Menrva

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On the back of an engraved bronze mirror now in the British Museum, a seated king holds his head, and from the crown of it a small armed figure rises into the open air. Around them stand named witnesses, their labels scratched in retrograde Etruscan: Tinia the enthroned father, then Thalna and Uni and Laran and Maris, and the new-risen one herself — Menrva. The Greeks who told this birth set Athena springing fully grown from the skull of Zeus; the Romans told it of Minerva and Jupiter. The Etruscan engravers told it too, and made of it something their own: the goddesses who crowd the scene are not spectators but midwives, hands ready, attending the delivery of wisdom as women attend a birth. The armed lady who comes of the thunder-god’s own head is the Etruscan power of the bright mind, and her name is older than the Roman one that grew from it.

The power and her parentage

Menrva — written Menrva, and in the fuller Latin-facing form Menerva — is the Etruscan goddess of wisdom, of war waged with counsel, of craft and the arts, and of healing. She belongs to the inner company of the Etruscan gods, set beside Tinia the sky-king and Uni the sovereign queen in the early triad of Etruria, the three powers whose grouping the Romans would later mirror on their own Capitoline hill. Her parentage is told in the manner of her birth: she is the daughter of Tinia, and the Etruscan mirrors that figure her coming-into-being show her emerging armed and grown from his head, needing no nursing and no childhood, wisdom arriving already in its armor.

The name itself carries her genealogy. Among the deities of the Etruscans, Menrva stands at a point where the histories of three peoples cross. The Greeks of the southern colonies brought the figure of their armed maiden Athena into the Etruscan world, and the Etruscans found in her a goddess of their own to set against the Greek one; the Romans, in turn, drew their Minerva from the Etruscan Menerva, so that the Latin name is the Etruscan name worn smooth — Menerva passing into Minerva. The deeper roots of the word are debated. One reading holds it indigenous to Italy and possibly Etruscan in origin, traced to an Italic moon-power whose name would have meant something like “she who measures”; another binds it to the wide Indo-European family of words for mind and measure and memory. The detail of the etymology is not settled. What the record shows plainly is the order of descent: the Etruscan goddess stands at the root of the Roman one, and Rome took the name of its wisdom-goddess from its northern neighbor.

That neighbor left no literature of its own. The religion of the Etruscans survives not in scripture or epic but in monuments and inscriptions — the painted tombs, the gold tablets, the bronze liver-model marked with the gods’ regions, and above all, for a goddess like Menrva, the engraved mirrors. These polished bronze disks, their reverse faces incised with mythological scenes and the gods named in Etruscan letters, are among the surest witnesses to who the Etruscan powers were and how their stories ran. Where a later Roman author describes the Etruscan gods, he writes from outside and after, fitting them to his own pantheon; where a mirror names Menrva and figures her armed, the Etruscans themselves are speaking, in their own hand and their own script.

This distance shapes everything that can be said of her. For Tinia there is the lightning-lore, the threefold bolt of the disciplina that the Roman authors preserved; for Uni there are the gold tablets of the Etruscan port that name her beside a Phoenician goddess; for Menrva there are, chiefly, the mirrors and the dug earth of her sanctuary. No Etruscan hand wrote down a hymn to her, no surviving liturgy gives her epithets, no native account explains why the wisdom-goddess should also rule the lightning. The mirrors show; they do not narrate. What they hold is iconography — the helmet, the spear, the company at the birth — and a handful of names beside the figures. Around that core the picture of Menrva is built by comparison: with the Greek Athena whose imagery the Etruscan engravers borrowed, and with the Roman Minerva who inherited her name. The comparison is indispensable and it is also a hazard, since it is always tempting to fill the silence of the Etruscan record with the fuller stories the Greeks and Romans told. Where the native evidence runs out, it runs out, and the honest account stops with it.

