Athena's Birth in Etruscan Dress, and the Healing Goddess

Much of what we can see of Menrva comes from the engraved backs of bronze mirrors, the single richest source for Etruscan mythic imagery. On them she appears helmeted and armed, and in one striking scene she springs fully grown and armoured from the head of Tinia, the Etruscan version of Athena's birth from Zeus, showing how thoroughly Greek myth was received and reworked in Etruria. But Menrva was not only a borrowed Athena. Her name appears to be genuinely Italic, linked to a root for "mind" and "memory," and her cult had a strongly practical, healing side: votive offerings of terracotta body parts at her sanctuaries show her invoked for health, childbirth and cure, the goddess to whom one turned for the body as well as for craft and war. She is thus both the third member of Tinia's sovereign triad and a working goddess of everyday need.

Menrva's grandest sanctuary stood at Veii, at the site called Portonaccio, where a temple built around 510 BCE once carried, along its roofline, an extraordinary set of over-lifesize painted terracotta statues, including the celebrated striding Apollo of Veii, and where the building's unusual triple inner chamber is generally read as housing a triad of Menrva with Tinia and Uni, the same three gods Rome would later enshrine together on the Capitoline.