Roman gods & goddesses: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra
"'Many of the Roman gods did come from the Greeks and many of them came from the Greeks by way of the Etruscans who lived just to the north of Rome, but not all gods by any means and it, whenever we look at books on ancient mythology, I know because I wrote one, it's almost all Greek mythology and then you have a little chapter at the end that says Roman mythology or Roman gods. Which is really probably not the best way to do it because the Romans had a very rich mythology and religion before the Greeks ever came along.
But yes they did adopt Greek gods and they had no trouble with doing this, there was no contradiction. They had many many gods and they were always willing to take on a few more. If they went to war with somebody, the Sabines or the Oscans or whoever it was, they had a wonderful ritual that they did, where they would go to the gates of the city they were at war with and were besieging, and they would do something called an invocatio where they would invite the gods of that enemy city to come live with them and they would say, oh we will build you a better temple and we will offer richer sacrifices to you. And it was a, it was sincere but it was also a great psychological tool in warfare.
But most of the time the uh the adoption of the Greek gods or other gods was a slow and gradual process. Occasionally, sometimes the Roman senate said wait a minute, this God is a little bit too wild for us. You know, we need to be careful about this, but most of the time there was no problem and there was no objection at all...
The Romans were in general a very conservative people and so they were careful but when they uh for example, when they invaded Asia Minor, modern day Turkey they came across a very old cult, a goddess named Cybele who had some worship involved that was pretty wild, including castration and all sorts of strange things. And so the Romans especially the Roman senate said uh no no no no wait a minute we're going to be very careful about this and if we do adopt this new uh rite, which they did, there are certain guidelines that we're going to follow. We're not going to be like those Greeks or those people over there. We're going to do this in a very Roman way. So it was a, it was a gradual process and gods grew in popularity and then they would you know fade away sometimes according to what, with a particular fashion was at the moment...
The Greek gods were much more human… they looked human in artistic representation and they acted human with all of our failings. The Roman gods, there's this wonderful Latin word, numen uh or in in the plural numina, which means forces. Divine forces and so the original Roman gods, were much more of of forces than they were humans. And this element was of course present in in the Greek and other gods that they took in, but the Roman gods were not originally represented by statues at least not very much. They were really thought of as powers in more of a, I guess you could say a primal sort of sense. It was certainly a very well developed theology that the Romans had, but they, they never saw the gods as just humans on a grander scale. They originally at least saw the gods much more as forces of nature, of of procreation, of weather, of war, in much more of a primal sort of sense...
The Romans they also had a really interesting gods that were household gods that also existed in a way in Greece but not nearly as much. Every Roman house, if you walked into an ancient Roman house you would see by the hearth, by the fireplace which everybody had, the lares and the penates who were these uh little household Gods. There was also a great deal of reverence for the ancestors so that especially in wealthier Roman homes you would see wax masks or representations of the ancestors and it wasn't quite ancestor worship like we see in some religions around the world but it verged on that...
I think the household guards were central to Roman worship. If you got up in the morning you would say prayer, you might make a little bit of offering of incense or something like that to your Gods, just as religious people today in various faiths will say a prayer in the morning before they go out to begin their day. So the household gods were extremely important and they tended to be much more personal, much more emotional than the gods. It's not that they didn't believe in Jupiter, they did absolutely believe in Jupiter and worshiped him. But somehow if you're in a crowd with hundreds of people sacrificing bulls, that's one thing. But if you're at home saying a prayer to your particular household gods, that is much more intimate... The Romans just like the Greeks were very religious… if you'd stopped a hundred average Romans on the street they would be quite serious about the gods that they worshiped, whether in private or in public...
There were very rarely religious conflicts or wars between people who worshiped this goddess or that goddess, that would have been a very strange notion to the Romans. Because they were absolutely willing to accept, if you had somebody come from Gaul, from modern day France and come down to Rome and say, you know, I worship this god named X, the Romans would say oh, that's nice. What do you do? And oh that's very much like our god and nobody ever said, you know our god is better or anything like that. They would either welcome that god in or they would simply ignore him. But this is one reason why when Christianity came into the Roman Empire that there was so much trouble. It wasn't a unique situation but Christians said, no, there are no other gods. You know those gods that you worship, the, they either simply don't exist or they are just demonic forces. And the Romans, they couldn't believe that somebody was saying this. How could anybody deny the gods? They called the Christians atheists for this reason. It was a very common label that the Romans gave to the Christians because the Christians were absolutely insistent on monotheism. But for the most part among Romans from all of the Empire, even people coming from outside the Empire, there were people who came into the Roman Empire from what's now India, from Africa, from wherever, there was never conflict when those people wanted to build a temple in Rome. That wasn't a problem for them...
You had Ares who was a God of War who actually was not very popular. If you read Homer's Iliad everybody says we hate Aries, you know, he's just awful. He's full of bloodshed and violence. But Mars in the Roman world was originally an agricultural god. You prayed to Mars for the growth of your crops and it was only over time that Mars became more of a god of of war and so they were very flexible people...
In the Roman Empire, the Cult of the Emperor became more important, and it was much more of a loyalty test. And we know about certain Emperors, you read about Caligula or Nero or or the others who are voted by the Senate to be gods. And we looked at that from a modern perspective and think that's ridiculous, nobody believed they were a god. But, and they probably didn't. But it was a a kind of a loyalty test and so this is why again Christians got into such trouble. The Romans expected everybody to, you know, throw, make a little bit of sacrifice, throw a little bit of grain on the altar for the Emperor. That was just a sign of like in America, saying the Pledge of Allegiance. You know, I I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. It's that sort of thing. And you could be as sincere or not sincere about it as you wanted to be. But the the Christians, again they refused to do that and they uh they got in trouble'"