Chiusi: dalla città etrusca al municipio romano

The epigraphic production of Chiusi in the Hellenistic period is well known for its exceptional size. Studying this extraordinary corpus poses problems that are not easy to solve, especially because the history of archaeological research has led to a considerable dispersion not only of the inscriptions themselves, but also of the reports about their discovery. In the last thirty-five years, the study of archival documents has made it possible to recover much information. The possibility to put on a map the findspots of inscribed objects, has helped to understand that during the first half of the 2nd century BC there was a partial reorganization of land ownership. This was not a generalized phenomenon, because only some of the large estates, following a crisis or the extinction of the owners’ families, suffered a fragmentation, which allowed groups of families of a more modest level to acquire landed properties, where they imitated the same patterns of behavior implemented by the local aristocracies. The most discussed aspect of the history of Clusine funerary culture concerns the sudden cessation of the qualitatively higher production, that of alabaster urns, after the first quarter of the 2nd century BC, and its complete replacement with more modest series, produced in very large quantities; this was accompanied by an explosion in epigraphic production. Prosopography has shown that this phenomenon is not a consequence of the disappearance of the elite families, which, on the contrary, still appear substantially in good health throughout the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Funerary epigraphy is an exceptional source for understanding the changes in the Clusine citizen body that followed its incorporation into the Roman state in 90 BC. It is possible to sigle out individuals of non-Etruscan origin, who, at least initially, seem to be of a relatively modest social rank; they try as much as possible to achieve integration through the establishment of marriage ties with local families. The same strategy was also followed by higher-ranking immigrant families, who arrived later, and became part of a new elite of domi nobiles in the early Imperial period.