It is more than likely that the development of red-figure was inspired by a desire to emulate the effects achieved by

painters working on a large scale and with a much less restricted palette. Red-figure vase painters could delineate figures in a far wider range of postures than before; they could indicate (if not quite express) emotion and character in their features; they could even suggest recession in space. The influence of Polygnotus has been detected in a vase made (and perhaps also painted) by Meidias (4,40). Draperies are agitated, horses turn their heads as they canter along, Hilaeiria, who is carried off in the chariot of Polydeuces, has an expression of almost caricatured despair on her face, some wispy branches of olive hint at a landscape setting. The potentialities of finely drawn lines to suggest form as well as movement have been brilliantly exploited. This vase is, indeed, a virtuoso performance, though one that betrays signs of striving after effects that could be fully realized only on a much larger scale by mural or panel painters.

The achievements of such artists as Parrhasius and Zeuxis may be more faithfully reflected on vessels decorated by a process closer to that of panel painting: the white-ground lekythoi. These relatively small jugs of supremely elegant form were made to hold oil for cleansing the body and many were specifically intended for use in burial rites and subsequent interment with the dead. They were entirely covered with white slip and after firing were decorated in tempera colors (see Glossary), which would soon have rubbed off vessels in frequent use. Indeed, they have all but vanished from most that survive. The figure drawings that remain, however, are no less astonishingly free than they are expressive (4,41). Nothing quite like them is to be found in European art for another 2,000 years. A few bold lines suffice to indicate a limb or a garment, a broad splash a shock of hair, two or three slight brush¬strokes give emotional expression to a mouth or an eye. What is even more remarkable is that outline is used not merely to define silhouette, as in black-figure and red-figure vases, but to indicate volume. It is a kind of visual shorthand that can be employed only by an artist who has already solved the problems of graphic representation, and one that can be 'read' only by those familiar with its conventions.

Several of the finest lekythoi - including the one illustrated here - were buried with Athenians who fell in the Peloponnesian War. Few memorials of the dead are simpler or more poignant. Two figures, probably friends or relations, stand on either side of a soldier, who is seated before his tomb with eyes open as if to catch a last lingering look at the 'warm precincts of the cheerful day'. There are no heroic gestures, the mourners strike no attitudes of grief and the soldier seems to confront the inevitability of extinction with a mixture of resolution and regret. Love of life counterbalances the fatalistic outlook summed up in the famous saying 'Call no man happy ere he die, he is at best but fortunate' (attributed by Herodotus to the law¬maker Solon, but also used by Sophocles).

Stelae

Graves were often marked by stone monuments - that is, by stone 'reminders' or 'memorials' - without the religious or magic properties that invested the sepulchral art of most other civilizations. Greek monuments emphasized life rather than death - the memory of the dead in the minds of the living. They were usually upright slabs called stelae carved in relief. Earlier examples rarely had more than one figure, but the type devised in the mid- or late fifth century BC shows two or more framed by a kind of pedimented porch. The relationship between the figures gives these works a sombre dramatic power, all the more effective for being underplayed. A husband takes leave of his wife, tenderly but without any demonstration of emotion; similarly a son says farewell to his aged father, and a father to a son who died in youth. More than one stele shows a pensive seated woman, the subject of the monument, with a standing woman - a slave or daughter - holding a casket (4,42). Repetitions make it clear that these cannot have been portraits (though portraits of distinguished men had begun to appear in Greek art by the early fourth century BC).

Not only the rich were commemorated by such stelae. Several record humble craftsmen with their tools. At least one is of a slave girl, presumably set up by her master or mistress. None has the grandiose pretensions of monuments to rulers such as were then being created on the fringes of the Hellenic world in Asia Minor (e.g. that of Mausolus of Caria, from whom the word 'mausoleum' derives). Fear of the dire consequences of hubris or arrogance may partly account for this. Similarly, they make no reference to an afterlife; they have no 'magic' function. Because of their scale and simple human subject-matter, they are perhaps more directly and immediately appealing than statues and reliefs of divinities behind which there always lurk those irrational beliefs prominent in Greek literature, but which nowadays seem remote and difficult to comprehend.

In the ancient world stelae were not regarded as major works of art. The Romans seem rarely to have robbed them or to have had them copied. Pliny and Pausanias passed them by. Yet, doubtful though it is whether any are by leading sculptors, they sometimes possess in the sensitivity of their carvings the very qualities that are lacking in the copies by which the work of celebrated sculptors is known. The majority, however, seem to have been almost mass-produced. The similarities between some examples are so close as to suggest that they had been roughed out with the help of some kind of pointing apparatus (see Glossary) from a single model: and in them and others we can follow the development of such techniques of working in marble as that of the running drill to cut deep furrows (introduced in the early fourth century BC). Stelae also reflect the main stylistic trends in Greek sculpture from the severity of the early Classical period, in the years immediately after the Persian wars, to the serenity of the mid-fifth century and the more highly worked elegance and greater expressive¬ness of the fourth. As very few are dated, this stylistic sequence can, of course, provide no more than a rough chronological framework. Some sculptors of the fourth century BC - and vase painters too - may well have harked back to earlier styles in response to those who, like Plato, distrusted change in art as in politics. Tradition played as important a part as innovation in Greek art and, especially, in architecture.

