Violence, Power and Religion in the South Etruscan Archaic City-State

Framing the Gods

Changes in architectural terracotta decoration of Central Tyrrhenian temple buildings in the second half of the 6^th century exemplify a radically new attitude towards cult statues and therefore the worshippers’ encounter with the gods. For the first time, around 540–530 BCE, the temple’s decorative programme included an artistic genre that acquired the highest level of religious and cultural significance (sensu Hölscher 2009), namely statues in the round of mid- to real-life size, which were reserved for the representation of the god and were placed at the ends of the ridges of temple roofs as acroteria (Winter 2005). In fact, we can trace the evolution in the placing of such terracotta statues on roofs to circa 580 BCE and from an earlier decorative roof system that pertains to elite courtyard buildings, of which the most complete example is the Upper Building at Poggio Civitate (Murlo, Tuscany), and to temple buildings in Rome; among the latter is the first-phase temple at S. Omobono where a fragment of possibly a bull acroterion was found (Winter 2005; 2009: 194–201). As over sixty pieces of terracotta human and animal figures at Poggio Civitate show, the acroteria of this earlier system were attached to ridge tiles and their roof arrangement, insofar as the reconstruction of the roof allows us to see, gave the impression of a frieze-like decoration to the viewer approaching the building (Winter 2017: 135). In the space of twenty years or so, such decorated roofs were limited to religious and public buildings only. Three or so decades later still, circa 530 BCE, the placing of statues in the round on temple roofs coincided with a veritable boom in such buildings across Tyrrhenian Central Italy: according to Winter (2016: 129; 2017: 148), the so-called Veii-Rome-Velletri workshops produced some twenty roofs at the eponymous sites in a single decade down to 520 BCE, while between 540 and 510 BCE some twenty-six roofs were produced in Caere alone and its hinterland.

Rarely has the scholarly literature of these acroteria statues defined them as cult statues (cf. Carlucci 2011: 117) seemingly for two reasons: on the one hand, the statue pair of Herakles with a female deity had no relation to the gods worshipped at these religious sites (Lulof 2000; Winter 2005: 247), while the more complex terracotta statuary groups placed on the ridge of later temples represented mythological stories, namely the temple of Apollo replacing, circa 510 BCE, an earlier building that was decorated with the Herakles and goddess pair at Veii-Portonaccio, and the temple of Mater Matuta at Satricum that was also rebuilt circa 500–490 BCE (Winter 2005: 247–149; Lulof 2011). On the other hand, the cult statue defined as the image of the god and hence the focus of worship evokes the Greek tradition of the housing of such a statue inside temple buildings. In fact, such a definition is not uncontroversial even for the Greek world (Donohue 1997), nor was that tradition at all uniform across Archaic Greece or indeed even the case for all Greek temple cellae (Sismondo Ridgway 2005: 11–112). Scholars have thus suggested a much more nuanced approach to the interpretation of Greek cult statues that gives prominence to either the spatial relationships of such a statue within a cult building (Sismondo Ridgway 2005) or, more broadly, to the encounter with the god that such a statue or other divine images facilitated (Tanner 2006; Platt 2011). The latter approach has proven particularly insightful for understanding the triangulation among the deity embodied in, even being, the statue, the worshipper viewing it and the craftsman representing it, ultimately leading to the problem of representation itself that is laid bare in the materialisation and human-like embodiment of a divine non-bodied being that affords its epiphany (Platt 2011: 10–23, 31–123). Such a materialisation, in fact, underlies the deliberately ambiguous boundary between the permissible and the impermissible in art production and craftsmanship insofar as representations of the human body are concerned, and the just as ambiguous boundary between the real and imaginary in the representation of the divine and its reception (Gordon 1979); while problematized by later Greek cultural discourses, such relationships and boundaries also characterised earlier religious traditions since the Homeric epic and the Homeric Hymns (Platt 2011: 31–72; Bierl 2017). As primarily visual, the reception of the divine, encapsulated by the Greek word theoria meaning viewing, beholding or ‘sacred spectating’ (Nightingale 2004: 45–47), was anything but a passive process (Neer 2010: 57–69). On the contrary, the act of viewing divine representations was itself a ritual performance and one in which the ontological difference between image and deity collapsed (Elsner 2000: 52–63; Tanner 2006: 40–67; Platt 2011: 20). Hence, the craftsmen’s choices of material, stylistic form, composition and iconography or any other figural attribute were theological ones (Tanner 2006: 48–51; Platt 2011: 41–42). At the same time, as noted above, in the overall temple’s decorative programme, sculpture in the round constituted the most culturally appropriate artistic genre for evoking the deity and hence activating divine epiphany (Hölscher 2009: 57).

