THE ORIENTALIZING PERIOD
As wealth came to concentrate in cities and towns, many communities began to expend resources on their defense. For centuries, villages were often located on easily defensible hills or plateaus, which the inhabitants might strengthen with ditches, dikes, and palisades. From the eighth century, some communities began to construct more elaborate and expensive defensive systems. Many fortified themselves by first digging a deep, broad ditch (fossa), and then using the excavated earth to construct a thick, high mound (agger) inside it.
Fossa and agger defenses do not necessarily surround an entire city; in general, only the most vul¬nerable areas were strengthened in this manner. A few cities built still more elab¬orate fortifications. At the beginning of the sixth century, the Etruscan city of Rusellae built itself a wall of large mud bricks mounted on a stone base, and in the sixth and fifth centuries, the Etruscan centers of Caere, Tarquinii, Vulci, and Veii built walls with stone blocks. Again, these fortifications seldom extended completely around the settlement.
The eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries saw major changes in the frequency of warfare, as well as in its scale, and degree of organization. The new ways of mak-ing war affected not only relations between the emerging cities, but also the role and power of aristocracies, the political and social organization of the communities themselves, and their physical layouts. In the fourth century and later, when our evidence is much better, it is clear that some cities made war in a very formal and highly organized manner. They fielded large armies led by the political lead¬ers of the city as a whole, and these armies fought formal battles in which soldiers were massed in large and regular formations. Before this date, however, simpler and less structured forms of warfare prevailed: There were few or no set battles; quick raids for cattle and other loot predominated; warriors served not as members of the community, but rather as followers of an aristocratic leader who had organized the enterprise. While the nature of the transition from one mode of warfare to another is clear enough, the stages and the timing of the shift are very obscure: It was probably a long process with much local and region¬al variation. From 600, however, the evidence shows traces of an ever intensifying warfare between cities, while later literary sources even provide the names of prominent leaders in war.