The Late Classical Period

The fourth century BC is often described as a period of artistic decline; it was certainly one of change. New tendencies in architecture are most clearly apparent in two buildings at Epidaurus: the theatre and the tholos, a circular structure of unknown function. Both are in the sanctuary of Asclepius, the god of healing who was also credited with the power of resurrecting the dead and whose cult became very popular in the fourth century. Offerings from many devotees who sought his protection provided the funds for the buildings. The theatre is among the most spectacular of all ancient Greek constructions and one that seems to crystallize an ideal of architecture as pure geometrical form (4,43). It could hardly be simpler - a vast auditorium 387 feet

(118m) in diameter, composed of 55 tiers of marble benches rising round rather more than half the circular orchestra platform or dancing space for the chorus (not for musicians), beyond which there was a long, narrow structure for the stage. The form regularized and embellished the earliest type of theatre, which had been simply a natural hollow in a hill adapted for rituals connected with the cult of Dionysus. It was out of these rituals that drama as we know it evolved. In Athens the theatre where tragedies and comedies were first performed in the fifth century BC had been a fairly simple affair in a cleft of the rock below the Acropolis, with wooden benches in an auditorium hemmed in by buildings on either side. (The extant remains date from a later remodelling.) At Epidaurus space was unlimited in the open country and the theatre could therefore take its 'natural' geometrical shape, which also enabled some 14,000 spectators to see and hear the performers - a feat of acoustics that still amazes audiences today. The theatre was, however, built after the great creative period of Greek drama had come to an end. Whereas in fifth-century Athens only new works had been given - three tragedies (each in three parts) and five comedies each year - now there were revivals of the most popular of those 'classics' from which Aristotle was soon to draw the rules of dramatic poetry. It was not only the architectural form of the theatre but Greek drama itself that had been regularized.

The tholos at Epidaurus is said to have been designed by the same architect as the theatre, Polyclitus (not to be confused with the slightly earlier sculptor of the Doryphorus), but it was strikingly different in style, with much carved decoration. Corinthian capitals, first devised in Athens in the fifth century but little used before the middle of the fourth, are prominent and characterize a new tendency in Greek architecture (4,44). With their curling tendrils and acanthus leaves they were not only more decorative than Ionic capitals but also, since all four faces were alike, avoided the awkward effect which the latter made when seen from the side (as at the angle of a building) but were used almost exclusively inside temples. They perfectly answered new demands for both embellishment and regularization.

Similar tendencies were apparent also in domestic architecture. Demosthenes (b. c. 384 BC), the great orator and leading opponent of Philip II of Macedon (see p. 179), declared that luxurious houses had made their first appearance in Athens in his life-time. There is an interesting signed floor mosaic in a house in Athens, but little else survives. At Olynthos near the coast of Thrace in north-east Greece - a town laid out about 430 BC and destroyed in 348 BC - excavations have revealed that the larger houses already had figurative mosaic pavements in the main room (the andron used for entertaining male guests). A magnificent though slightly later example survives from a house in Pella, some way inland from Olynthos (5,8). Olynthos was built on a regular grid, a type of planning not used in central and southern Greece, except for the rebuilding of the Athenian port of Piraeus (c. 460-445 BC) to the design of Hippodamus of Miletus, who was called in by Pericles. Athens itself was a maze of narrow winding streets and alleys. Its centre of daily life, market-place and meeting place, the agora (literally'field'), remained an irregular space with a simple stoa or long portico to provide shelter from the weather, until order was imposed on it in the second century BC (see p. 189).

Further evidence of a taste for luxury indulged by the ruling classes in northern Greece is provided by gold vases found in a tomb near Philippopolis (present-day Plovdiv in Bulgaria), the capital founded by Philip II of Macedon (4,45). They are of an extraordinarily sophisticated elegance. Figures which had become either tired or overwrought on painted pottery vases in the south here exude a new vigour. Contact with 'barbarians' may have

been responsible. The handles have the same animal vitality as the ibexes that serve the same function on Achaemenid vessels, although here they have been metamorphosed into lively young Greek centaurs.

Some of the finest examples of ancient Greek goldsmiths' work were, in fact, made for the Scythians of southern Russia. No gold ornament of any period or country is more exquisitely wrought than a pectoral intended to be worn on the breast of some nomadic chief and buried with him near the Dnieper river (4,46). Animals are rendered with a vitality and naturalism that makes the griffins of the lower register no less credible than the extremely sharply observed horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, hares and even a couple of grasshoppers. Four men are incorporated, one milking a ewe, another holding an amphora and two in the centre stitching a shirt out of animal skin. The contrast between the simple pastoral way of life represented by these figures and the highly developed technical accomplishment of the goldsmith who made them is not, however, stressed. The Scythians are neither caricatured nor idealized. Not until much later, in Roman times, did these people come to be regarded as 'noble savages', preserving the innocence and moral qualities that 'civilized' man had lost.

