Judging by the wall-paintings in the tombs, the artifacts in the Museo Archeologico in Perugia, Perugia (Alma Perusia) itself, and what little the Romans have vouchsafed to tell us about them, Etruscans were a militarist, energetic, long-civilized (by the time the Romans met them) society, in which equality of the sexes and robust monogamous heterosexuality co-existed with an equally robust male homoeroticism. The Etruscan language is entirely extinct, except for a few words which were assimilated into Latin during the Republican period, and was not related to Indo-European. The cities of Etruria--roughly, modern Tuscany and Umbria--never gave up their individual autonomy or coalesced into larger defensive alliances, as did most of the other