It is not far-fetched to identify parallel relationships and uses of Etruscan life-size terracotta acroteria-statues considering the similarities in the Greek and Etruscan polytheistic religious systems, and especially the role that the statues and other architectural sculptural decoration played in the transmission of Greek-derived myths in Etruria (Carlucci 2015: 116–117). The decoration and framing of these statues on the roof of Etruscan temple buildings lead to this suggestion: unlike earlier and smaller acroteria that were attached to ridge tiles, the statues and their plinths were inserted into decorated bases that were attached to the roof ridge through what must have been a sophisticated system of installation that ensured the stability of the bases and the maintenance of the roof system (Maras 2011; Carlucci 2011; Michetti 2011). In fact, statues and bases were a coeval innovation, seen first at the Temple of Mater Matuta at Satricum, Caere-Vigna Parrocchiale, Pyrgi (Colonna 2000: 290 n. 147), and then at the second-phase temple at S. Omobono in Rome (Winter 2009: 477–479; 2011). That this was a technical innovation to ensure the stability of the roof decoration is without a doubt. The innovation pertained not only to the conception of the separate elements of the group – bases and acroteria – and the different types of bases conceived for the different sizes and locations of the acroteria on the roof, either the ridge or the pitch, but also to the sophisticated firing technology needed in the manufacturing process (Winter 2011: 65). But the innovation also pertained to the religious significance of the statues themselves. The painted and/or moulded decoration of the bases, in fact, provided a particularly sacred framing to the statues in closely evoking sacrificial altars, which carried similar decorative patterns in some instances, as detected in coeval figured representations of these altars. This is the case with the chequerboard motif that was reserved for the bases of the largest, over-life-size statues placed at the margins of the roof of the temple of Apollo at Veii-Portonaccio (Winter 2005: 249; Michetti 2011: 100, 103; Maras 2011: 110; Marzullo 2018: 170–174). In other cases, the decoration alluded to highly charged epiphanic moments (Bierl 2017: 241–253): five bases from the same roof were decorated with painted eyes, which were clearly inspired from similar eye paintings on Attic Black Figure eye cups (Hedreen 2017: 165–170), and were associated with swimming dolphins (Michetti 2011: 101–103). The temple at Veii-Portonaccio, which provides the largest repertoire of such bases – a total of eighteen identified so far – and their decoration (Michetti 2011), illustrates the role of these altar-like bases in isolating the acroteria as cult statues, yet framing them for ritual viewing. That the craftsman intended this decoration to be visible at different viewing points of the worshipper’s deambulation within the sanctuary is confirmed by the sizes of the motifs painted on the bases, which differed depending on the viewing point, including the chequers on the chequerboard patterns (Michetti 2011: 101, 104 n. 17). Lastly, the light skin colour reserved for the bodies of the high-relief plaques, an innovative visual strategy for the decoration of the pedimental space below the roof (see below), may indicate a deliberate intention to differentiate the bodies of the statues on the roof ridge (Carlucci 2011: 117).

This raises a key distinction in regard to the act of viewing the divine image between Archaic Etruscan and Greek sanctuaries: at the former, the statues literally transgressed the frame of the building, blurring the spatial distinction between inside/outside and enhancing the viewing effect, even if from a distance (Platt 2017 on framing the divine in the Greek world; Marconi 2007: 189–191 on earlier 7^th-century Greek temple decoration). The different viewing points, identified by the decoration of the bases, may indicate that the worshipper’s movement about the sacred space in viewing the divine was not as free or unstructured as might first appear, but must have followed specific patterns of religious behaviour (Moser 2019: 15, 51–53). Later texts, after all, make it clear that rituals at sanctuaries required a very specific liturgical order of movement and action, and altars provided the very foci for tracing the ‘topography of ritual correctness’ and action through time (Elsner 2000: 54–56). Etruscan and Central Italic sanctuaries and the central role of their altars were no exception (Baglione and Belelli Marchesini 2013; Moser 2019). Moreover, the decoration of the bases that made them, in some cases, look like altars, not only provided a focus for viewing the divine, thus diminishing the viewing distance, but also must have helped frame the relationship between the worshipper and the divine (Blume 2016). Last but not least, the care with which these terracotta statues were discarded once the buildings, which they decorated, were demolished, as best seen at Veii-Portonaccio, provides further evidence for interpreting these large acroteria as cult statues and thus foci for divine epiphany although high reliefs and antefixes were buried with just as much care (Glinister 2000: 59–60; cf. Moser 2019: 20).

