Why Did We Start Using Greek Names for Greek Deities?

Today, in the English-speaking world, the classical deities are most widely known by their Greek names. Up until the late nineteenth century, though, the deities of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds were almost exclusively known in the west by their Roman names. The Greek names were almost totally obscure among English-speakers and they were almost never used.

What is it that changed? Why did we stop using the Roman names and start using the Greek names? The answer to this question is complicated and there are a lot of cultural factors that go into it, but I think that a large part of the motivation for the switch came as a result of the belief that the Greeks were culturally superior to the Romans because they were supposedly more “western.”

A short disclaimer about “Greek” and “Roman” names

It is conventional to talk about “Greek” and “Roman” names for classical deities, but this convention can be rather misleading. As I discuss in great detail in this article I wrote in September 2019, contrary to what some people have been led to believe, the Romans did not just take the Greek deities and rename them. Originally, the Greeks and Romans actually had their own entirely separate pantheons with entirely different deities.

Over time, though, the Romans gradually came to identify their own deities more and more with specific Greek deities through a process of religious syncretism. The Romans adopted epithets, attributes, and stories associated with particular Greek deities and attributed those same epithets, attributes, and stories to the Roman deities they identified them with. By the around the first century AD or thereabouts, the Romans had so thoroughly identified their own deities with the Greek deities that they became largely indistinguishable from each other.

The names of the Roman deities became thought of as simply the Latin names for the Greek deities and vice versa. Thus, when someone was writing in Latin, they spoke of “Iupiter,” “Mars,” “Minerva,” and “Venus,” but, when someone was writing in Greek, they spoke of “Zeus,” “Ares,” “Athena,” and “Aphrodite,” even though these were originally different deities from different cultures. This syncretism is the reason why we today think of the Greek and Roman deities as the same deities with different names.

The problem is that, although we think of the Greek and Roman deities as the same deities just with different names today, they weren’t originally the same deities with different names, but rather entirely different sets of deities. In fact, Roman deities were, in many cases, very different from the Greek deities they were identified with. For instance, in the Roman pantheon, Mars was originally an extremely important deity personifying masculine virtue. Mars was identified, however, with Ares, a relatively minor Greek deity personifying warfare, carnage, and raging bloodlust.

ABOVE: A chart I originally made for this article from September 2019 showing the names of the Greek and Roman deities

The names of deities used in mythology before the nineteenth century

It is almost impossible to find a Greek name for ancient Greek deity used in English prior to the nineteenth century. Even English translations of actual ancient Greek texts consistently use the Roman names rather than the Greek. For instance, Alexander Pope’s English translation of the Iliad, published from 1715 to 1720, consistently speaks of “Jove” rather than “Zeus,” “Minerva” rather than “Athena,” “Ulysses” rather than “Odysseus,” and so on.

The reason why Pope felt compelled to translate the Greek names as Roman was because the Roman names were known by literally everyone; whereas only people who could actually read Ancient Greek would even be able to recognize the Greek names at all. If he had chosen to use the Greek names, he would have undoubtedly been accused of deliberate obscurantism.

This is true no matter where you look. Whenever classical deities are referenced in English texts written before the nineteenth century, they are always referenced by their Roman names. Whenever classical deities appear in western paintings or statues, those works are always titled after the deities’ Roman names. Indeed, all of the planets in our solar system except for Earth and Uranus are named after Roman deities.

Use of Greek names in the nineteenth century

In the late nineteenth century, we start to see isolated instances of people using Greek names for classical deities rather than Roman names. The Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century brought with it a widespread obsession with all things Greek. This spirit of Philhellenism associated with the Romantic movement was only further fueled by the Greek Revolution (lasted 1821 – 1829).

Famously, the English poet Lord Byron (lived 1788 – 1824), one of the most prominent leaders of the Romantic movement, actually joined the Greek revolutionaries and died at Missolonghi. He also wrote poems about the glories of Greece. For instance, a famous extract from Don Juan, Canto III begins:

“The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
where grew the arts of war and peace,
where Delos rose, and Phœbus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
but all, except their sun, is set.”

Even most of the Romantic poets, though, more often used Roman names than Greek names.

The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes by Thomas Bullfinch, which was originally published in 1855, exclusively uses Roman names. Bullfinch’s original title for the book also notably uses the word fable, which comes from the Latin word fabula.

