man, nor Etruscan, nor Latin, at least so far as we know Latin
in Latium. If we can find a place however where a Latin people is under
strong Etruscan influence, we shall be near the solution. Such a place
is Falerii, in the country of the Faliscans. To the ancients it appeared
so thoroughly Etruscan that they go out of their way to explain that it
was not. As a matter of fact it was the only Latin town on the right
bank of the Tiber, and because of its locality it was early brought into
vital connection with the Etruscans, so vital that while it never lost
all of its original Latin character, it lost enough of it to exercise a
very considerable direct influence over Etruria, and to be to a very
large extent influenced by her in turn. We cannot of course positively
prove that Minerva was originally worshipped only at Falerii, and that
her cult spread entirely from this one point, but we have at least
strong negative evidence, and so far as the general history of ancient
religion is concerned there is nothing impossible in such a spread.
Religious history shows many parallels to this; for example the classic
case of the god Eros of Thespiae, in Boeotia, who would have lived and
died merely a little insignificant local god, if it had not been for the
Boeotian poet Hesiod who adopted Eros into his poetry and thus gave him
a start in life by which he ultimately succeeded in going all over the
Greek world, and then passing into Rome as Cupid; and so into all later
times.

We are accustomed to think of Minerva as the Latin name for Athena, the
daughter of Zeus, and unconsciously we clothe Minerva with all the glory
of Athena and endow her with Athena's many-sidedness. In reality the
little peasant goddess of Falerii had originally nothing in common with
Athena except the fact that both of them were interested in handicraft
and the handicraftsman, but Athena had a hundred other interests
besides, while this one thing seems to have filled the whole of
Minerva's horizon. When Minerva went on her travels into Etruria, she
came among a people who eventually learned from the representations of
Greek art a very considerable amount of Greek mythology, and who, when
they heard of Athena, saw her resemblance to Minerva and began thus to
associate the two. But even in this association Minerva was still
pre-eminently the goddess of the artisan and the labouring man, she was
the patroness of the works of man's hands rather than of the work