Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [124]
But a new star was rising in the Mediterranean. A small tribe of Indo-European speakers*on the Tiber River, living near the future city of Rome, had begun to build an unparalleled empire that would, over the course of the next three hundred years, dominate and control the entire Mediterranean world and well beyond. These warriors first entered Greece in 229 BCE, and, in 146 BCE, sacked Corinth, and soon all of Greece became a Roman province. Instead of forcing their own myths and gods on the people they conquered, the Romans quickly absorbed the ideas and cultures of the conquered, especially the Greeks, whose glorious legends and stories they adopted as their own.
Roman mythology, in fact, largely seems a copy of Greek mythology. As Thomas Cahill put it, “Of the many people of Earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all…. Contact with the impressive stories of Greek mythology and the thrilling art that accompanied them—a contact that began as a result of the Greek colonization of southern Italy—encouraged the Romans to dress up their own religion in Greek fashions.”
From ancient times, the earliest Romans did possess a mythology of their own. In fact, many of the basic similarities between Roman and Greek mythology can be traced to the common Indo-European heritage shared by Rome and Greece. Before the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, they worshipped the gods of their direct ancestors, the Latini, who may have arrived on the Italian peninsula around 1500 BCE and were on the future site of Rome by about 1200 BCE. The native Romans had many of their own gods, including three major deities—Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—who are known as the “archaic triad.” Jupiter ruled as god of the heavens and came to be identified with Zeus. Mars was god of war and occupied a much more important place in Roman mythology than did Ares, the war god of the Greeks. Quirinus, an agricultural god, eventually faded from prominence, absorbed by the Greek gods.
By the late 500s BCE, the Romans replaced the archaic triad with the “Capitoline triad”—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—a name that came from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where the main temple of Jupiter stood. In this new triad, Jupiter remained the Romans’ chief god. They identified Juno with the Greek Hera, and Minerva with Athena. It was during the 300s BCE, as the Romans came into increasing contact with Greek ideas, that they began to worship Greek gods and goddesses, gave them Roman names, and built temples and shrines in their honor.
Between the 500s and 100s BCE, additional Roman mythological figures appeared, nearly all of them based on Greek divinities. Besides Greek-inspired divinities, the Romans worshipped many native gods and goddesses, including Faunus, a nature spirit later connected to Pan; Pomona, goddess of fruits and trees; Terminus, god of boundaries; and Tiberinus, god of the Tiber River.
The earliest Romans had believed that gods and goddesses had power over agriculture and all aspects of daily life. For example, Ceres was the goddess of the harvest and became associated with the Greek Demeter. Her festival was the Cerealia, a ceremony held in April (and the source of the word “cereal”). Her daughter Persephone became the Roman Proserpina. The goddess Vesta guarded the hearth fire and was associated with Hestia. The god Janus stood watch at doors and gates. As such, Janus looked both ways and controlled beginnings, which is how his name gets connected with the first month in the Roman calendar, January. Jupiter, later the supreme Roman god, was first worshipped as a sky god with power over the weather, which, obviously, connected him with Zeus. (Their names are also connected, according to most linguists, by the same Indo-European root words for “sky.”) Liber, the ancient Roman god of wine, became associated with Dionysus and was also called Bacchus.
Despite the connections to Greek myths and deities, as Rome grew into a republic