The big 13 Roman gods are (usually thought to be) very similar to the big 13 Greek gods. But they (mostly) have different names. I have a few questions about this:
The Roman names largely came from local gods or spirits that didn’t have well-developed personalities or elaborate stories associated with them. When the Romans adopted the Greek religion, they identified the Greek gods with the local gods by replacing the Greek name of the god with one of the names of the Roman gods. So the mythologies are for the most part Greek mythologies, not really Greco-Roman. The Roman versions began as direct copies of the Greek stories with the names replaced with the names of relatively minor Roman deities
Complex questions, and ones I’ve been looking for for a while now. There seem to have been some differences between the two sets, but the boundaries were blurred right from the beginning of their recorded history --there were Greek colonies in Sicily and in Italy since the “Dark Age” of Greece, so by the time they were writing histories there had already been contact for a long time, with Greek gods mixing with Roman and Etruscan ones. Greek and Roman writers often equated foreign deities with their own (the Celtic gods, or the Egyptian ones, for instance), and we know that those were pretty rough fits. In the case of the Egyptian gods we know exactly how rough, since we have the Egyptians’ own words for it. But the Italian-Greek gods seem to have been pretty close from the start.
Ok, semi-answer until the pros come in
a) the Greeks had colonies–Paestum, Herculaneum, etc-- in Italy where a number of more indiginous groups were living. The Romans happened to adopt some of the more ‘civilized’ greek customs, and then happened to come out on top of some regional wars and ended up ruling Italy at large.
B) don’t know. I don’t think the observances of the religions were too similar, and cults varied widely.
c) oh, until 313 or a bit later? Lets say 400? There were a number of religions popular in the Empire for a while (Roman Gods, Mithras, Christ, etc), and I’m sure that after Chritianity was legalized and then made official there were people still observing other cults.
The Emperor Theodosius outlawed all pagan religions around the year 380, but they did persist for some time afterward. As the story goes, in the mid-500’s, when St. Benedict of Nursia arrived at the future site of his Monte Cassino Abbey, he found the local villagers all turned out for a festival in honor of the god Apollo.
I would love to find some late-antiquity/early midieval paganism on the web, but any such search is well nigh hopeless, what with all the neo-pagan and contemporary wiccan oriented sites that are out there.
Here’s a site one from Fordham University.
I have disabled the incorrect link and removed the triplicate posting of the incorrect link. Sigh. Don’t hit the SUBMIT button more than once, eh? – CK Dexter Haven, Administrator
Oh my god? What happened? Looks like I posted the wrong link three times-sorry.
Wrong link in triplicate? You got a future in government, kid.
How does this link to Alexander the Great, & his attempt to spread Hellenistic culture & religion around the Mediterranian?
Yeah, that’s seems to be my calling. The link was for Javaman:
If that’s what you mean, that is.
On why the transposition occurred:
As well as the reasons given above, part of it was cultural envy. The Romans realised that many of the intellectual aspects of the greek civilisation were superior to their own, many cultured Romans spoke Greek and Greek tutors and teachers were widely employed.
Transposing the Greek Gods to the local deities was a way of giving themselves a bit more intellectual credibility.
Bertrand Russell discusses this aspect briefly in his “History of Western Philosophy”. I haven’t got a copy here but can have a look tonight.
It also lent credibility to Roman myths about Rome being founded by Aneas and other refugees from the fall of Troy (from the Anaeid).
On the differences between the two pantheons:
The two were largely the same. The Romans adopted many of the gods directly, simply changing the names and adding or deleting a few stories and personalities. The hierarchy and personalities were pretty similar.
Don’t forget that the Etruscans, who were supplanted as the major culture in Italy by the Romans, had a similar pantheon of gods, which appear to have been at least heavily influenced by the Greeks. (Very little is known about the Etruscan religion.) But the gods we know of appear to correspond closely to the Greek versions. The Romans certainly were very familiar with the Etruscans and this probably played a part in their also adopting the Greek pantheon.
I have heard accounts that claim the Greco-Roman Pantheon was heavily influenced by the Celtic Gods and Goddesses. I don’t know how accurate a claim that might be, but thought I’d throw it out for consideration.
