No, the Romans Did Not Just “Steal” All the Greek Deities

Lots of people seem to wrongly assume that the Romans “stole” the Greek gods and just renamed them. People often portray this as though it were an act of plagiarism, like one student copying another student’s homework. It is easy to see how they have gotten this impression, since they know the Greeks came first and that the names of the Greek and Roman deities are used today interchangeably. The problem is that this is not at all what actually happened.

In reality, the ancient Greeks and Romans originally had separate deities with different names, different mythologies, and different attributes. These deities were worshipped in different and unique ways that were specific to the culture in which they were venerated. In other words, the Romans had their own deities. Then, due to immense Greek cultural influence in Italy, the Romans gradually came to identify their own native deities with the Greek ones.

In the process, the Romans adopted the traditional stories and distinctive divine attributes belonging to the Greek deities and attributed them to their own deities as well. Eventually, by around the first century AD or thereabouts, the Greek and Roman deities had become largely indistinguishable from each other and they were widely seen as the same deities only with different names.

The table

If you have ever read anything about mythology, you have almost certainly seen a table like this one before, listing the names of all the Greek and Roman deities side-by-side:

For the purpose of general understanding, this table is perfectly adequate. Using tables like this one, you can understand which major deities the ancient Greeks and Romans equated with each other. These tables can be useful in understanding references to deities in classical texts.

Nonetheless, tables like this one are simplified to make them accessible and easy to interpret. As is unfortunately often the case, these kinds of simplified tables inadvertently obscure the far more complicated reality. These kinds of tables can tell you which major deities the Greeks and Romans equated with each other, but they cannot describe to you the complicated process of religious syncretism through which those deities came to be equated.

Religious syncretism in the ancient world

This variety of religious syncretism was extremely common among polytheistic peoples in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds. It was commonly thought among people in the ancient world that basically all peoples worshipped more or less the same major deities, just using different names and different modes of worship. This made it easy to equate one’s own deities with those of foreign peoples.

When the Akkadians under Sargon conquered the Sumerians in Mesopotamia in the late twenty-fourth century BC, they did almost exactly the same thing that the Romans did with the Greeks; they syncretized their own East Semitic deities with the deities of the Sumerian people they had conquered. Eventually, the Akkadian deities and the Sumerian deities came to be regarded as the same deities under different names in the same way that Greek and Roman deities eventually came to be regarded as the same deities under different names.

It is important to note that ancient Greek writers were already in the habit of describing foreign deities using Greek names long before the Romans ever became prominent outside of Italy. For instance, the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) identified the Thracian and Egyptian deities by equating them with Greek ones who were originally unrelated but who bore certain superficial similarities to them.

Indeed, during the Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC), the syncretism of Greek and Egyptian deities resulted in the creation of a number of fascinating Greco-Egyptian hybrid deities, such as the god Serapis, who subsumed aspects of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Apis, but also aspects of the Greek gods Hades and Dionysos.

The world in which the ancient Greeks and Romans lived was one in which religious syncretism was common and seen as perfectly natural. In other words, when the Romans syncretized their own deities with the Greek deities and when the Romans adopted Greek deities into their own pantheon directly, neither of these things were in any sense considered “plagiarism” or “copying”; these sorts of actions were just seen as normal.

ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BC Greco-Egyptian bust of the god Serapis, who was a syncretism of aspects of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Apis and the Greek gods Hades and Dionysos.

Syncretism between deities with common Proto-Indo-European roots

The Roman identification of Greek deities with their own is known in Latin as interpretatio graeca, or “Greek interpretation.” Some of the identifications the Romans made between their deities and the Greek deities were entirely natural. For instance, the Romans identified their god Iupiter with the Greek god Zeus because, even before syncretism, the two deities already had a lot in common; they were both the heads of their respective pantheons, they were both associated with the heavens, and they were both seen as the father of all the gods.

