ARISTOCRATIC LEADERS OF EARLY ITALY
In peacetime, leading families also assembled dependents to farm their land, guard their herds and flocks, and attend to household tasks. Agriculture was becoming more complex, more capital-intensive, and perhaps more profitable. Beginning in the eighth century, the cultivation of grape vines, so essential to a culture with ceremonial drinking, spread to central Italy, along with the planting of olive trees. Powerful families probably played an important role in this process and in the accumulation of wealth that would have accompanied it. In the late seventh and sixth centuries, potters in Etruscan coastal centers made pottery vessels, amphorae, for the storage of olive oil and wine; some of these wine amphorae have been found along the coasts of southern France and northeast Spain.
Long term ties of dependency bound many of the inhabitants of the new cities to aristocratic leaders. Links between members of the elite and their followers could be defined in terms of “patrons” and “clients.” Ideally, the patron granted protection to his clients, who followed this protector in war and in politics and served him in other ways when appropriate. In some cases, a powerful family may have controlled entire villages or clusters of dwellings in.
The communities of central Italy possessed what has been called a “gentile” organization. Romans, for example, belonged to a clan or gens (plural, gentes). At first, a gens consisted of an aristocratic lineage or group of lineages and some of their lesser followers and dependents. A special system of nomenclature charac-terized groups formed in this fashion: Members were identified by a name or nomen (plural, nomina) that identified their gens, and they also had a first or personal name, the praenomen. Names in this style appear on inscriptions from the seventh century, although it is unclear whether that is a recent development or just the first appearance in writing of an already established practice. All of a city’s residents need not have been either aristocrats or dependents of some aris¬tocratic family. In some cities, independent elements of the population could certainly be found. Eventually, they too came to be organized into gentes, so that every member of a community would belong to a gens.