Charun

Charun took his name from the Greek Charon, but gave back something else. The borrowing is linguistic, not functional: the Greek boatman charges and rows; the Etruscan has no boat, collects no obols and crosses no river. His weapon is a great hammer, and his ground, the door of the tomb. The underlying difference is documentary: no Etruscan literature survives, so Charun has no told myths, only images and his name written beside them. He is known from the painted walls of the tombs of Tarquinia and Vulci (fourth to second centuries BC) and from engraved mirrors, urns and sarcophagi, where the inscription "charu(n)" accompanies a demon with bluish or greyish skin, a hooked vulture-like nose, pointed animal ears, and at times wings and serpents in his hands. George Dennis, who walked and described those tombs in The Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria (1878), met him so often that he called him the most popular of the Etruscan demons; Jules Martha (Etruscan Art, 1889) and Frederik Poulsen (Etruscan Tomb Paintings, 1922) later fixed his iconography. Everything said about him comes from there: from the painting, not from the tale.

Charun's inseparable attribute is the mallet, and what exactly he does with it is the classic debate about the figure. The readings come in layers, and it pays to date them. The oldest and grisliest, popular in the nineteenth century, makes him an executioner: the blow that finishes the dying or seals their death. Another reading ties him to the door: in several tombs Charun is painted beside the jambs, and the hammer would be the tool that drives home the final bolt, the one that closes the tomb from inside the myth. The third, more sober and prevailing today, takes it as a badge of office: the sign that death is irrevocable, whether it is used or not. What no source gives him is the role of judge: like his Greek namesake, Charun carries out a fate that others decide, and the scenes show him present, not deliberating. Terrible in face and colour, there is not a single image in which he punishes a soul for its sins: he accompanies, keeps the passage and leaves the verdict to whom it belongs.

Three tombs concentrate the essentials. In the Monterozzi necropolis at Tarquinia, the Tomb of the Charuns (around the second century BC) shows the most surprising thing: not one Charun but four, each with his epithet written out, among them Charun Chunchules and Charun Huths. The name then designates not an individual but a class of demons, a funerary crew with specialities we can no longer read. In the Tomb of Orcus, also at Tarquinia, the Etruscan world of the dead is peopled with Greek personnel, with Aita and Phersipnai enthroned and the local demons prowling the banquet of the shades. And in the François Tomb at Vulci (fourth century BC), Charun attends, mallet on his shoulder, the sacrifice of the Trojan prisoners at the hands of Achilles: an entirely Greek myth repainted with Etruscan funerary bureaucracy, proof that these demons were not decoration but the Etruscan way of saying that death was present in the scene. Dennis described these walls when they could still be seen fresh, and Poulsen catalogued them when they were already archaeology.

Charun hardly ever works alone. His usual partner in the tombs is Vanth, a winged female daimon with a serene face who carries a torch, a key or a written scroll, and sometimes eyes painted on her wings, as if Etruscan death needed two faces: the one that terrifies and the one that lights the way. The division of roles is visible in the scenes themselves: Charun imposes, with the mallet and the grimace; Vanth accompanies, lights the road and seems to read or carry the fate of the deceased. Neither of them punishes. Together they flank doors, escort processions and attend the violent deaths of myth. The pair works like an institution: not two monsters, but the civil service of the passage, and that logic of strict offices is the same one that orders the Greek underworld from which the Etruscans took the names and part of the scenery. When the Etruscan catalogue grows, Vanth is the first natural neighbour of this entry.

When Etruria dissolved into Rome, Charun did not vanish entirely. Tertullian and other Christian authors describe, at the gladiatorial games, a masked attendant who finished off or dragged away the fallen, armed with a mallet, whom the sources call Dis Pater; much of modern scholarship recognises in that hammer-bearing mask the direct inheritance of the Etruscan demon, moved to another stage: from the tomb wall to the arena. It is a loan in the opposite direction to that of the name: Greece gave Charun what to be called; Etruria left Rome how to finish off. Afterwards the figure lay buried with his language, and his second life is a museum one: the tombs of Tarquinia are today a visitable heritage site, sarcophagi with his figure fill rooms in Rome, Florence and the Louvre, and his name reappears in every handbook of ancient art since Martha. The demon with no written mythology ended up having what his Greek namesake never had: whole walls painted just for him.