Italy Before Rome

A Sourcebook

Katherine McDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429628061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

This book brings together sources translated from a wide variety of ancient languages to showcase the rich history of pre-Roman Italy, including its cultures, politics, trade, languages, writing systems, religious rituals, magical practices, and conflicts.

This book allows readers to access diverse sources relating to the history and cultures of pre-Roman Italy. It gathers and translates sources from both Greek and Latin literature and ancient inscriptions in multiple languages and gives commentary to highlight areas of particular interest. The thematic organisation of this sourcebook helps readers to make connections across languages and communities, and showcases the interconnectedness of ancient Italy. This book includes maps, a timeline, and guides to further reading, making it accessible to students and other readers who are new to this subject.

Italy Before Rome is aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, including those who have not studied the ancient world before. It is also intended to be useful to researchers approaching this material for the first time, and to university and schoolteachers looking for an overview of early Italian sources.

1

ORIGINS

DOI: 10.4324/9780429052910-2

Pelasgians, Oinotrians and Aborigines

Greeks and Romans were fascinated by origin stories. Many writers spend a lot of time trying to establish who the first peoples of Italy were, where they came from and when they arrived in Italy. But as soon as we start to read these accounts, we can see there is no consensus whatsoever about the early history of Italy. There are also no contemporary written records of this time, as writing did not arrive in Italy until c. 800 bce (Chapter 5). As a result, the histories of this early period are a mixture of tradition, myth, legend and projection back from the writers’ own times.

The sources in this chapter can be confusing to read, especially when trying to get to grips with them for the first time. Many of the ethnic names mentioned by poets simply connoted ‘barbarian group in contact with Greek-speaking world’ and could be used to describe different communities at different times. The same names are used for groups in very different places and periods, and some ancient authors try (with difficulty) to make plausible connections between all the groups that bear the same name. Historians such as Dionysius of Halikarnassos (Source 1.13) sometimes present multiple different theories and try to weigh up the likelihood of each version being correct. Nevertheless, later attempts by Greco-Roman historians and geographers to define these groups should not lead us to think they all really existed as distinct communities.

Names that recur across multiple sources are ‘Aborigines’ (from the Latin phrase ab origine, ‘from the beginning’), ‘Pelasgians’, ‘Oinotrians’ and ‘Tyrrhenians’. The last of these groups is the easiest to pin down, because it is usually an alternative name for the Etruscans. But there are some mentions of the Tyrrhenians when it is unclear that ‘Etruscans’ are meant specifically – for example, the ‘Tyrrhenian’ pirates in the Homeric hymn to Dionysus may just be ‘barbarian’ pirates (Source 2.16).

‘Aborigines’, as the name suggests, is normally the name given to the autochthonous people of Italy. But even this is sometimes questioned – as we will see, some sources claim that they are actually aberrigines or ‘wanderers’ (Source 1.4). ‘Pelasgian’ and ‘Oinotrian’ are sometimes presented as different names for the same group, or names for two parts of the same group. Some accounts say that the Pelasgians migrated to Italy from Greece after the Trojan War; for example, in Homer, ‘Pelasgians’ are associated with Greece, usually Thessaly or Crete (Source 1.1). Other writers suggest that the Pelasgians may be autochthonous – that is, they may be native to Italy. Still others (such as Sophocles) connect the Pelasgians to the Etruscans. In general, ‘Pelasgians’ appears to be a term that was used very broadly for various Italian peoples (Wallace-Hadrill 2011, 415–416).

‘Oinotrian’ is a name associated with the south of Italy (Roller 2017, 33), and often connected to a migration from Greece. Pausanias, for example, calls the Oinotrians the first migration from Greece to Italy, and explicitly names Oinotros as the first founder of an apoikia (the Greek name for a settlement abroad) (Source 1.5). The name ‘Oinotrian’ has sometimes been assigned to an early Italic language, or a group of closely related languages, in the south of Italy before the expansion of the Samnites and their Oscan language into the region. One of the longest and most keenly debated of these ‘Pre-Samnite’ texts is the Tortora Cippus (Source 1.6), which appears to be an early legal text (c. 600 bce).

Other ethnic groups which are sometimes named by ancient authors include the Sikels (also associated with Sicily), the Opikoi, Oskoi or Osci (associated with Campania, and often confused or conflated with the Oscan-speakers who lived in that area later), the Ausones or Aurunci (associated with the central and southern parts of Italy). These names are used interchangeably by some authors.

