Martianus Capella and the Cosmic System of the Etruscans

Abstract

What the Roman tradition, literary and artistic, has to tell us of the heavenly spheres is of Greek and Oriental origin, and it would be futile to go behind hellenized Rome: early Roman religion, though it had an extensive worship of heavenly gods, ignored the universe entirely. An examination of the Etruscan tradition leads to different conclusions. It offers, roughly speaking, three larger complexes to such an examination. One is the bronze model of a liver from Piacenza, used for extispicy and divided into many sections. The second is the doctrine about lightning, mainly to be found in Pliny and Seneca. The third is a list of gods, distributed among the sixteen regions of the heavens, in Martianus Capella (fourth-fifth century A.D.). The aim of this paper in its first part is to analyse this third complex (with occasional reference to the other two).

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