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CHAPTER 2
Fons et origo—Latin’s Kin
MAIORES NOSTRI…VIRVM BONVM CVM LAVDABANT, ITA LAVDABANT, BONVM AGRICOLAM BONVMQVE COLONVM. AMPLISSIME LAVDARI EXISTIMABATVR, QVI ITA LAVDABATVR.
Our ancestors … when they singled out a good man for praise, used these words: “a good farmer and a good settler.” Someone so praised was thought to have received the highest esteem.
Cato, On the Country Life1
LATIN OWES ITS NAME to its home region of Latium in west-central Italy, the southern half of modern Lazio. With hindsight, it certainly looks a good starting point for a future Italian, and then Mediterranean, power. Its position is central in Italy, and it controls the ford on the river Tiber (modern Tevere), which is the main divider of Italy’s western coastal plains. Italy, in turn, is central within the northern sector of the Mediterranean, equidistant from Spain in the west and Asia Minor (modern Turkey) in the east.
The first question that naturally arises is why the language is not known as “Roman,” for the power that spread the language far and wide was not Latium, but the city-state of Rome, and the result was the Roman, not the Latin, Empire. But the Romans’ influence was usually decisive, even with outsiders, in setting the names of their institutions; and the Romans always referred to their language as lingua Latīna, or sermō Latīnus. It shows that the language is older, and its area, originally at least, wider than the Roman state.
Languages of ancient Italy. Until the third century BC, Latin was just one among many Italic languages.
Looking as far back as we can to the origins of Latin, we do not have the convenience (as we do for English) of being able to give it a place and a period. But it is discernibly an Indo-European language, a member of a highly diverse family of related languages whose borders were set, before recorded history, between Bengal and Donegal (and indeed between Iberia and the edge of Siberia). Its speakers will have reached Latium along with the forerunners of most of the other language communities that largely surrounded Latin when we read their first traces in the written record. They are called Italic languages and included Faliscan, Umbrian, and Venetic to the north, Oscan to the south.* Sadly, there is no agreement on when these languages would have come to Italy (sometime between the sixth and the second millennia BC, but all as a group, or in separate events?), on what allowed their speakers to spread (prowess at farming? Copper, Bronze, or Iron Age weaponry?), or even on what their route would have been (over the sea from the Balkans? down the Adriatic or the Tyrrhenian coasts?). We can only say where in the Italian peninsula the Italic languages ended up, and what sort of languages they were.
As to where in Italy they settled, it is clear that there were two major groups or subfamilies: Latin-Faliscan-Venetic settled the north, whereas Oscan and the rest, usually known as the Sabellian languages, occupied most of the south of Italy. The main exception to this pattern is Umbrian, a dialect which is more similar to Oscan than northern Italic; so its position in north-central Italy suggests that the Umbrians migrated later from the south up into the Apennines. It is also significant that the very similar Latin and Faliscan—a dialect best known for its drinker’s motto FOIED VINO PIPAFO CRA CAREFO “Today I shall drink wine; tomorrow I shall go without.”2—were separated from their cousin Venetic by a large, and totally unrelated, Etruscan-speaking population. The geography suggests that the Etruscans moved in from the west, splitting the two wings of northern Italic apart.
The Italic languages were not mutually intelligible, at least not across their full range. An idea of how different they could be may be gained from looking at some very short texts in the two best known and farthest flung (Venetic and Oscan) with a word-for-word translation into Latin. (For comprehensibility, none of the languages is shown in its actual alphabet.)
First a Venetic inscription on a bronze nail, found at Este:
mego zontasto sainatei reitiai egeotora aimoi ke louzerobos [Venetic]
me dōnāvit sanātricī reitiae egetora aemō līberīsque [Latin]
i.e., word for word in English:
“me gave to-healer to-Reitia Egetora for Aemus and children”
or more clearly:
“Egetora gave me to Reitia the healer for Aemus and his children.”
