Chapter One
Discovery November 1634
Cave, cave, cave
Beware, beware, beware.
On a beautiful afternoon in November 1634, lunch had ended for the Inghirami family in their Tuscan villa. Curzio Inghirami, aged nineteen (fig. 1), decided to go fishing with his thirteen-year-old sister, Lucrezia, in the river behind their house. They were used to doing things together; their villa, Scornello (fig. 2), stood on an isolated hill in the rugged countryside south of Volterra, the highest and most remote of the great ancient Etruscan cities, and their only close neighbors were a few families of tenant farmers. Half an hour's walk brought them down to the flat bed of the river Cecina, where the fishing was good that afternoon. Curzio's manservant would later tell the police that as they made their way back up the tree-lined road toward home, brother and sister suddenly bent laughing over a "a mixture of certain hairs" (fig. 3). Curzio himself would tell the story somewhat differently; he confessed that he had been standing on the riverbank, throwing rocks:
It was when we were going fishing after lunch on Saint Catherine's Day, while, some three hundred cubits distant from our House, I looked over the river Cecina, waiting for the servants, and to amuse myself I rolled stones down the bank. It so happened that once another large stone had been moved aside, a small blackish clod was uncovered.... This I threw around several times, until it chanced to break apart. Then I could see that there were hairs underneath the layers of which the clod had been made. Astonished, I dissolved it with great effort. Many would come to think that the outer layer had been compacted of bitumen, pitch, resin, wax, frankincense, storax, and mastic, and other substances of this sort. The second layer, which was sturdier, was enveloped in fabric that had been mixed in with the hairs and reduced to powder, and underneath this there was linen rag paper marked with the following characters:
This paper contained another, which broke into fragments from the blows, with the following prophecy, precisely expressed:
In the year of the prophesied King of the Jews 1624, one thousand five hundred ninety-first from his Crucifixion:
A Dog shall come who shall serve out his term of indenture faithfully and freely for nine years, and more. The Wolf is the mother of the Lamb. The Lamb shall love the Dog. A Pig shall come forth from the horde of Pigs and shall devour the work of the Dog.
Cave, cave, cave [beware, beware, beware]
Prospero of Fiesole, resident of this colony, Guardian of the Citadel, Prophesied the year after Catilina's death. You have discovered the treasure. Mark the spot, and go away.
Archaeological discoveries were nothing new around Volterra; the city was one of the oldest in Italy. Its imposing walls had been built in Etruscan times, nearly two thousand years before Curzio took his fishing trip. Patched and restored, they had served their purpose until 1472, when the city finally fell to Florence in a horrific siege (fig. 4). Volterra's streets and buildings largely rested on Etruscan or Roman foundations, and where the city ended, limestone grave markers, marble statues, and tiny alabaster coffins came out of the earth with images of Volterrans long dead. Some of the names on these ancient graves were still familiar. Plowmen turned up tiny Etruscan bronzes in their fields or stored their animals and equipment in Etruscan chamber tombs. Nothing, however, had ever looked quite like the capsule that Curzio Inghirami had just pulled from the riverbank.
Despite their portentous tone, almost comical in its pomposity, the prophecies recorded by Prospero the guardian also fit neatly into Curzio's experience of the world. Seventeenth-century Italians heard oracular predictions all the time from traveling preachers and passed them to one another by printed broadsheet, book, or word of mouth, much as their twentieth-century descendants would scan their newspapers for the horoscope and the weather report. The biblical book of Revelation provided a favorite source for these oracles, as did the prognostications of Joachim of Fiore, a Calabrian abbot who had first spouted similar meldings of apocalypse, political satire, and animal fable in the twelfth century. Prospero the guardian's fulminations about the lamb, the wolf, the dog, and the pig therefore belonged to a familiar form of speech, and not only for prophecies, but also for satires about political figures of the day, especially about Italy's uniquely peculiar politician, the pope. The satires, especially, affected the same bombastic tones as Joachim's-or, now, Prospero's-prophecies, to comical effect.
