s of La Tolfa, which lies behind Cerveteri. The apparently inexhaustible mountain forests provided firewood for smelting the ore and timber for building temples and ships. This then was the rich soil from which Etruscan civilizationsprang and flourished, sustained by the wealthy families and yet aiming primarily not at any expansion of power or at profit, but at dominion through religion over life and death. Devotion to Music Music, dancing and masks played an important role in the life of these people. The instruments they particularly favoured were the double pipes, the zither, a percussion instrument like the castanets, the short, slightly curved horn, the long, curling horn and the resonant trumpet, whose inventors they were believed to be. We learn how sweet and bemusing was the sound of the Tuscan pipes from a tale told by Aelian in his work on zoology as late as the third century of our era, when their music had long been silent. 'It is said in Etruria, where wild pigs and stags are caught with nets and dogs in the usual manner of hunters, that success is greater when music is used as an aid. I shall now relate the manner of doing this. Nets are stretched out and all kinds of traps set in position. Along comes an experienced piper. He avoids so far as possible regular melodies and loud sounds and plays the sweetest tones the double pipes can produce. In the silent solitude his airs float up to the tops of the mountains, into the gorges and thickets, into all the retreats and breeding-grounds of the game. At first when the sounds reach their ears the animals are terrified and filled with fear. But later they are irresistibly overcome by enjoyment of the music. Enraptured they abandon their young, their lairs and their familiar trails, from which they would normally be so unwilling to stray. Thus are the wild beasts of the Tyrrhenian forests gradually attracted by a powerful magic, and they dr...