Before the end of the Classical period numerous examples of Greek artistry had found their way far beyond the frontiers of the Hellenic world: gold ornaments, bronze vessels, painted pottery vases and, much more widely, coins. The idea of fashioning precious metals into small pieces of uniform size, weight and value originated, like so much else, in Asia Minor. Bean-shaped lumps of electrum stamped with devices were minted in Lydia shortly after the middle of the seventh century BC. But within 100 years the Greeks had regularized the shape to a disc modelled in relief with the emblem of the city that issued it - at Athens, for instance, the head of Athena on the front and the owl sacred to her on the back (4,47)- As their designs were frequently modified and changed, coins provide a miniature history of Greek art from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. On the earliest, profile heads have frontal eyes and animals are schematized. Later they reflect the naturalistic ideals of the Classical period, none more beautifully than those of Syracuse in Sicily, which bear the firmly modelled head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins (4,48), and in the later fourth century BC a tendency towards greater delicacy and intricacy becomes apparent (4,49).

The most widely diffused coins were those issued by Philip II of Macedon after 356 BC, when he acquired the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus in Thrace. The gold stater (a piece weighing 8.6 grams) became an item of interna-tional currency and continued to be issued in Macedonia for a long time. It was subsequently imitated by central and northern Europeans ignorant of the significance of its emblematic designs. The process by which such designs stamped with devices were minted in Lydia shortly after the middle of the seventh century BC. But within 100 years the Greeks had regularized the shape to a disc modelled in relief with the emblem of the city that issued it - at Athens, for instance, the head of Athena on the front and the owl sacred to her on the back (4,47)- As their designs were frequently modified and changed, coins provide a miniature history of Greek art from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period. On the earliest, profile heads have frontal eyes and animals are schematized. Later they reflect the naturalistic ideals of the Classical period, none more beautifully than those of Syracuse in Sicily, which bear the firmly modelled head of Arethusa surrounded by dolphins (4,48), and in the later fourth century BC a tendency towards greater delicacy and intricacy becomes apparent (4,49).

The most widely diffused coins were those issued by Philip II of Macedon after 356 BC, when he acquired the gold mines of Mount Pangaeus in Thrace. The gold stater (a piece weighing 8.6 grams) became an item of interna-tional currency and continued to be issued in Macedonia for a long time. It was subsequently imitated by central and northern Europeans ignorant of the significance of its emblematic designs. The process by which such designs

merging into popular housing. Through this area the Panathenaic procession passed before ascending to the Parthenon (see p. 148). On the far south¬ern side of the Acropolis, the theatre with a hemicycle of ranked stone seats was cut into the slope. The main resi¬dential area closely packed with inward looking houses of one or two stories lay to the south and west on the site of the Mycenean city. The gymnasium where Socrates and Plato taught was far outside in a grove called Academia.

The earliest known attempt to construct a theory of urban design was made by Hippodamos of Miletus (c. 500-440 BC) who lived in Athens and was a friend of Pericles (see p. 138-40). The town of Miletus (Turkey) destroyed by the Persians in 479 BC is said to have been rebuilt on his plan and he was presumably responsible for the layout of the Athenian port of Piraeus, apparently the earliest example on the Greek mainland of grid planning, sometimes misleadingly termed Hippodamian. But his fame derives less from his practice than his ideas. According to Aristotle he devised an ideal city of 10,000 inhabitants divided into three classes (soldiers, artisans and husbandmen) on a site divided into three areas

(sacred, public and private). He seems to have been the first to appreciate that a town plan might formally embody, clarify and perpetuate a rational social order and his ideas, transmitted to posterity by Aristotle, inspired later projects that combined social engineering with urban design.

His influence has been detected in the remains of Priene (Turkey), a free

city founded c. 350 BC with help from Athens. Within a wall, it was laid out on a sloping site on a strict grid with six level principal streets running east-west crossed by minor streets, some with steps, leading up-hill. The blocks between them were of uniform size, multiples of a standard house plot. Buildings of the types dispersed in Athens were concentrated in the centre: the temple of Athena, stoas on three sides of a rectangular agora, the Bouleuterion, theatre, market and even the gymnasium (4,53). The scheme established here was reproduced widely in the east during the Hellenistic period, as at Dura Europos on the Euphrates founded in 300 BC. In the second century Priene became part of the kingdom of Attalus I under whom the royal and sacred hilltop area of his capital, Pergamum, was built in an entirely different manner for monumental effect (see p. 189). His son Attalus II (!59_138 BC) who had studied philoso¬phy in Athens brought order to the Athenian agora by financing a long two-story stoa closing off the eastern side at a right angle to the south stoa (4,54 as reconstructed under the supervision of American archaeologists in 1950). The Romans were to add a new square agora after their conquest of Greece and final extinction of Athenian democracy. As we have seen, Scythians clearly valued Greek crafts¬manship. Many of the finest examples of Greek goldsmiths' work were preserved in the tombs of their kings (4,46). So too were bronze and pottery vessels, including a fifth-century BC amphora, which had originally been made as a prize for a victor in the Panathenaic games. Egyptian artifacts have also been found in these tombs. Fine objects from Achaemenid Persia and Zhou dynasty China were buried with nomads of the eastern steppes and Altai mountains. But the so-called Animal' style developed by the cultures of the steppes differs almost as much from Persian and Chinese art as from ancient Egyptian and Greek. A gold plaque of a stag wrought to decorate an iron shield or breast-plate is a characteristic example (4,51), modelled in relief but with extraordinary feeling for full-bodied form, simplified, schematized and contracted into a tight pattern, yet mysteriously alive with animal vitality.

