Aita

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On the rear wall of a chamber cut into the soft tufa below Tarquinia, two figures sit enthroned at the head of a procession of the dead. The man is bearded and gray; over his brow he wears the scalp and snout of a wolf, the pelt drawn down like a hood, the jaws framing his face. Beside him a woman leans close, snakes in her hair. Painters of the late fourth century before the common era set them there, and along the wall in the Etruscan letters that read from right to left someone wrote their names: Eita, and Phersipnai. He is the lord of the world below. The wolf upon his head is the sign by which the Etruscans knew him.

The wolf-capped king

Aita — the name also appears as Eita — is the ruler of the Etruscan underworld, the king of the dead in the reckoning of the cities of Etruria. In the comparison the Etruscans drew with the gods of their Greek trading-partners, and that the Romans drew after them, he stands where Hades stands, the somber sovereign of the realm below, the god the Romans called Pluto and Dis. That comparison is a likeness and not an equation, and the distance between the two is the whole interest of the figure. For Aita is in part a Greek god in Etruscan dress, and in part something older and native, and the seam between the two runs straight through the wolf-skin on his head.

He is a late arrival, as far as the surviving evidence reaches. The Etruscan gods of the sky and the council — the sky-king Tinia, the sovereign Uni, the armed wisdom Menrva — stand in the record from far back, named on bronze mirrors and on the temple-walls of the seventh and sixth centuries. Aita does not. He appears in image and in inscribed text only from the fourth century before the common era onward, and he appears almost entirely in one kind of place: the painted tombs of the southern Etruscan cities, and the carved alabaster urns of the centuries after. He emerges, that is, at the moment when Greek myth had soaked deepest into Etruria, when the banquet of the dead painted on the tomb-walls of Tarquinia migrated, in the imagination of the painters, from the bright halls of the living down into the kingdom below the earth. It is there, presiding over that subterranean feast, that Aita is first seen.

The wolf complicates the borrowing. The Greek Hades wears no wolf; the cap is an Etruscan addition, and a deliberate one. Scholars who have traced it back point to an older Etruscan power of the world below — a wolf-deity whose name is given as Calu — and read the wolf-scalp on Aita’s head as an attribute carried over from that earlier figure onto the new, Hellenized king. The Greek model supplied the throne, the queen, the scepter, the whole apparatus of a royal court of the dead. The wolf supplied the local stamp, the mark that says this underworld is Etruria’s own and not a translation. How far the rest of his realm is native and how far it is Greek-derived is among the genuinely unsettled questions of Etruscan religion, and the wolf-cap sits exactly on the fault-line: it is the one element that is unmistakably not Greek.

The comparison with the Greek lord of the dead must be held as a comparison and not collapsed into a sameness. To say Aita stands where Hades stands is to say the Etruscans, looking at the Greek myths their merchants and their painters knew, found in their own underworld a king they could set beside that one — much as they set their sky-king beside Zeus, or their love-lady Turan beside the Greek goddess of desire, or named the sovereign Uni where the Greeks named Hera and the Romans Juno. The matching of names across peoples is itself an ancient habit, the device by which traders and travelers made one pantheon legible in terms of another. It does not mean the gods were one. Aita keeps a face the Greek Hades never had, and the overview of the Etruscan gods kept by the World History Encyclopedia is among the surveys that gather what the images allow to be said of him.

The Etruscans left no literature of their own to set beside the painting. No hymn to Aita survives, no underworld narrative in the Etruscan tongue, no theology of the kingdom below. The religion of this people reaches the present almost wholly through its monuments — the painted tombs, the engraved bronze mirrors, the inscribed urns, the few long ritual texts whose language is still imperfectly read — and, at a further remove, through the later Roman writers who took over and wrote down Etruscan divinatory lore at their own distance from it. For Aita there is not even that Roman echo of much use; he is recovered from the walls and the urns and the handful of inscribed names, and reconstructed, with care, against the Greek myths the Etruscans plainly knew. The god is met in the silence of images — which is the condition of nearly everything in this religion, and nowhere more sharply felt than in the chamber of the dead.

The court of the realm below

Beside Aita sits his queen. Her name is written Phersipnai, or Persipnei, and she is the Etruscan counterpart of the figure the Greeks called Persephone — the maiden carried down to the underworld to reign there as its lady. In the Etruscan paintings she is no captive but a consort enthroned: in the Golini tomb at Orvieto she holds a scepter crowned with a bird and rests her hand on the king’s knee, while he, wolf-helmed and gripping a snake-wound staff, turns and lays his hand against her. Snakes coil in her hair. The two of them rule together, a married sovereignty over the country of the dead, and the painters set them at the head of the banquet as the lord and lady of the house receive their guests.

The banquet is the key to the whole conception. In the earlier painted tombs of Tarquinia the feast belongs to the living — reclining diners, wine, music, dancers, the bright pleasures of the aristocratic table, painted as a celebration set against the grave. Across the fourth century the scene descends. The diners become the dead; the host becomes Aita; the hall becomes the underworld. The Golini tombs near Orvieto, found in the eighteen-sixties at Settecamini and dated to that century, show this transposed banquet in full: the deceased arriving in the kingdom below, welcomed, a feast prepared in his honor, the king and queen of the dead presiding over the celebration. The frescoes were lifted from the tomb-walls in 1950 and now hang in the archaeological museum of Orvieto. The afterlife they picture is not a torment. It is a continuation — the noble table set again, below the earth, under a new and sovereign host.