The armed wisdom and the sanctuary at Veii

On the mirrors Menrva appears as the Greeks and Romans would have known their own maiden-goddess and as no Greek goddess ever quite was. She wears the crested helmet; she carries the spear and the round shield; sometimes the aegis lies across her breast. She attends the scenes of heroic myth that the Etruscans loved — the labors of Hercle, the deeds of Perseus, the contest the Greeks called the Judgment of Paris — moving through them as the patroness of the skilled and the well-counseled. Yet she is not simply Athena translated. On certain Etruscan mirrors she wields the lightning, a power her Greek counterpart never held, so that the daughter carries something of the father’s own weapon. The interpretatio that sets Menrva beside the Greek and Roman wisdom-goddesses is a comparison, an alignment of like with like across three peoples; it is not an identity, and the Etruscan goddess keeps attributes the others lack.

The birth-scenes deserve their own attention, because they are the place where the Etruscan engravers departed most clearly from their Greek models. The Greek vase-painters who showed Athena springing from the head of Zeus gave the father a midwife — the smith-god who split the skull with an axe — and ranged the other gods around as onlookers. The Etruscan mirrors of the fourth and third centuries before the common era keep the enthroned Tinia and the emerging armed daughter, but they fill the scene with goddesses who do the work: figures named in the Etruscan script who attend the delivery with their hands, midwives to the birth of wisdom rather than spectators at a marvel. It is a small change and a telling one. The Etruscans took the image and made the women in it active, turning a Greek prodigy into something nearer a confinement attended by its own.

Her great cult lay at Veii, the Etruscan city on its tufa plateau some sixteen kilometers north of Rome, the nearest and most dangerous of Rome’s Etruscan rivals. Just outside the city walls, along an important approach road at the place called Portonaccio, stood her sanctuary. Its three-celled temple was raised around 510 BCE, and it carried a roof-decoration of painted terracotta whose quantity and quality the excavators judged without parallel in Etruscan art — antefixes molded into the faces of Gorgons and maenads and satyrs, and, crowning the ridge-beam, a row of life-sized acroterial statues. These roof-giants were the work of the Veientine workshops, and the tradition preserved by Pliny the Elder names the master of Veii: Vulca, the only Etruscan sculptor whose name has come down, the same artist Rome is said to have summoned to make the cult-image for its own great temple of Jupiter.

Of that roof-group one figure survives nearly whole, and it is among the finest sculpture the Etruscan world produced.

The Apollo of Veii (Aplu), a life-sized painted terracotta acroterion of about 510–500 BCE from the roof-group of Menrva’s temple at the Portonaccio sanctuary, attributed to the workshop of Vulca. Sailko, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The striding figure is Aplu, the Etruscan Apollo, modeled in fired clay and once brightly painted, caught mid-stride twelve meters above the temple floor. He was part of a group set along the ridge: Aplu and Hercle contending over the Ceryneian hind, with other powers — the messenger Turms, the mother Leto — standing by. The statue was lifted from the sanctuary’s earth on the nineteenth of May, 1916, and it remains the most celebrated single object of Etruscan art, the proof of what the painted-terracotta sculptors of Veii could do. It must be said plainly, because the famous name attaches so easily to the wrong altar: the surviving giant is the find, and the sanctuary is Menrva’s. The Apollo of Veii is the supreme relic of her roof; the temple beneath it was raised to the armed goddess of wisdom.

What was brought to her there tells the rest of her character. The sanctuary’s votive deposits held the offerings of those who sought her help — among them a long series of terracotta statues and heads given by the city’s youth, the famous “Malavolta” head among them, marking her care over the passage of the young into adulthood, and the figures of the afflicted that name her, like the later Roman Minerva Medica, a healer of the body as well as a mistress of the mind. The sanctuary’s plan held more than the temple: a great altar, a sacred pool fed for the rites of purification, the deep votive deposits into which the broken and the spent offerings were laid. People came to Menrva of Veii with the needs that a goddess of wisdom and the body could meet — a son entering manhood, a sickness to be lifted, a craft to be blessed — and left their terracotta likenesses behind in her ground, where the excavators would find them.

For she was the goddess of the skilled hand in every material the Etruscans worked — the bronze of the mirror, the fired clay of the acroterion, the wool on the loom, the metal of the smith. The Etruscans were among the great metalworkers of the ancient Mediterranean, their bronzes traded the length of the inland sea, and a goddess of craft sat at the center of what their cities made and sold. The same patronage carried into the Roman Minerva, kept as the protectress of guilds and craftsmen and physicians. Wisdom, for Menrva, was never only thought. It was thought made into a made thing — the cast mirror, the woven cloth, the fired and painted giant on the temple roof — and the goddess who ruled the bright mind ruled also the hands that turned the mind’s design into bronze and clay.

