White - Roman Gods & Goddesses

Published in 2014 by Britannica Educational Publishing (a trademark of Encyclopdia Britannica, Inc.) in association with The Rosen Publishing Group, Inc.

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First Edition

Britannica Educational Publishing

J. E. Luebering: Director, Core Reference Group

Anthony L. Green: Editor, Comptons by Britannica

Rosen Publishing

Hope Lourie Killcoyne: Executive Editor

Nicholas Croce: Editor

William White: Editor

Nelson S: Art Director

Cindy Reiman: Photography Manager

Nicole Baker: Photo Researcher

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

White, William.

Roman gods & goddesses/edited by William White1st ed.

p. cm.(Gods & goddesses of mythology)

In association with Britannica Educational Publishing, Rosen Educational Services.

Includes index and bibliography.

ISBN 978-1-62275-159-4 (eBook)

1. Gods, RomanJuvenile literature. 2. Mythology, RomanJuvenile literature. 3. RomeReligious life and customsJuvenile literature. I. Title.

BL803.W55 2014

292.2d23

On the cover: Statue of Neptune in the Fontana del Nettuno (Fountain of Neptune) in Rome, Italy. iStockphoto.com/wjarek

Interior pages (mosaic) iStockphoto.com/Fyletto; back cover iStockphoto.com/DavidMSchrader

CONTENTS

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy, was built during the reign of Augustus as the temple to all the gods of ancient Rome. Sergey Kelin/Shutterstock.com

T he Romans, according to the orator and politician Cicero, excelled all other peoples in the unique wisdom that made them realize that everything is subordinate to the rule and direction of the gods. Yet Roman religion was based not on divine grace but on mutual trust (fides) between god and man. The object of Roman religion was to secure the cooperation, benevolence, and peace of the gods (pax deorum). The Romans believed that this divine help would make it possible for them to master the unknown forces around them that inspired awe and anxiety (religio), and thus they would be able to live successfully. Consequently, there arose a body of rules, the jus divinum (divine law), ordaining what had to be done or avoided.

These precepts for many centuries contained scarcely any moral element; they consisted of directions for the correct performance of ritual. Roman religion laid almost exclusive emphasis on cult acts, endowing them with all the sanctity of patriotic tradition. Roman ceremonialism was so obsessively meticulous and conservative that, if the various partisan accretions that grew upon it throughout the years can be eliminated, remnants of very early thought can be detected near the surface.

This demonstrates one of the many differences between Roman religion and Greek religion, in which such remnants tend to be deeply concealed. The Greeks, when they first began to document themselves, had already gone quite a long way toward sophisticated, abstract, and sometimes daring conceptions of divinity and its relation to mortals. But the orderly, legalistic, and relatively inarticulate Romans never quite gave up their old practices. Moreover, until the vivid pictorial imagination of the Greeks began to influence them, they lacked the Greek taste for seeing their deities in personalized human form and endowing them with mythology. In a sense, there is no Roman mythology, or scarcely any. Although discoveries in the 20th century, notably in the ancient region of Etruria (between the Tiber and Arno rivers, west and south of the Apennines), confirm that Italians were not entirely unmythological, their mythology is sparse. What is found in Rome is chiefly a pseudomythology (which, in due course, clothed their own nationalistic or family legends in mythical dress borrowed from the Greeks). Nor did Roman religion have a creed; provided that a Roman performed the right religious actions, he was free to think what he liked about the gods. And, having no creed, he usually deprecated emotion as out of place in acts of worship.

Statue of Cicero at the Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice) in Rome, Italy. Hemera/Thinkstock

However, in spite of the antique features not far from the surface, it is difficult to reconstruct the history and evolution of Roman religion. The principal literary sources, antiquarians such as the 1st-century BCE Roman scholars Varro and Verrius Flaccus, and the poets who were their contemporaries (under the late Republic and Augustus), wrote 700 and 800 years after the beginnings of Rome. They wrote at a time when the introduction of Greek methods and myths had made erroneous (and flattering) interpretations of the distant Roman past unavoidable. In order to supplement such conjectures or facts as they may provide, scholars rely on surviving copies of the religious calendar and on other inscriptions. There is also a rich, though frequently cryptic, treasure-house of material in coins and medallions and in works of art.

F or the earliest times, there are the various finds and findings of archaeology. But they are not sufficient to enable scholars to reconstruct archaic Roman religion. They do, however, suggest that early in the 1st millennium BCE , though not necessarily at the time of the traditional date for the founding of Rome (753 BCE ), Latin and Sabine shepherds and farmers with light plows came from the Alban Hills and the Sabine Hills, and that they proceeded to establish villages in Rome, the Latins on the Palatine Hill and the Sabines (though this is uncertain) on the Quirinal and Esquiline hills. About 620, the communities merged, and c. 575 the Forum Romanum between them became the towns meeting place and market.

D EIFICATION OF F UNCTIONS

From such evidence it appears that the early Romans, like many other Italians, sometimes saw divine force, or divinity, operating in pure function and act, such as in human activities like opening doors or giving birth to children, and in nonhuman phenomena such as the movements of the sun and seasons of the soil. They directed this feeling of veneration both toward happenings that affected human beings regularly and, sometimes, toward single, unique manifestations, such as a mysterious voice that once spoke and saved them in a crisis (Aius Locutius). They multiplied functional deities of this kind to an extraordinary degree of religious atomism, in which countless powers or forces were identified with one phase of life or another. Their functions were sharply defined, and in approaching them it was important to use their right names and titles. If one knew the name, one could secure a hearing. Failing that, it was often best to cover every contingency by admitting that the divinity was unknown or adding the precautionary phrase or whatever name you want to be called or if it be a god or goddess.