Framing Narratives vis-à-vis the Divine: Violence and Sacrifice at Caere 

As mentioned above, the earliest statues in the round placed on the ridge of temple roofs were the groups of Herakles and a female deity, mostly identified as Athena, circa 540–530 BCE (Lulof 2000; Winter 2005: 244–246; 2009: 571). Another near-contemporary innovation, circa 520–510 BCE, was the placing of handmade terracotta plaques sculpted in high reliefs at the ends of the central and four side beams supporting the sloping roofs, known as columen and mutuli respectively. First found at sites within Caere and across its hinterland, at Pyrgi and Montetosto (Winter 2009: 463–466; 2016: 128), this innovation probably began in this city, a datum that corroborates the primary role of Caeretan workshops in innovating and very quickly influencing workshops southwards (Winter 2016: 130). This is shown by the placing of these plaques on the aforementioned temple of Apollo at Veii-Portonaccio circa 510 BCE (Winter 2005: 248–250; Carlucci 2011: 116), and, later, on other temple roofs decorated with so-called Second Phase terracottas (Lulof 2011: 24–25). As seen from the reconstructions of two Caeretan roofs decorated with these plaques, namely those from a temple at the urban site of Vigna Marini Vitalini (Lulof 2008) and Temple B at Pyrgi (Colonna 2000), these plaques provided the mythological narrative counterpart to the acroteria statues, and thus played a role half way between dilated metopes (Colonna 2000: 283) and pedimental sculpture, both conceptually – being hand-made like the acroteria statues themselves and half life-size – and spatially. In fact, the combination of acroteria-statues and plaques highlights yet another distinction from coeval Greek architectural decoration, which, from the second quarter of the 6^th century, shifted towards mythological narratives incorporating divine images within them, save for Temple C at Selinus, which bucked this trend (Marconi 2007: 190–192). In southern Etruria, by contrast, while the plaques disclose a similar concern with displaying such narratives, the divine statues, isolated on the roof ridge, maintained a remarkable prominence, promoting a particularly enhanced manifestation of the divine, as argued above. The profusion of statues on the Apollo temple at Veii-Portonaccio seemingly indicates a convergence of visual strategies for representing mythological narratives with that of Greek temple decoration, but their placing as statue pairs on the roof ridge, in fact, discloses a culturally distinctive preference with singling out narrative snapshots, so to speak, for the viewer, rather than with whole sculpted pediments.

The differences do not end here, however. Greek architectural sculpture reflected the worshippers’ stock knowledge of mythology, which was in turn largely derived from poetic performance from the Homeric epic onwards (Tanner 2006: 48–52; Hölscher 2009: 57). Beside the performance of Archaic epics such as that of Sicilian poet Stesichorus, about which we know very little (see below), Etruscan sanctuaries arguably provided the earliest instance of a public display of Greek-derived myths, which, up until then – we surmise from the epigraphic and visual evidence – was limited to elite circles and hence responded to the moral and social values of those circles (Menichetti 1994: 44–83; Maras 2002; Bellelli 2010). Hence, as Herakles, a Greek hero at the centre of an elites’ visual culture, was chosen for the earliest statue groups across Central Tyrrhenian Italy, those values had to translate for the myths to appeal to the wider community (cf. Cristofani 1992: 39–41). Evidence of that translation may be detected at temple B in Pyrgi where the high-relief plaques singled out Heraklean labours, illustrating a novel visual strategy from that used for the architectural terracotta decoration of elite residential buildings exemplified by the figured friezes from Zone F at Acquarossa (Winter 2009: 265–271). Here, Herakles, represented in the act of grasping the Nemean lion and the Cretan bull, was instead couched, almost hidden, within rows of warriors and chariot processions. The novelty of this visual strategy, it must be underlined, was precisely the singling out of mythological narratives, which these plaques enabled, since the use of the latter was not new; it is found at Acquarossa itself circa 600–580 BCE and, slightly later, at Poggio Civitate and perhaps Vulci (Winter 2009: 67–68, 143–144). At the same time, however, the choices of myths related to Herakles reflected a specific social and historical reality, which must have varied across the broader region, as much as it did across the larger Greek world, from Attica to Western Sicily (Marconi 2007: 205–209). In this respect, Caere’s richness of architectural sculpture, recently augmented by new reconstructions of roofs and identification of sculpture pairs dated from the last decades of the 6^th century (Rizzo 2011; Carlucci 2015; Lulof 2016), provides the opportunity to examine how and why, in respect to these aforementioned aspects, these choices were made at a frenetic phase of temple building.

