ABSTRACT

The history of Etruscan studies has always featured an unusually large number of forgers, and for good reason. In the first place, there was the matter of patriotism: long after the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the descendants of the Etruscans, well aware of their heritage, were tempted to embellish any ancestral story that glorified a culture conquered, but never entirely eradicated, by Rome. Furthermore, because the written Etruscan language largely disappeared from Italy at the time of the early Roman Empire, scholars from later periods were faced with a frustrating lack of first-hand information about one of the peninsula’s most important ancient populations. Their hunger for knowledge, however far-fetched, often overruled their skepticism. Needless to say, people who traced their ancestry back to Etruscan forebears were especially eager to grasp at any trace of their heritage, in any form: object or text, real, embroidered, or invented. And because the line between a vivid historical imagination and a vivid imagination is not always an easy one to draw, fictions about the Etruscans have ultimately been as plentiful as facts, from the tall tales told by medieval chroniclers to the lyrical prose of a dying D. H. Lawrence in Etruscan Places.