Italic peoples

• 1. Introduction

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  The Italic peoples are not a single nation or a single tribe. They are a category. A word that scholars have argued over, stretched and redefined across centuries of archaeology and linguistics. And depending on which expert you ask, the answer to the question "who counts as Italic?" changes entirely.

  In the strict sense used by linguists, the Italic peoples are those who spoke the Italic languages: the Osco-Umbrians and the Latino-Faliscans. Both belong to the broader Indo-European language family, that vast ancestral web connecting languages from Sanskrit to Welsh. But historians have long used the word more loosely, applying it to virtually every ancient people who lived on the Italian peninsula, whether or not they spoke an Indo-European tongue. That wider group includes the Etruscans, the Rhaetians, and the Ligures, none of whom spoke Italic languages at all.

  So how did these many peoples come to share a peninsula? Where did they actually come from? And what happened to them once Rome began its long, relentless expansion? Those are the questions this documentary will follow.

• 2. Bronze Age Origins

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  The story of how Indo-European speakers reached Italy begins far to the northeast, somewhere on the Eurasian steppe. According to the historian David W. Anthony, a massive migration out of the Yamnaya culture swept into the Danube Valley between 3100 and 3000 BC. Thousands of burial mounds called kurgans are attributed to this event. From those migrations, linguists believe, the ancestral roots of the Italic, Celtic, and Germanic language families began to separate from one another.

  The proposed homeland of a hypothetical "Italo-Celtic" ancestral people is placed in what is now eastern Hungary. The Yamnaya culture had settled there around 3100 BC. That detail matters because it forms the basis for one influential hypothesis: that Italic and Celtic languages share an origin closer than either shares with Germanic. Indeed, researchers Russell Gray and Quentin Atkinson applied a computational technique called Bayesian phylogenetic analysis to the problem. Their work suggests Proto-Italic speakers separated from Proto-Germanic speakers roughly 5,500 years before the present day, placing the split approximately at the dawn of the Bronze Age.

  From the late third to the early second millennium BC, people carrying what archaeologists call the Beaker culture arrived in the Po Valley, in Tuscany, and along the coasts of Sardinia and Sicily. They came from both the north and from the Franco-Iberian region. Some scholars see the Beakers as the bridge that carried Yamnaya-derived dialects westward from Hungary through Austria and Bavaria, where those dialects may have developed into Proto-Celtic.

  Around 1800 BC, a migration across the Alps from east-central Europe brought another wave of early Indo-Europeans into Italy. The archaeologist Barfield connected the appearance of the Polada culture to new populations arriving from southern Germany and Switzerland. Bernard Sergent traced the origins of the Ligurian linguistic family to the Polada and Rhone cultures, which he considered southern variants of the Unetice culture. The people who carried these traditions settled in the foothills of the eastern Alps and left behind a material culture closely resembling that of contemporary Switzerland, southern Germany, and Austria.

  Mid-way through the second millennium BC, a distinctive culture emerged in the Po Valley: the Terramare. Its unusual name comes from the Italian term terra marna, meaning the black earth left behind in ancient settlement mounds. Local farmers had been using that enriched soil as fertilizer long before archaeologists understood what the mounds were. The Terramare people hunted and kept domesticated animals. They cast bronze in moulds of stone and clay. They grew beans, wheat, flax, and cultivated the vine. The archaeologist Luigi Pigorini associated the Latino-Faliscan people specifically with this culture.

• 3. The Proto-Villanovans

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  Before 1000 BC, multiple Italic tribes had probably entered Italy from the east, crossing through what would become known as the Proto-Villanovan culture. These groups penetrated through the eastern passes and gradually spread across central and southern Italy, eventually crossing the Apennine Mountains to reach Latium.

  The Proto-Villanovan culture dominated the peninsula and displaced the older Apennine culture that preceded it. Its most recognizable feature was burial practice. The dead were cremated, and their ashes placed inside double-cone shaped funerary urns decorated with geometric designs. But not everyone received the same treatment in death. Elite graves containing jewellery, bronze armour, and horse harness fittings were clearly separated from ordinary burials. Scholars read this as evidence of a deeply hierarchical society, a pattern they associate broadly with Indo-European cultures.

  Proto-Villanovan settlements have been found across almost the entire Italian peninsula, from the Veneto region in the north-east to eastern Sicily in the south. The most important excavated sites include Frattesina in the Veneto, Bismantova in Emilia-Romagna, and a site near the Monti della Tolfa, north of Rome. Various scholars, including Marija Gimbutas, connected this culture directly to the arrival or spread of proto-Italic peoples across the peninsula.

  In the 13th century BC, a separate movement was underway further north. Proto-Celts, probably the ancestors of the Lepontii people, arrived in northern Italy from an area encompassing modern-day Switzerland, eastern France, and south-western Germany. These newcomers established what is known as the Canegrate culture in Lombardy, eastern Piedmont, and Ticino. Their pottery and bronzework were, by scholarly assessment, completely new to the region. The name Canegrate comes from a locality in Lombardy, south of Legnano and 25 kilometres north of Milan, where a researcher named Guido Sutermeister unearthed approximately 50 tombs containing ceramics and metal objects. When the Canegrate people merged with the indigenous Ligurians already living there, a new mixed culture appeared: the Golasecca culture.