The origins of the Animal style are obscure. So too are those of the Scythians, who established themselves to the west of the Volga and on the northern shores of the Black Sea in about the eighth century BC, displacing another group of nomads known to the Greeks as Cimmerians (who retreated into Asia Minor and sacked Greek cities on the coast). Excavations have revealed traces of a succession of pre-Scythian cultures in the southern Caucasus - a famous tomb dating from the late second millennium at Maikop and several tombs of the early first millennium have yielded some notable bronzes of animals, but these are closer to the arts of Assyria and Anatolia than to that of the Scythians. A more likely connection would be with the bronzes of Luristan (see p. 114). But the latter include numerous human figures, which are very rare in Scythian art. Also the animals of Luristan often merge into one another by what is known as the 'zoomorphic juncture' -the tail of one creature being fashioned like the head of another of different species - a device which does not seem to have been adopted by Scythian craftsmen until a relatively late period. The arts of the Shang and Zhou China (see pp. 88-91,118-21), at the other end of the steppes, probably contributed to the formation of the Animal style, but here influences seem to have been reciprocal and are, therefore, very hard to disentangle. Works in perishable materials, of which we now know very

little or nothing at all, may also have played a part - not least the tattoos with which the nomads decorated their bodies.

Whatever its origins, the Animal style as we know it seems to have first emerged on the western steppes in the seventh century BC. It is found almost exclusively on small objects, mainly metal - bronze or, quite often, gold enriched with colored glass paste - to be attached to clothing, arms and armour, chariots and the harnesses of horses. The animals from which it takes its name were wild (not those bred by the nomads), usually various species of deer, wolves and large felines although fabulous monsters also appear. Single animals are rendered with a sharp-edged compactness that gives them an almost monumental quality, despite their small size. A stag's antlers are rendered as a series of scrolls running the length of the back; the legs folded together beneath it (4,51). The slim body of a feline, probably a snow-leopard, is coiled into a circle, schematized with ruthless concision but given a tensely flexed muscular vitality. But what do they signify? They can be read in more than one way. Is the stag bound for sacrifice and, therefore, a symbol of man's mastery of the animal world - or was the reverse intended? Is the stag in full flight, escaping capture by its fleetness and superior muscular force, wound up like a hard metal spring?

Another animal, usually identified as a panther, is shown on the prowl (4,53). Its paws are fashioned like curled felines, which are repeated along the tail, a device probably intended to compress the force of many animals within a single image. Similar superimpositions occur on many other pieces, including bronze finials for poles. The significance of the animals themselves remains, none the less, mysterious. Clearly they are more than merely decorative in intent. But their 'meaning' remains obscure, just as their form resists analysis. It is impossible to say more than that the extraordinary contortions and involutions of this art sprang from a culture and sense of form totally distinct from that of the Mediterranean world.

Numerous attempts have, of course, been made to explain or interpret these works of art. They have been associated with the rites of hunting magic, for the nomads are known to have hunted wild beasts as well as bred the tame. They may have represented supernatural beings. Later peoples of the steppes are known to have believed that stags transported the dead to the other world. They have also been explained as totems venerated by the various clans of nomads as ancestors. Their transformation into clan symbols would have followed naturally and easily. The heraldic beasts of medieval chivalry, which include many deer and felines like those on the British royal coat of arms, may certainly be traced back to emblematic devices of later barbarian tribes from central Asia.

Animal style art was essentially aristocratic, intended for the adornment of the person and possessions of the rulers, their families and perhaps some of the more important mounted warriors. (Kingship seems to have been hereditary among the royal Scythians of the west.) The vast majority of examples come from tombs in which the riches and power of the deceased are very clearly displayed. Herodotus described in chilling detail how a dead king was embalmed and taken in a chariot around his dominions, accompanied by an increasing crowd of mourners, to the burial place. There the corpse was placed in a pit together with a selection of royal treasures. One of his wives, his butler, cook, groom, steward and chamberlain were strangled and buried with him, as were a number of horses

which had been clubbed to death. A mound of earth was heaped over the tomb and a year later 50 youths and 50 of the finest horses were killed, stuffed with straw and stationed round it. Several tombs excavated in the Kuban region to the east of the Black Sea have confirmed the substantial accuracy of this account, notably one at Kostromskaya, containing the dead man's armour, a gold plaque of a stag (4,51)., leather quivers, bronze arrow-heads, copper and iron horsebits. Thirteen human skeletons without any adornments lay in the compacted earth above. Outside the main area the remains of 22 horses were found, apparently buried in pairs.

