Sylvia has gotten pretty interested in learning about the gods and heroes of Greece and Rome -- prompted in part by a study unit her class did and in part by Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians books; and one thing that has occupied a bit of her attention lately is learning which Latin names correspond to which Greek names.
I remember doing this too, probably at about the same age; and ever since I've walked around with a sort of simple equivalence in my head, Zeus is Jupiter, Ares is Mars, Venus is Aphrodite, etc. -- that the two names identify the same entity. But I wonder how this could be? Recently I have formed a sort of vague notion that the Greeks 
and the Romans, living close to each other over the millenia, had developed their mythologies roughly in parallel -- that there were two separate entities named Athena and Minerva who featured in similar stories.
Also kind of interesting, Frazer seems to imply at the outset that the story of Diana and Hippolytus was made up to account for the tradition of Rex Nemorensis, that this was an ancient tradition incorporated into the Greek/Roman religion à la Solstice rituals into Christianity.
posted evening of Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
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Well, but Frazer was pretty much makin' it up--or, more charitably, being carried away with his theoretical model. My neighborhood expert says that Greek and Roman gods were once very different, and she's not sure when they got put together. Hmmm.
posted evening of February 24th, 2010 by Randolph
Huh -- that's wild, maybe something like conscious imitation of Greek culture by the Romans? I wonder where I could find out more about this -- maybe Bullfinch...
posted morning of February 25th, 2010 by Jeremy
Greek culture and philosophy dominated the Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic period. The importation of Greek cults to Rome appears to be part of the syncretism of Hellenism. There's a bit in Wikipedia. But if Fraser is unreliable, what are we to make of wiki? I am not sure where I would go to read about this.
posted morning of February 25th, 2010 by Randolph
So I guess maybe the names Minerva, Mars, Venus etc. were pre-existing in the Latin tradition and during the Hellenistic period, as the myths were imported the gods and heroes in them were assigned names out of the previous mythos. That makes some sense, though it's pretty wild how completely the imported myths overrode tradition.
posted morning of February 25th, 2010 by Jeremy
The big Roman gods that merged with the Greek gods, I think, were part of the state cult, and this was part of the general ascendance of Greek culture during the Hellenistic period. But the Romans had lots of little gods: Lares, Penates--gods of place and family. I don't think that much is known about or their worship; they seem to be rather like the minor deities of east Asian culture, and the worship was practiced rather than written.
I think I'll ask some experts!
posted afternoon of February 25th, 2010 by Randolph
Good deal. Well, let me know what you find out...
posted afternoon of February 25th, 2010 by Jeremy
Bryon Boyce, Portland, Oregon area pagan, writes:
There are three factors behind this - one is the common Indo-European spiritual heritage of the Romans and Greeks, a second is the Roman proclivity to equate every God they encountered with one of their own, and the last is the Roman importation of Greek deities and myths wholesale into their own belief system.
Both Zeus and Jupiter derived linguistically and historically from an early Indo-European God / name Deiwos, which meant basically 'the shining one' and is the root for many deity names - including the generic term deity. With changes in the many Indo-European-based spoken languages, many words have descended from this ancient root. The original Greek for what we spell as Zeus is "Δίας or, ThIas. The "th" sounds like the article "the"so the thunder-oak god became Zeus. Jupiter in Latin is based on two words, Deus and Pitar, and can be read as 'father-god' or 'father of the gods'. Diverse words like 'devil' 'theology' 'divine' 'Diana' 'demon' 'diva' all can be traced back to this one root. Almost all Indo-European cultures have a primary deity whose name and nature come from this source.
The Roman way of understanding the gods of the many nations they came in contact with was simple: each was an equivalent of a god they already knew. [Cultural imperialism from the old Empire.--RF] The Greek Ares to them was obviously a war god like their Mars. This equivalence was accepted even though the Greek divinity had none of the agricultural associations of Mars. Zeus was a fairly close fit with Jupiter. When they encountered the Germanic Odin (Othin) they equated him with their Mercury, even though that was a poor fit. And so on and on.
Then lastly the stories surrounding the Greek pantheon were imported into Roman consciousness wholesale. The tales of Zeus were attached to Jupiter, those of Hermes to Mercury, and so on. When they had no similar deity, as with the Greek Dionysos, they imported both name and stories, only changing the Greek -os ending to the Latin -us. On rare occasions they adopted deities from other lands than Greece into Roman practice. The best known and influential is Mithras, made the centerpiece a new mystery religion, but there was also Epona, a Celtic goddess adopted as a deity by the Roman calvary.
So this is a big subject deserving of a book - hopefully this brief note can send you off for a little new research!
[Hee. I suppose someone has already written that book. Right?]
posted evening of February 27th, 2010 by Randolph
Lots of good comments on the questions, I just wanted to note that this is at least 3 generations of interest in the classical mythos and the specific matter of equating the Greek and Roman systems. I think it actually goes back farther, as I learned from a book that was my dad's and may have been my grandfather's (Sylvia's great-great-grandfather!) before that...
posted morning of February 28th, 2010 by Grandpa George
Thanks, Randolph -- and thanks in absentia, Bryon! Frazer also makes reference to this root word in his chapter on "Dianus and Diana".
Hi Dad, I certainly remember reading about mythology with you and Mom way back when...
posted afternoon of February 28th, 2010 by Jeremy
