The Etruscan World (Routledge Worlds)

• Ingrid Krauskopf –

a

b

Figure 25.7 a–b Pontic amphora Paris, Bibl. Nat. 171: a) Aplu killing Tityos who tried to abduct

Aplu’s mother, Letun. b) Two demons dragging the unfaithful Koronis and her lover Ischys to Aplu and

Artumes. After MonInst. II (1835) pl. 18 (= Hampe/Simon 6–7).

Etruscan divinities and their Greek counterparts do not fully correspond to one another
in other cases either. Even in the case of the Dioscuri, which had been borrowed without
direct Etruscan parallels from Greek religion under the translated name of tinas cliniar
(“Sons of Zeus”), new functions were added which, in fact, fi t well with their myth,
but are not known from Greece for them. In Etruria, they belong to the divinities who
protected the dead on their way to the Underworld (see Chapter 28).^30 The Greek Hermes
was divided into two gods: Turms,^31 who was associated with Tinia, and Turms Aitas,
associated with Aita/Hades, and who corresponds to the Greek Hermes Psychopompos
(Fig. 25.8). Even more examples could be given, but that would far exceed the bounds
of this article.

A PECULIARITY OF ETRUSCAN RELIGION: CIRCLES

AND COUNCILS OF GODS

With Turms Aitas, we have reached an area that could belong to the core of Etruscan
religion: the attribution of a god to the circle of another, or the combination of two
divinities, as in some of the compartments on the liver from Piacenza (s. above). F. D.
Maras^32 has drawn attention to circles of gods which form themselves around a divinity:
in an inscription, for example, Turan(?) and Selvans are designated as thanral (“belonging
to Thanr”); there is a group centered on the underworld-god Calus, to which Tinia and