A still more extraordinary group of tombs, rather more elaborate than those of the Scythians and constructed partly of stone, is located far to the east at Pazyryk in the Altai mountains of Mongolia (near the present-day frontier between Russia and China). Here the peculiar climatic conditions preserved their contents deep-frozen in solid ice, allowing us a unique close-up glimpse of the life-style and art of the nomads of the steppes some 2,400 years ago. The body of a king or chieftain has been found, strongly marked with tattooing in the Animal style - a tantalizing indication of the role that decorations on the human skin, now totally lost and unknown to us except for this one chance survival, may well have played in the development of drawing and painting from a very early period (4,56). Also deep-frozen were fabrics with their colors still bright and fresh, including a magnificent Persian pile carpet (the earliest known), delicate Chinese silks and panels of applique work in felt, which were presumably local products. A particularly fine saddle-cover is decorated with dragon masks and fighting griffins and goats, motifs derived respectively from Chinese ritual bronze vessels and the arts of the ancient Near East, but transformed and incorporated into a richly luxuriant version of the Animal style of the steppes (4,57). Such objects as pole-tops made of wood and leather reveal a mastery of complex three-dimensional form: one is fashioned like the head of a plumed griffin holding a deer's head in its jaws, another as a deer with antlers of exaggerated magnificence. That nothing quite like these pieces has been found at the western end of the steppes may well be due simply to climatic conditions less favourable to survival.

There are other related cultures of the steppes, notably that of the Sarmatians, a nomadic people from south Russia who moved into Scythian territory in about the third century BC and then pressed on towards Europe. Sarmatian art reveals contacts with both China and Persia and is notable mainly for metalwork, especially gold and the early development of cloisonne enamelling (see Glossary). The Sarmatians were eventually absorbed into the 'empire' of the Huns from central Asia, whose art forms yet another variant of the Animal style.

Examples of Animal style art may well have reached central and northern Europe long before the mounted nomads from Asia. One of the finest of all, probably dating from the fifth century BC, was found in a hoard of treasure at Vettersfelde in Germany (some 50 miles, 80km, from Berlin); how it got there remains a mystery. This is a relatively large electrum plaque in the form of a fish embossed with a shoal of fish on its belly and animals on its back, with its tail terminating in rams' heads - a good example of the zoomorphic juncture (4,58). An electrum plaque of a stag, of about the same period, in exactly the same pose as the stag from Kostromskaya (4,51), was found in Hungary on the frontier between the nomadic world of the steppes and agrarian Europe. How far work in the

Animal style influenced European art at this time is, however, impossible to determine.

THE ETRUSCANS

Soon after the Greeks founded their first colonies in southern Italy in the mid-eighth century BC they encountered an Iron Age culture not so very different from their own: that of the people who called themselves Rasenna, but were later known as Etruscans. The Etruscans were beginning to transform their small agricultural settlements into cities and were becoming the best organized inhabitants of the peninsula, the only ones who were to be a match for the Greek invaders. During the next hundred years or so their materially rich civilization rivalled that of Archaic Greece. Their language, preserved in many thousand inscriptions, was not of the Indo-European group and is still little understood. It set them apart from the other people of Italy, who spoke dialects closely related to one another, including a primitive form of Latin. It has been suggested that they were themselves relatively recent arrivals in Italy, probably from west Asia, as Herodotus stated, but this can neither be proved nor disproved.

Although they shared a common language and religion, the Etruscans were not a political unit. Their independent city-states (traditionally said to be 12), at first monarchical and later republican, were somewhat similar to the Greek poleis, though much less frequently at war among themselves. From cities on the coastal plain between the Tiber and the Arno, they expanded inland as far as the Apennines, occupying the area of modern Tuscany and Umbria, rich in minerals which they exploited. Later they spread north into the fertile valley of the Po and south nearly as far as Naples. Rome itself was ruled by Etruscan kings until 510 BC. Their influence stretched further and by the end of the sixth century BC they seem to have dominated the whole peninsula apart from the areas colonized by the Greeks. Their fleet, perhaps the most powerful in the Mediterranean, protected their widespread commercial interests.

Cultural relations between Etruscans and Greeks were complex. Before the end of the eighth century BC the Etruscans adopted an alphabet like that of the Greeks (though-an independent derivation from the Phoenician has been proposed), but they wrote from right to left. They bought Greek artifacts on a large scale, notably pottery painted with scenes from Greek myths and legends and statues of Greek deities, some of whom they adopted, for example, Apollo and Artemis. From the seventh century BC onwards Greek artists are known to have been working in Etruscan cities. Yet Etruscan culture was not simply an offshoot from that of Greece. It sprang quite independently from similar Iron Age origins. Significantly, the Greeks and later the Hellenized Romans regarded the Etruscans as people apart.

The Etruscans left no literature from which we might gain some insight into their thought, feelings, way of life or their history. We know them only from the probably biased comments of Greek and Latin writers and from the material remains of their culture, found mainly in tombs and susceptible to a bewildering range of interpretations. They have been described by ancient and modern authors as a people obsessed by death and as one wholly devoted to the pleasures of living, as deeply religious and as amorally dissolute. Their art has been condemned for its lack of originality and praised for its vital spontaneity. Etruscan bronze work is known to have been prized in Athens in the fifth century BC, that is at the height of the Greek Classical period. At least one surviving work fully justifies this estimate - the famous She-Wolf of the Capitol (4,65), for centuries the totem of the city of Rome which was traditionally founded by Romulus and Remus, who had been suckled by a she-wolf. This is a superb example of bronze casting and chasing. It is also, of course, quite unlike any Greek animal sculpture. The extraordinary realism of the tense, watchful stance - ears pricked, brow furrowed, jaws snarling, hackles rising - epitomizes at its finest and most vividly factual the unidealized, down-to-earth quality of Etruscan art.

