SOCIAL LIFE OF EARLY GROUPS
In these gatherings, elite males in a community and their guests from elsewhere created links among themselves and proclaimed their distinction from others. Essential implements in such gatheringsbowls for mixing wine, cups, and tripods were often expensive, and they served as symbols of a special, and highly desirable, way of life. The bulk of the bronze vessels and tripods included in Italian elite graves, along with most of the imported ceramics and their local imi¬tations, were designed and made specifically for these occasions, which suggests that formal feasting and drinking occupied a similar position in the self-definition of the Italian elite.
In Greece, guests at symposia were virtually all male; in the Italian world, artistic representations show that wives participated too. Extravagance was a prominent feature of elite burials of the eighth and seventh centuries, but their sixth- and fifth-century successors were on a much-reduced level. The “princely” burials of the eighth and seventh centuries are relatively rare; clearly, they held the remains of only a tiny portion of the population. The elite tombs of the following centuries exhibit a wider range of sizes, and grave goods generally are fewer, less costly, and less exotic. Despite the reduced scale, these burials were still the prerogative of a select group, and their builders shared some values with their seventh-century predecessors.
Construction required a commitment and display of resources on a scale that most contemporaries could not match. Burial chambers often replicated rooms in the houses that the deceased would have occupied when alive. The walls of many such chambers, moreover, were covered with elaborate frescoes, certainly a task calling for skilled artisans; scenes of feasting were common, illustrating some continuity with earlier ideals. More families may have interred their members in a relatively expensive manner than was the case earlier: At Etruscan Volsinii, for example, inscriptions deposited between 550 and 500 reveal the presence of at least ninety families rich enough to build tombs. Placing a tomb was no longer solely the choice of the family: At some major centers, formal cemeteries or necropoleis (singular, necropolis), located on the margins of the settlement, contained the burials, while grids of streets determined the placing of tombs. In later periods, communal institutions over¬shadowed any single elite family, and the broadening of the elite from the sixth century may well reveal an early stage in this process.