A Greek Hades on Etruscan Tomb Walls

Aita is a comparatively late and thoroughly Hellenised figure: his very name is taken straight from the Greek Hades, and he emerges in the surviving record only from the fourth century BCE, in the painted tombs of cities such as Tarquinia and in the Golini and Orcus tomb chambers. There he is shown enthroned in the world below, often wearing a wolf-skin cap, beside his consort Phersipnai, the Etruscan Persephone. That Aita arrives late and Greek does not mean the Etruscans lacked an older concern with death, far from it; their afterlife was elaborate and much-depicted, and it was peopled by distinctively native underworld demons, Charun and Vanth, who have no close Greek equivalent. Rather, Aita is what happens when an existing, deeply felt Etruscan preoccupation with the fate of the dead is given a ruler borrowed and adapted from Greek myth to preside over a decidedly Etruscan hell.