Thus far, much attention has focused upon the extant Herakles-Athena pairs, combined with another divine couple, whose identification has been subject to debate (Lulof 2016: 132–133), and their political significance at Caere and beyond, as mentioned in my introduction, with recent attempts at understanding their cultic significance (Maras 2015). In the case of Temple B at Pyrgi, built circa 510 BCE and possibly succeeding one or more earlier buildings with terracotta roof decoration (Winter 2009: 553–554), scholars have identified the goddess accompanying the hero as either Athena or, more likely, Uni, the deity worshipped at the site, named Uni-Astart in the Etruscan inscribed dedication on a renowned set of golden plaques (Bellelli and Xella 2016), and assimilated to Hera. This second interpretation places emphasis upon a specific characterisation of Herakles’ apotheosis, not found elsewhere, that saw him accessing the Olympus under the protection of Uni-Hera and as husband of Ebe, daughter of Hera, who may have been represented in one of the high-relief plaques, and possibly the plaque on one of the columen’s beam ends (Colonna 2000: 288–290; Maras 2015; Lulof 2016: 137). Less attention has been paid towards the peculiarities of Herakles’ characterisation vis-à-vis the iconography of the rest of the architectural decoration of the Caeretan temples where he featured centrally, and what can be inferred about the values underlying the decorative register at these temples. 

Although the mutuli and columen plaques illustrating Herakles’ labours at Temple B were highly fragmented, Colonna (2000: 283–287) identified five plaques illustrating the following labours, but not their location on the building: the fight against the Lernaian Hydria, which may have been placed on one of the columen’s beam ends, to judge from the size of its fragments, and which has been associated with another set of fragments, also referring to the Hydria and including a lion-skin-wearing Herakles; the killing of the Nemean lion; the capture of Cerberus, the Erymanthian boar, and the fight against the three-bodied monster Geryon. The mutuli at the four corners of the building represented pairs of horses moving towards the centre accompanied by a male youth. Colonna (2000: 287) has interpreted these plaques as representations of the outcome of Herakles’ taming of the man-eating mares of Thracian king Diomedes, which provided an exemplar of the aristocratic life style for the local horse-owning elites. Lastly, a group of acroteria placed on the corners of the front sima of the roof, probably on both fronts of the temple, with which a torso of a lion-skin-cladded Herakles has been associated (contra Carlucci 2011: 125 n. 8, who refers this torso to a building in Caere), has been identified as an Amazonomachy, if not a specific labour, that of the theft of Hippolyte’s girdle (Colonna 2000: 284–286). 

The life-size Herakles on the ridge was represented with the lion skin and wearing hoplite armour, greaves and a breastplate, which Colonna (2000: 290) has interpreted as the reward for his labours and hence an apt attribute for his apotheosis by conflating Archaic and later textual sources. This armour is a notable contrast to other similar acroteria statues of the hero both here, at Caere (Lulof 2016: 132, fig. 11.9), and elsewhere in Tyrrhenian Central Italy although an armoured Herakles sometimes appeared in the broader visual culture of Archaic Etruria with no particular identifiable pattern (Colonna 2000: 290–292). In Archaic Greek visual culture, similarly, there is no pattern in the iconographic choices of Herakles’ attributes and/or weapons. If there is any, it is that he only uses his club when fighting against beasts and monsters with the exception of Attic vase-painting depicting Geryon (see below), and that he rarely wears body armour. Where he does, this happens on the architectural decoration in sanctuaries (Cohen 1994: 698–699). Late Archaic Greek art, furthermore, frames, iconographically, an opposition between the lion-skin-clad hero and other mythological figures depicted as heavily armoured warriors (Cohen 1994: 699). This opposition expresses a visual discourse on the margins and the centre of the polis community and hence its membership and ideology, which Herakles was best placed to exemplify given his incursions across its limits (d’Agostino 1999: 152). The discourse is centred upon the use of appropriate and inappropriate weapons and hence Herakles’ characterisation as anti-hoplite (Burkert 1992). It is further enhanced by the reversal of this antithesis as is the case with the mythical story linked to Herakles’ foundation of a cult to Hera at Sparta, which saw the hero wearing hoplite armour and fighting the hubristic Hippocoontides who endangered the community’s order by grabbing political power (Giangiuglio 1996: 221–229). 

