- chapter 61: Annius of Viterbo –
Janus had always been a fi gure of particular interest in the Etruscan areas of Italy, the
god who governed doors, openings, crossings, and beginnings, including the beginnings
of civilization.^19 A twelfth-century guidebook to Rome, Peter the Deacon’s Graphia
aureae urbis Romae (Map of the Golden City of Rome), claimed that Janus was really the
Biblical patriarch Noah, who had come to Italy after the Flood in order to replace its
drowned population with the help of his wife, sons, and daughters-in-law.^20 In 1450,
the Florentine humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti credited “Father Janus” and
the Etruscans with the invention of city walls, Doric architecture, and sculpture, all of
these innovations developed in Italy long before the ancient Greeks ever set their hands
to carving stone.^21 And during Viterbo’s heyday in the thirteenth century as the home of
the papacy, a local chronicler and curial offi cial, Godfrey of Viterbo, identifi ed Noah as
the fi rst king of Italy, succeeded by his son Janus.^22 Now Annius of Viterbo presented his
own version of this complicated story. He agreed with Peter the Deacon that Janus had
been Noah himself rather than Noah’s son, basing his claim on a series of ancient texts he
had collected during his time in Genoa, and a new series of archaeological fi nds to add to
the repertory he mentions in his earlier writings.
This trenchant textual analysis represented a new horizon for Annius, and presumably
refl ects the infl uence of his Roman environment. Most of these newly discovered texts,
like the fragments of Cato, the Itinerary of Antoninus Pius, the Questions of Xenophon,
and the chronology of Berosus the Chaldaean were works mentioned by ancient authors,
though no manuscripts had been known to survive of any of them (nor had Annius himself
mentioned any such manuscripts in his earlier works). A few texts, like the chronicles of
Metasthenes the Persian, were entirely unknown.
By 1498, Annius had also amassed an extensive collection of ancient inscriptions, in
Greek, Latin, and Etruscan, some in marble, some in volcanic rock, some in alabaster,
including one that glowed with a mysterious interior light. Three of these artifacts can
still be seen on display in Viterbo’s Civic Museum: two inscriptions on alabaster roundels
and a carved marble stele that the good friar identifi ed as a work of evident Egyptian
manufacture.
Taken together, and analyzed in light of what the physical layout of Viterbo and
Rome revealed about their urban history, this treasury of sources allowed Friar Annius
to announce marvelous new revelations about the history of the whole world. This book,
his masterwork, clearly contains material composed during his time in Viterbo as well
as new material composed in Rome, with the result that its magnifi cent discoveries are
sometimes inconsistent with one another. Just as often, however, these different kinds of
evidence are interwoven with stunning ingenuity.^23
If the chief concern of Magister Giovanni’s Viterbo lectures had been to give that city
a suitably ancient pedigree, the Commentary of Annius aims to provide the same favor for
the papacy, an offi ce he traces back, far beyond Saint Peter, to Janus, who is, of course,
Noah by another name. If the Etruscans were famous throughout the ancient world for
their devotion to religion, Annius showed, it was because they had been instructed in
piety by their fi rst king, Noah-Janus, and because of the Hebrew patriarch’s nearness to
God many Etruscan beliefs and rituals prefi gured those of Christianity.
Here, as in his discussions of Viterbo, Annius was building on real traditions. Many
trappings of the papacy do originate with Etruscan rituals, passed down to the Romans
and absorbed by the Christians of the Roman Empire: the Pope’s title pontifex maximus,
supreme pontiff, is an ancient Roman priesthood that goes back to the period of Rome’s