The Emperor Who Wrote Twenty Books on the Etruscans

Somewhere in Alexandria, once a year, a group of readers took it in turns to read a twenty-book history of the Etruscans aloud, from the first sentence to the last. Next door, the same thing was happening with eight books on Carthage.

The buildings existed for this. Suetonius says a second Museum was added at Alexandria and named after Claudius, with the annual recitation written into the arrangement.

An emperor had endowed an institution whose job was to keep saying his book out loud. Nothing about it survives: not the books, not a quotation from them worth the name, not a line.

The best-placed person who ever tried

What makes this the most painful loss in Etruscan studies isn't the length of the work. It's the author's access.

Claudius was writing in the first century CE, when Etruscan was dying but not dead. There were still families who spoke it. There was still a functioning haruspical priesthood in Roman state service, with its own training and its own books. Etruscan noble houses kept their own archives, and thought of themselves as Etruscan.

He had a personal route in. His first wife, Plautia Urgulanilla, came from an Etruscan family. He was an antiquarian by temperament from adolescence, in a household that regarded this as an embarrassment rather than an asset. His own relatives thought he was slow, and scholarship was where they were content to let him go.

And then he became emperor, which meant unlimited money, unlimited access to archives, and the ability to summon anyone who knew anything.

Nobody has ever again been in that position. Every scholar of Etruscan since has worked from objects and epitaphs. Claudius could ask.

Proof that he really could read it

It would be easy to assume the emperor's scholarship was flattery-grade. There is a bronze tablet at Lyon that says otherwise.

It records a speech Claudius gave to the Senate in 48 CE, arguing that Gauls should be admitted to it. Making his case, he takes a long detour into early Roman history, and cites Etruscan authorities, auctores Tusci, against the standard Roman account.

Specifically: the king the Romans called Servius Tullius was, according to Etruscan sources, a man named Mastarna, a companion of the brothers Caelius and Aulus Vibenna.

That is a genuine, checkable claim, and it checks out from an entirely independent direction. In the François Tomb at Vulci, painted around three centuries before Claudius spoke, there is a scene of armed men freeing prisoners. The figures are labelled in Etruscan. One is Macstrna. The Vibenna brothers are there too.

Nobody excavated that tomb until 1857. Claudius was not guessing, and he was not repeating a Roman story. He had read an Etruscan historical tradition that we can now confirm existed, and he was using it to correct the Roman one in front of the Senate.

There's a small, bleak joke in the sequel. Tacitus retells the same speech in the Annals, and tidies it: the argument survives, the Etruscan material is gone. Even in the first century, the antiquarian digression was the bit an editor cut.

The dictionary that probably wasn't

A caution, because this one has escaped into general circulation.

You will very often read that Claudius compiled an Etruscan dictionary or lexicon. It's an appealing detail: the last man who could read the language, writing it all down.

Suetonius doesn't say it. He lists the twenty books of Etruscan history and the eight on Carthage, and moves on to the three new letters Claudius invented for the Latin alphabet. No ancient source mentions a dictionary at all.

What almost certainly happened is that "he wrote a history and could use Etruscan sources" has been rounded up, repeatedly, until it became a distinct lost book. The real loss is quite large enough without it.

A preview of what happens to an emperor's scholarship

Those three letters are worth a moment, because they're a controlled experiment in how durable imperial authorship is.

Claudius invented three new characters for Latin, published an argument for them before he took power, and once emperor put them into official use. They appear in inscriptions and public documents during his reign. He had every lever a person can have.

They vanished at his death. Not banned. Just dropped, immediately, by everyone.

If a reform backed by the full apparatus of the state can't outlive the man by a year, an endowment for reading a Greek history aloud in a distant city was never the safeguard it looks like.

Nobody burned it

Here is what makes the Tyrrhenica the purest example of its kind of loss.

There is no villain. No fire, no purge, no emperor ordering it scraped from the record. Claudius was deified. His works were not proscribed.

What happened is that a text survives only for as long as somebody keeps choosing to copy it, and copying was expensive, slow work done by people with limited materials and firm opinions about what was worth the labour.

Set the competition out plainly. A long Greek prose history of a people who no longer existed, in a language nobody could check, written by an emperor whom Seneca had lampooned as a drooling fool within months of his funeral, against Virgil, Homer, the Gospels, and every text a school actually taught.

It didn't stand a chance. And each century that passed made it worse: fewer copies meant fewer exemplars to copy from, which meant fewer copies.

The Alexandrian endowment didn't help either, because institutions are not immortal. An arrangement guaranteeing an annual reading is only as good as the building, the funding and the interest, and all three ran out.

So the position is this. We cannot translate Etruscan, mainly because almost nothing survives in it but gravestones. The one substantial account of these people written by someone with living informants was composed, copied, deposited in a library, and endowed with a ceremony to keep it in the world.

What reached us instead is a bronze tablet in Lyon where he mentions, in passing, that the Etruscans called one of Rome's kings by a different name, and a painted wall in a tomb, dug up eighteen centuries later, agreeing with him.