Tomb of Lars Porsena
The tomb of the Etruscan king Lars Porsena (Italian: Mausoleo di Porsenna) is a legendary ancient building in what is now central Italy.[1] Allegedly built around 500 BCE at Clusium (modern Chiusi, in south-eastern Tuscany), and was described as follows by the Roman writer Marcus Varro (116–27 BCE):
Porsena was buried below the city of Clusium in the place where he had built a square monument of dressed stones. Each side was three hundred feet in length and fifty in height, and beneath the base there was an inextricable labyrinth, into which, if any-body entered without a clue of thread, he could never discover his way out. Above this square building there stand five pyramids, one at each corner and one in the centre, seventy-five feet [c. 22 meters] broad at the base and one hundred and fifty feet [c. 44 meters] high. These pyramids so taper in shape that upon the top of all of them together there is supported a brazen globe, and upon that again a petasus from which bells are suspended by chains. These make a tinkling sound when blown about by the wind, as was done in bygone times at Dodona. Upon this globe there are four more pyramids, each a hundred feet [c. 30 meters] in height, and above them is a platform on which are five more pyramids.
Destruction of the tomb
[edit | edit source]This structure, standing some 200 meters high, was supposedly destroyed along with Clusium itself in 89 BCE by the Roman general Cornelius Sulla.[2] No trace of it has ever been found, and historians have generally regarded Varro’s account as a gross exaggeration at best, and downright fabrication at worst. [citation needed]
In the 18th century Angelo Cortenovis proposed that the tomb of Lars Porsena was a machine for conducting lightning.[3]
Gallery
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Conjectural restoration by Quatremere de Quincy after Varro's description. From Mazes and labyrinths; a general account of their history and developments (1922).
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References
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