Tages

Summary

Tages is a boy who came up out of the earth in a ploughed field near the city of Tarquinii in Etruria, with a child's face and an old man's mind, and dictated to the people of Etruria the whole science of divination, which the Romans called the Etrusca disciplina. Etruscan religion makes his story the origin of its written law: one prophet speaks once, and books are kept and interpreted after him.

Cicero tells the story as he had it from the Etruscans. A man was ploughing land near Tarquinii when the ploughshare went deeper than usual, and out of the furrow Tages suddenly sprang and spoke to the ploughman. The Etruscan books say he had the appearance of a boy and the wisdom of an old man. The ploughman, astonished, cried out; people gathered, and in a short time the whole of Etruria had assembled at the spot. Tages spoke at length, his hearers took down every word, and all he said concerned the science of reading the entrails of victims; later the science grew as new things were learned and referred back to the same principles. "This is what we have from them," says Cicero; "their writings preserve it, and they hold it to be the source of their science." Cicero, On Divination 2.50.

Ovid tells it another way: the Tyrrhenian ploughman saw a clod of earth in the middle of his field move by itself, with no one stirring it, then take the shape of a man and lose the shape of earth, and open a new mouth to tell of things to come; the people of the land called him Tages, the first who taught the Etruscans to lay open the future. Censorinus says the boy was "ploughed up" from the earth by divine power and sang the discipline of the entrails, which the lucumones, the lords of Etruria at that time, wrote down. John the Lydian adds that the ploughman was Tarchon himself, founder of Tarquinii, and that the child looked newborn but lacked neither teeth nor the other signs of full age; Tarchon took him up, placed him in holy places and questioned him, and wrote a book in which Tarchon asks in the Italians' language and Tages answers in ancient letters. The Greeks, he says, took Tages for the earthly Hermes. Festus makes him the son of Genius, the Romans' guardian spirit, and grandson of Jupiter, that is Tinia, and says he gave the art of divination to the twelve peoples of Etruria.

The Romans called what he dictated the Books of Tages, among them the books of the entrails and the Libri Acherontici, the books on the rites by which the dead are saved after death. Other writers say his teaching took in lightning, the founding of cities with the plough, earthquakes, and a remedy for mildew on the crops.

The idea the story turns on is that knowledge comes up out of ploughed earth and is then written down. The ploughman opens the ground to sow, and the ground gives him a science for reading signs. What comes up is a boy with an old man's wisdom, so the knowledge is old even when it appears new. He speaks once, the lords write down his words, and what they wrote becomes the root to which every new sign is referred. Tages is one of the culture heroes who brought people a craft they did not have, and his craft is the reading of livers and lightning. In Ovid the clod of clay takes human shape, as humans are made from clay in the stories of the creation of humans.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this. Tages is the Latin form, genitive Tagetis, whence the Libri Tagetici. The Etruscans did not write g, and de Grummond takes his Etruscan name to have had a hard c. Remove the case ending -es and Tak remains; the t answers Arabic dh, and the name is dhakāʾ. In Lane dhakāʾ is sharpness and quickness of mind, and also full age, a year after an animal's teeth are complete; and the Arabs say "the youthfulness of such a one is like the full age of such another", meaning that the one's judgment, young as he is, equals the other's in full age. That is Tages as Cicero describes him, a boy's appearance with an old man's wisdom, and as John the Lydian describes him, a newborn with teeth and the signs of full age. The same root gives dhakāh, the due slaughter of a victim, and the Etruscan diviner reads the liver of a slaughtered victim. It is a reading proposed on the method.

Linguistic Root

Tages and dhakāʾ

Lane: dhakiya, said of a man, "he was sharp, or acute, in mind, with quickness of perception and of understanding". Dhakāʾ is also age, or full age, the root's primary sense being completeness; dhakāʾ as-sinn according to al-Khalīl is when a year has passed after a solid-hoofed animal has finished teething, and balaghat ad-dābba adh-dhakāʾ is "the beast attained full age". One says "the youthfulness of such a one is like the full age of such another", meaning that one's prudence, short of age as he is, equals the other's at full age. Dhakkā a victim is to slaughter it in due form, and dhakāh is that slaughter. Dhukāʾ is the sun, and ibn dhukāʾ the dawn.