And then a clause of a Roman magistrate’s arbitration (183 BC) between Nola and Avellino, written on a boundary stone:
avt púst feihúís pús fisnam amfret, eíseí tereí nep abellanús nep nuvlanús pídum tríbarakattins [Oscan]*
autem pōst murōs quī fānum ambiunt, in eā terrā neque avellānī neque nōlānī quicquam aedificāverint [Latin]
i.e., word for word in English:
“but behind walls which temple they-surround, on that land neither Avellani nor Nolani anything they-shall-have-built”
or more clearly:
“but behind the walls which surround the temple, on that land neither the Avellani nor the Nolani may build anything.”
Nevertheless, there are striking similarities among them, and features, from the most specific to the most general, that set Italic languages apart from the other Indo-European languages.
First of all, a distinctive sound in Italic is the consonant f. It is extremely common, cropping up mostly in words where the Indo-European parent language had once had either bh or dh. In Latin, the sound is mostly restricted to the beginning of words, but in Oscan and Umbrian it often occurs too in the middle: Latin fūmus, facit, forēs, fingit; Oscan feihús, mefiú; Umbrian rufru—meaning ‘smoke, does, doors, makes’; ‘walls, middle’; ‘red’.*
With respect to meanings, the verb form ‘I am’ is sum or esom, with a vowel (o or u) in the middle and none at the end; there is no sign of such a vowel in Greek eimí, Sanskrit asmi, Gothic im, Hittite ešmi. There are also some distinctive nuances of words in the Italic vocabulary (asterisks show that forms are historical reconstructions): the common Indo-European root *deikmeans ‘say’ here (Latin dīcere, Oscan deíkum), not ‘show’ as it does in the other languages (Greek deíknumi, Sanskrit diśati, English token); also, the root *dhē- means ‘do’ or ‘make’ (Latin facere, Oscan fakiiad, Umbrian façia, Venetic vhagsto ‘made’) and not ‘put’ as it does in the other languages (Greek -thēke, Sanskrit -dhā-).
The pattern of verb forms is simplified and regularized from Indo-European in a distinctive way. As every schoolboy once knew, Latin had four different classes of verbs, each with slightly different endings, known as conjugations. The different sets of endings corresponded to the vowel that closes the stem and preceded the endings (as amā- ‘love’, monē- ‘warn’, regĭ- ‘rule’, audī-‘hear’). This vowel then largely determined the precise forms of all the verb’s endings, 106 choices in all.† Something similar is seen in Oscan and Venetic verbs. This is complex by comparison with English, but is in fact rather simpler than the fuller, differently organized systems seen in such distantly related languages as Greek, Sanskrit, or Gothic, where one can find more persons (dual as well as singular and plural), an extra tense (aorist), voice (middle), and moods (optative, benedictive).
The nouns, on the other hand, followed five patterns (declensions), choosing a set of endings on the basis of their stem vowel (-a, -o, none, or -i, -u, -e): the endings marked whether a noun was singular or plural (here too, in Italic languages, dual was not an option), and which case it was in, i.e., what its function was in the sentence; the cases were nominative (for subject), accusative (for object), genitive (for a noun dependent on another noun), dative (for a recipient), ablative (for a source), locative (for a place), and vocative (for an addressee), though the last two had become marginal in Latin. Hence analogously to a Latin noun like hortus ‘garden’, which had a pattern of endings
Sing. N. hortus, Ac. hortum, G. hortī, D. hortō, Ab. hortō, L. (hortō), V. horte Plur. N. hortī, Ac. hortōs, G. hortōrum, D., Ab., L. hortīs
we find in Oscan (remembering that ú was probably pronounced just like ō)
Sing. N. húrz, Ac. húrtúm, G.*húrteis, D. húrtúí, Ab. *húrtúd, L. *húrtei, V. ? Plur. N. *húrtús, Ac. *húrtúss, G. *húrtúm, D., Ab., L. *húrtúís.