The book soon after became known, however, as Bullfinch’s Mythology. The word mythology comes not from Latin, but rather from the Greek word μυθολογία (mythología). This change of the title of the book from a Latin word to a Greek one may be illustrative of the ongoing shift that was taking place at the time, partly as a result of the Romantic movement.

ABOVE: Front cover of a 1998 edition of Thomas Bullfinch’s book The Age of Fable, which was originally published in 1855. Like most other works of the time, Bullfinch’s book exclusively uses the Roman names for classical deities.

In the late nineteenth century, the habit of using Greek names for particular classical deities gained popularity within certain intellectual circles. the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (lived 1844 – 1900) and the Irish poet Oscar Wilde (lived 1854 – 1900) both very deliberately used the Greek name “Dionysus” rather than the name “Bacchus” to describe the god of wine from classical mythology.

They did this because the name “Bacchus” was too vulgar and familiar. When people heard the name “Bacchus,” they instantly thought of the fat, jovial figure depicted in paintings by the old masters and praised in contemporary drinking songs. By sharp contrast, the longer name “Dionysus” sounded exotic and strange, perhaps even a little frightening.

Even as Greek names for some deities started to be used by certain educated individuals, the Latin names remained by far the more commonly used and the more widely recognized throughout the entire nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the middle of the twentieth century that using Greek names really started to take off.

ABOVE: Portrait of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is famous for his distinction between “Dionysian” and “Apollonian”

Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: a shift in the tide

Probably the most pivotal figure in the transition from using Roman names to using Greek names is the classicist Edith Hamilton (lived 1867 – 1963). In order to understand why Edith Hamilton chose to use the Greek names for classical deities in her books rather than the traditional Roman names, everyone needs to know a few things about Hamilton as a person and what she believed. Edith Hamilton was a brilliant writer and her prose is still rightly admired today for its elegance. Unfortunately, she was also an absolutely relentless pro-Greek chauvinist who displayed outright bigotry against nearly all non-Greek cultures.

Hamilton published her first book, The Greek Way, in 1930. In it, Hamilton lauds the ancient Greeks as the greatest people ever to exist. Throughout the book, she constantly compares works of ancient Greek literature and art with works from other cultures, always finding the Greek works superior, usually by far. She even bizarrely claims at one point that the ancient Greeks literally invented the idea of enjoying life, asserting that, before the Greeks, life was so perpetually miserable for everyone that no one could even conceive of the notion that anyone might enjoy it.

In the book, Hamilton constantly denounces non-western cultures, relying heavily on that old racist conceit that so-called “western” cultures, which are supposedly all rational, forward-thinking, and democratic, are naturally and inherently superior to “eastern” cultures, which are supposedly all backwards, stagnant, superstitious, and ruled by despots. This view, promoted by Hamilton as by many others before her, is egregiously wrong. In reality, as I discuss in this article from last month, eastern and western cultures are both diverse and ever-changing.

Nonetheless, Edith Hamilton repeatedly denounces the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and all other eastern civilizations, declaring them naturally inferior to the Greeks. Most importantly for our purposes, though, Edith Hamilton felt the exactly same way about the Romans, seeing them as vastly inferior to the Greeks and, indeed, scarcely better than easterners. In The Greek Way, Hamilton writes:

“The same cannot be said of Rome. Many things there pointed back to the old world and away to the East, and with the emperors who were gods and fed a brutalized people full of horrors as their dearest form of amusement, the ancient and the Oriental state had a true revival. Not that the spirit of Rome was of the Eastern stamp. Common-sense men of affairs were its product to whom the cogitations of Eastern sages seemed the idlest nonsense. ‘What is true?’ asked Pilate scornfully. But it was equally far removed from the Greek spirit. Greek thought, science, mathematics, philosophy, the eager investigation into the nature of the world and the ways of the world which was the distinguishing mark of Greece, came to an end for many a century when the leadership passed from Greece to Rome. The classical world is a myth in so far as it is conceived of as marked by the same characteristics. Athens and Rome had little in common. That which distinguishes the modern world from the ancient, and that which divides the West from the East, is the supremacy of mind in the affairs of men, and this came to birth in Greece and lived in Greece alone of all the ancient world. The Greeks were the first intellectualists. In a world where the irrational had played the chief role, they came forward as the protagonists of the mind.”

