The libri rituales and the founding of cities by Etruscan rite

The third part of the Etrusca disciplina was concerned not with interpreting signs but with ordering collective life. The libri rituales laid down how a city was to be founded, a temple consecrated, boundaries drawn and the people divided. The grammarian Festus, who summarises the work of the Augustan scholar Verrius Flaccus, gives them a broad definition: in those books it was written “by what rite cities are founded” and altars and temples consecrated.

The first furrow

According to Varro, many cities of Latium were founded in the Etruscan manner. The founder ploughed a furrow with a plough drawn by a bull and a cow, yoked so that the cow was on the inner side. The earth turned up was thrown inwards and ideally formed the wall, while the furrow represented the ditch. Where a gate was to be opened, the plough was lifted and carried across, leaving the ground untouched.

Varro linked the word porta, gate, precisely to this gesture, deriving it from the verb portare, to carry. The etymology is probably a scholarly reconstruction, but it shows how present the rite still was in Roman memory. Plutarch, in his Life of Romulus, relates that the founder of Rome sent for skilled men from Etruria, who directed the ceremonies according to sacred laws and writings, teaching every detail as in a mystery rite.

The pomerium and the mundus

The line traced by the plough defined the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city. Special rules applied within it: the dead could not be buried there and magistrates could not exercise military command. Enlarging the pomerium was a solemn act, reserved for those who had extended the boundaries of the state. The emperors Claudius and Vespasian, among others, performed this rite, which is recorded by inscribed boundary stones found in Rome.

Plutarch also mentions the mundus, a circular pit dug at the moment of foundation, into which first fruits were thrown together with a handful of earth brought by each settler from his homeland. The mundus joined the new city to the underworld and to the land of the ancestors. According to Roman tradition it was opened on certain days of the year, and it was said that the world of the dead was then in contact with that of the living.

Beyond the city

According to Festus, the libri rituales also dealt with the organisation of tribes, curiae and centuries, the formation of armies and many other matters relating to war and peace. Connected with the same sphere were the texts on the limits of human life and the lifespan of peoples, and the libri Acherontici, which concerned the fate of souls after death and the possibility, according to Etruscan doctrine, that some of them might become divine.

Christian writers such as Arnobius and the Virgilian commentator Servius speak of these last books, often in polemical or cursory terms. We therefore cannot reconstruct their content precisely, but their existence confirms that the Etruscan discipline embraced the whole of human existence, from the founding of the community to its destiny beyond death, and not merely the interpretation of signs.

Through the libri rituales the Etruscans left Rome something more than a technique of divination: an idea of the city as a consecrated space, bounded and ordered according to the will of the gods. Roman colonies, with their walls, gates and street grids, long preserved traces of this conception, even when the religious meaning of the original gestures had faded.