Now, as it happens, the reason why Iupiter and Zeus were so similar from the beginning is because they share a common origin; Zeus and Iupiter are both derived from the much earlier Proto-Indo-European god *Dyḗus Pḥ₂tḗr, the god of the daylit skies, whose name literally means “Sky Father.” *Dyḗus Pḥ₂tḗr is also the root of the Vedic god Dyáuṣ Pitā́, the Illyrian god Dei-Pátrous, the Norse god Týr, and the Latvian god Dievs. The fact that Zeus and Iupiter had so many attributes in common, therefore, was because they were etymologically related to each other.

Similarly, the Greek goddess Eos and the Roman goddess Aurora are both derived from the Proto-Indo-European dawn goddess *H₂éusōs, who is also the root of the Hindu dawn goddess Uṣás, the Avestan dawn goddess Ušå, the Lithuanian dawn goddess Aušrine. *H₂éusōs may also be the root of the Anglo-Saxon goddess Ēostre, who is known solely from a single brief mention in Bede’s De temporum ratione. All that is known about Ēostre, however, is that, according to Bede, she apparently had some kind of festival in the spring, so we cannot be sure she was really a dawn goddess. In any case, when the Romans and Greeks came into contact with each other, it only made sense for them to equate Aurora with Eos.

ABOVE: Third-century AD Greek statue of Zeus from the city of Smyrna in Asia Minor, dating to the Roman period

Syncretism of completely unrelated deities

The vast majority of Greek and Roman deities, however, had no relationship to each other prior to being syncretized. For instance, the Roman god Mercurius was primarily associated with commerce, trade, and finance. The Greek god Hermes, on the other hand, had some associations with commerce due to his role as the patron god of merchants, but he was also closely associated with heralds, travelers, thieves, roads, and the crossing of boundaries. The Romans equated Mercurius with Hermes on account of their shared associations with the economy, but this was not a perfect one-to-one equation—or at least not at first.

Some identifications were not natural at all. For instance, the Roman god Mars was an extremely important, widely venerated, and dignified god personifying masculine virtue. He was closely associated both with martial virtues, such as strength and courage in battle, and with agricultural fertility. He was second only to Iupiter himself in terms of his importance and he was known as the “Father of the Roman People” because he was said to have been the father of the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus.

The Romans chose to syncretize Mars with the Greek god Ares, because, like Mars, Ares was a male god associated with warfare. The problem is that, in the Greek pantheon, Ares had a completely different personality from Mars in the Roman pantheon. Among the Greeks, Ares was a relatively unimportant god associated with unrestrained violence, carnage, and raging bloodlust. He was seen as personifying the unthinking brutality and devastation of war.

Unlike Mars, who was one of the most important deities in the entire Roman pantheon, Ares was seldom if ever worshipped by the Greeks at all. Indeed, the Greeks seem to have largely regarded Ares as almost something of a joke. As I discuss in this article I published in April 2019, a conspicuously high percentage of Ares’s myths seem to involve him getting beat up and humiliated, often by mortals or by deities of seemingly inferior strength.

ABOVE: Second-century AD Roman marble statue of Mars from the Forum of Nerva

Similarly, the Roman goddess Venus seems to have originally been a perfectly respectable mother goddess associated with agricultural fertility, good fortune, and marital love. In the same way that Mars was seen as the “Father of the Roman People,” Venus was seen as the mother of Rome. She was known by the title Venus Genetrix (“Venus the Mother”).

In spite of this, the Romans came to identify her with Aphrodite, the young, sex-crazed Greek goddess of lust and sexual passion, who was well known for her many adulterous exploits. According to the Roman historian Titus Livius (lived c. 59 BC – AD c. 17 AD) in his Ab Urbe Condita Libri, Venus was first identified with Aphrodite in the third century BC, when the cult of Aphrodite from her temple at Mount Eryx in Sicily was introduced to Rome as the cult of Venus Erycina (“Venus of Mount Eryx”).