Through that kingdom move the demons who are most distinctly the Etruscans’ own, and who have no close Greek equal. The first is Charun — Charu in the Etruscan, his name kin to the Greek Charon but his nature quite other. Where the Greek Charon is the ferryman who rows the dead across the river for his fee, the Etruscan Charun is a guardian and an escort of death, a figure of the threshold. The painters gave him a fearsome shape: livid or bluish flesh, the color of a corpse; a hooked vulture’s nose; pointed ears, sometimes tusks; and great wings. In his hand he carries a heavy hammer or mallet, the implement that is his sign above all others. He is not, for all that, a tormentor. His office is to mark the moment of death and to conduct the soul onward — to stand at the door of the passage, not to punish what comes through it. In the François tomb at Vulci he appears at the killing of a captive; in the Tomb of the Charuns at Tarquinia he is multiplied into four, each with his own added name. The hammer has been read as the instrument with which he seals the door of death, or strikes the appointed blow, or wards off harm — its exact force is debated — but the figure who wields it is a minister of the passage, not an executioner of the damned.

Charun (Caronte), wall-painting from the François tomb at Vulci, fourth century BCE. Unknown Etruscan painter, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The second is Vanth, and she is Charun’s opposite in temper. She is a winged female spirit, young and vigorous, often bare-breasted, dressed in the short tunic and crossed straps and boots of a huntress, and she carries a torch, a scroll, or a key. The torch lights the road of the dead; the key opens the door of the underworld; the scroll, it has been suggested, records the fate or the name of the one she comes for. She attends the moment of death and she walks beside the soul on its journey, sometimes alongside Charun, sometimes alone. Where his look is grim, hers is benign: she is a guide and a protector, an escort who in some scenes even shields the living hero from harm. The two of them — the hammer-bearer and the torch-bearer — are the Etruscan ministers of mortality, neither of them the equal of any single Greek figure, and together they make the passage to Aita’s realm a thing watched over and conducted rather than dreaded.

These are the powers of the world below as the painted tombs set them out: the wolf-capped king and his snake-crowned queen enthroned at the feast, and between them and the living the winged escorts who light and seal the road. It is a court, not a pit — a sovereignty with its officers and its rites of welcome, the dead received as a guest is received into a great house.

The painted tombs and the long recovery

Aita has no temple and no surviving cult of his own that the record preserves. He is met where the Etruscans met death — in the chambered tombs cut into the rock beneath their cities of the dead, and on the urns that held the ashes of the cremated. The chief monuments are two. At Orvieto, the Golini tombs carry the underworld banquet with Aita and Phersipnai enthroned among the feasters. At Tarquinia, in the Monterozzi necropolis whose painted chambers the city of Tarquinia guards above the sea, the Tomb of Orcus holds the most famous image of the god. The name is a modern misnomer: when the tomb was opened in 1868, a painted giant on its wall was taken for the Roman underworld spirit Orcus, and the name stuck. The tomb is in truth two chambers joined, cut at two different dates; the later of them, painted around 325 before the common era, carries on its back wall the funeral procession overseen by Aita and Phersipnai, and at its entrance the guarding figure of Charun. Tarquinia, with its neighbor Cerveteri, holds the largest body of Etruscan painted tombs that survives, and stands since 2004 on the list of World Heritage sites kept by the cultural arm of the United Nations — the single richest record of how a vanished people imagined the country of the dead.

Aita (“Eita”) and Phersipnai (“Φersipnei”) in the Tomb of Orcus II, Monterozzi necropolis, Tarquinia, c. 325 BCE. Photograph by Robin Iversen Rönnlund, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The urns extend the record forward in time. In the cities of the north, above all at Volterra and Chiusi, the carved alabaster and terracotta ash-chests of the later centuries figure the journey of the dead again and again — the soul on horseback or on foot, the demons in attendance, the door of the underworld, the king who waits within. Two ash-urns from Volterra of the second century before the common era show Aita himself; a painted vase from Vulci and a red-figure jug carry him too. He is, throughout, a god of the funerary monument and almost nowhere else: not a deity of the temple-front or the civic festival, but the sovereign one meets at the end, painted or carved at the threshold one’s own ashes will cross.

Because the Etruscans wrote no surviving books, the recovery of Aita has been the slow reading of these images, and it has carried with it a recurring temptation that the modern study has had to resist. The Roman writers who looked back on Etruria, and the antiquarians who followed them, were quick to find the Etruscan dead morbid — their tombs gloomy, their demons ghoulish, their whole imagination of the afterlife a dark and decadent thing. That verdict says more about the lookers than about the painted chambers. The Etruscan tomb is not a chamber of horrors. It is the house of the dead furnished as a house, the banquet laid again, the journey watched over by its guides, the kingdom below given a king and a queen who rule it as a court. To read Charun’s hammer as cruelty, or Vanth’s torch as menace, is to mistake the office for the dread. What the paintings set out is a vision of death as passage and reception, sober and complete, and entitled to the same seriousness as any people’s reckoning with its own end.

The scholarly question that does remain genuinely open is the older one of the seam: how much of Aita’s realm the Etruscans made, and how much they took. The throne and the queen and the courtly shape of the underworld follow the Greek model closely enough that the borrowing is plain. The wolf-cap, drawn down from an older native power of the world below, is the mark that the borrowing was not wholesale — that the Etruscans took the Greek king and set their own wolf upon his head. Whether the demons who attend him, Charun above all, are native growths or Hellenized inventions, and how deep beneath the Greek surface the older Etruscan death-lore runs, are matters on which the evidence is too thin for a settled answer, and the honest study marks them as undecided rather than forcing them shut. The wolf-king of the painted tombs keeps that much of his mystery. He is the sovereign the Etruscans gave their dead, drawn half from the Greeks they traded with and half from a deity older than the painting, and he sits enthroned at the head of the underworld feast wearing the one thing that was wholly his — the gray pelt of the wolf, pulled down over the brow of the lord of the dead.

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