At Caere, from the extant evidence available, we may find a comparable visual discourse centred on armour that must be related to religious worship and the underlying mythical narrative in which Herakles participated. As mentioned earlier, at the other building, most probably a temple at Vigna Marini Vitalini, coeval to, if not slightly earlier than, Temple B at Pyrgi, where we see the same innovative use of mutulus and columen plaques, the entire decorative programme centred upon armed fighting (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: The reconstruction of the temple roof at Vigna Marini Vitalini, Caere (author: Patricia Lulof)

Copyright: Patricia Lulof

Fragments of more plaques from Vigna Parrocchiale, another site within the city, show similar themes (Winter 2009: 465). According to Lulof’s reconstruction of the heavily fragmented Vigna Marini Vitalini roof (2008; 2011; Winter 2009: 463–465; Carlucci 2015), the plaques depicted groups of fighting warriors; fallen warriors fitted into the two plaques placed at the corners of the roof. A bigger plaque, probably placed at the columen’s end and depicting a larger number of warriors, may have included Herakles, identified by a head with lion skin, but with no other associated body fragments. Culminating on the ridge of the roof was a half-life-size hand-made acroterion depicting a frontal-facing fully armed warrior striding towards the right (Winter 2009: 472–73), but lacking any attribute that would allow viewers to identify him with a specific hero or deity. That the warrior acroterion is not a statue in the round with its own separate base as other acroteria cult statues discussed above is significant. On either side of this warrior were smaller quarter-life-size sima acroteria depicting pairs of horses with either single riding Amazons, facing frontally and unarmed but with greaves, or pairs of fully armed riding warriors facing side-ways, all riding towards the roof ridge (Lulof 2008: 204–206). 

While Lulof (2011: 25–28; also Carlucci 2015) underlines the experimentation of this roof’s decoration that inaugurated a subsequent phase of architectural terracottas of temple buildings focused on battle themes, and which was to be particularly popular in Rome and Latium, the warrior acroterion of the Vigna Marini roof represents thus far a unicum in respect to the decorative system adopted by other coeval temples, as seen above. If Lulof’s reconstruction is correct, however, it may not be far-fetched to explain such a unicum by establishing a correlation between this conspicuous display of fully armoured fights at the heart of the city and the just as violent imagery of Herakles’ labours on the correspondent and contemporary high-relief plaques on Pyrgi Temple B. That the roofs were coming from the same Caeretan workshops (Lulof 2008: 212) strengthens this suggestion, but the correspondence must also have answered specific theological intentions and demands which, I suggest, are to be found in two interrelated aspects: 1) the relationship between the mortal worshipper and the divine, which was not only established by the embodiment of a deity in a cult statue and hence the religious epiphany as argued above, but was particularly problematized by what seems to me to be a deliberate contrast between a non-divine warrior figure towering over the Vigna Marini building and the armed hero Herakles, about to be divine, at Pyrgi, a contrast that is enhanced by the reference to the Amazonomachy on both buildings; and 2) the role of violence in the establishment of sovereign power and its entanglement with sacrifice. 

In regards to the first aspect, it seems reasonable to suppose a shared system of religious communication across the Caeretan city-state, and that this was driven theologically by an intense local worship for Herakles as attested by the inscribed votives dedicated to Etruscan Hercle and found at Pyrgi and at the urban sanctuary at Sant’Antonio (Maggiani 2013). Some of these votives were imported Greek oversize vessels meant for display such as Attic parade cups (Tsingarida 2009; Cerchiai 2018c). The hypothesis of a shared system is further corroborated by the architectural terracottas of the sanctuary at Montetosto, among which is an Egyptian head whose stylistic features match those of the terracottas at Pyrgi (Winter 2009: 463; Belelli Marchesini et al. 2015: 36–37), and thus may also be the product of the same workshops. The head, furthermore, may belong to a depiction of the story of Herakles’ violent encounter with the Egyptian king Busiris, a paradigm of the transgression of sacrifice, illustrated on the renowned Caeretan hydria by the Busiris Painter (Hemelrijk 1984: 50–52; Bonaudo 2004: cat. 34). 

This story leads me to examine the second aspect raised above: scholars have extensively noted the role of Herakles’ labours, in Archaic Greek and Etruscan visual culture, in highlighting the transgression of cultural norms from commensality to sacrifice, and hence their codification and institutionalisation (Cerchiai 2018a with previous bibliography), making the hero’s cult particularly apposite in cross-cultural religious spaces such as Pyrgi, the sanctuary of a cosmopolitan emporion (Baglione and Gentili 2013). By signalling sacrifice as a codified practice, the illustration of an improper sacrifice, in particular, emphasises the structures of religious space and experience (d’Agostino 1999: 160–161; 2010–2011: 288). Another of Herakles’ labours, also present in Etruscan visual culture, crucially combines a paradigm on sacrifice and a discourse on the uses of improper and proper armour, namely Herakles’ theft of three-bodied Geryon’s cattle and the killing of the monster along with his herdsman Eurytion and dog Orthus. As d’Agostino has argued (1999: 154–157), Herakles’ theft of the cattle illustrates an act of rupture, in which the hero moved the bovine animals, object of pious sacrifice, from the world beyond into the human world where such sacrificial acts must take place. To that act of rupture also belongs the killing of Geryon, a monster who is unlike any other Herakles encountered; he is a monster with divine origins, whom Stesichorus characterised as a tragic hero, in his epic poem Geryoneis, drawing from the Homeric ones, thus blurring opposed categories of hero and monster (Franzen 2009; Noussia-Fantuzzi 2013; Finglass and Davies 2014: 34; Eisenfeld 2018). 