The frontier between the arts of the Greeks and the Etruscans is less easily defined than that between the arts of the Greeks and the Scythians, Celts and Iberians. Controversy among archeologists and scholars has raged

around the numerous objects found in the cities and cemeteries of Etruria. There are literally thousands of Etruscan tombs with painted and sculptured decorations, cinerary urns, sarcophagi and 'grave goods' ranging from the simplest household equipment to lavish and even sophisticated works of art. Yet much remains obscure. The objects themselves have been variously attributed to Greek or Etruscan artists, all too often by highly subjective criteria. It is for this reason rather more difficult to define the art than the artistic taste of the Etruscans.

Greek 'Geometric' pottery (see pp. 129-30) of the early eighth century BC has been found in tombs at Veii (a few miles north-west of Rome). But the majority of imported objects in Etruscan tombs of the eighth and seventh centuries are in Near Eastern styles: pieces of'faience' from Egypt, Phoenician bronze-work and ivory carvings and also Greek 'Orientalizing' bronzes and painted vases. They provide evidence of a substantial luxury-loving upper class in each of the main Etruscan cities. It was for their own use or pleasure, it should be noted, that rich Etruscans bought bronze cauldrons of a type made by the Greeks exclusively for dedication to the gods.

Among the many objects in 'Orientalizing' styles there are some which are generally agreed to have been made in Italy, presumably by Etruscan craftsmen. They include ivory arms with long-fingered hands, probably handles for mirrors or fans, their sleeves decorated with prowling lions, which no inhabitant of Italy at this date is likely to have seen for himself and which must have derived ultimately from Assyrian art. Lions also appear prominently on one of the finest examples of Etruscan gold jewelry, a large fibula or clasp from a very rich and perhaps royal tomb at Caere (modern Cerveteri) (4,66). The maker of this piece derived from the Near East not only decorative motifs but also techniques of working gold which he elaborated into a feat of virtuoso craftsmanship. The five lions on the upper part are cut out and applied to the ground. Lines indicating their manes are composed of minute granules of gold; so, too, are the lines of the wreaths that surround them and the zigzags on the bars joining the two parts of the fibula, soldered to the surface by an exceptionally tricky process. On the lower part six rows of winged lions are outlined by granulation and here there are also tiny ducks modelled in the round. Etruscans clearly loved such work, on which wealth was conspicuously displayed both by the precious nature of the material and, still more, by the lavish expenditure of time and skill.

The 'Orientalizing' style of the seventh century BC drew the Etruscan cities on to the periphery of a cultural world that had its centre in Assyria, then the dominant power in the Middle East (see p. 107). It was carried throughout the Mediterranean not only by Greeks but also by Phoenicians. This great maritime trading nation had settled in the Lebanon and about 800 BC established at Carthage a colony that became their new capital, from which they gradually expanded along the coasts of north Africa and southern Spain. The Etruscans were to be closely involved with the Phoenicians, or Carthaginians as they came to be called, until both were conquered by Rome. In the sixth century BC they were allied against the Greek cities of the western Mediterranean. It was, none the less, to the Hellenic world that the Etruscans turned for works of art.

The Archaic Greek style which, as we have seen (p. 132), followed the 'Orientalizing' style in sixth-century Greece, was introduced to Etruria by imports and also by Greek artists many of whom were probably refugees from Asia

Minor after the Persian conquest of Ionia in 548-547 BC. Most of the more notable surviving works of art made for the Etruscans - whether by Greek or local artists - are in this style. A magnificent and unusually well-preserved bronze-covered processional chariot found in a tomb near Spoleto is a case in point (4,67). Both the subject-matter and the style of the decorations are Hellenic. On the front Achilles receives his armour, a helmet and a shield with grimacing gorgon mask, from his mother Thetis. One of the side panels shows Achilles battling with Memnon, the other the apotheosis of Achilles. Scenes from the story of the Trojan War as recounted by Homer were, of course, often painted on Greek pottery at this period, sometimes with great narrative ability. But here the compositions are so crowded that the artist's aim seems to have been merely one of enrichment.

Etruscan love of adornment found its most striking expression in bronze mirrors and caskets engraved with figurative designs of great vivacity and elegance. An early example shows an embracing couple animated in a jerky dance (4,68). Comparison with contemporary Greek vase decoration is illuminating. On an Archaic Greek vase the figures are depicted with the utmost clarity, almost as if they were a frieze of silhouettes (4,12). Here they are placed together in such a way that the design is at first sight difficult to 'read'. They are to be understood as facing one another, with the youth's right arm around the girl's shoulders. Apparent similarities between the arts of the Greeks and Etruscans are often deceptive. They overlie differences which go much deeper. For instance, a Greek statue of the late sixth or early fifth century BC, like those of the warriors on the temple at Aegina (4,21), may have provided the model for the figure of a youth on the cover of an urn found at Caere (4,69). But there is a world of difference between them. The heroic idealization of the Greeks has been brought down to earth. The Etruscan figure is much more descriptive, much more factual -almost the portrait of an individual caught in a casual moment, a banqueter resting his elbow on a cushion, with a cloth thrown lightly over his loins.

