ABSTRACT
The diffusion of Etruscan products in the Mediterranean is amply documented in the seventh and sixth centuries (all dates bc), during the “Belle Époque” of Etruscan civilization. The archaeological discoveries relating to maritime trade confirm the attestation of the historian Livy concerning the Etruscans who “had long extended their dominion over land and sea.”1 Often we envisage the emergence of this Etruscan Golden Age in an overly schematic manner. Thus, one might think that the Etruria of the Orientalizing period marks a phase of opening-up, after a long period of “Proto-Etruscan” gestation when the Villanovan villages would have lived in isolation from each other and cut off from the wider world. In the eighth century it was the Greek colonies in southern Italy, and Phoenicians from Carthage to Sardinia and even up to south-eastern Iberia, who induced a complete transformation of Etruscan civilization. Etruscan art, and as well the entire culture and fringe technology, were quite simply transformed based on Greek and oriental models (see Chapter 6). And so it was only around 670 that the Etruscans embarked on their sea voyages, which the Greeks, their primary maritime rivals, denounced as acts of piracy.
