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| Topics in Roman mythology | |
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| Important Gods: | |
| Legendary History: | |
| Roman religion | |
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| Greek/Roman myth compared | |
Roman mythology can be considered as two parts. One part, largely later and literary, consists of whole-cloth borrowings from Greek mythology. The other, largely early and cultic, functioned in very different ways from its Greek counterpart.
One might almost say that the Archaic Romans did not have myths. That is to say: until their poets began to borrow from Greek models in the later part of the Republic, the Romans had no stories about their gods comparable to the Titanomachy or the seduction of Zeus by Hera.
What the Romans did have, however, were:
The Roman model involved a very different way of defining and thinking about the gods than we are familiar with from Greece. For example, if one were to ask a Greek about Demeter, he might reply with the well-known story of her grief at the rape of Persephone by Hades.
An archaic Roman, by contrast, would tell you that Ceres had an official priest called a flamen, who was junior to the flamens of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus, but senior to the flamens of Flora and Pomona. He might tell you that she was grouped in a triad with two other agricultural gods, Liber and Libera. And he might even be able to rattle off all of the minor gods with specialized functions who attended her: Sarritor (weeding), Messor (harvesting), Convector (carting), Conditor (storing), Insitor (sowing), and dozens more.
Thus the archaic Roman "mythology", at least concerning the gods, was made up not of narratives, but rather of interlocking and complex interrelations between and among gods and humans.
The original religion of the early Romans was modified by the addition of numerous and conflicting beliefs in later times, and by the assimilation of a vast amount of Greek mythology. We know what little we do about early Roman religion not through contemporary accounts, but from later writers who sought to salvage old traditions from the desuetude into which they were falling, such as the 1st century BC2nd century BC 1st century BC 1st century other centuries) The 1st century BC starts on January 1, 100 BC and ends on December 31, 1 BC. An alternative name for this century is the last century BC . 2nd millennium BC 1st millennium BC 1st millennium AD) E scholar Marcus Terentius VarroVarro was a Roman cognomen carried by: Marcus Terentius Varro (known as Varro Reatinus), the scholar Publius Terentius Varro (known as Varro Atacinus), the poet See also Varro (Star Trek) Ancient Romans Families of Rome.. Other classical writers, such as the poet OvidFor other uses, see Ovid (disambiguation Publius Ovidius Naso ( March 20, 43 BC AD 17) Roman poet known to the English-speaking world as Ovid wrote on topics of love, abandoned women, and mythological transformations. Ovid wrote in elegiac couplets, with in his Fasti (Calendar), were strongly influenced by HellenisticThe term Hellenistic (established by the German historian Johann Gustav Droysen) in the history of the ancient world is used to refer to the shift from a culture dominated by ethnic Greeks, however scattered geographically, to a culture dominated by Greek models, and in their works they frequently employed Greek beliefs to fill gaps in the Roman tradition.