But a saint dies with her boots on

[sovay]

I wish I had Carthaginian or Etruscan authors to love as much as the Greek or Roman ones. I stared at the Pyrgi Tablets last night and thought again that they are one of the coolest things I know from the ancient world, and so very singular. Wikipedia in translating both texts renders the personal name of Thefarie Velianas as "Tiberius," although the Etruscan form is older. His city was Cisra. The Romans called it Caere; it was Kyšryʼ to his Phoenician-speaking allies. I'm sure the political situation was complex. It is a curious thing for a ruler to dedicate a shrine in gratitude to another people's god. But he calls her Uni-Astre, syncretizing. (Her name on the Phoenician side of the tablets is rendered ʻštrt, Aštart—cognate with Akkadian Ištar, Hebrew Aštoret, I don't like to use Astarte outside of Greek contexts for the same reason I prefer not to Romanize Greek names wherever possible. That š is important.) The Romans assimilated Tanit to Juno Caelestis, raised temples to her after the destruction of Carthage and the building of Roman Carthage on the same ground. Not Venus, despite her equivalence to the evening star. Carthage is Juno's city in the Aeneid; its future defeat is the reason the goddess hates Aeneas, his abandonment of Dido and her enmity-ensuring curse a closed loop of time. Roman tradition held that Juno herself was taken from the Etruscans by evocatio at the siege of Veii in 396 BCE. Scipio Aemilianus is supposed to have performed the same ritual on Tanit during the sack of Carthage in 146. At Cisra, she was offered a shared name and invited in. These old, old links, irrecoverable fragments. Everything becomes a sigil of something lost: an unspoken language, an unreadable book. I have no more right to the Etruscans than D.H. Lawrence, but I can't stand reading his Sketches of Etruscan Places (1932), lovingly as he writes of their ruins and their art; he romanticizes them so much, so much freer, more spontaneous, more sexual, more primitive than the clipped stony Romans who succeeded them. So much more in tune with nature, so unspoilt. (Plus lots of assumed phallic symbolism, because this is Lawrence. I cannot actually read his interpretation of the duck with a straight face.) The Etruscans were as warlike as anyone else in the ancient world, not just in fighting off Roman expansion. They had colonies themelves. They made sacrifice of prisoners taken in war. Nothing is as simple as falling in love with a painting on a tomb wall. I keep coming back to voices that cannot speak for themselves; I never want to be Lawrence. I wish I knew some of their poetry. Or even the histories they wrote.

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[sovay]

The problem is, Mybug is a parody, but the original is even funnier now.

"And that is another curious thing. One can live one's life, and read all the books about India or Etruria, and never read a single word about the thing that impresses one in the first five minutes, in Benares or in an Etruscan necropolis: that is, the phallic symbol! Here it is, in stone, unmistakable, and everywhere, around these tombs. Here it is, big and little, standing by the doors, or inserted, quite small, into the rock: the phallic stone! Perhaps some tumuli had a great phallic column on the summit: some perhaps by the door. There are still small phallic stones, only seven or eight inches long, inserted in the rock outside the doors: they always seem to have been outside . . . The big phallic stones that, it is said, probably stood on top of the tumuli, are sometimes carved very beautifully, sometimes with inscriptions. The scientists call them cippus, cippi. But surely the cippus is a truncated column used usually as a gravestone: a column quite squat, often square, having been cut across, truncated, to represent maybe a life cut short. Some of the little phallic stones are like this—truncated. But others are tall, huge and decorated, and with the double cone that is surely phallic. And little inserted phallic stones are not cut short."

SOMETIMES A ROCK IS JUST A ROCK.