Uni

Also Known As: Etruscan Uni, genitive Unial; syncretised with Phoenician Astarte as Uni-Astre at Pyrgi; identified by the Romans with Juno
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Etruscan Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: Sovereign goddess of marriage, childbirth and women, who shared rule of the Etruscan pantheon with Tinia and was counted among the nine gods entitled to hurl thunderbolts.
Role in Mythos: Queen of the Etruscan gods, patron deity of cities including Perusia and Veii, and the divine mother who took the hero Hercle into her family by nursing him.
Relation to Humans: Etruscan households turned to her at marriage and at childbirth, and whole cities held her as their protector. That protection was conditional rather than unbreakable, as Veii discovered when Rome called her out of the city by ritual in 396 BC.

Three sheets of gold, thin enough to bend between finger and thumb, were once nailed to a temple doorframe on the Tyrrhenian coast. Two carried Etruscan text and one carried Phoenician, and all three said much the same thing: this house belongs to Uni. When Massimo Pallottino’s team lifted them out of the ground at Pyrgi in 1964, folded and stowed where someone had hidden them long before, they were holding the closest thing the Etruscans left behind to a treaty and a prayer written in one breath.

Pyrgi was the harbour town of Caere, and the man who paid for the temple was Thefarie Velianas, styled king of Caere in his own inscription, around 510 BC. Temple B went up in the Greek manner, a single chamber ringed with columns, and the goddess inside it answered to two names at once. The Etruscan text gives her as Uni. The Phoenician text gives her as Astarte. The dedication survives in the genitive as unialastres, one goddess wearing two languages, which tells you a good deal about how business was done on that coast: Punic ships beaching below the sanctuary, Etruscan priests above it, and a deity broad enough to receive both.

At home she needed no translation. Uni stood at the head of the Etruscan pantheon beside Tinia, the sky god who threw the lightning, and Menrva, and the three of them held the summit of the divine order in a grouping the Romans would later mirror on the Capitoline. Where Juno and Minerva became junior partners in Rome, the Etruscan pair carried more weight. Uni governed marriage and childbirth, women and the continuity of families, and she was the patron of Perusia, the hill city that is now Perugia. In Perusia she was the city’s own. The two thresholds a household cannot avoid, the wedding and the birth, both fell inside her keeping, and hers was the name spoken at each of them, in a room warm with lamps and too many relatives.

Etruscan art shows her as a woman in her full authority rather than a girl. On engraved bronze mirrors from the sixth century onward she wears a diadem or a bridal veil, heavy earrings, a torque at the throat, sometimes a pleated peplos and sometimes little more than drapery arranged with intent. She holds a sceptre. In the crowded assembly scenes on the backs of those mirrors she is seldom at the edge. The metal has gone soft green now and the engraved lines are shallow enough to need raking light, but the hierarchy still comes through: everyone else is arranged in relation to her and to Tinia.

One mirror out of Volterra, made around 300 BC and now in Florence, carries a scene no Greek workshop would have engraved. Uni sits with her breast bared and a bearded, fully grown Hercle at it, drinking. A woman stands behind her and grips her, steadying her the way a midwife would. The inscription runs across the field: eca sren tva ichnac Hercle unial clan thrasce. This image shows how Hercle became Uni’s son. It is an adoption staged as a birth, the hero brought into the divine family by the act of nursing, and it turns the Greek version inside out. Hera spent Heracles’ whole life trying to destroy him. Uni fed him.

Where she came from, nobody can say. The Etruscans wrote a great deal about their gods and none of it survives. What is left is inscriptions, mirror backs, temple foundations, and the Roman authors who read the Etruscan books before they were lost and paraphrased them for their own ends. Her name may be cognate with Juno’s, which would make the two goddesses relatives rather than translations of one another, though much of the Etruscan language is still imperfectly understood and the question stays open.

She belonged to the machinery of Etruscan divination as much as to the temples. The bronze liver found near Piacenza in 1877, a life-sized model of a sheep’s liver used to train diviners, is parcelled into forty compartments inscribed with divine names, and one of them is hers, marked Uni mae. A haruspex turning a real liver in his hands and finding a blemish in that quarter knew whose attention he had drawn. Roman writers preserving the Etruscan lightning doctrine counted nine gods permitted to throw thunderbolts, of which Tinia commanded three distinct kinds, and Uni under her Latin name stood among the nine. She was not merely the consort of the storm.

Her great limitation was written into the nature of civic patronage, and Rome found it. In 396 BC, after a siege measured in years, the Romans took Veii, and before the assault Marcus Furius Camillus performed the evocatio: he called the city’s tutelary goddess out from behind her own walls and offered her a better house in Rome. Livy tells what followed with visible unease. Young men were chosen from the army, washed clean and dressed in white, and sent up to the temple to fetch the statue, which by Etruscan rule only a priest of one particular family was allowed to touch. They approached it carefully. One of them asked the goddess whether she wished to go to Rome. The others shouted that she had nodded. The statue came away from its seat lightly, Livy says, almost of its own accord, and was carried down to the Aventine, where Camillus dedicated a temple to Juno Regina on the first of September in 392 BC.

That is the shape of her power and its edge inside a single story. Uni could hold a city, sanctify a marriage, adopt a hero and split the sky with a bolt of her own. What she could not do was refuse a better offer made properly, in the correct words, by an enemy who had learned the ritual. Veii was levelled. The goddess moved house. Whether those young soldiers saw a nod or talked one another into it is a question Livy leaves standing, and the gold at Pyrgi, which had already shown her answering to a Phoenician name whenever the shipping required it, does not exactly argue against the idea that Uni was flexible about her address.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Uni in Etruscan mythology?

Uni is the queen of the Etruscan gods and the consort of Tinia, the sky god. She governed marriage, childbirth, women and the continuity of families, and she was the patron deity of the city of Perusia, now Perugia. With Tinia and Menrva she formed the ruling triad of the Etruscan pantheon, the grouping the Romans later echoed with Jupiter, Juno and Minerva on the Capitoline.

What are the Pyrgi Tablets and why do they matter for Uni?

The Pyrgi Tablets are three gold sheets found in 1964 at Pyrgi, the harbour of the Etruscan city of Caere, and dated to around 500 BC. Two are inscribed in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, and they record the dedication of Temple B to Uni by Thefarie Velianas, king of Caere. In the Phoenician version Uni is rendered as the goddess Astarte, which makes the tablets direct evidence that Etruscans and Phoenicians worshipped her as one goddess under two names.

Was Uni the same goddess as the Roman Juno?

The Romans identified Uni with Juno, and the two names may be linguistically related, but Uni is not simply Juno in Etruscan dress. She carried more authority in the Etruscan pantheon than Juno did in the Roman one, and Etruscan art gives her stories, such as the adoption of Hercle, that have no Roman equivalent.

Why is Uni shown breastfeeding a grown man?

A bronze mirror from Volterra of about 300 BC, now in Florence, shows Uni nursing the adult, bearded hero Hercle, with an inscription stating that this is how Hercle became Uni’s son. The scene depicts adoption performed as a symbolic birth, admitting the hero into the family of the gods. It is the opposite of the Greek tradition, in which Hera persecutes Heracles for his entire life.

What happened to Uni’s temple at Veii?

When Rome besieged and took Veii in 396 BC, Marcus Furius Camillus performed the evocatio, a ritual calling the enemy city’s protecting deity to abandon it in exchange for a new home in Rome. Livy describes soldiers in white carrying her cult statue from the temple after they claimed the goddess nodded her consent. Camillus dedicated a temple to her, as Juno Regina, on the Aventine Hill in 392 BC.