A different kind of deviation from the Greek ideal is apparent in the Apollo of Veii. This famous Etruscan statue has the face, the braided hair and even the enigmatic smile of a kouros (4,70). The motif on the pier which serves as a support between the legs is lifted straight from Greek architectural ornament. The drapery which seems to have been ironed into pleats and folds is also Greek, though imitated from a kore since male figures in Greek sculpture were usually nude. But this Apollo with his heavy limbs and somewhat lumbering gait has none of the poised elegance of Greek statues. And it differs still further from the Greek in two other respects. It is of molded terracotta, not of marble, which was very rarely used for sculpture in Etruria (not until much later did the Romans exploit the quarries at Carrara; see p. 202). And it was one of a group of figures which stood outlined against the sky along the roof ridge of a temple, giving the latter a very different aspect to that of its Greek prototype.

The earliest Etruscan temples seem to have been simple rectangular huts built of timber and mud-brick with decorations of molded and painted terracotta. Although the building materials remained the same, this basic form was amplified under Greek influence before the end of the sixth century, when temples began to be set on high plinths or podia and provided with columns, pitched roofs and triangular pediments, later filled with sculpture. Very little survives apart from foundations and fragments of terra¬cotta, but the descriptions by Roman writers enable us to reconstruct their general form (which was to influence later Roman architecture; see pp. 199-202). In contrast to Greek temples, the cella was often divided into three compartments for different cult figures and seems never to have been completely surrounded by columns (4,71). There was a deep porch in front and sometimes colonnades on either flank, but not at the back. The podium had steps only at the front. Thus, whereas the Greek temple was intended to be seen from an angle, the Etruscan was designed to be approached along its axis and this deter¬mined the symmetrical plan of its forecourt. Etruscan temples were much smaller than the great Doric structures of the Greeks but very much more richly decorated - with figurative acroteria on the pediments, antefixes along the eaves, as well as statues on the roof ridge. Painted terracotta was extensively used both to protect the impermanent

building materials and for ornamental effect.

Symmetrical planning and rich decoration similarly marked their domestic architecture. Our knowledge comes mainly from tombs, which were conceived as habitations for the dead (like those of ancient Egypt) and reproduce the interior architecture and even the furniture and furnishings of the now vanished cities. The wooden columns, door-posts, lintels and decorative details of Etruscan houses are simulated in roughly carved tufa (4,72). Foundations show that the larger houses, though built only of mud-brick and timber, had spacious rooms and often a central courtyard or atrium open to the sky. By Athenian standards they were luxurious. Figurative paintings on the tomb walls, larger than any that survive from Greece, similarly reflect their interior decoration. The earliest known, in a tomb at Veii, date from the second quarter of the seventh century BC and are of ducks painted directly on the tufa without a prepared ground. They were followed slightly later by paintings of creatures from the semi-fabulous bestiary of'Orientalizing' art. Shortly after the mid-sixth century BC human figures made their appear¬ance in the tombs of Tarquinia, painted on a prepared ground of clay plaster. (Most of the surviving tomb paintings are at Tarquinia.)

The Archaic Greek style of these Tarquinian tomb paintings is so similar to that of recently discovered paintings of about the same date in Asia Minor (notably at Gordion and in Lycian tombs) that there can be little doubt of its having been introduced by Ionian artists. Subjects include hunting and fishing scenes, athletic contests, riding exercises, wild ecstatic dancing and occasional illustrations of Greek myths and legends. A decorative scheme or program, often repeated from about 500 BC, shows banqueters reclining on one wall of a tomb chamber and, on the other three, musicians and dancers in an outdoor setting amongst trees and birds (4,73). Whether these depict funeral banquets, as in Egypt, is hard to say. Much in Etruscan tomb paintings is foreign to Italy. But as indica¬tions of the wealth of the families who commissioned them they are certainly effective. They vividly reflect the worldly pleasures of members of a moneyed upper class, who loll on their couches listening to the music of lyre and pipes while watching the elegant motions and postures of dancers and the contortions of acrobats. The Etruscans appear, in fact, as spectators and not as participants in the Dionysiac dances and athletic sports with which the Greeks honoured the gods.

It seems likely that Greek art had in Etruria the value of what would now be called a status symbol. This may partly account for the persistence there of the Archaic Greek style, which had been introduced when the Etruscan cities were at the height of their wealth and power. Schematically drawn figures in a limited number of poses, with heads and legs in profile and frontally rendered torsos, went on being painted on the walls of Etruscan tombs long after they had been superseded by more naturalistic representations on Greek pottery. Often they have great linear grace and convey a sense of exuberant, rhythmical movement. The youthful lyre-player illustrated here is a good example, his body drawn nude, partly covered with the drapery that Etruscans demanded and the outline then filled in with bright color without any modelling (4,73). No attempt seems to have been made to follow the Greeks along the path towards greater naturalism. Indeed, any departure from well-established conventions seems to have met with disapproval from Etruscan patrons. Similarly in architec-ture, once the form of the temple (adapted from Greece, as we have seen) was established it remained unchanged until Etruria was swallowed up by Rome.

