Roman & Hellenic Polytheism - they are Not the Same Thing
Listen you guys. This is something I see everywhere and it bothers the heck out of me.
It is so very important to remember that Roman polytheism, while it came to borrow stories from Hellenic polytheism, was a *completely different religion* with roots in the Etruscan, not Hellenic, tradition.
Straight out the gate, Roman polytheism has a multitude of different gods without a so-called ‘Hellenic equivalent’. I can list at least ten off the top of my head and there were many, many more than that.
In instances where the Romans equated their gods with the Hellenic, there was already a long tradition of that god in their own country - they did not just take a Hellenic god and superimpose it onto their own similar deity - quite the contrary. They thought the Hellenic god was a form of *their* deity.
Only in cases where they shared a god, honouring them under the same name as their native country - for example Apollo, Isis, Mithras or Magna Mater - might we suppose there was a wholesale acceptance of that god as they were perceived in their country of origin - and even then, I strongly suspect it would’ve quickly taken on a distinctly Roman form.
The way in which these two religions, the Hellenic & Roman, with their two pantheons of gods, are conflated and misrepresented is incredibly widespread and horrifyingly reductive.
The trouble is, many Hellenic gods cannot now be recovered in their true Hellenic form, but must be viewed through a Roman lens; and that Roman lens, it should surprise no one to hear, saw Roman gods in their Roman form, even when couched in pseudo-Hellenic terms.
Just because we can’t now unpick the one from the other doesn’t justify us assuming they’re the same. We have plenty of evidence that they weren’t.
It would be like taking Plutarch’s history writing about classical Sparta, composed ~500 years after the fact, and assuming he was 100% correct simply because that’s one of the only ancient sources we have on the subject. We know this can’t be so - yet where the mythos is concerned, we leave this basic understanding of the ‘trouble with ancient texts’ at the door, and assume it’s all one - that the Romans have just ‘taken over’ Hellenic polytheism and made it their own. It is *infinitely* more complicated than that.
I always recommend reading ‘Religions of Rome’ by Beard, North & Price on the subject; it’s very in-depth and does what can be done to gain a picture of Roman religion as it’s own entity. It also makes a clear point of just how much we don’t know about ancient religion more broadly - an acknowledgement that is missing in so much discourse that goes on here.
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