On this kind of evidence, one can say that Latin and Oscan in the second century BC were about as similar as Spanish and Portuguese are today.
Consciousness of Latin as a language with its own identity began in the words of the poet Gnaeus Naevius, one of the very first in the Latin canon, writing from 235 to 204 BC. He wrote his own epitaph, showing either a concern that the language was in danger of decay, or an inordinate pride in his own literary worth!
Naevius is the earliest Latin poet whose works have survived. (He was actually a man of Campania and so probably grew up speaking Oscan.) But when these words were written, at the end of the third century BC, Rome already had three centuries of forthrightly independent existence behind her, and we know that Latin had been a written language for all of that time. Our earliest surviving inscriptions are from the sixth century BC.
Latin had been literate, then, but not literary: scribes will have noted down important utterances, but few will have consulted those records after the immediate need for which they had been made. One ancient historian recounted that important laws were stored on bronze pillars in the temple of Diana on Rome’s Aventine Hill,3 and at least one ancient inscribed stone has been found in the Roman Forum.4 There was a tradition at Rome that the law was set down publicly on Twelve Tables in 450, but the fragments that survive, quoted in later literature, are all in suspiciously classical-looking Latin.5 It seems unlikely that there was any canon of texts playing a part in Roman education in this early period.* Famously, the important written texts, such as the Sibylline Books, consulted at times of crisis by the Roman government, were not in Latin but in Greek. The absence of a literary tradition in Latin until the second century seems to have allowed speakers to lose touch with their own language’s past, in a way that would have been unthinkable, say, for Greeks in the same period.
The Duenos ceramic, a tripartite vase of uncertain, but perhaps erotic, use. It holds the earliest substantial inscription in Latin (sixth to fifth centuries BC).
In fact, about three generations after Naevius, the historian Polybius managed to locate the text of a treaty that had been struck between Rome and Carthage, explicitly dating it to the first year of the Roman Republic, 508 BC (“under Lucius Junius Brutus and Marcus Horatius, the first consuls after the expulsion of the kings, twenty-eight years before Xerxes crossed into Greece”). He commented, “We have transcribed this, interpreting it to the limits of accuracy possible. But such a great difference in dialect has arisen between modern and ancient that the most expert Romans can barely elucidate parts of it, even after careful study.”6
He then quoted it in full, but tantalizingly only in Greek translation. However, one of the few inscribed survivals from earlier Latin may offer a hint at the kind of difficulties those Roman experts were encountering. Latin grammar had moved on quite smartly in those two hundred years; and many old inscriptions remain enduringly obscure, even though we now can approach them with a comparative knowledge of other Indo-European languages inconceivable to contemporaries.
Consider for example the oldest substantial example, on the famous DVENOS ceramic, a tripartite, interconnecting vase rather reminiscent of a Wankel engine. Found in Rome in 1880, it is dated to the sixth or early fifth century BC, the same period as that early treaty.
The inscription is in three lines, which may be transcribed as
IOVESATDEIVOSQOIMEDMITATNEITEDENDOCOSMISVIRCOSIED
ASTEDNOISIOPETOITESIAIPAKARIVOIS
DVENOSMEDFECEDENMANOMEINOMDUENOINEMEDMALOSTATOD
and which are conjectured to mean
He who uses me to soften, swears by the gods.
In case a maiden should not be kind in your case,
but you wish her placated with delicacies for her favours.
A good man made me for a happy outcome.