The popularity of the Geryon myth in the visual culture of the central Mediterranean is well-attested from Sicily to southern Etruria, most likely promoted by the oral performance and circulation of the Geryoneis itself (Spivey 2009: 68–69; Finglass and Davies 2014: 23–32). While we know little of the modes of that circulation, the myth must have served different local social and historical realities (Marconi 2007: 205–208). In Etruria, a closer look at the whereabouts and modalities in which the myth is depicted shows a pattern (Tables 1, 2): since their earliest occurrence, namely on the so-called second Pania ivory pyxis, Etruscan representations of the myth tend to focus upon Geryon’s cattle and only occasionally on the actual combat with Herakles, as far as we can see from the severely fragmented extant architectural terracottas, including a fragment from Pyrgi temple B (Colonna 2000: 284). A notable exception is the Etrusco-Corinthian Gobbi krater where the cattle is depicted alongside Herakles’ and Geryon’s combat, but here the composition is closely comparable to the earliest Greek depiction of the combat on a proto-Corinthian pyxis from Phalerum (Brize 1988: 188, no. 11, fig. 2). By contrast, all Greek imported images of the Geryon’s myth from circa 575 BCE down to the end of the century, mostly on Attic Black-Figure amphorae, a few hydriae and a couple of cups, isolate the scene of the combat. Isolating a specific episode of a story is also a choice made by Athenian painters for the depiction of Herakles’ encounter with Pholos that was probably targeted at Etruscan viewers (Riva 2017: 252). Of the more than eighty Attic vessels depicting the combat thinly distributed from Rhodes to Selinous, thirty-eight have an Etruscan secure or likely provenance, perhaps hinting at a similar targeted exchange of these vessels.^[2] This suggests a particular Etruscan interest for specific scenes that disclose not simply a focus on violent combat, but, more significantly, on violence vis-à-vis a political community within a visual discourse on the use of proper and improper weapons:^[3] Geryon is always represented fully equipped with hoplite armour covering all his triple body, a visually striking composite suggestive of a file of hoplite soldiers (d’Agostino 1999: 156), while Herakles is sometimes equipped with a sword, at other times with a club, or just a bow and arrow, in and out of appropriate weapons, as he attacks what visually appears as a group of hoplite soldiers, an allusion to the citizen body according to the polis ideology.

While these images likely circulated among elite viewers, they have to be understood vis-à-vis the social and political transformations across Etruscan city-states from the second half of the 6^th century that involved a tension between these elites’ political rule and other social groups attempting to widen membership to the political community, as attested by recent analyses of Etruscan iconography of hoplite warriors (Cerchiai 2018b). It is thus not far-fetched to recognize a similar focus on violence vis-à-vis the citizen body, however defined this body was under local circumstances, on the Vigna Marini roof decoration, where it was so much more powerful for what was a public display of violent combat within a religious space where Herakles appeared surrounded by hoplite warriors. Far from sending specific messages related to particular mythological themes (Hölscher 2009: 56), however, the cultural significance of this decoration and the underlying values and worldviews that were expressed and that reflected the socio-political tensions of the time may be understood by drawing upon Giorgio Agamben’s thought on violence and the control of biological life at the very origins of sovereign power and its entanglement with the sacred. Notwithstanding due criticism of Agamben’s reading of ancient sources (Depoortere 2012), his political philosophy cogently locates political power in the politicisation of bare life, namely the ability to place biological life (and hence its control, and the power to end it) outside the political and legal order. The very institution of that order cannot occur without conceiving of what is excluded from it, what Agamben calls ‘the exception’ which is not simply what is outside the norm in juridical or factual terms, but which is such because imposed a priori by sovereign power (Agamben 1995: 22–23). This determination of sovereign power instituting the law a priori co-exists with the institution of sacrifice, which, invested with prescriptions and prohibitions, equally determines exclusion and is determined by it. Without wishing to resort to a Girardian perspective, we may still consider violence as intrinsic of sacrifice, at least in the ways in which ancient cultural and moral attitudes made it so (Ando 2012). Agamben defines sacrifice as an apparatus of the sacred, that is, the action that delineates the separate sphere of the sacred, but also triggers a process of subjectification of those involved, namely the worshippers (Agamben 2006: 21–22; Tommasi 2008). Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of disciplinary apparatus and the processes of subjectification which the apparatus generates, Agamben sees subjectification as driven by the relation between a living being and an apparatus, which he defines as ‘anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions or discourses of living beings’ (2006: 14). 

