Mezentius

He reveled in bloodshed and was overwhelmingly savage on the battlefield, but more significantly to a Roman audience he was a contemptor divum, a "despiser of the gods."

He appears in Virgil's Aeneid, primarily book ten, where he aids Turnus in a war against Aeneas and the Trojans.

Once he hears of Lausus' death, he feels ashamed that his son died in his place and returns to battle on his horse Rhaebus in order to avenge him.

However, since his benefactor Maecenas was a native Etruscan, Virgil portrayed Mezentius as a tyrant,[1] attributing to him personally the evils of which the Greek authors had previously accused the Etruscans, such as torture and savagery, an ethnic prejudice already present in the Homeric Hymns.

[citation needed] Thus he created something of a scapegoat of Mezentius and portrayed the Etruscan people as a good race who fight alongside Aeneas.