III.

The Roman Gods

The early Romans did not represent their gods in human or animal form, and the gods did not have well-defined personalities. Most Roman gods were, however, associated with particular places. For example, high hilltops and oak-groves were associated with Jupiter, the god of rain, thunder, and lightning. Any piece of land struck by lightning was dedicated to him. According to Varro, Romans worshiped their gods without images for 170 years after the city was founded. Only in the 6th century bc, under the influence of the Greeks and of neighboring societies such as the Etruscan civilization did the Romans first represent their gods in human form and build temples for them.

While the personalities of their gods were not important to the early Romans, they cared a great deal about the gods’ functions. Gods presided over every aspect of life and death, including the phases of the agricultural year. The Romans integrated their worship into the routines of public and private life. For example, the doorway of a house—an important threshold separating personal space from public space—fell under the protection of the god Janus, who was also the god of beginnings. The first month of the year, January, was named for him. The hearth, which served as the center of the home, was the province of the goddess Vesta. A state shrine to Vesta featured a fire that was perpetually tended by priestesses called Vestal virgins.

Knowledge of early Roman religion is limited, but some evidence exists that the earliest Roman community had special reverence for the gods Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus. Jupiter was the Roman form of the sky-god whom the Greeks worshiped as Zeus. The Romans worshiped Jupiter as the special protector of the Roman state. Mars—later equated with the Greek god Ares—was a warrior-god whose sacred animals were the wolf and the woodpecker. Festivals in his honor took place in March and October and marked the opening and close of the military campaigning season. Mars also appears to have had some role in protecting farmers’ fields. Quirinus remains a vague figure. The Romans associated him with the Sabine people, and he later came to be identified with Romulus, who had become a god.

According to Roman tradition, a dynasty of Etruscan kings ruled the city in the 6th century bc. During this period Rome adopted a group of three Etruscan gods as the focus of state worship. Because the Romans worshiped these gods in a grand temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, they were known as the Capitoline triad. The triad consisted of Jupiter and the goddesses Juno and Minerva. At this time Jupiter was viewed as the sovereign, or head, of the Roman state. Juno was both the protector of women in marriage and childbirth and was the patron deity of several communities in ancient Italy. The Romans worshiped her under several names, including Juno Sospita (Juno the Savior) and Juno Regina (Juno the Queen). Minerva, who later came to be identified with the Greek goddess Athena, was the goddess of handicrafts. Her temple on the Aventine Hill in Rome was a center for organizations of skilled craftspeople.

According to tradition, in 509 bc the dynasty of Etruscan kings ended and the Roman Republic was founded. The republic was ruled by two chief magistrates, called consuls, who were elected by the people to one-year terms. During the time of the republic, the Capitoline temple became the most important public shrine of the Roman people and the focus of public worship. Each January, the new consuls offered sacrifices to open the new year, and provincial governors took their vows before departing for their provinces. At other times, victorious generals led triumphal processions up to the Capitoline temple, where they offered sacrifices and gave thanks for their victories.

As Rome’s sphere of influence expanded, the Romans encountered the older and richer religious and mythological beliefs of the Greek civilization, and the beliefs of other cultures of the eastern Mediterranean Sea region. Major innovations in Roman religious life occurred as a result of this contact, most notably the Romans’ acceptance of gods from these other cultures. New gods and heroes were traditionally given temples outside the pomerium, the ritual boundary of the city, rather than in the city center.

Among the earliest of the Greek gods to be accepted by the Romans were Castor and Polydeuces, divine twins who were believed to have intervened in the Romans’ favor at the battle of Lake Regillus in 484 bc. This battle marked an early victory for the young Roman Republic against a force of surrounding Latin peoples. Later in the 5th century bc, on the advice of an oracle, the worship of the Greek god Apollo was introduced in Rome to avert a terrible plague. Apollo later became a symbol of Roman virtue and austerity. Other Roman gods that took on characteristics of Greek divinities were Diana (Artemis), Mercury (Hermes), Neptune (Poseidon), Pluto (Hades), Venus (Aphrodite), and Vulcan (Hephaestus).

The Romans also adopted Greek heroes into their mythology. Perhaps the best-known figure was the Greek hero Heracles, who became known in Rome as Hercules. According to Roman historian Livy, Hercules once stopped at the site of Rome before Rome’s founding, and there killed a monster that had terrorized the local people.

Rome also imported gods from other regions of the Mediterranean world, sometimes to fill particular roles. In 204 bc, armies from the rival city-state of Carthage, led by the Carthaginian general Hannibal, threatened to invade Rome. In this emergency, Roman priests consulted the Sibylline Books, which contained collections of oracles or prophecies, and recommended that the Romans begin to worship the goddess Cybele from the city of Pessinus in Asia Minor. To worship Cybele, the Romans dedicated a spot to her on the Palatine Hill in the heart of Rome. The Romans eventually defeated Hannibal.

As Rome expanded and became a hub of international commerce, more and more foreign gods found their way into the culture. Especially popular were the so-called savior-gods of religious orders known as mystery religions. Savior-gods such as Mithra, the ancient Persian god of light and wisdom, offered the promise of individual salvation through the belief in the immortality of the soul. Mystery religions such as Mithraism were open only to the initiated. As a result, many people saw them as offering a greater sense of community than traditional Roman religion. Scholars have noted similarities between mystery religions and the early Christian church, which took root in the Roman world when mystery religions were popular and widespread.

A later development in Roman religion was the worshiping of emperors as gods. As the Romans expanded their holdings to the east, they encountered the phenomenon of divine kingship. At first they rejected the idea that a human ruler should be worshiped as a god. But in 44 bc, Roman ruler Julius Caesar permitted a statue to be erected to himself bearing the inscription deo invicto (“to the unvanquished god”), and declared himself dictator for life. That same year Caesar was assassinated by citizens who were unhappy with his dictatorial regime and wanted to see a return to Rome’s earlier republican ideals. While Caesar’s heir, Octavian, took the name Augustus and made himself the first emperor of Rome, he also avoided any claim to divinity. In the first century of the Roman Empire, the idea of the divinization of emperors was often ridiculed. The philosopher and playwright Seneca mocked the imperial divinization of Claudius I as the “Pumpkinification of Claudius.”

As the government of the Roman Empire became more and more autocratic, giving rulers almost unlimited power, emperors eventually accepted divine honors, and sacrifice to the emperor came to be required as a token of loyalty. The requirement of sacrifice became a significant source of conflict between early Christians, who resisted the practice, and the Roman political authorities who enforced it. The period of emperors being considered gods ended in the 4th century ad, when Emperor Constantine the Great became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity. By the end of the 4th century, Emperor Theodosius I, who was a supporter of orthodox Christianity, officially banned the practice of the old Roman pagan religion.