I should mention that, once again, almost everything Edith Hamilton says here is egregiously inaccurate. Hamilton reduces both the Greeks and the Romans to mere stereotypes. The Greeks and Romans she presents are nothing but ridiculous caricatures of their true selves. As I talk about in this article from February 2020, people who lived in ancient civilizations were every bit as diverse as people in modern civilizations.

Neither the ancient Greeks nor the ancient Romans shared a single way of thinking; most people in ancient Greece were not rationalist philosophers and most people in ancient Rome were not “common-sense men of affairs.” Every person in every civilization has always thought at least a little bit differently from other people in the same civilization.

ABOVE: Photograph of Edith Hamilton, whose wildly popular book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes is partly responsible for popularizing the use of Greek names for Greek deities in English

In any case, Edith Hamilton’s love for the ancient Greeks and her disdain for the ancient Romans greatly influenced her later writings. In 1944, Edith Hamilton published her book Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, which was wildly popular and, within a couple decades, it had fully replaced Bullfinch’s The Age of Fable as the preeminent work on the subject of Greek mythology. To this day, Hamilton’s book remains the most widely read book on Greek mythology in the English language.

I think that, in retrospect, we can say that the publication of Edith Hamilton’s book marks a major transition in the history of how modern English-speakers have conceived of classical mythology. More than anyone else, Hamilton shifted the focus from Roman mythology to Greek mythology.

Not only does the title of Hamilton’s book uses the Greek word mythology rather than the Latin word fable, the book itself also uses the Greek names for all the classical deities. When the deity is first introduced, Hamilton gives the Greek name with the Roman name in parentheses. From then on, Hamilton only uses the Greek name. The Roman names are only given at all so that people will be able to know which familiar deities the Greek names refer to.

Knowing what we do about how Hamilton felt about the Greeks and Romans, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that Hamilton made the very conscious to decision to use the more obscure Greek names rather than the more recognizable Roman names primarily because she saw the Greeks as superior to the Romans.

ABOVE: Front cover of the first edition of the book Mythology by Edith Hamilton, originally published in 1944

Continued use of Roman names

Even after the publication of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, the Roman names still remained far more commonly used than the Greek names. Nonetheless, we can observe that the Greek names were slowly becoming used more often.

Evidence of this can be seen in the book Gods and Goddesses in Art and Legend with Sixty-Four Illustrations in Gravure by Herman J. Wechsler, a rather obscure book about mythology originally published in 1950, just six years after Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Throughout the book, Wechsler primarily uses the Latin names for the classical deities. This is fairly typical for works of the time.

Interestingly, though, Wechsler doesn’t consistently use the Latin names and he has a tendency to use the Greek names for some deities and the Roman names for others. For instance, Wechsler often uses the names “Zeus,” “Hera,” and “Cronus” rather than “Jupiter,” “Juno,” and “Saturn,” but he virtually always uses the names “Venus,” “Cupid,” “Hercules,” and “Ulysses” rather than “Aphrodite,” “Eros,” “Herakles,” and “Odysseus.”

Even more interestingly, Wechsler leaves a note at the beginning of the book on page XIII explaining why he has chosen to mostly use the Roman names rather than the Greek names:

“Most painters, in giving titles to their pictures, have used the Roman and not the Greek names. And the most prolific writers after Homer, and the Greek dramatists, have written in Latin. Therefore, in the pages of this book, I have favored the Roman names, and if offense has been given to those ancient Greeks who give this book its meaning, I hope to win forgiveness by making the proper and required sacrifices at some future date.”

Wechsler’s impression that “the most prolific writers after Homer, and the Greek dramatists” all wrote in Latin is incorrect, since we actually have a much larger body of mythological writings in Greek than we do in Latin. People have actually continued writing about mythology in Greek all the way up to the present day. Wechsler, however, was an art historian, not a Hellenist, so I will cut him some slack.

The mere fact that Wechsler felt compelled to leave this note reveals just how much things had changed since the days of Bullfinch. Writing in the 1850s, Bullfinch would have never have felt compelled to explain why he was using the Roman names; quite simply, in Bullfinch’s day, that was what everyone did. Using the Greek names would have been seen as an oddity. Writing only around a century later, though, in the 1950s, Wechsler felt it necessary to explain why he was using the Latin names rather than the Greek ones.

