vowels to a sound akin to r, written by a special symbol