Let no ill from me befall a good man.7
This is unlikely to be fully correct—some of the vocabulary may simply be beyond our ken because the words died out—but even if it is, it presupposes that the words here must have changed massively over three centuries to become part of a language that Naevius would have recognized. Here is a reconstruction into classical Latin, with the necessary changes underlined:
iurat diuos qui per me mitigat.ni in te_comis virgo sietast [cibis] [fututioni] ei pacari vis.bonus me fecit in manum munus. bono_ne e me_malum stato
Virtually every word had changed its form, pronunciation, or at least its spelling between the sixth and the third centuries BC. This shows what rapid change for Latin occurred in these three centuries, comparable to what happened to English between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries AD, when Anglo-Saxon (typified by the Beowulf poem), totally unintelligible to modern speakers, gave way to Middle English (typified by Chaucer’s writings), on the threshold of the modern language.
The inscription that circles the Duenos ceramic. Written in a highly archaic form of Latin, it appears to offer a love potion.
Yet (again like English), as reading and writing became more widespread, the pace of change in the language was to slow dramatically. Naevius’ poetry of the third century remained comprehensible to Cicero in the first, and indeed Plautus’ comedies, written in the early second century BC, were still being performed in the first century AD. Those plays are in fact written in a Latin close to the classical standard, canonized by Cicero and the Golden Age literature that followed him, a literary language that was simply not allowed to change after the first century BC, since every subsequent generation was taught not only to read it but to imitate it.
But why did this language, which only came to a painful self-awareness in the third century BC, go on to supplant not only all the other languages of Italy but almost all the other languages of western Europe as well? In the sixth century BC, a neutral observer could only have assumed that if Italy was destined to be unified, it would be under the Etruscans; and in the third century BC, Latin was still far less widely spoken than Oscan. Where did it all go right for Latin, and for Rome?
CHAPTER 3
Sub rosa—Latin’s Etruscan Stepmother
thesan tins, thesan eiseras seus, unus mlakh nunthen thesviti favitic fasei, cishum thesane ushlanec mlakhe luri zeric, zec athelis sacnicla cilthl spural methlumesc
Dawn of the Day-god, Dawn of All the Gods, you in your goodness I invoke in the east and in the west with a libation, and three times, at dawn, at high noon, and by the serene brightness (of the stars), as written by the ancestors, for the citizens of the tribe, the city, and the nation.
Etruscan prayer1
THE ETRUSCANS ARE FAMOUS for their attendant mystery. The puzzle of their origins goes back three thousand years; but when we first have evidence of which named people lived where in Italy, the Etruscans were already firmly ensconced in the northwest, richer and more powerful than any of the other residents. The identity of their language is at the heart of the mystery, since it was clearly unrelated to all the Indo-European languages, most of them Italic languages, that surrounded it on every side. Unlike them, it was an agglutinative language—which means that it was structurally more like Central Asian Turkish or Peruvian Quechua than Latin or Gaulish, or indeed other neighbouring languages such as Greek (in Sicily) or Punic (in Sardinia). Any words that it shared with its neighbours are seen as individual cultural borrowings; they are not the kind of similarities, more distant yet more systematic, that could stand as evidence of a common origin.
Rome was to establish itself as the successor to the Etruscans, but before it could do so, it first had to extricate itself from their dominance. More permanently, this political transition would lead to the linguistic spread of Latin, as the successor language in Etruria.
The Etruscans were clearly the dominant power in Italy in the period when the Greeks, farther east, were establishing their classical culture. This raises the question why they were so much more outgoing and culturally influential than their local neighbours, who spoke Italic languages: for the Etruscans in their heyday were challenged only by the two seafaring powers, the Carthaginians (who were largely their allies), and the Greeks (who largely opposed them).
This period was largely documented through Greek sources: Greeks were literate and well-travelled in the middle of the first millennium BC. But it was also revealed through the discovery of inscriptions, and the Etruscans’ distinctive black bucchero pottery. In it we can see evidence of the Etruscans expanding their power and commercial reach around what became known as the Tyrrhenian (i.e., Etruscan) Sea, as well as eastward overland from their famed “Twelve Cities.” In the eighth century BC they were colonizing Campania in the southwest, but also northern Italy across to the Adriatic. With Greeks from Euboea they established a trading presence in Ischia. In 540 BC, in alliance with Carthage, they defeated the Phocaean Greeks at the Battle of the Sardinian Sea and established a foothold in Corsica.