Ultimately, we cannot untangle the ‘real’ communities behind these names. The names represent only a Greco-Roman attempt, many centuries later, to make sense of the distant past. These stories do tell us a lot, however, about Greek and Roman attitudes to migration and autochthony, and their understanding of the relationships between languages and peoples in their own time. They also show how Greco-Roman writers sought to get to grips with their own distant past through storytelling about themselves and their neighbours (Crielaard 2009, 39).

1.1 Pelasgians

This is one of the earliest mentions of the Pelasgians; here they live in Larisa, in Thrace (part of mainland Greece). Homer also mentions them living in Crete in the Odyssey (19.177).

Homer, Iliad 2.840–844

Probably first recorded eighth–sixth century bce.

Language: Greek.

And Hippothoos led the Pelasgian peoples who fought with spears

and dwelt in loamy Larisa:

Hippothoos and Pylaios, descendant of Ares, led them,

the two sons of Pelasgian Lethos, son of Teutamos.

1.2 Tyrrhenian Pelasgians

Here the Pelasgians are connected to, or perhaps equated with, the Tyrrhenians (Etruscans).

Sophocles, Inakhos fragment 270

Lived c. 497/6–406/5 bce.

Language: Greek.

Flowing Inakhos, child of Ocean,

father of springs, taking precedence

in the lands of Argos and in Hera’s rocky hills

and among the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians.

1.3 The languages of the Pelasgians and Tyrsenians

In this passage, Herodotus uses his knowledge of the languages spoken in his own time to try to understand the relationships between different groups in the past. He seems to place both the Pelasgians and Tyrrhenians in Thrace. Note that in Herodotus’s dialect of Greek, ‘Tyrrhenian’ is written as ‘Tyrsenian’.

Herodotus, Histories 1.57–58

Lived c. 484–425 bce.

Language: Greek.

[57.1] I cannot say for certain what language the Pelasgians spoke. But if it is possible to make a judgement from the Pelasgians who live above the Tyrsenians in the city of Kreston, who at one time shared a border with those now called Dorians and lived in the land now called Thessaly, [57.2] and the Pelasgians who lived in Plakia and Skylake on the Hellespont, who became fellow-inhabitants of the Athenians, and by the many other settlements that were Pelasgian but have now changed their names – if it is possible to judge from all of these, then the Pelasgians spoke a non-Greek language.

[57.3] If, then, all of the Pelasgians spoke in this way, then the Attic people, being Pelasgian, learned the Greek language at the same time as they became Greeks. For the people of Kreston and the people of Plakia speak the same language as each other, but do not speak the same language as their neighbours, and it is clear that they brought this way of speaking with them when they arrived in the area, and that they have preserved it.

[58] But the Greeks – I think this is clear – have always consistently used the same language. They split from the Pelasgians and initially had a tiny population. But from these small beginnings they set off and grew into a huge number of peoples, and most of the Pelasgians and many other barbarian peoples have joined them.

1.4 Aborigines

In this passage, Dionysius discusses the Aborigines. He ties the history of the Aborigines into Roman accounts which claimed that Rome had been founded by the Trojan Aeneas, who came to Italy after the Trojan War. For the term ‘apoikia’, see Chapter 3.

Dionysius of Halikarnassos, Roman Antiquities 1.10–11

Lived c. 60–7 bce.

Language: Greek.

[10.1] Some say that the Aborigines, from whom the Romans sprang, were autochthonous Italians, who appeared from nowhere. (When I say ‘Italy’, I mean the whole peninsula, bounded by the Ionian Gulf, the Tyrrhenian Sea and, by land, the Alps.) And they say that this name was originally given to them because they were the first ancestors of those who came after them, so we might call them the ‘Founding Fathers’ or the ‘First Generation’. [10.2] But others say that a few homeless people and wanderers came together from many areas, stumbled on each other in that spot and made a defensible home there, and made their living by piracy and pasturage. And the people wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and maps
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and conventions
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 Etruscan life and death
• 3 Great Greece
• 4 From Samnites to Italians
• 5 Alphabets, literacy and names
• 6 Gods and humans
• 7 Rituals and sacrifice
• 8 Magic and divination
• 9 Italy at war
• Index locorum
• Subject index