Roman mythology

Roman mythology is the body of myths

of ancient Rome as represented in the
literature and visual arts of the Romans.
One of a wide variety of genres of Roman
folklore, Roman mythology may also refer
to the modern study of these
representations, and to the subject
matter as represented in the literature
and art of other cultures in any period.
Roman mythology draws from the
mythology of the Italic peoples and
ultimately from Proto-Indo-European
mythology.

Romulus and Remus, the Lupercal, Father Tiber, and the Palatine on a relief from a pedestal dating to the reign of
Trajan (AD 98–117)

Roman mythology also draws directly on

Greek mythology, potentially as early as
Rome's protohistory, but primarily during
the Hellenistic period of Greek influence
and through the Roman conquest of
Greece, via the artistic imitation of Greek
literary models by Roman authors.[1] The
Romans identified their own gods with
those of the ancient Greeks—who were
closely historically related in some cases,
such as Zeus and Jupiter—and
reinterpreted myths about Greek deities
under the names of their Roman
counterparts. Greek and Roman
mythologies are therefore often
classified together in the modern era as
Greco-Roman mythology.

Latin literature was widely known in

Europe throughout the Middle Ages and
into the Renaissance. The interpretations
of Greek myths by the Romans often had
a greater influence on narrative and
pictorial representations of "Greco-
Roman mythology" than Greek sources.
In particular, the versions of Greek myths
in Ovid's Metamorphoses, written during
the reign of Augustus, came to be
regarded as canonical.

Nature of Roman myth

In this wall painting from Pompeii, Venus looks on while the physician Iapyx tends to the wound of her son, Aeneas;
the tearful boy is her grandson Ascanius, also known as Iulus, legendary ancestor of Julius Caesar and the Julio-
Claudian dynasty

Because ritual played the central role in

Roman religion that myth did for the
Greeks, it is sometimes doubted that the
Romans had much of a native mythology.
This perception is a product of
Romanticism and the classical
scholarship of the 19th century, which
valued Greek civilization as more
"authentically creative."[2] From the
Renaissance to the 18th century,
however, Roman myths were an
inspiration particularly for European
painting.[3] The Roman tradition is rich in
historical myths, or legends, concerning
the foundation and rise of the city. These
narratives focus on human actors, with
only occasional intervention from deities
but a pervasive sense of divinely ordered
destiny. In Rome's earliest period, history
and myth have a mutual and
complementary relationship.[4] As T. P.
Wiseman notes:

The Roman stories still matter,

as they mattered to Dante in
1300 and Shakespeare in 1600
and the founding fathers of the
United States in 1776. What
does it take to be a free citizen?
Can a superpower still be a
republic? How does well-
meaning authority turn into
murderous tyranny?[3]

Major sources for Roman myth include

the Aeneid of Virgil and the first few
books of Livy's history as well as
Dionysius's Roman Antiquities. Other
important sources are the Fasti of Ovid, a
six-book poem structured by the Roman
religious calendar, and the fourth book of
elegies by Propertius. Scenes from
Roman myth also appear in Roman wall
painting, coins, and sculpture, particularly
reliefs.

Founding myths

The Aeneid and Livy's early history are

the best extant sources for Rome's
founding myths. Material from Greek
heroic legend was grafted onto this
native stock at an early date. The Trojan
prince Aeneas was cast as husband of
Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus,
patronymical ancestor of the Latini, and
therefore through a convoluted
revisionist genealogy as forebear of
Romulus and Remus. By extension, the
Trojans were adopted as the mythical
ancestors of the Roman people.[5]

Other myths

Mucius Scaevola in the Presence of Lars Porsenna (early 1640s) by Matthias Stom
Polyphemus hears of the arrival of Galatea; ancient Roman fresco painted in the "Fourth Style" of Pompeii (45–79 AD)

The characteristic myths of Rome are

often political or moral, that is, they deal
with the development of Roman
government in accordance with divine
law, as expressed by Roman religion, and
with demonstrations of the individual's
adherence to moral expectations (mos
maiorum) or failures to do so.