If we consider Herakles’ double rupture in his theft of Geryon’s cattle and the slaying of Geryon as paradigmatic of the entanglement between violence (sensu Agamben) and the sacred, the Etruscan reception of the Attic iconographic material can also be understood in relation to the occurrence of Etruscan representations of armed violence at the altar. These are often but not exclusively scenes derived from the Trojan cycle, most notably Achilles’ ambush and killing of Troilus, for which scholars have identified a symbolic correlation between death at the altar and animal sacrifice (Cerchiai 1999). To these representations corresponds the paucity of images of sacrifice proper, and isolated images that pose a contrast between sacrifice and violence at the altar (D’Agostino and Cerchiai 1999: 160–161). Among the latter is what appears as a mythological scene on a hand-made high-relief revetment plaque from a building at Vigna Marini Vitalini dated to circa 540 BCE (Winter 2009: 451–452). One of the most renowned images of proper sacrifice, on an Etruscan Black Figure amphora from Dresden dated to the beginning of the 5^th century, shows the sacrificial act by a certain Larth Vipe, his name inscribed along with a description of that very act by him. Significantly, the other side of the vessel shows a pyrrich, an armed dance, the cultic nature of which has been convincingly demonstrated (Ceccarelli 1998: 53–57; Cerchiai 2014), reinforcing, again, the relationship between armed violence and sacrifice.

Agamben’s articulation of sacrifice as apparatus is ultimately methodologically useful for analysing the broader material evidence at sanctuary sites because it can help us understand religious experience, from sacrificing and making libations to being in the presence of the deities, as discussed earlier, and, at the same time, draw out the politicisation of religion. In regards to religious experience, Pyrgi offers a remarkable preservation of the evidence. The record of altars, their positions vis-à-vis Temple B and other structures within the sanctuary precinct is accompanied by the recent excavation of the southern sanctuary, which gives us an extremely accurate picture of ceremonies marked by specific rites that are contemporary with the installation and use of the sanctuary of Temple B located to the north of this area. Unlike temple B, this southern area was not monumentalised, nor planned until the beginning of the 5^th century. The arrangement and construction of the altars and their ritual deposits, in fact, was purely determined by the offering activities that were remarkably varied, from blood sacrifice and libation linked to chthonic cults, to the deposition of series of offerings underneath altars, and deposits aimed at ritualising the sacred space (Baglione and Belelli Marchesini 2013). In some cases, as attested with deposit rho, the deposit was particularly rich in offerings that corresponded closely with the character of the deity worshipped there, Etruscan Cavatha that was assimilated to Greek Kore-Persephone. The re-construction of the ceremony from the excavated remains confirms the following of a strict order of use of the votive material and its final deposition carefully reversing that order (Belelli Marchesini et al. 2012: 230). The epigraphic data from the area furthermore indicate a socially varied demographics of worshippers, as well as the worship of other deities, including Etruscan Hercle, or Greek Herakles (Maras 2013).

