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’s108 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

The scroll in the hand of the female demon, referred to above, presumably contained an account of the good actions of the dead, to be used when he presented himself before the throne of Hades. The good genius herself is seen at work in a small panel of the Tomba degli Scudi, where she is scratching an inscription on a tablet (cp. fig. 27), while another holds a torch upside down. Both these figures are repeated in the reliefs of the Etruscan cinerary urns and pass directly into the plastic art of Roman sarcophagi as two allegorical figures: Fama, who writes the merits of the dead on a tablet, and the genius of Death with torch inverted.

A couple of flying genii appear already in the Tomba della Pulcella, which belongs to the first half of the fifth century, in the pointed pediment above the recess in which the ashes of the dead were deposited. They carry between them a cloth which they seem to be laying down, probably the cerecloth for the dead (fig. 41).112 Perhaps this also explains the mysterious scene, figured on two tomb altars from Chiusi, one of which is in the Barracco Collection (fig. 42), the other in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (Catalogue No. H. 76). The motives of the reliefs on these limestone altars from Chiusi and on the cinerary urns from the same town, all dating from the sixth century, are taken from the funeral, like the subjects in the contemporary tomb-paintings, and represent the lament of men and women over the dead on the bier, the burial feast and the preparations for it, and the wild dancing-scenes at the funeral. It may thus be that the scene on the relief illustrated, which seems to give a picture of the women’s quarters, represents the women of the house in the act of scrutinizing and choosing the cerecloth for the deceased; meanwhile, the house was probably draped with cloth, and the dwellers of the house put on mourning. Presumably the mourning colour of the Etruscans was white, like that of the Romans at a later date; when in mourning, the women of Rome, to the wonder of Plutarch, assumed white dresses and white headgear, at the same time loosening their hair.113 The hair flowing down upon the shoulders is also frequently seen in reliefs on cinerary urns. But there is still something mysterious in this motive, and an examination of the mutilated ash urn in the Museum of Chiusi (fig. 43) does not make it any clearer. This urn has hitherto been explained as representing a marriage scene. But as the opposite side of the urn represents scenes at the door of the tomb, it is more natural to interpret this relief also as a death scene; the flute-player and the two men with laurel branches we know from the funeral ceremonies (cp. p. 19), and the curious scene to the right, where two men draw a fringed cloth like a baldachin over a veiled centre figure, each of whose arms is held by two side figures (probably a man and a woman), might then be conjectured to represent a sort of symbolic interment where the dead is placed in a sitting posture, supported by the family, instead of the normal posture, full length on the bier.

It is to be hoped that future investigation may throw some light on this point, and may also deal with the question whether the oft-recurring motive on the Roman sarcophagi of two genii holding a cloth (parapetasma) between them, as a background either for a scene or for the portrait of the deceased (fig. 44), can be traced to Etruscan prototypes or not. Hitherto, we have probably been too one-sided in attributing the types and symbols of the plastic art of Roman sarcophagi to Greek pictures, and the investigation of the share of Etruria therein would be a fine subject for a monograph.