Rape of the Sabine women, explaining

the importance of the Sabines in the
formation of Roman culture, and the
growth of Rome through conflict and
alliance.
Numa Pompilius, the Sabine second
king of Rome who consorted with the
nymph Egeria and established many of
Rome's legal and religious institutions.
Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome,
whose mysterious origins were freely
mythologized and who was said to
have been the lover of the goddess
Fortuna.
The Tarpeian Rock, and why it was
used for the execution of traitors.
Lucretia, whose self-sacrifice
prompted the overthrow of the early
Roman monarchy and led to the
establishment of the Republic.
Cloelia, a Roman woman taken
hostage by Lars Porsena. She escaped
the Clusian camp with a group of
Roman virgins.
Horatius at the bridge, on the
importance of individual valor.
Mucius Scaevola, who thrust his right
hand into the fire to prove his loyalty to
Rome.
Caeculus and the founding of
Praeneste.[6]
Manlius and the geese, about divine
intervention at the Gallic siege of
Rome.[7]
 Stories pertaining to the Nonae
Caprotinae and Poplifugia festivals.[8]
Coriolanus, a story of politics and
morality.
The Etruscan city of Corythus as the
"cradle" of Trojan and Italian
civilization.[9]
The arrival of the Great Mother
(Cybele) in Rome.[10]

Religion and myth

Narratives of divine activity played a
more important role in the system of
Greek religious belief than among the
Romans, for whom ritual and cult were
primary. Although Roman religion did not
have a basis in scriptures and exegesis,
priestly literature was one of the earliest
written forms of Latin prose.[11] The
books (libri) and commentaries
(commentarii) of the College of Pontiffs
and of the augurs contained religious
procedures, prayers, and rulings and
opinions on points of religious law.[12]
Although at least some of this archived
material was available for consultation
by the Roman senate, it was often
occultum genus litterarum,[13] an arcane
form of literature to which by definition
only priests had access.[14] Prophecies
pertaining to world history and to Rome's
destiny turn up fortuitously at critical
junctures in history, discovered suddenly
in the nebulous Sibylline books, which
Tarquin the Proud (according to legend)
purchased in the late 6th century BC
from the Cumaean Sibyl. Some aspects
of archaic Roman religion survived in the
lost theological works of the 1st-century
BC scholar Varro, known through other
classical and Christian authors.

Capitoline Triad

The earliest pantheon included Janus,

Vesta, and a leading so-called Archaic
Triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus,
whose flamens were of the highest order.
According to tradition, Numa Pompilius,
the Sabine second king of Rome,
founded Roman religion; Numa was
believed to have had as his consort and
adviser a Roman goddess or nymph of
fountains and of prophecy, Egeria. The
Etruscan-influenced Capitoline Triad of
Jupiter, Juno and Minerva later became
central to official religion, replacing the
Archaic Triad – an unusual example
within Indo-European religion of a
supreme triad formed of two female
deities and only one male. The cult of
Diana became established on the
Aventine Hill, but the most famous
Roman manifestation of this goddess
may be Diana Nemorensis, owing to the
attention paid to her cult by J.G. Frazer in
the mythographical classic The Golden
Bough.

Punishment of Ixion: in the center stands Mercury holding the caduceus, and on the right Juno sits on her throne.
Behind her Iris stands and gestures. On the left Vulcan (the blond figure) stands behind the wheel, manning it, with
Ixion already tied to it. Nephele sits at Mercury's feet. – Roman fresco from the eastern wall of the triclinium in the
House of the Vettii, Pompeii, Fourth Style (60–79 AD).

The gods represented distinctly the

practical needs of daily life, and Ancient
Romans scrupulously accorded them the
appropriate rites and offerings. Early
Roman divinities included a host of
"specialist gods" whose names were
invoked in the carrying out of various
specific activities. Fragments of old ritual
accompanying such acts as plowing or
sowing reveal that at every stage of the
operation a separate deity was invoked,
the name of each deity being regularly
derived from the verb for the operation.
Tutelary deities were particularly
important in ancient Rome.

Thus, Janus and Vesta guarded the door

and hearth, the Lares protected the field
and house, Pales the pasture, Saturn the
sowing, Ceres the growth of the grain,
Pomona the fruit, and Consus and Ops
the harvest. Even the majestic Jupiter,
the ruler of the gods, was honored for the
aid his rains might give to the farms and
vineyards. In his more encompassing
character he was considered, through his
weapon of lightning, the director of
human activity. Due to his widespread
domain, the Romans regarded him as
their protector in their military activities
beyond the borders of their own
community. Prominent in early times
were the gods Mars and Quirinus, who
were often identified with each other.
Mars was a god of war; he was honored
in March and October. Modern scholars
see Quirinus as the patron of the armed
community in time of peace.