The sounds: in the Juthoor tables t, ṭ, dh and ẓ form one group that becomes t or d in the European languages, so dh is the t of Tages. Q, k and j form a group that becomes Latin c or g, and the Etruscans wrote c where Latin writers wrote g. The final weak y of dhakiy drops, and -s is the Greek and Latin case ending. The t of the genitive Tagetis is Latin stem formation with no counterpart in the root.

The Etruscan form and idrāk

On a third-century BCE mirror from Tuscania a youth in a priest's conical cap stands with his left foot on a rock, looking at a liver, labelled pava tarχies. Beside him a bearded elder listens and ponders, labelled avl tarχunus. Pallottino suggested that pava means "boy" and that tarχies became Latin Tages, so that the scene is Tages teaching Tarchon. If so, the Etruscan name has an r that the Latin lacks. Etruscan tarχ- answers Arabic darak, with Etruscan t for d and Etruscan χ a heavy k: in Lane adraka is to reach, attain; adraka al-ghulām, the boy attained full maturity; adraka ath-thamar, the fruit ripened; adraka ash-shayʾ bi-baṣarihi, he perceived it with his sight; and one's knowledge adraka a thing when it comprehended it. The two readings meet in one sense: a young one who has reached full understanding, a fruit ripe before its time. Tarχies and tarχunus share tarχ-, the opening of Tarchon's name. What stays open is that Pallottino's identification is not agreed among scholars, and we do not know from which Etruscan form the Latin Tages was taken.

Key Mythic Narratives

Witnesses from the ground

Excavations at Pian di Civita, the site of ancient Tarquinii, found in a sacred area the skeleton of a child of seven or eight, buried at the end of the ninth century BCE, whose bones show a deformation that specialists connect with epilepsy; beside it was a natural cavity in the earth joined to an altar by a channel. De Grummond sees in this a suggestive background for the myth of the wise child, since the ancients credited epileptics with spiritual power. Carnelian scarabs of the fourth century BCE show a man bending to listen to a small being coming up out of the ground, taken for Tarchon and Tages. And the bronze liver of Piacenza itself, against which a diviner compared the liver of a victim, was found in 1877 by a farmer ploughing a field near Gossolengo.

Cicero mocks

Having told the story, Cicero mocks it: who is fool enough to believe that anyone ever ploughed up a god or a man? If a god, why did he hide in the ground to be uncovered by a plough; if a man, how did he live under the earth, and where had he learned what he taught? Cicero, On Divination 2.51.

In Diana's grove

Ovid sets Tages in a simile inside his story of Diana's grove at Aricia: Hippolytus was astonished to see Diana turn the weeping Egeria into a spring, as the Etruscan ploughman was astonished to see the clod become a man, and as Romulus was when he saw the spear he had planted on the Palatine put out leaves and become a tree.

Symbolic Reading

The Roman rereading essay in this project reads divination from entrails as a health check: the colour of the liver shows the health of the animal, and the animal's health shows the health of the pasture, so a sound liver means a sound environment and a safe decision. Tages's story agrees with this reading in at least one place: the science that reads the liver came up out of a ploughed field, the ground on which the flock grazes and the grain is sown, and the first to hear it was a ploughman. The second Roman essay notes that the Etruscans took their letters from the Phoenicians and passed them to the Latins, and in Tages's story writing becomes the condition of knowledge: the ploughman cries out, the lords write, and the book remains.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Ashurbanipal says he learned "the craft of the sage Adapa", which takes in the signs of heaven and earth; Adapa is the first of the seven sages whom Enki sent before the flood to teach humankind. In Mesopotamia as in Etruria, divination is a first science brought by a sage from beyond the human world, then kept and explained by scribes. Among the Greeks the river carried the severed head of Orpheus to Lesbos still calling out, and on Etruscan mirrors his head comes up out of the ground with open mouth and a written tablet before it, in the guise of a seer, a picture that recalls Tages. John the Lydian reports that the Greeks counted Tages as the earthly Hermes.