ABOVE: Syncretic fresco of Aphrodite/Venus rising from the sea on a conch shell from the Casa della Venere in Conchiglia in the Roman city of Pompeii, dating to before 79 AD

Greek deities who really were just directly imported into the Roman pantheon

Other deities were directly imported from the Greek pantheon into the Roman pantheon, retaining their original Greek names and attributes fully intact. The most obvious example of this is the god Apollo, whose Roman name is merely a Latinization of his Greek name Ἀπόλλων (Apóllōn).

There are, however, several other deities who were simply imported directly into the Roman pantheon without syncretism. For instance, the name Bacchus is just a Latinization of the Greek name Βάκχος (Bákkhos), an epithet of Dionysos, the Greek god associated with wine, drunkenness, the theater, fertility, and ritual ecstasy.

ABOVE: Second-century AD Roman marble statue of Dionysos. Dionysos was directly imported into the Roman pantheon without being syncretized with any native Roman deity.

Likewise, the name Pluto is just a Latinization of the Greek name Πλούτων (Ploútōn), meaning “the Wealthy One,” which was an epithet of Hades, the ruler of the Greek Underworld. There were two different rulers of the Underworld in native Roman mythology. One of these was Dis Pater, whose name means “Wealthy Father.”

Dis Pater was closely associated with agriculture and with mineral wealth, since these things come from the Earth. Another Roman god associated with the Underworld in Roman religion was Orcus, who was believed to punish those who broke their oaths. Eventually, Pluto, Dis Pater, and Orcus were all conflated and these eventually all just became different names for the same deity.

The Dioskouroi (i.e. Kastor and Polydeukes) also entered into the Roman pantheon with merely Latinized forms of their Greek names. The Greek name Διόσκουροι (Dióskouroi), meaning “Zeus’s Youths,” was Latinized as Dioscuri; the Greek name Κάστωρ (Kástōr) was Latinized as Castor; and the Greek name Πολυδεύκης (Poludeúkēs) was Latinized as Pollux.

Castor and Pollux were adopted by the Romans very early on. According to tradition, they fought alongside the Romans in the Battle of Lake Regillus, which took place in around 496 BC or thereabouts. It is unclear whether they passed directly from the Greeks to the Romans or if they passed through the Etruscans as an intermediary, but, in any case, they were definitely of Greek origin.

ABOVE: Third-century AD Roman marble statuette of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, whom the Romans adopted directly from the Greeks without syncretizing them with any of their own native deities.

Non-Greek foreign deities adopted into the Roman pantheon

The Romans did not just adopt deities from the Greeks, though. They adopted deities from various different peoples throughout the Mediterranean world and beyond. For instance, one of the earliest foreign entries into the Roman pantheon was the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele, whom the Romans knew as “Magna Mater” (i.e. “The Great Mother”).

The Romans officially adopted Kybele into their pantheon during the Second Punic War (lasted 218 – 201 BC) after an oracle told them that Carthage might be defeated if they adopted Kybele as their goddess. The Romans adopted Kybele and she remained important in Roman religion for long afterwards.

ABOVE: Mid-first-century AD Roman marble statue of the Phrygian mother goddess Kybele seated on a throne with a lion by her side

Similarly, the Egyptian goddess Isis also became an extremely important member of the Roman pantheon from around the first century BC onwards. Isis had an entire mystery cult devoted to her, which flourished throughout the Empire during the early centuries AD.

The cult of Isis plays a major role in the plot of the surviving ancient Roman novel The Golden Ass, which was written in the late second century AD by the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis (lived c. 124 – c. 170 AD). Isis’s son, the Egyptian god Horus, was also known by the Romans under the name Harpocrates.

ABOVE: First or second century AD Roman marble statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis

ABOVE: Wall painting from the Roman temple of the Egyptian goddess Isis in the Roman city of Pompeii depicting Isis welcoming the Greek heroine Io, who is portrayed here with the horns of a cow

Another foreign deity who became important in ancient Roman religion was the Syrian sun god Elagabalus, who was introduced into the Roman pantheon in 218 AD by the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus Augustus (ruled 218 – 222 AD), who was known to later writers as “Elagabalus” himself.