The 19th-century scholar Georg

Wissowa[15] thought that the Romans
distinguished two classes of gods, the di
indigetes and the di novensides or
novensiles: the indigetes were the original
gods of the Roman state, their names
and nature indicated by the titles of the
earliest priests and by the fixed festivals
of the calendar, with 30 such gods
honored by special festivals; the
novensides were later divinities whose
cults were introduced to the city in the
historical period, usually at a known date
and in response to a specific crisis or felt
need. Arnaldo Momigliano and others,
however, have argued that this distinction
cannot be maintained.[16] During the war
with Hannibal, any distinction between
"indigenous" and "immigrant" gods
begins to fade, and the Romans
embraced diverse gods from various
cultures as a sign of strength and
universal divine favor.[17]

Foreign gods

Mithras in a Roman wall painting

The absorption of neighboring local gods
took place as the Roman state
conquered neighboring territories. The
Romans commonly granted the local
gods of a conquered territory the same
honors as the earlier gods of the Roman
state religion. In addition to Castor and
Pollux, the conquered settlements in Italy
seem to have contributed to the Roman
pantheon Diana, Minerva, Hercules,
Venus, and deities of lesser rank, some
of whom were Italic divinities, others
originally derived from the Greek culture
of Magna Graecia. In 203 BC, Rome
imported the cult object embodying
Cybele from Pessinus in Phrygia and
welcomed its arrival with due ceremony.
Both Lucretius and Catullus, poets
contemporary in the mid-1st century BC,
offer disapproving glimpses of Cybele's
wildly ecstatic cult.

In some instances, deities of an enemy

power were formally invited through the
ritual of evocatio to take up their abode in
new sanctuaries at Rome.

Communities of foreigners (peregrini)

and former slaves (libertini) continued
their own religious practices within the
city. In this way Mithras came to Rome
and his popularity within the Roman army
spread his cult as far afield as Roman
Britain. The important Roman deities
were eventually identified with the more
anthropomorphic Greek gods and
goddesses, and assumed many of their
attributes and myths.

Astronomy

The Origin of the Milky Way (c. 1575–1580) by Tintoretto

Many astronomical objects are named

after Roman deities, like the planets
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Uranus and Neptune.
In Roman and Greek mythology, Jupiter
places his son born by a mortal woman,
the infant Heracles, on Juno's breast
while she is asleep so the baby will drink
her divine milk and thus become
immortal, an act which would endow the
baby with godlike qualities. When Juno
woke and realized that she was
breastfeeding an unknown infant, she
pushed him away, some of her milk spills,
and the spurting milk became the Milky
Way. In another version of the myth, the
abandoned Heracles is given by Minerva
to Juno for feeding, but Heracles'
forcefulness causes Minerva to rip him
from her breast in pain. The milk that
squirts out forms the Milky Way.[18][19][20]
See also
Ancient
Rome
portal
Mythology
portal
History
portal

Wikimedia Commons has media

related to Roman mythology.

List of Ovid's Metamorphoses

characters
List of Roman deities
Roman Polytheistic Reconstructionism

References
1. Rengel, Marian; Daly, Kathleen N. (2009). 
Greek and Roman Mythology, A to Z (http
 s://books.google.com/books?id=c7cNB-J
aZA8C&q=%22Hellenization%20refers%2
2) . United States: Facts On File,
Incorporated. p. 66.

2. T. P. Wiseman, The Myths of Rome

(University of Exeter Press, 2004), preface
(n.p.).

3. Wiseman, The Myths of Rome, preface.

4. Alexandre Grandazzi, The Foundation of
Rome: Myth and History (Cornell
University Press, 1997), pp. 45–46.

5. See also Lusus Troiae.

6. J.N. Bremmer and N.M. Horsfall, Roman
Myth and Mythography (University of
London Institute of Classical Studies,
1987), pp. 49–62.

7. Bremmer and Horsfall, pp. 63–75.

 8. Bremmer and Horsfall, pp. 76–88.
9. Bremmer and Horsfall, pp. 89–104;
Larissa Bonfante, Etruscan Life and
Afterlife: A Handbook of Etruscan Studies
(Wayne State University Press, 1986), p.
25.