• 4. Iron Age Fragmentation

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  Around 900 BC, the relatively uniform Proto-Villanovan world began to break apart. The catalyst was the transition into the Iron Age. New techniques, new trade routes, and new regional identities pulled communities in different directions.

  In Tuscany, parts of Emilia-Romagna, Latium, and Campania, the Proto-Villanovan tradition gave way to the Villanovan culture. The earliest physical remains of that successor culture date to approximately 900 BC. South of the Tiber River, in the region known as Latium Vetus, a distinct Latial culture took shape among the Latins. In the north-east of the peninsula, the Veneti developed their own Este culture.

  At roughly the same time, from their heartland in what is now Umbria and the Sabina region of central Italy, the Osco-Umbrians began spreading outward. They moved through a ritual process called Ver sacrum, a practice of formally extending colonies in a sanctioned, ceremonial fashion. Their migrations took them into southern Latium, into Molise, and eventually across the whole southern half of the peninsula. As they spread, they displaced older tribes including the Opici and the Oenotrians.

  This Osco-Umbrian expansion corresponds to the Terni culture, which carried strong similarities to the Celtic cultures of Hallstatt and La Tene. The Umbrian necropolis at Terni, dating to the 10th century BC, was in every observable aspect identical to the Celtic necropolis of the Golasecca culture. That parallel is striking evidence of how intertwined the Italic and Celtic worlds remained, even as they developed separately on the ground.

  A genetic study published in Science in November 2019 brought new evidence to this picture. Researchers examined the remains of six Latin males buried near Rome between 900 BC and 200 BC. Those individuals carried specific paternal and maternal haplogroups, and they were distinguished from earlier Italian populations by carrying roughly 25 to 35 percent steppe ancestry. The study found that the genetic difference between the Latins, the Etruscans, and the preceding Proto-Villanovan people was statistically insignificant. Iron Age and early Republican Italic and Etruscan samples overlap with the genetic profiles of present-day Italians and other west Mediterranean populations.

• 5. Conflict and Romanization

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  By the middle of the first millennium BC, the Latins of Rome were becoming the dominant force on the peninsula. Several Italic tribes had already banded together in what was called the Latin League, specifically to resist the Etruscans, who were not Indo-European speakers and represented a distinct cultural and political force. After the Latins freed themselves from Etruscan rule, they occupied a leading position among the Italic peoples, and a long period of inter-tribal conflict followed.

  The most thoroughly documented of these conflicts are the wars between the Latins and the Samnites. Those wars shaped the political map of Italy for generations. Eventually the Latins succeeded in drawing the other Italic groups under a common framework. Many non-Latin Italic peoples adopted Latin culture and received Roman citizenship. Italic colonies were planted across the country, and peoples who had not been Italic at all gradually absorbed Latin language and customs through the process known as Romanization.

  That process was interrupted, briefly and violently, in the early first century BC. Several Italic tribes, most notably the Marsi and the Samnites, rose in rebellion against Roman authority in what became known as the Social War. Rome ultimately prevailed. After the Roman victory, all peoples in Italy, with the exception of the Celts of the Po Valley, were granted Roman citizenship. In the centuries that followed, the remaining Italic tribes were drawn fully into Latin culture. The Po Valley Celts, the last group explicitly excluded from that grant, stand as the one marker of how far Rome's reach extended and where it stopped.

• 6. Theater and Performance

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  Among the cultural inheritances the Italic peoples left behind, theatrical performance is one of the least expected. The Etruscans had already developed forms of theatrical literature before Rome rose to prominence. An account reported by the Roman historian Livy describes a pestilence striking Rome and the city turning to Etruscan performers in response. Livy's account also resists the idea that Roman theater descended directly from Greek theater, noting that meaningful contact with Magna Graecia and its theatrical traditions came later. No architectural remains of Etruscan theaters have survived. A very late source, the historian Varro, names a figure called Volnius, said to have written tragedies in the Etruscan language. That single reference is all that survives of what may have been a richer tradition.

  The Samnites, too, left a mark on Roman performance culture. Their contribution came through a comedic form known as the Atellan Farce, a genre that exerted considerable influence on Roman dramaturgy. Physical evidence of Samnite theatrical spaces survives as well. The theater at Pietrabbondante in Molise and the theater at Nocera Superiore, on whose foundations the Romans later built their own structure, both demonstrate that the Samnites possessed an architectural tradition of performance spaces that predated Roman construction in the same locations. Scholars have used the design of those Samnite theaters to argue for an architectural lineage connecting them to Greek theatrical traditions, running through the Samnite world rather than arriving in Rome directly from Greece.