The emperor Elagabalus had been the high priest of the god Elagabalus at Emesa in Syria and chose to bring the cult of his native god to Rome with him when he became emperor. In later times, the god Elagabalus became known in Latin as Sol Invictus, which means “the Unconquered Sun.”

ABOVE: Third-century AD Roman silver plate depicting the sun god Sol Invictus, whose cult was imported from Syria

Ultimately, of course, the most famous foreign deity adopted by the Romans is Jesus Christ (or, in Latin, Iesus Christus), a god of Jewish origin whose devotees were known as Christiani (“Christians”). The cult of Iesus Christus originated in the province of Judaea in the first century AD and was persecuted sporadically for the first few centuries of its existence. It became more systematically persecuted during the reign of the emperor Diocletian (ruled 284 – 305 AD).

The cult of Iesus Christus was finally legalized in February 313 AD when the emperors Constantine I and Licinius issued the Edict of Milan. Decades later, in February 380 AD, the emperors Theodosius I, Gratian, and Valentinian II issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and outlawed the public observance of rites in honor of the traditional Greco-Roman deities.

Ultimately, the Romans adopted Christianity in much the same way that they had adopted other foreign deities such as Apollon, Dionysos, Kybele, Isis, and Sol Invictus in the past. The biggest difference is that, eventually, the Romans declared that Jesus was the only deity that was acceptable to worship publicly—something they had never done before for any other deity.

ABOVE: Fourth-century AD Roman mural painting of the god Iesus Christus from the Catacombs of Commodilla

Native Roman deities who were never syncretized

I think I have now demonstrated that the syncretism of native deities with foreign ones and the outright adoption of foreign deities were both fairly common phenomena in classical antiquity. Now I must address another common misconception, which holds that the ancient Romans had no deities of their own. In reality, even after centuries of syncretism, the Romans still had native deities who were purely Roman who had never been syncretized with foreign deities.

For instance, the god Quirinus was one of the most important deities in the Roman pantheon and a member of the archaic “Capitoline Triad,” which was composed of Iupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. It makes sense why Quirinus was never syncretized with any Greek deity or other foreign deity, since he was the patron god and protector of the Roman people. Quirinus’s importance declined in later times as Roman religion became more and more cosmopolitan, but he did not completely disappear from the religious scene altogether until the Roman Empire converted to Christianity in the late fourth century AD.

Another native Roman deity who was never syncretized with any Greek deity was Ianus, the Roman god associated with transitions, beginnings, endings, and doorways. Ianus was depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. One face was said to look into the past and the other was said to look into the future. Ianus’s name has given us the name of our month January, which, in Latin, is Ianuarius.

ABOVE: Photograph of a Roman marble head of Ianus, showing him with two faces on either side of his head, from the Capitoline Museums in Rome.

Conclusion

The ancient Romans did not “take” or “steal” or “copy” the Greek deities; they syncretized their own deities with the Greek ones and, in some cases, adopted Greek deities into their own pantheon. This was not plagiarism in any sense, but rather simply the way religion in the ancient world worked. The Greeks were already syncretizing their deities with foreign deities before the Romans, and other people were doing it before the Greeks.

To say that the Romans “stole” or “plagiarized” their gods off the Greeks is to profoundly misunderstand the very nature of how religion in the ancient world worked. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not think of the gods in terms of modern copyright laws; for them, the gods were not a form of intellectual property, but rather real beings that actually existed and that needed to be worshipped.

Furthermore, the Greeks were not the only ones the Romans adopted deities from; they also, for instance, adopted deities of Phrygian, Egyptian, Syrian, Persian, and Jewish origin. Finally, the Romans actually did have deities of their own that were of native Roman origin that were never syncretized with Greek counterparts, such as Quirinus and Ianus.