Tages and Vegoia, the revealers of Etruscan wisdom

Every great religious tradition tells where its knowledge comes from. The Etruscans traced theirs back to two supernatural figures: Tages, who was said to have dictated the rules of haruspicy, and Vegoia, to whom the doctrine of lightning and the rules on field boundaries were attributed. Both belong to myth, but the stories about them tell us a great deal about how the Etruscans understood the relationship between gods and human beings.

The child who rose from the furrow

The best-known version of the myth is reported by Cicero in the second book of De divinatione. In the territory of Tarquinia a farmer was ploughing when, from a furrow cut deeper than usual, a being suddenly emerged and spoke to him. He had, says Cicero, the appearance of a child but the wisdom of an old man. At the ploughman's cries a crowd gathered, and before long the whole of Etruria had assembled at that spot.

Tages spoke at length before those present, who gathered his words and wrote them down. According to tradition, these discourses formed the core of the books on haruspicy. Cicero tells the story in order to mock it, asking who could believe in a god who sprang from a clod of earth. Ovid too, in the fifteenth book of the Metamorphoses, recalls the fateful clod from which Tages was born, the first to teach the Etruscans how to unveil the future.

Later sources add another figure, Tarchon, the founding hero of Tarquinia, who was said to have been the first to receive the teaching. An Etruscan mirror from Tuscania, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, shows a young seer bending over a liver beside a figure named Avl Tarchunus. Many scholars see in it an echo of this legend, although the identification of the figures is still debated.

Vegoia and the sanctity of boundaries

The second figure is a nymph, called Vegoia or Begoe by Latin sources. The Virgilian commentator Servius mentions the books of this nymph, who was said to have written down the art of lightning among the Etruscans. Her name also appears in a remarkable text preserved in the collection of writings of the Roman land surveyors: a prophecy addressed to a certain Arruns Veltymnus, concerning the measurement and protection of land.

In that text Vegoia recalls that Jupiter, when he claimed the land of Etruria for himself, wanted the fields to be measured and marked with boundary stones. Whoever moves boundaries out of greed, the prophecy warns, will bring upon himself disease, storms and ruin. The land itself thus becomes a sacred order, and property a pact with the divine. The fragment has come down to us in Latin and its date is uncertain.

The meaning of the two myths

Tages and Vegoia share an essential feature: knowledge does not arise from human enquiry but is a divine gift that rises from the earth itself or is entrusted by a nymph. Human beings are only required to preserve it faithfully. This explains the importance of the books and of the priestly families who guarded them, as well as the discipline's extraordinary resistance to change over the centuries.

The child with the face of an old man long remained the symbol of the antiquity and seriousness of Etruscan doctrine. When the Romans spoke of the Tagetic books, they meant precisely this heritage of venerable rules. Read today, the myth keeps the fascination of a powerful image: wisdom rising from the furrow of the plough, where the earth is opened to feed humankind.