In the Dark

A young (male) person of my acquaintance sent me this picture a while ago. I think he found it here. I assume he thinks the old guy with the walking stick is me, and the boy is him. We’ll gloss over what he was trying to say by sending it to me but, whatever the reason, I found it intriguing.

The online description reads

Elderly man supported by boy, fresco of the Tomb of the Jugglers, Necropolis of Tarquinia (Unesco World Heritage List, 2004), Lazio, Italy, Etruscan civilization, 6th century BC.

This is from the Etruscan (i.e. pre-Roman) period and the best guess for the date is around 530 BC, so the first thing of interest is that, although it is damaged, it has survived pretty well. Fresco (paint on wet plaster, left to dry) is a very fragile medium and many made 1,000 years after this have not lasted as well. The reason for this is that the tomb was not unearthed until 1961, so it was undisturbed for about 2,500 years. The piece above is a section from a larger work that depicts a sort of funerary ritual.

Now to the description quoted above. For a start, the man is not all that “elderly” as his beard is not grey. He is however clearly older than the boy, who isn’t wearing a beard (nor anything else for that matter). The description says “supported by a boy” but if you look at the painting the older man is holding the younger man firmly by the wrist. That doesn’t look like “support” to me!

When I first saw this piece I assumed the older man was holding a staff or walking stick of some sort, but if you look at his right hand you’ll see his index finger extended as if he is pointing and the object in question is behind his hand. The stick also appears to be decorated, but I think it might be the trunk of a small tree; there are fig trees with fruit than hangs on the trunk, for example. It could be that the damaged area at the top of the stick represented foliage at the top. There are several depictions of trees elsewhere in the tomb.

Iinitially I thought the shapes under the original excerpt were meant to be waves, but it seems they are just part of an abstract frieze that runs all the way around.

So what can we infer from these clues? One interpretation is that the man with the beard is taking the boy away reluctantly for some nefarious activity? Sexual relationships between boys and older men were not uncommon in Greek civilisation so maybe that was also the case for the Etruscans?

But there is another interpretation, which I find more plausible given the context of the painting. The scenes in the centre and right represent the funeral rites, including music, but the man and boy (on the left) are clearly walking away from all that. Moreover, the figure in the central panel apparently standing in some sort of vessel looks very much like the boy in the panel above. Is the lid off to let him out, or is he about to be sealed in?

My reading of it, therefore, is that the boy is dead, and the man with the beard is no less than Charun, the demon charged with guiding the departed to the underworld. The name Charun is derived from the Greek Charon, but the character of Charun is quite different from the ferryman Charon. Anyway, he definitely looks like he’s taking the boy somewhere he doesn’t want to go, and Charun is often depicted wearing a skull cap as he is in the picture.

Now I definitely need to find out why my young friend sent me this…