That Etruscan Urn

There is nothing as thrilling to the historical novelist as to have her intuition borne

out to be the truth. Sometimes this is luck or the Spirit, but I think it can also come

from an understanding of basic human nature.

I have fallen in love with a plot point in which my main character is inspired to tell

his story when he finds an Etruscan coffin (actually they were funerary urns and

held ashes) on which were carved images from the deceased Etruscan man’s life. I

want my character to say:

This unknown man who preserved the events of his life through carvings of himself

and a woman, children, a horse, a ship, continues to call to me, and even in the

night I sometimes come out and study it. It raises more questions than it gives

answers: who was the man, why did the child die, what is the meaning of the horse,

the ship?

I know that I will never know the answers to these questions. And yet, at some

place deep within me, I know the man. He is no longer just one of that mysterious

race we call Etruscan. He is saved from oblivion by his story, vague and

incomplete as it is.

But, unfortunately, when I visited all the great Etruscan sites near Rome, I learned

that these funerary pieces depicted religious symbols—gods and sacrifices, etc. 

Well, bummer. I decided maybe I would just invent a funerary urn with a personal

story—there might have been one, right?

But then, in San Gimignano, the town that I can see in the distance when I look out

my bedroom window, I found funerary urns that were much smaller and cruder

than the ones in Rome. With family events carved around the base. Apparently the

Tuscan Etruscans valued their personal stories.

Which was my intuition. Of course they valued their stories. Of course they wanted

them preserved and remembered. This is a basic trait of a human person, now and

then.

So, I am inspired to tell my 14 th -century character's story because he was inspired

to tell his story by the story of the Etruscan man's life. To be human is to reflect

one another like a hall of endless mirrors