ABOVE: Front cover of the book Gods and Goddesses in Art and Legend with Sixty-Four Illustrations in Gravure by Herman J. Wechsler, originally published in 1950

Kerényi, Graves, and Green

In the 1950s, we see several noticeable trends that take place. One is that authors of began describing their works as being specifically about “Greek mythology” rather than “classical mythology.” The other trend is that they began using the Greek names for the Greek deities more consistently.

In 1951, Karl Kerényi’s The Gods of the Greeks was published. In his introduction, Kerényi asks the reader to imagine that they are hearing the stories he is about to tell from a well-educated Greek. He wrote the book with this idea in mind and, throughout the book, he speaks of the Greek myths as “our myths.” It makes sense, then, that, like Hamilton before him, Kerényi uses the Greek names for the Greek deities.

In 1955, the novelist Robert Graves published The Greek Myths, a book in which he retells Greek myths as though he were ancient author writing in the late second century AD in the age of the Antonines, a literary pretense he may have borrowed from Kerényi. Naturally, like Kerényi, Graves chose to use the Greek names over the Roman ones.

In 1958, Roger Lancelyn Green, a regular member of the Inklings literary discussion group and a close friend of both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, published his book Tales of the Greek Heroes: Retold From the Ancient Authors, which exclusively uses the Greek names for classical deities. This sets Green apart from C. S. Lewis, who, in his series The Chronicles of Narnia, uses the Roman names for all classical deities.

ABOVE: Front cover of the Puffin Classics edition of Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes, which uses the Greek names rather than the Roman names

d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths

I think that another major step in the transition from using Latin names to using Greek names came with the publication of Ingri and Edgar Parin d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths in 1962. d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths remains the most popular and beloved retelling of Greek myths for children to this day.

It is notable, then, that it calls itself a book of specifically “Greek myths” rather than “classical myths.” It also uses the Greek names exclusively, just like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Karl Kerényi’s The Gods of the Greeks, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, and Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes before it. On page 187, however, the d’Aulaires write:

“So it came to pass! The Romans built huge temples to the Olympian gods, not so beautiful as the Greek ones, but more luxurious, and the glory of the gods became greater than ever. They were given Roman names instead of their Greek ones, but they were still the same gods and it is under their Roman names that we know them best today.”

Why did the d’Aulaires decide to use the Greek names rather than the Roman names, even though, by their own admission, at the time when they wrote their book, the Roman names were far better known and far more recognizable? My guess is that they chose to use the Greek names at least partly because Hamilton used the Greek names.

It is easy to detect the influence of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. For instance, let’s look at the introductions. Edith Hamilton begins her introduction to Mythology by contrasting the myths of the Greeks with the myths of “uncivilized people everywhere.” She claims that “uncivilized people” believe that the forests are inhabited by horrors and monsters, but the ancient Greeks believed the forests were inhabited by beautiful nymphs.

This comparison is wrong; the ancient Greeks most certainly believed that the forests were filled with monsters and other horrors. For instance, Greek literature abounds with tales of ghastly female bogeymen like the horrible, shape-shifting empousa, the hideous, infant-devouring Lamia, and the child-frightening Gello. Hamilton just doesn’t talk about those stories because they don’t fit her vision of a bright, playful Greek mythology free from superstition.

Indeed, even the satyrs of classical Greece weren’t the peaceful, sanitized creatures of nature we like to imagine today; they hideous, lustful nature spirits that were constantly looking for vulnerable women to rape. Frankly, it’s no surprise that satyrs are such a common presence in modern horror literature.

ABOVE: Image of the front cover of the book d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, which notably calls itself a book of “Greek myths” rather than “classical myths” and uses only the Greek names for deities

After this, Hamilton contrasts the Greek deities with deities from other ancient cultures, claiming that no ancient culture before the Greeks ever had anthropomorphic deities. She describes the ancient Egyptians as worshipping “a rigid figure, a woman with a cat’s head, suggesting inflexible, inhuman cruelty” and the ancient Mesopotamians as worshipping “bas-reliefs of bestial shapes unlike any beast ever known, men with birds’ heads and lions with bulls’ heads and both with eagles’ wings, creations of artists who were intent on producing something never seen except in their own minds, the very consummation of unreality.”