10. Bremmer and Horsfall, pp. 105–111.

11. Moses Hadas (1952). A History of Latin
Literature (https://books.google.com/boo
ks?id=QnvOnY6ydngC&pg=PA15) .
Columbia University Press. p. 15.
ISBN 978-0-231-51487-3.

12. C. O. Brink (1963). Horace on Poetry:

Epistles Book II: The Letters to Augustus
and Florus (https://books.google.com/bo
oks?id=loI8AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA64) . CUP
Archive. p. 64. ISBN 978-0-521-20069-1.

13. Cicero, De domo sua 138.

14. Jerzy Linderski, "The libri reconditi,"
Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 89
(1985) 207–234.

15. Georg Wissowa, De dis Romanorum

indigetibus et novensidibus disputatio
(1892), full text (in Latin) online. (https://b
ooks.google.com/books?id=FYlbAAAAM
AAJ&q=%22De+dis+Romanorum+indigeti
bus+et+novensidibus%22)
16. Arnaldo Momigliano, "From Bachofen to
Cumont," in A.D. Momigliano: Studies on
Modern Scholarship (University of
California Press, 1994), p. 319; Franz
Altheim, A History of Roman Religion, as
translated by Harold Mattingly (London,
1938), pp. 110–112; Mary Beard, J.A.
North and S.R.F. Price. Religions of Rome:
A History (Cambridge University Press,
1998), vol. 1, p. 158, note 7.

17. William Warde Fowler, The Religious

Experience of the Roman People (London,
1922) pp. 157 and 319; J.S. Wacher, The
Roman World (Routledge, 1987, 2002), p.
751.
18. "Myths about the Milky Way" (http://judy-v
olker.com/StarLore/Myths/MilkyWay1.ht
ml) . judy-volker.com. Retrieved 21 March
2022.

19. Leeming, David Adams (1998).

Mythology: The Voyage of the Hero (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=YJawuz5
Q1vEC&pg=PA44) (Third ed.). Oxford,
England: Oxford University Press. p. 44.
ISBN 978-0-19-511957-2.

20. Pache, Corinne Ondine (2010). "Hercules".

In Gargarin, Michael; Fantham, Elaine
(eds.). Ancient Greece and Rome (https://
books.google.com/books?id=lNV6-HsUpp
sC&pg=RA2-PA400) . Vol. 1: Academy-
Bible. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press. p. 400. ISBN 978-0-19-538839-8.
Sources
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Declamation, and the Problems of
Definition." In Mythos in Mythenloser
Gesellschaft: Das Paradigma Roms.
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Germany: Teubner.
Braund, David, and Christopher Gill,
eds. 2003. Myth, History, and Culture in
Republican Rome: Studies in Honour of
T. P. Wiseman. Exeter, UK: Univ. of
Exeter Press.
Cameron, Alan. 2004. Greek
Mythography in the Roman World.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Dumézil, Georges. 1996. Archaic
Roman Religion. Rev. ed. Translated by
Philip Krapp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press.
Fox, Matthew. 2011. "The Myth of
Rome" In A Companion to Greek
Mythology. Blackwell Companions to
the Ancient World. Literature and
Culture.Edited by Ken Dowden and
Niall Livingstone. Chichester; Malden,
MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
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Texas Press.
Grandazzi, Alexandre. 1997. The
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NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
Hall, Edith 2013. "Pantomime:
Visualising Myth in the Roman Empire."
In Performance in Greek and Roman
Theatre. Edited by George Harrison and
George William Mallory, 451–743.
Leiden; Boston: Brill.
Miller, Paul Allen. 2013. "Mythology
and the Abject in Imperial Satire." In
Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis:
Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self.
Edited by Vanda Zajko and Ellen
 O'Gorman, 213–230. Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press.
Newby, Zahra. 2012. "The Aesthetics
of Violence: Myth and Danger in
Roman Domestic Landscapes."
Classical Antiquity 31.2: 349–389.

Wiseman, T. P. 2004. The Myths of

Rome. Exeter: Univ. of Exeter Press.

Woodard, Roger D. 2013. Myth, Ritual,

and the Warrior in Roman and Indo-
European Antiquity. Cambridge; New
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External links
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae
Classicae (LIMC) (1981–1999,
 Artemis-Verlag, 9 volumes),
Supplementum (2009, Artemis_Verlag).

LIMC-France (http://www.limc-france.f
r) (LIMC): Databases Dedicated to
Graeco-Roman Mythology and its
Iconography.

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