Before we leave the François tomb we must remind the reader of the existence of a remarkable series of pictures with subjects taken from the conflicts between Etruria and Rome in the time of the Roman kings.[107] FOOTNOTES: [100] Cp. for the well-appointed table Plautus’s description of a liberal host (_Menaechmi_ 102): ‘tantas struices concinnat patinarias.’ [101] Walther Riezler, _Weissgründige attische Lekythen_, pl. 70. [102] It is to be observed that the Etruscans thrust with the sword; this also the Romans inherited; whereas the Gauls cut and the Iberians thrust as well as cut. Polybius ii. 33. 6, and iii. 114. [103] Cp. Beazley, _Lewes House Collection of Gems_, p. 38, 74 f. [104] Herodotus i. 167. [105] Livy vii. 15. 10; 19. 3. [106] Plutarch, _Themistocles_ 13. [107] Körte, _Jahrbuch des archäol. Instit._ xii. 1897, p. 58 ff. XVII [Sidenote: CHARUN AND THE LASAS] The demons of the Underworld who figure in the Etruscan paintings are almost all sinister. The devils brandishing torches and snakes, familiar both from the paintings and from the reliefs on the cinerary urns, remind one of Livy’s[108] description of the fight of the Tarquinians and the Faliscans against the Romans in 354 B.C., when a troop of Etruscan priests, armed with flaming torches and live snakes, threw themselves in ecstatic fury on the Roman armies, who received them undauntedly and won the day. Charun, also, is a common figure on the Etruscan sarcophagi and cinerary urns of the fourth and following centuries, suggesting by his colour the demon of putrefaction, Eurynomus, whom Polygnotus had painted, in his great picture of the Underworld in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi, seated snarling on the skin of a carrion-vulture, his flesh the colour of a blue-bottle fly.[109] Charun, therefore, is not identical with the old ferryman, Charon, of the Greeks; he is the messenger of death, the terrible fetcher of souls, like Charos in the popular Greek belief of our own day. Only the ‘Charon door’ of the Greek theatre indicates the existence of similar popular ideas among the ancient Greeks.