Etruscan gold bulla depicting the apotheosis of Achilles at the Gregorian Etruscan Museum in Vatican City

Etruscan gold bulla depicting the apotheosis of Achilles at the Gregorian Etruscan Museum in Vatican City.
The Romans, who traditionally traced their lineage to Troy, took a highly negative view of Achilles. Virgil refers to Achilles as a savage and a merciless butcher of men, while Horace portrays Achilles ruthlessly slaying women and children. But the Etruscans, influenced in their art and mythology by the Greeks, honored Achilles and often portrayed him in their art like they did here on this gold bulla depicting the apotheosis of Achilles. Here, the hero drives a chariot pulled by a team of winged horses. Early dedicatory inscriptions from the Greek colonies around the Black Sea, including Olbia, attest to the existence of a heroic cult of Achilles from the sixth century BCE onwards. The cult was still thriving in the third century CE, when a dedicatory stelae from Olbia refers to an Achilles Pontárchēs (roughly "lord of the Pontus Euxinus"), who was invoked as a protector of the city of Olbia, venerated on par with Olympian gods such as the local Apollo Prostates, Hermes Agoraeus, and Poseidon. The bulla was found in 1837 in an intact tomb in the Camposcala necropolis in Vulci. In addition to this bulla and two others, the tomb's grave goods included two thymiaterion (ancient incense burners), two funerary crowns, a pair of cluster earrings and a necklace, two rings with a scarab, five bronze altars, a helmet, a set of crockery, and four mirrors. Researchers assume the tomb probably housed two burials: one male, implied by the helmet, the crown and at least the two twin bullæ, the other female, as attested by the presence of the earrings and the necklace.


Image: Etruscan gold bulla depicting the apotheosis of Achilles at the Gregorian Etruscan Museum in Vatican City courtesy of the museum.

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