In reality, Hamilton’s characterization of Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythologies is wildly inaccurate. Yes, most Egyptian deities are often depicted with animal heads, but not all of them. Osiris, for instance, is nearly always portrayed as fully anthropomorphic. Even deities that were usually portrayed with animal heads could be portrayed fully anthropomorphically on some occasions.

Meanwhile, her characterization of Mesopotamian mythology is even more inaccurate. The vast majority of ancient Mesopotamian deities were, in fact, fully anthropomorphic. The creatures in the relief carvings Hamilton describes are, for the most part, not deities, but rather chimeric monsters of the exact same sort that exist in Greek mythology as well. (Think of the Minotaur, the Chimera, Kerberos, or the Lernaian Hydra.)

ABOVE: Ancient Assyrian relief carving from Kalhu depicting the god Ninurta pursuing the Anzû, a bird-like monster that stole the Tablet of Destinies from the sanctuary of Enlil. Notice that the god is portrayed as anthropomorphic, but the monster is portrayed as a chimeric beast.

Despite this, d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths repeats Hamilton’s misinformation about Greek mythology being bright and cheery in contrast to the dark mythologies of other, “primitive” cultures as well as her misinformation about pre-Greek cultures supposedly never having anthropomorphic deities. On the very first page of the story, they write:

“In olden times, when men still worshiped ugly idols, there lived in the land of Greece a folk of shepherds and herdsmen who cherished light and beauty. They did not worship dark idols like their neighbors, but created instead their own beautiful, radiant gods. The Greek gods looked much like people and acted like them, too, only they were taller, handsomer and could do no wrong.”

Again, this idea that the Greeks were the only people in the ancient world to worship anthropomorphic deities is simply wrong. Anthropomorphic deities were actually quite normal in the ancient Mediterranean world. Nonetheless, the d’Aulaires repeat it in their introduction just as Hamilton does in hers.

We also notice the d’Aulaires contrasting the Greeks with other, supposedly inferior cultures throughout the book, such as at the end when they call Greek temples more beautiful than Roman temples. This seems to show Hamilton’s influence on the d’Aulaires which influence may be indirect but which is certainly existent.

d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths has become probably the most beloved retelling of Greek myths for children ever written on account of its simple, elegant writing and its many beautiful full-color illustrations. It is from the d’Aulaires’ book that many children over the course of the past half century have been introduced to classical mythology.

Many other books about mythology for children have been directly modeled on the d’Aulaires’ book. These books almost invariably use the Greek names rather than the more traditional Roman names. Thus, children have grown up reading about Zeus, Athena, and Aphrodite rather than Jupiter, Minerva, and Venus. Is it any surprise, then, that, when the vast majority of children’s books call the deities by their Greek names, these are the names that are most familiar to most children and to most adults?

ABOVE: Illustration from the beginning of d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths showing the family tree of the gods. Notice the use of Greek names.

Conclusion

Largely as a result of the impact of works like Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, Robert Graves’s The Greek Myths, Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes: Retold From the Ancient Authors, and d’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, in the second half of the twentieth century, the English-speaking world experienced a remarkable shift from using Roman names for classical deities to using the Greek names.

Now we are in exactly the reverse of the situation the world was in when Bullfinch published The Age of Fable in 1855. Now the Greek names are the ones that everyone knows and the Roman names are the ones that people find obscure. A review on Library Thing from September 2013 of Bullfinch’s Age of Fable remarks on Bullfinch’s use of Roman names, commenting, “Personally, I found that rather irritating as I had to keep translating them in my head.”

To be clear, I am not saying that we should go back to using the Roman names all the time. In fact, I absolutely think we should be using the Greek names when we talk about the Greek deities, since, as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, the Greek and Roman deities weren’t originally the same and using different names for them is useful because it allows us to distinguish between them.

Likewise, as I mentioned before, most of our most important sources on classical mythology were written in Greek and use the Greek names. Many of these sources were written before the Greek and Roman deities were even syncretized. Thus, it only makes sense for us to use the Greek names when talking about stories derived from those sources.

Unfortunately, when we examine the modern sources about mythology, they reveal that a large part of the motivation for the switch from Roman names to Greek names in the middle of the twentieth century came not from a desire for greater specificity, but rather from the chauvinistic belief that ancient Greek culture was superior to Roman culture because it was supposedly more “western.”