Here’s the deal in a nutshell - in earliest Roman times, the religion was a “household” religion that centered around ancestor worship. Each family"s deceased members were it’s “gods,” essentially, and each house had a little altar to honor their them. These household gods were known collectively as the Laertes. Rome was still a fairly primitive “backwater” society when it became powerful enough to conquer Greece, and the lack of a uniform, formalized religion meant that there was a kind of a cultural vacuum. Roman society needed a state religion to help give the increasingly sophisticated society necessary cohesion and prestige. The Romans not only admired the Greeks they had just conquered, they were completely awe-struck by their culture and sophistication. Despite being the stronger society militarily, the Romans quickly developed a huge inferiority complex and a bad case of culture envy, and they quickly absorbed almost everything about Greek culture, including their religion. They imported Greek artists, sculptors, and artisans with a vengeance, copied Greek statuary like mad, and no respectible social-climbing Roman could hold his head up unless he had a well-educated Greek slave to teach the kids. The imported gods and goddesses may have gotten more Roman-sounding names in the process, but the basic notions were awfully similar.
I thought they were known as the Lares and Penates. Laertes was the guy in Hamlet.
aldiboronti: You are absolutely right! It was very late at night when I wrote that - sorry!
Let’s kill this before it can spread any farther.
Does your source for this propose any mechanism for this level of cultural contact between two proto-civilizations at opposite ends of the European continent more than 3000 years ago? Are there any written records of such contacts? Archaeological records? Trade goods? Loan words in the Greek language?
The Greeks influenced the Etruscan and Roman pantheons because the Greeks were the dominant culture in the area from the late 2nd millennium BC, far advanced over these other cultures. There is extensive evidence of hundreds of years of constant trade and cultural contact. And of course it’s far, far easier to get from Greece to Italy than to the British Isles.
Unless you can provide some outstanding evidence, I flatly don’t believe a word of this.
Exapno Mapcase, I no longer have the book I got that tidbit from (it fell into the clutches of an Evil Ex-Girlfriend[sup]TM[/sup] and never was returned), but remember the Celts weren’t simply in Ireland. The Celts were spread throughout Europe and its entirely possible that their influence could have made its way to places such as Rome and Greece. This isn’t as far fetched as it might sound. The various cultures in the Americas had a highly developed and far ranging trade network that allowed goods to get from South America to North America and back again long before the introduction of the horse. So on a continent where horses were utilized, it seems, to me anyway, entirely possible that this could happen.
Celtic cultures survived in Turkey (Galatia), northern Greece, northern Italy (the Celts sacked Rome in 390 BC in revenge for a betrayal by Roman generals the year before at the Siege of Clusium), France (Gaul) and Spain/Iberia (Galitia). Of course, most people are much more familiar with the Celtic cultures of northern France (Brittany), Wales, Scotland, Ireland, etc. Perhaps it was the latter you were thinking of when you suggested that the Celts were at the other end of the continent.
The Celtic pantheon was rather different from the Greco-Roman one, though many later Roman writers and also a few earlier Greek ones often tried to compare the Celtic gods to their own. This is not so much for the convienence of the readers, but because of their own ethnocentricity; the writers were seeing the Celtic systems of gods through the system of Olympian type gods they were already familiar with. They also did this for the god-systems of other cultures as well (Egyptians, Germans, etc).
IIRC, the Celts had a few divinities that did not corespond to the Greco-Roman ones at all. The horned god (Corunna?) comes to mind immediately.
The old gods died out AFAIK because the religion of the cities switched over to Christianity and the ways of the country-dwellers (paganoi?) fell out of fashion and were eventually absorbed by the majority religion. The celebration of Apollo mentioned at Monte Cassino above likely became the feast of Saint Somebody in short order.
I believe I recently came across a website on Coptic that mentioned the last use of heiroglyphics was in (IIRC) around the mid-400’s (A.D.) on an island up the Nile; it was in connection with a temple of the old religion(s).
Cernunnos–and one *could[/], I suppose, argue for a rough correspondence between Pan and Cernunnos, but then we’d be getting into the question: how many of these various gods were derived from an Indo-Aryan pantheon? Many scholars believe that the Indo-Aryan invasion of Europe superimposed the invaders’ gods over the chthonic gods of the natives.
Epona, a horse goddess, is another Celtic diety that the Romans had trouble classifying/corresponding, I believe.