It is reasonable to assume that the terracotta decoration of Temple B culminating with the couple Herakles-Uni, would have shaped worshippers’ experience in these sacrificial and votive practices, but that those practices equally drove them to create their own mythopoiesis. The latter was not necessarily built around specific Heraklean myths, but responded emotionally to the allusions prompted by an armed Herakles and episodes from his labours (Marconi 2009 on emotional responses to animated architectural decoration), and the individual worshippers’ needs leading to those practices, as well attested by the notable absence of a match between specific votive objects satisfying those needs and the deities worshipped at the sanctuary receiving those votives (Lippolis 2017: 403–404). Indeed, other aspects of Herakles’ cult were displayed at Temple B, if the antefixes decorating the roof of the so-called building of the Venti Celle, located just south of Temple B and representing the Master and Mistress of horses, referred to Herakles and Hera in their journey to the Olympus (Colonna 2000; Maras 2015), among other figures replicating the image of the phiale, the vessel indexical of sacred libation (Gentili 2015). At the same time, all this architectural decoration, along with that of other temples in the city where Hercle featured prominently, belonged to a religious space that was explicitly politicized as revealed by the set of inscribed golden plaques, mentioned above, that may have been affixed to the door of the cella of Temple B (Santoro and Baglione 2013). In the engraved dedication, an almost bilingual Etruscan and Phoenician text, Thefarie Velianas, calling himself zilac, or supreme magistrate in Etruscan and ‘ruler of Caere’ in Phoenician, is asked by the goddess Uni, named Astart in Phoenician, to build a cella or cult place for her and, probably, the offering of a cult statue (Xella 2016). Scholars (e.g. Belelli Marchesini et al. 2012: 230; Xella 2013) have frequently argued for the political significance of this inscription and its bilingualism that highlight the existence of a specific Phoenician cult at the sanctuary, which, in turn, must be understood vis-à-vis a phase of tension and re-grouping among Central Mediterranean city-states, including Carthage, at the aftermath of the Battle of the Sardinian Sea (Herodotus 1.166–167). In fact, the values expressed by the architectural decoration of religious spaces between Vigna Marini Vitalini and Pyrgi, as analysed above, enhanced the political potency of this dedication precisely because of the entanglement between the sacred and violence in the sense of sovereign power that included and excluded and hence defined the political community of the city. It is not far-fetched to imagine that Thefarie exploited these values in his politicization of sacred space; that, however, does not and should not constitute, to us modern interpreters, a divergence to the worshippers’ religious experience that included the performance of sacrifice intended as apparatus, as argued above. On the contrary, one was part and parcel of the other, rendering the assertion of violence effective because fully enmeshed in the sacred. The offering by Thefarie of a cult statue, if Xella’s (2016) proposed translation of the Phoenician text is correct, furthermore added to the efficacy of the dedication because of the new attitude towards the encounter with the gods that was materialized by the placement of acroteria cult statues, as argued above. In explicitly playing with the ambiguous boundaries of divine representations, Thefarie’s claim was also about his power to control the imaginary of the worshippers’ community in the communication with the divine, an act, in other words, of symbolic violence (sensu Godelier 2015).

Conclusion

Archaic Central Tyrrhenian Italy represents a particularly rich laboratory for exploring the relationship between religion and political power in urban settings as attested by recent conference proceedings on power and authority where religion almost dominates the documentary base (Lulof and Smith 2017b). This relationship is not unlike what scholars have identified for the Greek world where the phrase polis religion, however highly contested and certainly attuned to more nuanced perspectives now, still seems to maintain a kernel of accuracy (de Polignac 2017). Thus, far, however, the arguments in favour of the uses of religion to serve political propaganda have constrained the debate into a fairly narrow avenue that leaves unanswered the critical question of how such political uses intersected religious experience. This is ultimately a question on the triangulation between the worshippers, agents and subjects of that experience, those detaining political power and using the control of the symbolic imaginary to political ends, and the craftsmen who were fully implicated in the material realisation of that experience. How we answer this question is a methodological challenge, particularly for a region and time period where the highly fragmented nature of the archaeological evidence is compounded by the lack of texts offering emic perspectives. In this contribution, I have adopted a comparative approach to the evidence that has sought to identify key differences between Etruscan and Greek sanctuaries in how the changing visual and material culture of religion responded to, and was in turn shaped by, new attitudes to the divine and hence the surrounding sacred space. The aim has then been to use these differences and the city-state of Caere and its sanctuaries as a case study, in order to demonstrate that, beyond a shared iconography and visual strategies for the decoration of temple buildings across the Central Tyrrhenian region, each city used these strategies to respond to its own socio-political reality much like other cities across the broader Central Mediterranean region. 

Indeed, the cultural discourse of violence vis-à-vis community and the power to exclude, which I have developed by bringing together other strands of evidence, may belong to a larger ideological change, which scholars have identified in the so-called Second-Phase terracotta decoration of temple buildings that focused on military themes and battle scenes (Lulof 2011: 27–30). It is in this discourse, ultimately, that we can locate the intersection between cult and ritualization and the appropriation of that cult for political ends. Whether we can then link such a broader ideological change to specific historical events (e.g. Strazzulla 2011), however, is a thorny question, which we should approach cautiously as recently argued (Hopkins 2017). More convincing are, in fact, recent perspectives, enriched by a broader and theoretically supported basis, that explore political rulership in urban settings from different angles and its key relationship to reciprocity in all its facets, religious, political and economic (Smith 2020). From this perspective, historical events can be accommodated into these dynamics and provide the historical context, rather than an explanation to changes in the material and visual culture of urban religion as I have tried to do here.