I was thinking the other day that the Romans had an equivalent to most of the gods in the Greek Pantheon: Jupiter = Zeus, Juno = Hera, Minerva = Athena, Diana= Artemis, and so on.
But, I couldn’t think of an equivalent to Apollo. Did they not have one, or did they just use the same name as the Greeks?
Agree with pan1. That’s what I recall from my Classical Civilizations class in college (I took all the tough courses) - that Apollo was the only god whose name did not change from Greek to Roman pantheons…TRM
The Roman Space program was limited by multiple factors, notably a cosmology that identified celestial bodies with deities, a lack of sufficient mathematical and computational power - which was further limited by the “Roman Numeral” system - and insufficient research into rocket fuels.
Had Archimedes been captured alive by the Romans after the siege of Syracuse - comparable to the capture of Werner Von Braun - the subsequent development of Roman rocket technology might have been much different.
It’s worth noting that while Apollo was not per se a sun god, he was often equated by the Greeks with Helios, the sun personified, and hence by the Romans with Sol, the Helios-equivalent in their pantheon. (Helios and Sol were always minor gods, without a significant cultus of their own.)