However familiar the tone of Prospero's oracles, however, the guardian's final injunction to "mark the spot, and go away" sounded serious, and Curzio obeyed. In his own words: "I read it over, and I marveled; I marked the spot." But the augur's scroll said nothing about souvenirs, so Curzio and Lucrezia took the whole strange bundle home with them, while their manservant went ahead with the fish; it had been, all in all, a productive afternoon. When they brought their package into the house, their grandmother spluttered, "It's a curse!" and ordered them to throw it away. Luckily their father, Inghiramo, took a more sober interest in the sturdy capsule with its paper scroll, so much so that he and Curzio returned to the riverbank with shovels the very next day-"You have discovered the treasure" seemed to impress Inghiramo more than the warning to "mark the spot, and go away." But their search for Prospero's treasure proved frustrating; the amateur archaeologists uncovered only a series of clay vessels that had been broken in antiquity, their contents long since carried off. That single day's taste of excavation was enough for Inghiramo, who took off for Florence shortly afterward, bound on his own business, which included not only their farms and pastures, but also the salt springs that welled up on their property and at the base of the hill, one of the many oddities of Volterra's strange, mineral-rich terrain.
There matters stood until 13 December, when the Inghirami's tutor, Father Domenico Vadorini, came by Scornello to celebrate the Feast of Saint Lucy with the family, say Mass in the villa's little chapel, and hear the children's lessons. When Curzio brought out the paper scroll with its Etruscan prophecy, Vadorini urged another try at excavation with a larger team of diggers. Together they summoned the only candidates available, a contingent of Scornello's tenant farmers, and marched back to the site to make their assault. Seasoned spadeworkers, the contadini soon cleared a sturdy wall with a stone urn embedded in one of its crannies. The urn contained another bundle like the one Curzio had found by the river, again inscribed on the outside, and again with what appeared to be Etruscan letters (fig. 5).
Confirmation of the bundle's Etruscan origin was easy to secure. Volterra boasted a famous pair of Etruscan inscriptions, both unearthed in 1494 by the famous local scholar Raffaele Maffei, whose descendant, Raffaello Maffei, was Curzio Inghirami's best friend. A visit next day to the Palazzo Maffei gave Curzio and Father Vadorini the information they needed: the letters on this new capsule were almost identical to those on the ancient tomb markers. Together with Raffaello Maffei and some of Curzio's other friends in town (the "more studious" among them, he recalled), they broke the capsule open with great ceremony and found to their delight that it, too, was stuffed with rolls of paper documents. This time, however, some texts were written in Etruscan (fig. 6) and some in Latin.
The Etruscan texts could not be read, but their content could be guessed from the Latin records: once again Curzio learned that the cache of documents was connected with the figure of Prospero of Fiesole, who could now be identified as a novice in training to become an augur, an Etruscan priest:
I, Prospero, was instructed in the art of divination by my Father, Vesulius, as is the custom among the Etruscans, so that from the records of the ancients I came to believe in the coming of the Great King, after whom the years shall be numbered. Therefore in my own Oracles I numbered the years as I knew from the auspices they would one day be numbered. But when my Father died prematurely, I came to Volterra because there was a College of Diviners in that City, but ever since Catilina betrayed his Fatherland, I have been assigned as Guardian of this Citadel by the Volterrans.
Now Curzio Inghirami began to display some of the qualities for which he was habitually singled out among the young men of Volterra: a quick, nimble mind and an impressive depth of knowledge-his parents were certain that he had the makings of a great lawyer, and everyone else in town was inclined to agree. But Curzio's real love was history: he could therefore discern immediately from Prospero's mention of the traitor Catilina that the scrolls in both capsules must have been written around 62 b.c.
Lucius Sergius Catilina was a disgruntled Roman nobleman who lost the consular election in 64 b.c. to Cicero. A violent man of mesmerizing presence (and a very sore loser), Catilina then hatched a plot with a group of associates to seize the consulship he had failed to secure by vote. Before he and his fellow conspirators could set their plans in motion, Cicero denounced them before the Roman Senate in a series of four speeches, each recounting the progress of Cicero's own detective work amid outbursts of superbly elegant indignation, including the famous lament, "O tempora! O mores!" As the consul unfurled his masterful oratory, Catilina fled north to Etruria, where he had cultivated allies among the old Etruscan families by playing upon their resentment at Rome's policy of settling army veterans on former Etruscan lands. As always, too, the local slaves were ready to revolt in exchange for the promise of freedom. But Catilina had mistaken the caliber of his adversary. With the blessing of the Senate, Cicero, in full consular power, unleashed the Roman army on Catilina's ragtag forces and followed on his own initiative with a brutal purge of the plotters. By 63 the Catilinarian revolt was over. Catilina himself committed suicide before the Roman troops could arrest him and hand him over for Cicero, in the regalia of a triumphing general, to drag him in chains through the Roman Forum. Catilina or no Catilina, Cicero would celebrate the triumph anyway and published his Catilinarian orations for all Rome to savor.