Etruscan “forward policy,” 750–475 BC. Etruscan influence extended beyond the “Twelve Cities” of Etruria north into the valley of the Po and south along the Campanian coast.
They suffered a major reverse in 511 at Aricia, just south of Rome, when they lost to an alliance of Cumaean Greeks and Latins; two generations later in 474, they were defeated at Cumae itself by the combined naval forces of Cumae and Syracuse. Thereafter they rapidly lost their southern Italian bases and dependencies. It was the end of the Etruscan “forward policy,” which had lasted for three hundred years. The next two centuries of Etruscan history were taken up with a long, drawn-out series of unsuccessful defences, as one by one each of their cities yielded to the encroaching new power, Rome. The first city to engage Rome, in 477, was Veii, Rome’s close neighbour north of the Tiber; but the struggle continued for eighty-one years, until Veii’s annihilation in 396. The last one, Volsinii, fell in 264, 132 years later.
One clue to Etruscan identity lies in their various names for their nation. Their name for themselves was rasna or rasenna, but this turns out (like so many accepted ethnonyms all over the world) to be just their word for ‘people’. The Greeks, however, were introduced to them as tursānoi.2 In the Ionian Greek accent (which was characteristic of the Euboean and Phocaean colonists active in the area), this comes out as tursēnoi; and in Attic Greek (which, being Athenian, became the standard) as turrēnoi. (This was Romanized as ‘Tyrrheni’, still seen in the name of the Tyrrhenian Sea, modern Italian Mare Tirreno, which had once been the Etruscan lake.) Some Greeks knew them as turranoi, perhaps a compromise pronunciation; their own dedication plaque left at Delphi is marked in Greek TURRANO; and Hiero of Syracuse, on helmets taken at the battle of Cumae and dedicated at Olympia, wrote the name TURAN.3 By contrast, the Latin name for them was Etrusci or Tusci. If the final consonant here is an adjectival ending (compare Graii vs. Graeci for Greeks, Poeni vs. Punici for Carthaginians), then the root looks like TRUS or TURS, also seen in tursanoi.4
Now, it is a remarkable fact that apparently this same root underlies the Greek words for Troy (troia) and Trojans (trōes), namely TRŌS.5 So Troia and Etrūria would have the same origin: they are Greek and Etruscan-Latin developments, respectively, of the root TRŌS-IA.6
Coins showing Venus on one side with Aeneas carrying his father to safety on the reverse, and a votive statue of Aeneas and his father. Aeneas, the Trojan refugee to Italy, was a cultural hero of the Etruscans before the Romans.
For this, the cultural background turns out to fit pretty well. Not only is there a story in Herodotus7 that the Tyrsēnoi migrated from Asia Minor (admittedly it is a story that they came from Lydia, about two hundred kilometres south of Troy),* but Hellanicus, a contemporary historian whose works have not survived, also apparently related that the Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians (i.e., pre-Greek inhabitants of the Aegean) who had migrated to Italy when driven out by the Greeks.8 It was also a persistent theme of ancient folklore that some Trojans at least had escaped from the destruction of their city and headed west. Virgil, Rome’s national poet, of course employed this as the basis for his Aeneid, with Aeneas leading a party of escaped Trojans ultimately to settle in Latium, there allying with the native Latini (specifically against the Etruscans) to found the race of Romans. And in the previous generation Julius Caesar himself had liked to trace his family’s ancestry back to Aeneas’ son Iulus: during his dictatorship he struck a coin that showed Venus on the front and Aeneas leaving Troy on the reverse.
