Etruscan Religion

The Etruscans lived in central Italy, between the Arno and the Tiber, in the region the Romans called Etruria. Their civilisation grew out of the Iron Age Villanovan culture in the ninth and eighth centuries BCE and reached its height in the seventh and sixth centuries, when powerful cities such as Tarquinia, Caere, Vulci and Veii traded across the Mediterranean and ruled much of Italy. For a time, according to Roman tradition, Etruscan kings even ruled Rome, and the great temple of Jupiter on the Capitol was said to have been begun under them.

The Etruscans spoke a language unrelated to Latin, Greek or most other languages of Europe. They wrote it in an alphabet adopted from Greek settlers, and some thirteen thousand inscriptions survive, but most are short: names, dedications and epitaphs. The Etruscans did have religious books, which Roman writers mention and sometimes quote, but none survives in the original except fragments such as the Liber Linteus, a linen ritual book that ended up, cut into strips, wrapped around an Egyptian mummy now in Zagreb.

What is known of Etruscan religion therefore comes from a mixture of sources: inscriptions, temples, tombs and their paintings, objects such as bronze mirrors, and Roman authors who admired, used and sometimes mocked Etruscan lore. Roman writers called the Etruscans the most religious of peoples, a reputation that shaped how they described them.

The Etruscans honoured many gods. Some had native names, such as Tinia, the god of the sky and thunder, Uni, his queen, Turan, goddess of love, and Fufluns, god of wine. Others came from the Greeks, such as Aplu (Apollo) and Hercle (Heracles). Romans and modern scholars often equate them with Greek and Roman gods, and the Etruscans themselves painted Greek myths on mirrors and vases with their gods’ names, but these equations are approximate. Some Roman writers report groups of gods whose names were secret or unknown, and there were many local deities.

At the heart of the religion lay the belief that the gods made their will known through signs in the world, and that humans could learn to read them. According to Roman tradition, this knowledge was revealed by Tages, a child with the wisdom of an old man who sprang from a furrow being ploughed near Tarquinia and taught the leading men of Etruria before vanishing. The nymph Vegoia was said to have revealed the rules for marking boundaries. The resulting lore, written in sacred books, was known to the Romans as the disciplina etrusca. Roman authors describe three groups of books: on reading livers, on interpreting lightning, and on rituals, including the founding of cities, the arrangement of the life of humans and peoples, and the afterlife.

The Etruscans pictured the sky as a temple divided into sixteen regions, with the friendly gods in the east and the more threatening ones in the west and north. The same map could be found in the liver of a sacrificed animal, as the bronze Liver of Piacenza shows: its outer rim is divided into sixteen sections, and its surface bears the names of gods such as Tin, Uni and Fufluns.

Roman writers also report an Etruscan idea of time. Each people, they say, was granted a fixed span of ages, called saecula, whose length was not a set number of years but was measured by the life of the longest-lived person born at its start. The gods marked the end of each age with signs. According to the late Roman writer Censorinus, the Etruscans believed their own nation had been allotted ten such ages, and some Roman authors linked the comet seen after Caesar’s death in 44 BCE with the end of one of them. Whether or not the details are reliable, the idea expresses a striking belief: that peoples, like individuals, have a destined lifetime.

The best-known Etruscan priests were the haruspices, who inspected the entrails of sacrificed sheep. The shape, colour and markings of each part of the liver revealed whether the gods favoured a plan. Other specialists interpreted lightning: where it appeared in the sky, where it struck and what it hit. Roman writers say Tinia had several kinds of thunderbolt, some of which he could throw only with the agreement of other gods.

Temples, built of wood and mud brick on stone bases and decorated with brightly painted terracotta, stood on high platforms facing south. The greatest of them, the Portonaccio temple at Veii, carried life-size terracotta statues on its roof, including the famous Apollo of Veii. At Pyrgi, the port of Caere, two temples stood beside the sea, and gold tablets found there in 1964 record in Etruscan and Phoenician that the ruler Thefarie Velianas dedicated a sacred place to Uni, whom the Phoenician text calls Astarte. The find shows how Etruscan religion was open to the gods of trading partners across the Mediterranean. The cities of Etruria shared a federal sanctuary, the Fanum Voltumnae, near Volsinii, where they met each year for festivals, games and councils.

Tombs reveal much about belief in the afterlife. At Caere and Tarquinia, families built chambers carved like houses, with beds, chairs and doorways. The painted tombs of Tarquinia show banquets, dancing, music, hunting and athletic games in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. From the fourth century the mood changes: tomb paintings show the dead travelling to the underworld, escorted by the winged Vanth and the hammer-bearing Charun, and meeting the rulers of the realm of the dead.

Rome expanded into Etruria city by city. Veii fell in 396 BCE, and according to Livy the Romans ceremonially invited its goddess Juno, the Etruscan Uni, to move to Rome. Volsinii was destroyed in 264 BCE. After the Social War of 91–88 BCE, the Etruscans became Roman citizens, and within a few generations their language faded from everyday use.

Yet Etruscan religion lived on inside Roman religion. The Roman Senate consulted haruspices about portents, and an order of sixty haruspices served the state. The emperor Claudius, who wrote a history of the Etruscans, urged the Senate in 47 CE to preserve their art. Haruspices remained active into the fourth century, even under Christian emperors who restricted private divination. The historian Zosimus reports that during Alaric’s siege of Rome in 408 CE Etruscan diviners offered to save the city with their rites, an episode whose details are uncertain.

What survives today is mostly in museums and tombs: the painted chambers of Tarquinia, the Liver of Piacenza, the Pyrgi tablets and countless dedications. The Etruscans also left a deep mark on Rome, from the shape of its temples and the rites for founding cities to the image of the diviner watching the sky, which passed through Rome into European memory.