We pass on to the right main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12) where dancers in a row with drinking-bowls in their hands alternate with servants carrying wine in large bowls. That the funeral dance was animated by free indulgence in wine is often exemplified in the tombs. In the Tomba delle Leonesse, named after the beasts of prey in the pediment, which are really hunting leopards, a red-brown lad to the right is dancing with a girl; to the left is a woman with castanets, and in the centre, flanked by a flute-player and a lyre-player, stands the wine-bowl wreathed with fresh leaves (fig. 13), ‘the wine-bowl filled with joy,’ in Xenophanes’ words. Evidently the Etruscans drank heavily to celebrate the memory of their dead, as Xenophon relates of another barbarian tribe, the Odrysians.[28] To the right of the false door of the same main wall in the Tomba delle Iscrizioni (fig. 12), a man in a loin-cloth with a laurel branch in each hand is greeting another man, who carries chaplets and rests one leg on the cushions of a couch. Laurel branches constantly recur in the reliefs of the Etruscan cinerary urns, where the death lament round the bier of the deceased is reproduced, and it seems probable that laurel branches were carried round the house and used for wall decoration in the house of the deceased on the funeral day, for the purpose of purification. This decoration of the walls, then, would be the subject of our picture, together with the other preparations for the funeral, as shown by the paintings.[29] Perhaps it was a general custom of the Etruscans to decorate their walls on festival days with laurel branches, just as the Egyptians decorated theirs with lotus, and this would often account for all the foliage which appears in the backgrounds of the paintings alternating with suspended chaplets, even where the action—the death lament (fig. 9) or the symposium—takes place indoors. In other cases, however, as in the Tomba dei Tori (fig. 2) and in the Tomba del Triclinio (fig. 10), there is no doubt that real trees and open-air scenes are represented, but even there the chaplets are often seen hanging—on the wall. Again a proof of the want of clarity in Etruscan art! Trees, however, in the background of scenes with figures are also found on South Italian vases of the same time, and thus seem to be a common Italic trait. FOOTNOTES: [17] Kestner, _Annali_ i (1829), p. 101 ff. [18] Athenaeus iv. 154a. [19] Livy ix. 30. 5-10. Plutarch, _Aetia Romana_, 55. [20] Dionys. Halicarn. vii. 72-3. [21] Livy i. 35. 9. [22] Hesych. _s. v._ The word is not mentioned in S.P. Cortsen’s _Vocabulorum Etruscorum interpretatio_ in _Nordisk Tidsskr. for Filologi_, 1917; no doubt because he considers Hesychius’s statement insufficiently authoritative. Cp. Skutsch, Pauly-Wissowa, vi. 775. [23] Helbig’s letters of June 21 and December 10, 1895.