But it is clear from votive statues found in the city of Veii (dated to 515–490 BC), and a score of vases (525–470) found farther north, especially in Vulci, all depicting Aeneas dutifully carrying his father to safety, that Aeneas the heroic Trojan survivor was already a cult figure, and a putative founding father, among the Etruscans themselves before the Romans appropriated him.9
Pursuing the origins of the Etruscans any further would not enhance an understanding of their impact on Latin. But the mystery remains, if anything, deeper today than ever before. Suffice it to say that trails of evidence lead in two apparently incompatible directions: one to the island of Lemnos, not far from Troy, where an epitaph from the late sixth century BC in a language closely related to Etruscan has been found, and even read; but the other to the eastern reaches of the Alps, where another language, clearly but more distantly related to Etruscan, and known as Rhaetic, survives in inscriptions from 500 to 50 BC. Clearly Etruscan had some link with the eastern Mediterranean; but rather than being an import from Asia Minor, the language may have been a remnant from Europe’s pre-Indo-European past.10
The Etruscans left abundant evidence of how luxurious a life their aristocrats were able to lead—and perhaps hoped to continue in the afterlife. Some of their tombs were decorated with exquisite, brightly coloured wall paintings, which show much feasting, juggling, lyre and flute music and dancing, wrestling and game playing, enjoyment of gardens, hunting, and fishing. The coffins themselves were often elaborate statues, showing the deceased reclining as in life, occasionally as devoted couples lying down to dinner. Pottery and the engravings on the backs of mirrors show much of the same, but add more sober themes: sacrifice of animals, consultation of entrails, soldiers with crested helmets, warships, battle elephants, sea creatures including seals and octopuses.
The only work to match them at the time came from Greece or the Near East, and this again underlines how advanced the Etruscans were in the Italy of the sixth century BC. The city that was to become modern Bologna began as an Etruscan foundation of this period, Felsina. They had by then expanded beyond their cities in Etruria to control the full extent of the Po’s drainage in northeastern Italy and were also influential along the southwestern coast of Italy, well to the south of Rome. How was it that this political and cultural advantage did not translate into a permanent empire? And if this had happened, is there a chance that Etruscan might have supplanted all the Italic languages, including the then rather insignificant Latin?
Urn of the Spouses. This funerary image, now in the Museo Guarnacci, shows an ideal picture of Etruscan marital harmony.
Rome was the immediate neighbour to the south of their northern domains, which they seem to have dominated for a time, but then lost. The direct evidence that they controlled Rome was the Etruscan name (properly spelled Tarchunies) that was borne by two of Rome’s latter kings, Tarquinius Priscus (‘the Ancient’) and Tarquinius Superbus (‘the Proud’). The emperor Claudius (himself a serious Etruscologist, but writing six centuries after the events) added that according to Etruscan sources the intervening king Servius Tullius had also been an Etruscan, whose name in that language was Mastarna.11 Yet a fourth example of an Etruscan ruler of Rome exists in the person of Lars Porsena of Clusium, who (according to a poorly kept secret)* conquered Rome and imposed disarmament on her, in the aftermath of the expulsion of Tarquinius Superbus.*
So Rome must have been dominated by Etruscan aristocrats or kings for at least a century. Whatever the precise political arrangement,† it was from Etruscans that they derived their tradition that kings, and hence magistrates, should wear purple. And from Etruscans came the symbol of their authority, the fascēs, a bundle of rods surrounding an ax, showing the right to give out corporal, and capital, punishment. Beyond politics, it is quite clear that the Etruscan language too had considerable influence on Latin.
