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.
This family’s story included a horse.
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 14th-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.