The descent of the name

A goddess known through mirrors and a buried sanctuary comes back to the world by the spade and the reading-glass. The recovery of Menrva is, first, the recovery of her objects. The engraved bronze mirrors — turned up across Etruria and beyond, at Praeneste and Bolsena and many sites between — were gathered and cataloged by scholars who learned to read the retrograde names beside the figures, and it is from these that her iconography is known: the helmet and spear, the lightning, the attendance at the births and contests of the heroes. One such mirror in the British Museum, recorded in a nineteenth-century engraving, preserves the full company at her own birth, every figure labeled.

Drawing of an Etruscan engraved bronze mirror: Menrva rises from the head of the enthroned Tinia, attended by Thalna, Uni, Laran, and Maris, their names inscribed in retrograde Etruscan. British Museum, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.

The second recovery is the sanctuary at Veii. Excavation along the Portonaccio road brought up the temple’s footprint, the great altar, the sacred pool, the votive deposits, and the shattered roof-statues whose reassembly yielded the Apollo of 1916. The finds were carried to Rome, where the Apollo of Veii and the Portonaccio terracottas are the chief treasures of the Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, the national collection of Etruscan antiquities. Veii itself did not survive its rivalry with Rome: after a long siege the city fell in 396 BCE, in the tradition under the dictator Marcus Furius Camillus, and the Etruscan town gave way to the Roman countryside. The goddess of its plateau outlived the city.

The mirrors that carry her are themselves a discipline. Scattered through the museums of Europe — at Praeneste and Bolsena and across Etruria, in the British Museum and the Metropolitan and Villa Giulia — they were assembled over more than a century into a corpus, read figure by figure and name by name, until the reverse of an Etruscan mirror became a legible page. From them the iconography of Menrva is fixed: the crested helmet, the spear and round shield, the aegis, the lightning that is hers and not Athena’s, the attendance at the births and contests of the heroes the Etruscans loved to draw. Each mirror is a small theology in line-engraving, and Menrva is among the figures most often named on them — a measure, in a literature-less religion, of how central the armed goddess was to the Etruscan imagination of its gods.

She outlived Veii, in part, by becoming Roman. The name she carried into Latium did not stop at the fallen city. Minerva — Menerva worn down — took her place in the great triad of the Capitoline hill beside Jupiter and Juno, the Roman echo of the older Etruscan grouping of Tinia, Uni, and Menrva; she kept the helmet and the spear, the patronage of craftsmen and physicians, the descent from the head of the sky-father. How far the Etruscan triad shaped the Roman one, and which came first, is argued rather than fixed. The grouping of a sky-king, a sovereign queen, and an armed wisdom-goddess is attested in Etruria, and the Roman Capitoline triad mirrors it closely; whether Rome received the pattern from its Etruscan neighbors or arrived at a kindred one of its own is the kind of question the thin record will not close. The kinship is plain, the order of priority less so. What is certain is the path of the name. The Roman goddess of wisdom and the just war is the Etruscan goddess of wisdom and the just war, carried south and renamed, her birth-myth and her armor and her crafts coming with her.

So the armed lady of Veii stands at a hinge in the religious history of Italy. Behind her lie the bronze mirrors of Etruria, on which the Etruscans drew their own gods and named them in their own letters, and the great clay giants of the Portonaccio roof; before her lies the Minerva of Rome, who carried the Etruscan name and the Etruscan wisdom into a religion that would spread far beyond Etruria’s plateaus. Between the two, on a tufa hill north of the river, a temple once held a goddess born of the thunder, and a painted Apollo strode along its ridge against the sky.

→ Related: Tinia · Uni Goddess · Turan Goddess · Aita · Veii · Tarquinia · Cerveteri · Pyrgi · The Faliscans · The Umbrians · The Veneti · Etruscans · Villanovan · Jupiter · Juno · Venus · Apollo · Divination · Astarte Goddess