The demons of the Underworld who figure in the Etruscan paintings are almost all sinister. The devils brandishing torches and snakes, familiar both from the paintings and from the reliefs on the cinerary urns, remind one of Livy’s[108] description of the fight of the Tarquinians and the Faliscans against the Romans in 354 B.C., when a troop of Etruscan priests, armed with flaming torches and live snakes, threw themselves in ecstatic fury on the Roman armies, who received them undauntedly and won the day. Charun, also, is a common figure on the Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns of the fourth and following centuries, suggesting by his colour the demon of putrefaction, Eurynomus, whom Polygnotus had painted, in his great picture of the Underworld in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi, seated snarling on the skin of a carrion-vulture, his flesh the colour of a blue-bottle fly.[109] Charun, therefore, is not identical with the old ferryman, Charon, of the Greeks; he is the messenger of death, the terrible fetcher of souls, like Charos in the popular Greek belief of our own day. Only the ‘Charon door’ of the Greek theatre indicates the existence of similar popular ideas among the ancient Greeks.
The winged Vanth in the François tomb seems to be one of the benevolent demons of the underworld, the Lasas. Such a one also appears in a door panel in the Tomba Golini, already frequently cited: here she has wings, snakes in her girdle, and a scroll in her hand ([fig. 40]). She is evidently either receiving or escorting the dead, a young man in a mantle, who stands in a biga with running horses; in the inscription above him the word Larth can easily be read, proving that he is not a professional charioteer, but a young man of high standing. His arrival in the underworld is greeted by a trumpeter, painted over the door. We may notice here that the ‘Tyrrhenian trumpet’ was famous far and wide and was even introduced into Greece; it is mentioned several times in Greek tragedies.[110] The curved trumpet here seen is also depicted on a wall in the Tomba degli Scudi at Corneto and, like the curved staff of the augurs, was adopted by the Romans, who designated both of them by the name of lituus; Cicero maintains that the lituus-trumpet was the earlier of the two and gave its form and name to the lituus-staff, the badge of the augurs. The introduction of the lituus-staff was attributed to Romulus, and his sacred staff was said to have been rediscovered by a miracle in the time of Camillus.[111]
Fig. 39. WALL-PAINTING FROM THE TOMBA FRANÇOIS AT VULCI
Fig. 40. PAINTING IN THE TOMBA GOLINI AT ORVIETO