Etymology and lexicography were not skills that flourished in the ancient world, so there is no full statement by Romans of the Latin vocabulary’s debt to Etruscan. Nevertheless, it is possible to use modern methods on ancient materials. If we class together all the words that Roman authors tell us are of Etruscan origin, adding others whose origin is clear from their use in Etruscan inscriptions, a family resemblance emerges among them. Then, with an idea of what it is about a word that makes it look Etruscan, we can look for other such words.12 The outcome is a substantial harvest, and we can see that the effect of Etruscan on Latin was quite comparable to the effects on medieval English of French after the Norman conquest of 1066—a major cultural infusion, essentially of an early urban culture on a more countrified society.‡
One first linguistic point of note—which has implications for the cultural history of the period—is that the words borrowed are overwhelmingly nouns. The only verbs we can find are, in fact, derived from nouns, and this is why they are all stems ending in ā-, referring to actions performed with some newfangled Etruscan item: gubernāre ‘to steer’ (a ship), from guberna ‘steering oars’; iduāre ‘to divide’, from idūs ‘the Ides, halfway through a month’, laniāre ‘to butcher’ (meat), from lanius ‘butcher’, triumphāre ‘to celebrate victory’, from the Etruscan victory shout triumphe, and fascināre ‘to charm’, originally using a strange phallic object, the fascinus. This preference for nouns suggests that Etruscan words came in as names for unfamiliar objects; it does not show (as later, when Greek words flooded into Latin) that an important segment of the population was bilingual.* These are not the signs of a Roman elite who spoke (or thought) in Etruscan, but of Romans coming to terms with Etruscan practices, and (to some extent) Etruscan institutions.
The keynote is above all urban. It shows Etruscans leading the way in the architecture (atrium ‘forecourt’, columna, fenestra ‘window’, fornix ‘arch’, grunda ‘gutter’, turris ‘tower’, mundus ‘crypt’), particularly temple architecture with attendant waterworks (favisa ‘tank’, cisterna). Domestic conveniences were often named from this source: lanterna ‘lantern’, catēna ‘bracket’ or ‘chain’, verna, a slave not bought but born and bred in the family. City trades tended to have Etruscan names: the word for a shop or tavern is taberna, the original currency unit was as, the people you dealt with caupō ‘landlord, shopkeeper’, cociō ‘dealer’, mangō ‘slaver’.
Urban also meant urbane: Etruscans set fashions in clothing, including Greek-style palla for women and pallium for men,† as well as the warmer laena (from Greek khlaina). They even provided the light and practical lacerna cloak, which was to become so popular in Augustus’ time that he tried to restrict its use: it seemed too informal. They provided the accessories, a belt (balteus) and cap (cappa), a cord (cimussis) to draw the cloak together, and a pair of stout shoes (calcei) on the feet. An early style of toga, the tebenna, is Etruscan. Even tunica itself, the standard Roman tunic, may be an Etruscan deformation of Greek khitōn, which is essentially the same garment. Etruscan also provided the dry-cleaning experts (fullō, nacca) to keep the clothes in good order. Cosmetics were naturally an Etruscan thing: cērussa ‘white lead’, purpurissum ‘purple’, mundus ‘toiletries’. Even the word pulcher ‘beautiful’ may be an Etruscan loan.
The kind of urbanite who would wear this stuff was termed by an Etruscan word too, scurra. The characteristic Roman attitude to such people can still be felt in the derived adjective scurrilous: in Latin they were a byword for tasteless—because disrespectful—humour. Insults to another’s intelligence evidently tripped off the tongue in Etruscan: they could call an idiot barginna, bargus, buccō, or barō (and the last of these has become the standard word for a male in Spanish, varón, and a hereditary nobleman, a baron, in English). In general, the Etruscan type for the Roman was one who enjoyed the soft and easy things of life to excess: likely to be an aleō ‘gambler’, ganeō ‘glutton’, helluō ‘splurger’, lurchō ‘guzzler’, or levenna ‘wimp’, consorting with lenōnēs ‘pimps’ and lenae ‘madams’, carisae ‘foxy ladies’ and paelicēs ‘tarts’, in the lustra ‘brothels’ of Rome, and probably resorting to calumnia ‘name-calling’ and the services of a pettifogging rabula ‘shyster’ if ever you should cross him. At least his self-indulgent madulsa ‘binge’ would be likely to leave him suffering the torments of crāpula ‘hangover’ in the morning.
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