Clusium

One of the twelve cities of the Etruscan league, and the one Rome remembered as the last time it was nearly extinguished by a neighbour. Clusium sat in central Italy above the Chiana valley, rich on farmland and on the trade route between the Tyrrhenian coast and the Adriatic. Around 508 BC its king Lars Porsenna marched on Rome, which had just expelled its own Etruscan king. The Roman tradition about what happened is unusually transparent about being a cover story: it gives us Horatius holding the bridge, Mucius Scaevola burning his own hand off to show that pain would not stop him, and Cloelia swimming the Tiber - three tales of heroic resistance - and then admits, in Tacitus and Pliny, that the city surrendered and was disarmed. Porsenna appears to have taken Rome and then lost interest in it. Etruscan Clusium is known mainly from its cemeteries. The canopic jars with modelled human heads are peculiar to the city, and Pliny describes Porsenna's tomb as a labyrinth under a pyramid with bronze bells on spires, a monument nobody has ever located and which may never have existed. Clusium is where the Gauls were said to have been invited into Italy, and Roman envoys sent to mediate there broke the truce and fought, which brought the Gauls to Rome in 390. The city allied with Rome against them afterwards and was absorbed by 295. What survives of the city is mostly underground. The chamber tombs cut into the tufa around it hold the painted walls and the sculpted urns that supply much of what is known about Etruscan funerary practice, and the museum at Chiusi holds the largest collection of the canopic jars. The Etruscan language is still only partly understood, so a city that fought Rome to a standstill speaks to us almost entirely through its graves.

• Existed: 700 BCE – 295 BCE
• Type: City State
• Government: Monarchy, then oligarchy
• Capital: Clusium