Chapter IX: Sidenote: TOMBA DELLE BIGHE SYMPOSIUM

Similar incongruities, due to Greek artists, or at any rate Greek art, having set a Greek stamp on the wall-painting of Etruria, meet us in the representations of _symposia_. Again we can take the Bighe tomb as our starting-point (fig. 23).[42] Three festive couches are seen with two young men on each. The youths are naked to the waist, and have sumptuous gold necklaces, red or blue mantles, and chaplets on their heads. Some of them hold flat drinking-bowls, some eggs, and others have branches in their hands—all this, however, we only learn from the old copies: they are reclining on metal couches, whereas the tables in front of them are wooden, as is clearly proved by the colours employed. We may wonder that the couches are of metal, for according to the literary tradition the first metal couches came to Rome as late as 187 B.C. Nevertheless, ivory and golden couches are already mentioned by Plautus; this may, however, be due to the Greek text on which he based his comedy (_Stichus_ 377). The Etruscans, at any rate, knew bronze couches at least three hundred years earlier, and this is corroborated by the find of an actual bronze banqueting-couch in a tomb at Corneto.[43] The couches are covered with many-coloured woven or embroidered bolsters and cushions; these also are mentioned in the Roman comedies as ornaments of couches.[44] Ducks appear beneath the couches, and the guests are attended by three naked lads: a flute-player, a boy holding a branch, and another with a ladle, which are wrongly reproduced in the Ny Carlsberg facsimile as a staff.

The symposium has begun, the tables having been cleared. Only young beardless men are seen feasting together, and nothing informs us who they are or why they are drinking. All that is certain is the luxury and pomp which seem to have characterized Etruscan houses and which are especially manifest in the jingling necklaces and the material and appointment of the festive couch.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI—HUNTING LEOPARDS]

New problems arise with the large symposium scene in the Tomba dei Leopardi at Corneto, which was discovered in 1875 and has now been described in an exemplary manner by Weege in the article mentioned above. The pictures are among the best preserved in the whole of Etruria, and date from about the same time as the Bighe tomb, about 500 B.C. The tomb takes its name from the two almost life-sized leopards in the pediment (fig. 24). They have been neatly proved by Weege to be hunting leopards. As early as the days of ancient Egypt leopards were trained for hunting purposes, and hunting leopards appear in Greek vase-paintings and Etruscan wall-paintings, for instance, in the earlier tombs such as the Tomba delle Leonesse and the Tomba del Triclinio, where the animal lies beneath a couch. In the Middle Ages the hunting leopard was still trained in the East, and is therefore depicted in the paintings of the Renaissance—for instance in the pictures of Gentile da Fabriano and Benozzo Gozzoli—as seated on the cruppers of the horses behind the Magi or their servants.[45] In modern India leopards are still trained to hunt.

[Sidenote: TOMBA DEI LEOPARDI]

Beneath the two long-bodied hunting leopards we see the main picture of the back wall (fig. 24) representing a symposium. On the couch to the left two youths are reclining, on each of the two others a youth and a young girl.[46] The young men are attired in mantles, the girls in chitons and mantles; all wear garlands. In their hands they hold either chaplets, drinking-bowls, or round objects usually supposed to be eggs. Similar ‘eggs’ appear in numerous Etruscan banqueting-scenes: in the Tomba del Triclinio, del Letto funebre, della Pulcella, degli Scudi, &c., and as egg-shells are frequently found in the tombs at Corneto, and eggs must therefore have been offered to the dead[47]—as the most nourishing of foods, and one which stimulates in particular the procreative force—it is not improbable that the old interpretation is the correct one. Weege supposes them to be ballot-balls used to decide who should be the master of the symposium (symposiarch), but this was usually decided by throwing dice. A third conceivable interpretation, which I think might be acceptable in certain cases where a man and a woman hand each other these round objects, is that they are rings. In Plautus’s _Asinaria_ (778) it is spoken of as typical of two young lovers reclining on one couch at the symposium that one of them gives the other his or her ring to look at.

Beneath and above the banqueting-couch we find the previously noted laurel branches—not laurel trees as Weege calls them—the familiar adornment of the walls. The guests are served by two naked pages: one of these, who holds a jug, beckons to the other, who holds a small jug and a strainer, to make haste. How necessary it was to strain the wine is seen from the description of the elder Cato. The Latin word for cleaning the wine-jars of the grape-skins deposited by the wine is _deacinare_.[48]

FOOTNOTES:

[42] The large frieze with dancing scenes on the left main wall was already badly damaged in 1827. A copy of it, now in the Vatican, is mere fiction, and has unfortunately served as basis for the large facsimile in the Glyptotek. On the other hand, its damaged state is correctly represented in the small drawing of the tomb in the Glyptotek.

[43] Blümner, _Römische Privataltertümer_, p. 118.

[44] On Etruscan cinerary urns and terracotta sarcophagi the covers are as a rule strongly scalloped. These are presumably the _tonsilia tappetia_ referred to by Plautus (_Pseudolus_ 145 ff.). They usually came from Alexandria and were decorated with pictures of wild beasts, whereas the bed coverlets proper came from Campania.

[45] These cheetahs were brought alive to Italy, if not actually used for hunting by the princes of the Renaissance. For among Pisanello’s drawings in the Codex Vallardi in the Louvre is a fine study of one of these animals from the life; it wears a collar round its neck, showing that it was led on a leash. I owe this reference to Mr. G. F. Hill.

[46] Dennis and Stryk are mistaken in speaking of a youth and a girl on the left couch; the error is due to the damaged condition of the colouring.

[47] Cp. Juvenal, _Satires_ v. 82, where eggs are referred to as a common course at funerals.

[48] Cato, _De re rustica_ 26. In the Greek pictures of symposia also the slave boy carries a strainer, ἡθμός.