Contatti interlinguistici e interculturali: il caso dei Pulena

A detailed re-analysis of Laris Pulenas's famous inscription (ET, Ta 1.17), in the light of the latest grammatical and lexical acquisitions, provides an insight into the exceptional importance of this document on the historical level of interlinguistic and intercultural contact. The interpretative basis of the most accessible parts of the long epigraph reveals without doubt the Greek ancestry of the Pulena family. From this document emerge very important key-points for the hermeneusis of the Etruscan language and, more generally, onomastic and linguistic data provide the opportunity for profitable reflections also for some of the most difficult sections. But, even if we want to limit ourselves to what is more readily interpretable today, the historical, legal and cultural elements that are inferable or implied have a really significant value. This affirmation is all the more justified by the necessary correlation with fragmentary but unequivocal elements deriving from literary sources. Such links (often neglected, but in fact solidly supported by a careful analysis of textual information) are embedded in a comprehensive reconsideration of the significance of epigraphic attestation. The entrance and integration of a Greek citizen into the social context of Tarquinia towards the late 4th century BC, so clearly asserted, allows to formulate different considerations at the onomastic and legal level; but, moreover, it is the epigraph itself that reveals the fundamental, intercultural, pattern of contact of the Greek auctor gentis with the Etruscan world. It must be borne in mind that the information derived from the ancient literary sources, by authors far closer than us to historical phases or linguistic contexts of our studies, can not absolutely be overwhelmed, ultimately, on the basis of merely speculative reasoning, however complex and elegant, which too often tend to consolidate in communis opinion no longer questionable.