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The Triad Rome Inherited

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The Triad Rome Inherited

With his consort Uni and the armed goddess Menrva, Tinia formed a great triad whose temple-form Rome took over wholesale as the Capitoline Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, worshipped in the huge temple on the Capitol that anchored Roman state religion. This was part of a wider debt: Rome absorbed the Etrusca disciplina, the body of Etruscan divinatory science, and kept haruspices on call for centuries, consulting them at moments of crisis long after the Etruscan cities themselves had been absorbed. How much of the Roman triad's theology is genuinely Etruscan and how much is Roman reworking is debated, but the structural inheritance, three chief deities sharing one great temple, is clear, and it makes Tinia one of the few Etruscan gods whose influence outlived his own civilisation and its language. Etruscan divination outlived the Etruscan cities by centuries.

As late as 408 to 410 CE, with Alaric's Goths besieging Rome, the historian Zosimus records that haruspices, brought from Etruria by the prefect Pompeianus, offered to call down lightning against the enemy camp, and Pope Innocent I is said to have allowed the rite on condition it be performed privately, a condition the priests would not accept, so the ritual was never carried out and Rome fell soon after, but the episode shows Tinia's old sky-lore still on offer, if no longer trusted, at the very end of the Western Empire.

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Tinia, Deities
Source Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
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Divinity Atlas Long-Form Articles, First Edition
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