The Gods of War and Peace in Etruria

At present a comprehensive study on the gods of war and peace in Etruria was never carried out. Any general framework of the Etruscan religion, and especially of his pantheon, must have a provisional character in front of the almost total absence of written sources on their mythology and their beliefs and especially on the evolution of these in the course of history. According to the iconographic evidences we can identify in Laran the Etruscan god of war, correspondent of the Greek god Ares and the Italic Mars and to propose a possible identification of the Etruscan Alpan with the Greek goddess Eirene and the Latin Pax. In both cases only the attributes present in the representations of deities help us in this identification. The war attributes of Laran, helmet, shield, armor, spear and shin guards are in common with those in generic depictions of warriors, therefore the identification with the divinity of war can never be entirely certain. Equally difficult is the identification of the goddess of peace: L. A. Milani proposed to identify it with a female figure depicted on some Etruscan bronze box mirrors, sitting with a child in her arms holding a cornucopia, but, as we shall see, this identification is far from certain.