Lars Porsenna

Lars Porsenna was the Etruscan king of Clusium who besieged Rome around 508 BC, and the Roman tradition about him is unusually transparent about being propaganda. In the familiar version he came to restore the expelled Tarquin, was held at the Sublician bridge by Horatius and two companions while the Romans cut it down behind them, was impressed by Mucius Scaevola thrusting his own hand into a fire to show what Roman resolve looked like, and by the hostage Cloelia swimming the Tiber to escape - and withdrew in admiration without taking the city. Tacitus and Pliny both record a different account in which Rome surrendered to him, and Pliny quotes treaty terms forbidding the Romans the use of iron except for agriculture, which is what a defeated people accepts. Modern historians generally take the second version, on the principle that a story preserved despite being inconvenient is likelier than one that flatters. What is not disputed is that this is the moment the Roman monarchy ended and the republic began, and that Etruscan power over Latium was near its height and about to break. His tomb at Clusium was described by Varro as a labyrinth under a monument of enormous size, and has never been found. Horatius at the bridge, Mucius Scaevola's hand in the fire and Cloelia swimming the Tiber are three of the four or five stories every Roman child learned, and all three exist to explain a siege the city may well have lost. Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome put Horatius into English schoolrooms for a century. Etruscan Clusium is modern Chiusi. His portrait here is an imagined one from a sixteenth-century printed collection, which is the only kind that exists.

• Lived: 560 BCE – 498 BCE
• Nationality: Etruscan
• Roles: monarch, military_leader