Laran

A terracotta slab in Berlin, about half a metre across, carries the second longest text anyone has recovered in Etruscan. The lines run in alternating directions, left to right and then right to left, the way a plough turns at the end of a furrow, and most of what they say is still guesswork. Ten bands, apparently ten months, each one prescribing which rite falls where. In the band that seems to cover May, beside a word for the ides, sits the name Larun. Bouke van der Meer’s tentative reading gives a feast held for him there, in the middle of the month, and that one line is about as close as anyone gets to hearing an Etruscan speak about the god of war.

He is usually written Laran. For a long time the identification went to the wrong god entirely. Maris looks like Mars and sounds like Mars, which was enough for generations of scholarship to hand him the spear, until the inscribed mirrors settled it the other way. The name will not even fix his sex. Etruscan divine names ending in that syllable give nothing away, which is why Laran the war god and Turan the love goddess turn up as a matched pair whenever the problem is discussed.

What he looks like is the one thing the record is generous about. He is a young man, nude, beardless, in a crested helmet, sometimes in a fitted cuirass, with a spear or a lance in hand and often a round shield. Now and then a plain mantle hangs off one shoulder and does nothing useful. He is lean rather than heavy, built like a runner instead of a butcher, and he never ages. Whatever else the Etruscans thought about war, they did not think of it as an old man’s business.

On a mirror from Settecamini, outside Orvieto, he stands with Turms and a long haired, youthful Tinia. His hand rests over the face of a shield marked with something like a sun, and the spear is upright beside him. Nobody in the scene is fighting. He is present and armed at the edge of a conversation between greater gods, which is what he mostly does. Another mirror puts him behind Menrva, among Leinth, Turan and two infant Maris figures, mantle over the shoulder, watching whatever is being done to the babies.

Only once does the engraving let him move. A fifth century mirror from Populonia shows him driving his spear into Celsclan, a giant whose name means son of Cel and so gives his mother as the earth. Laran is the smaller figure in the picture. The giant goes down anyway. That scene is the only thing in the surviving material with a beginning and an end, which means the entire narrative career of the Etruscan war god fits inside one image of him killing somebody’s son.

The Romans were fascinated by Etruscan lightning, and they preserved a piece of doctrine that matters here. Pliny reports that the Etruscan books allowed nine gods to throw thunderbolts, where Greek and Roman practice normally allowed one. The names that came through are Latin ones: Jupiter, Minerva, Vulcan, Saturn, Hercules, Summanus, and Mars. That last is Laran. The full nine were never written down, or never survived being written down.

Set against that, a silence. The Liver of Piacenza is a life sized bronze model of a sheep’s liver, cast late in Etruscan history, its surface parcelled into cells and covered with forty two inscriptions naming the gods who hold each quarter of the sky. A haruspex turned a real liver, still warm, in his hands and read it against this map. Laran is not on it. Maris is, three times. For a god the Roman books put on the thunderbolt list, that absence is worth sitting with, and it is a corrective to the habit of assuming he was a major power because his Greek counterpart was one.

The idea that he guarded boundaries rests on two sandstone blocks from a burial ground outside Bettona, cut with the words tular larna and tular larns. Tular means something close to boundary. Larna is where the trouble starts. Read as a divine name it produces a war god posted at the property line, an appealing thought that has travelled a long way. Read as what it looks like, it produces a family called Larna, known from the cemeteries of Volsinii and quite possibly arrived at Bettona after that city was destroyed in 264 BC, marking the edge of the ground where they buried their dead. Both readings are in print. Only one of them needs a god.

There is a better attested companion. In a small shrine beside a bridge at San Giovenale, someone left a black bucchero chalice scratched with a statement of ownership: I am of Lurs, that of Larun. Lur is an obscure and dark tempered figure with a prophetic streak, named on lead plaques among the powers of the underworld, and his link to Laran runs back to the archaic period. It is the best evidence that the Etruscan war god had a face turned downward as well as outward. It is also a cup rather than a story.

So the powers come to this. He commands fighting and settles how it ends, and he was asked for that outcome. He can throw the thunderbolt, if the Roman books are right about the nine. Something in him leans toward the ground and the dark under it, by way of Lur, though no one wrote down what he does there.

The limits are stranger than the usual divine weakness, because they are not weaknesses at all but gaps. He has no birth. No parents are named, no origin is told, and no rival version competes with another because there is no version. He has no death and no wounding, which for a war god is not mercy but an accident of survival, since whatever poems could have hurt him were never set down in a language anyone can now read. In the crowded mirrors he stands a pace behind the gods doing the talking. Subtract Ares, and most of what gets said about Laran goes with him, leaving a young man in a helmet, a giant on the ground, a line in a Capuan calendar, and a cup beside a bridge.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Laran?

Laran is the Etruscan god of war, the figure Greek and Roman writers matched to Ares and Mars. He is known almost entirely from engraved bronze mirrors and a handful of inscriptions rather than from any surviving Etruscan story. Earlier scholarship gave the role to a different god, Maris, on the strength of that name resembling Mars, and the mirrors corrected it.

How was Laran depicted in Etruscan art?

Laran appears as a beardless nude young man in a crested helmet, sometimes wearing a fitted cuirass, carrying a spear or lance and often a round shield. A plain mantle is occasionally draped over one shoulder. He never ages in the images, and he usually stands at the edge of a group of gods rather than at its centre.

Is Laran named on the Liver of Piacenza?

No. The bronze liver carries forty two inscriptions naming Etruscan gods, and Laran is not among them, although Maris appears three times. This matters because Roman writers list Mars, meaning Laran, among the nine gods the Etruscans allowed to hurl thunderbolts, so the god is on one authority and missing from the other.

Was Laran a god of boundaries?

Possibly not. The claim comes from two sandstone markers at Bettona reading tular larna and tular larns, where tular means roughly boundary. Larna can be read as a form of the god’s name, but it is also a known Etruscan family name from the cemeteries of Volsinii, in which case the stones simply mark where that family buried its dead.

What happens in the myth of Laran and Celsclan?

On a fifth century BC bronze mirror from Populonia, Laran drives his spear into Celsclan, a giant whose name identifies him as the son of the earth goddess Cel. Laran is drawn as the smaller of the two and wins regardless. It is the only scene involving Laran that tells a complete story from start to finish.

Related Entries

Tinia, Turan, Uni, Thesan, Vanth, Charun, Culsu, Mars, Ares, Minerva, Jupiter, Gaia