Tarquinia

The Etruscan name of the city, Tarχna, written in the Etruscan alphabet from right to left, with the letter chi for the aspirate. It is attested as the great gentilicial name Tarchunies / tarχna, the clan that the legend of the seer Tarchon and the history of the Tarquin kings both attach to the city; the most famous instance is in the François Tomb at Vulci, where the figure Cneve Tarchunies Rumach, “Gnaeus Tarquinius of Rome,” appears among the painted heroes. The city-toponym is the accepted reading of this attested name-stem.

Tarχna is the Etruscan original behind one of the most consequential names Rome inherited. From it the Romans formed both the city-name Tarquiniī and the dynastic Tarquinius, the family of Rome’s fifth and seventh kings, whose expulsion founded the Republic. That an Etruscan tomb-painting should label one of these Tarquins Rumach, “the Roman,” is a striking thing: the Etruscans were recording a member of the house as belonging to Rome at about the time Rome was making the name a byword for the monarchy it had overthrown. The kings were driven out; the name they brought from Tarχna stayed.

The Latin name of the city, Tarquiniī, a plural like the names of other Etruscan towns, taken from the Etruscan Tarχna; from the same stem came the dynastic name Tarquinius and the adjective Tarquiniēnsis. To Rome, Tarquinii was the city of its own early kings, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus and Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, whose overthrow in 509 BCE Roman tradition made the birth of the Republic.

Tarquiniī is the Etruscan name in Roman form, and it is the form that survived, in the modern Tarquinia and in the historians’ “Tarquin.” The Greek writers who treated Roman history, Dionysius and the rest, knew the city only under this Latin name, so it has no separate Greek form on this page. The city thus reaches us doubly through Rome: as the home of the kings Rome remembered expelling, and in the Latinized shape of the Etruscan name Rome kept long after the Etruscans themselves were gone.

The Greek name of the Etruscan city, Tarkynía, in Strabo and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, both of whom tell the same story about it: that Demaratus, a merchant-aristocrat of Corinth fleeing the tyranny of Kypselos in the seventh century, settled there with his craftsmen, and that his son moved to Rome and reigned as Tarquinius Priscus. The Greek form renders the name the atlas records at its source as Etruscan Tarchna, softened through the Latin-facing shape that also gives Tarquinii.

Greek had no independent knowledge of the city; it knew Tarkynía almost entirely as the setting of the Demaratus legend, a story Greeks told to give Rome’s kings a Corinthian grandfather. That is the entry’s interest: the name enters Greek not as geography but as genealogy, an Etruscan city adopted into Hellenic family history so that the Tarquin dynasty could be half-Greek. The Etruscans on this page name the city from inside and the Romans administer it from next door; the Greeks, farthest away, used it as a stage, and their name for the place survives mainly as the birthplace of a convenient ancestor.