Seventeen centuries later, crowding around Prospero the Etruscan's buried scrolls, Curzio and the other young Volterrans suddenly saw Catilina's conspiracy and its suppression with a piercing new immediacy. As schoolboys, they had all struggled through Cicero's four Catilinarian orations, unraveling the consul's intricate grammar while Cicero himself unfolded the story of Catilina's conspiracy. Mastering Latin as they watched Cicero master Rome, they could hardly have resisted crowing with the victorious Romans when the Fourth Catilinarian came to its close:
Vote, then, for your safety and that of the Roman people, for your wives and children, your altars and hearths, your shrines and temples, the houses and headquarters of the whole city, for sovereignty and liberty, for the safety of Italy, for the whole republic, vote carefully and strongly. You have a consul who does not hesitate to obey your decrees and, so long as he lives, shall defend your decrees and decisions and adopt them as his own.
Now, abruptly, Prospero's scrolls turned the story inside out, telling it from the Etruscan viewpoint, and telling it in the very words, with the very handwriting, of an Etruscan eyewitness. Cicero's triumph, they could now see, had been Volterra's defeat, one more example of the Etruscans' relentless absorption by Rome.
In the beginning, the Etruscans had ruled the Romans, at least according to Roman tradition. But from the day when the people of Rome expelled their last Etruscan ruler, Tarquin the Proud, in 510 b.c., the little Latin republic had grown from a tiny city-state to a vast cosmopolitan empire. It began its expansion by gradually engulfing the other native peoples of the Italian peninsula, subjecting culture after culture to the dominion of the Latin language, Latin literature, and Latin customs. It took three hundred years for Rome to vanquish Etruria once and for all; the last dramatic episodes of the struggle were played out in the first century b.c., precisely in the time of Prospero the Etruscan, Catilina, and Cicero. By the time of the emperor Augustus (31 b.c.-14 a.d.), Etruscan writing had all but disappeared from tombs, buildings, coins, statues, books, everything except religious texts. As Curzio Inghirami and his friends read on and on through the cache of curled and yellowing scrolls, Prospero the Etruscan, waiting for Cicero's armies to close in on his citadel, bore vivid witness to the terrible price of Romanization:
When the Roman Army restored Fiesole and Volterra to Roman Dominion and laid siege to this Citadel, and I despaired of survival, I stored away my dear Household Gods and what money I had, together with the treasury of this Fort ... and the Oracles written in Etruscan and Latin Letters. But because the Etruscan language has almost disappeared, I have summarized those [Oracles] that are in Etruscan letters.... I committed them all to the earth, so that they would not fall into the hands of the enemy, but if the fates permit it, may they be seen one day in a better light; otherwise let them be guarded here in perpetual eternity.... I, Prospero of Fiesole, the Augur, in the year after Catilina.
Clearly, as in the famous phrase of Tacitus, the Romans were once again to "create a desert and call it peace." Prospero's scrolls made it clear that when Cicero eradicated Catilina and his allies, he had also purged Volterra of its largely Etruscan leadership. Prospero himself, the aspiring priest pressed into incongruous service as a soldier, gave tragic proof that many Etruscan men were already dead or under arms. Only thanks to a seer's foresight had Prospero consigned his testament to these strange capsules as his own culture faced extinction. The lonely hill of Scornello had been his refuge as it was Curzio's, with views across rolling fields toward Volterra on one side, and down chalky crags toward the river Cecina on the other. But Curzio could look out and daydream; Prospero spent his days in the grim search for Roman armies moving across the land.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Scarith of Scornelloby Ingrid D. Rowland Copyright © 2005 by Ingrid D. Rowland. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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