Propertius’ elegies on the rise of Rome (4.1), the treachery of Tarpeia (4.4), the Battle of Actium (4.6) and the spoils thrice dedicated to Jupiter Feretrius (4.10) boast ostensibly triumphant and teleological narratives that have little by way of elegiac sensibility. Yet this chapter argues that Propertius accesses via Virgil’s Aeneid alternative and less self-assured histories based on repetition and defeat. A locus for this tension betweeen linear and circular chronology is the shield of Aeneas, with its presentation of historical scenes up to Actium, an ecphrasis that Propertius recasts (with an eye on its notionally static and spatial properties) in his own description of Actium in elegy 4.6. The shield features also in elegy 4.4 to associate Tarpeia’s treachery with the Gallic sack of Rome, a historical ‘interpenetration’ much in keeping with Virgilian technique. In 4.10 further intertextuality with the Aeneid multiplies the canonical three dedications of spolia opima in a way that destabilizes the institutionalized Augustan history of Jupiter Feretrius. Ultimately, Propertius’ reading of Virgil implies that not even Rome is immune to the vicissitudes of an elegiac history.

The antiquarian interests of Propertius 4 introduce a series of vignettes of early Rome (elegies 4.1, 4.4, 4.9, 4.10), and several further poems include rustic or quasi-rustic loca amoena in less likely contexts (a marine locale in 4.6, an urban park in 4.8). This chapter investigates how these passages engage elegy in an encounter with the genre of pastoral as codified in Virgil’s Eclogues, expanded in the Georgics and inserted in the antiquarian Aeneid. The politics of this encounter are urgent, pastoral being a vehicle of the Augustan ‘Golden Age’, but also inherently evanescent and ‘elegiac’. No less urgent are its poetics, pastoral being a lowly erotic genre like elegy, but also capable of cosmic and epic flights (as in Eclogue 6, notwithstanding its recusatio of epic themes – a tension closely tracked in elegy 4.6 on Actium). This ‘upward mobility’ is another respect in which pastoral is, arguably, analogous to elegy in its late-Propertian phase (if not earlier in the lost work of Gallus, an ‘absent presence’ here). Propertius’ recurrent loca amoena (which are not as idyllic as their name suggests) are thus spaces of generic negotiation in which ideology is never far away.

Before our project Etruscan Tuscania was best known for its great family tombs with inscribed sarcophagi of the 4th-2nd centuries BC, but the survey evidence shows that the Etruscan landscape was most densely settled in the 6th century BC (219 sites), coincident with the process of urbanization. The frequency of ‘off-site’ material indicates that Etruscan agricultural activity extended over the greater part of the surveyed area. Little survives of the remains of the Etruscan town, but the richness of Etruscan material immediately south of the city walls indicates a suburban extension of it. The development of Tuscania implies that the control of minor centres by major centres (or rather, the control of less powerful by more powerful families as social and economic inequalities became increasingly marked) was one of the earliest features of Etruscan urbanization. The Archaic Etruscan phase was followed by a marked, though not dramatic, population decline in the Later Etruscan phase (129 sites), the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Activities at Guidocinto, a small but long-lived Etruscan farm we excavated near Tuscania, included the production and processing of oil, wine, and wool, products that enhanced elite lifestyles and provided them with valuable resources for exchange and trade.

An underappreciated difference between fifth- and fourth-century Rome was the emergence of stipendium and tributum (military pay and the land tax to fund it). Encompassing every citizen landowner and soldier, stipendium and tributum likely involved more people than any other civic institution at Rome. Moreover, this fiscal system changed the way in which Rome operated. It created a set of tasks that needed to be completed; it then instituted a new set of roles to complete those tasks; then it elevated a set of people in order to fill those roles; and finally those people developed new tactics to derive maximum benefit from their new functions. The key stakeholders in all this were the tribuni aerarii, who operated the system in local areas across the countryside. Though poorly attested in the extant sources, these men had the ability to control the smooth operations of the war machine. They promptly realized that they could hold the fiscal system hostage to extract political concessions. The exclusive rule of Rome’s patrician leaders, now reliant on plebeians to pay and collect taxes, was doomed.

From about 550 to 510 BCE, Etruscan terracotta roofs display many innovations linked to terracotta roofs in Anatolia stratigraphically datable between 585 and 560/550 BCE: decorative motifs including double volutes and scrolls, lotuses, star-flowers, meanders, birds, landscape elements, centaurs, and animal battles; chariot race scenes with dogs and hares running below the horses, and particular horse trappings; painted motifs, without relief; a new polychrome palette of brown, gold, blue, and green; a white background and black outlines; L-shaped simas with an overlapping flange system; and high-relief pedimental sculpture. These features are documented pre-550 BCE at the sites of Larisa on the Hermus; Phocaea and Sardis in Anatolia; and post-550 BCE at Tarquinia, Veii, and Cerveteri (ancient Caere) in Etruria. The correspondences are so close as to indicate that artisans from Anatolia were active in Etruscan terracotta workshops for one generation after 550/540 BCE, recalling Herodotus’ stories of refugees fleeing west from Anatolia when the Persian king Cyrus began advancing into the area around 560 BCE and of Phocaean captives taken to Caere after the Battle of Alalia in 540 BCE.