In sculpture, too, the Greek Archaic style lived on, barely influenced by fifth-century developments in Greece. The closest approximation to the Classical style is seen in the famous life-size statue known as the Mars ofTodi (4,74); but this is in every way an exceptional work, the only surviving large-scale bronze of Etruscan workmanship dating from before the second century BC. It was found, carefully buried in a sarcophagus, in the ruins of a temple at Todi, just outside the territory of the Etruscan cities. An inscription written in a mixture of Etruscan and Latin characters records that it was dedicated by a man named Ahal Trutitis. As on many Greek bronze statues, the lips were originally inlaid with copper and the eyes filled with colored material (a helmet, which is lost, was cast separately and attached to the head). In craftsmanship it is as skilful as the best Hellenic work of the same late fifth- or early fourth-century date. Yet it could hardly be mistaken for a Greek statue. The slightly awkward pose as well as the armour which conceals the torso set the Mars of Todi apart. His features are ideal¬ized, but according to an ideal altogether different from that of the Greeks: burly rather than athletic, with an expression of blunt assertion rather than inward self-confidence. There is, furthermore, a disturbing incongruity between the delicacy of the hands, the feet and the undergarment (especially its ruffled collar) and the lack of articulation in the thick neck and gross, swollen, rather than muscular, thighs. As in so many other Etruscan works, the naked flesh is treated summarily without any hint of that obsessive attention to the underlying structure of bone and muscle which marks the art of Greece. Nudity is rare in Etruscan art, in sculpture as in painting, where it usually indicates the inferior status of paid performers, servants or slaves. Etruscan art was focused less on images of the gods or of men displaying godlike physique with the bloom of eternal youth than on mortals. Even in the tomb the emphasis was on the here and now (at any rate until a late period). Their funerary art is, therefore, baffiingly paradoxical. The dead were normally cremated and cremation suggests a distinction between spirit and body. Yet belief in a material link between the two is implied by the Etruscan practice of providing the dead, whether cremated or buried, with the necessities and luxuries of the living. These apparently contradictory ideas lie behind the peculiar form taken by the containers in which the remains of the dead were placed.

Cinerary urns of the seventh century BC, found mainly in the cemetery of Clusium (modern Chiusi), have covers in the form of heads, sometimes with torsos and arms as well. They seem to have been evolved by a process of reification - the opposite of abstraction - from urns with helmet-shaped lids made for ashes by the early Iron Age people who preceded the Etruscans in north-central Italy (called Villanovans after an archeological site near Bologna). The impassive countenances with tightly closed lips and, usually, lowered eyelids are too alike to be described as portraits, although they were presumably intended as representations of the dead. In the tombs they were placed on chairs and later the whole urn was sometimes fashioned like an enthroned figure. For bodies which were inhumed, rather than cremated, a type of sarcophagus was developed in the sixth century BC in the form of a rectangular couch, on which a figure (or a couple) reclines (4,75). This was probably inspired by Carthaginian sarcophagi, which combined the mummy-case of ancient Egypt with the rectangular coffin of the Near East. The same general form was adopted also for cinerary urns. Stylistically the figures derive from Archaic Greece and, as we have already seen, at least one of them is a distant relative of the warriors from Aegina.

What is new and distinctive about Etruscan sarcophagi and urns is that the figures are shown alive and apparently enjoying the pleasures of the table. From the fourth century onwards they were also modelled with almost caricatured individuality as if to preserve their physical identity. Curiously, however, the introduction of this more realistic style of representation coincided with a sharp increase in references to a terrifying dark afterworld - in tomb paintings as well as in sarcophagi and urns. Two figures with strongly characterized faces and attenuated bodies on an urn from Velathri (modern Volterra) may represent either a none too happily married couple or a man accompanied by a demon of death.

A similar, if more restrained, naturalism is apparent in bronze heads. The finest, probably from a whole-length statue, is that traditionally said to portray Lucius Junius Brutus (fl. 509 BC), the supposed founder of the republic, who roused his fellow Romans to expel the last Etruscan king, Tarquinius Superbus, from their city (4,76). Whether or not the identification is correct, this rugged face with piercing eyes, aquiline nose and sternly set jaw surely records an individual, and one with an unbending sense of purpose. Hair and short beard are rendered with all the accomplishment for which Etruscan bronze-workers were renowned. As an example of skill in casting and chasing, it surpasses the She-Wolf of the Capitol (4,63) and confirms the survival of these skills into a later period. (The drapery below the neck is part of a later, probably sixteenth-century, addition.)

The Etruscans, although they had shown themselves so strangely impervious to later developments of the Greek Classical style, were drawn into the cultural orbit of the Hellenistic world towards the end of the fourth century BC. So, too, were the Romans, soon to become the dominant power in the Italian peninsula. One by one the cities of Etruria fell to Rome and by the beginning of the first century BC the Etruscans had been absorbed into the composite population of Italy. Before long, the Roman poet Propertius was to write his famous lament: