in Latium or Southern Italy, and we are absolutely certain that she was not known in Rome.  In the country north of Rome, however, the situation is different There she is found quite frequently, especially in Etruria under the name of MENERVA or MENRVA.  Yet she cannot have been an Etruscan goddess, because the name itself is Italic and not Etruscan.  She is therefore neither Roman, 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 works of his mind, and as such she was brought into Rome by Etruscan and Faliscan workmen.  At first she was worshipped merely by these workmen in their own