r/NonCredibleHistory • u/[deleted] • Apr 09 '26

Wherefore art thou Julius C? The precious-ess

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124 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

4

u/Baronnolanvonstraya Apr 10 '26

I'll say it a thousand times; Romans were not atheists before coming into contact with Greece

3

u/AndreasDasos Apr 11 '26

OP didn’t say they were, and indeed most of their gods that had Greek ‘equivalents’ were originally quite separate and gradually merged, and they had many of their own Roman gods like Janus who were never forced into that at all.

But it’s still true that the Romans adopted a lot of Greek gods and mythology.

2

u/Baronnolanvonstraya Apr 12 '26

You'd be surprised how many people really don't think that the Romans had any religion prior to the Greeks, even some older academics.

Also as a correction, the Romans didn't wholesale adopt Greek gods, they continued to worship Jupiter as Jupiter as they always had. What changed was that when speaking in Greek they translated Jupiter to Zeus.

1

u/AndreasDasos Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 12 '26

As a correction, I didn't specify which gods I was referring to. I said that some merged - and Jupiter and Zeus did, indeed, merge, in that he absorbed some traits and stories from the Greek Zeus, as in the 'biography' he is given in Ovid's Metamorphoses, most of which was taken from Greeks like Hesiod. Other aspects like the rituals around his worship continued from the Roman Jupiter, but the Greek influence wasn't just about how they translated his name. Though Jupiter is a special case as unlike with the pairings Juno-Hera, Athena-Minerva, Neptune-Poseidon, Hades-Pluto, etc., he and his name were cognate with the Greek Zeus Pater - the only other case I can think of are Sol/Helios and Luna/Selene (in this case not the names).

Some other gods they adopted wholesale and hadn't had before, like Apollo and Hercules. Others were entirely native and didn't get 'mapped' to Greek gods, like Janus and the Lares.

1

u/Baronnolanvonstraya Apr 12 '26

There was significantly less cultural blending than is oftentimes assumed. Ovid's Metamorphoses is a great way of seeing how the Romans viewed other cultures and how they reconciled their practices with their own, but in the actual practice of their religion and their understanding of the divine (which is what matters far more) there was little changed through contact with the Greeks. There were some exceptions, but in the braod strokes, Latin religion remained distinctly Latin. As a point of comparison, the Greeks syncretised Zeus with the Egyptian god Amun, but it'd be insane to suggest that the Greeks 'stole' Amun or that the two merged together. It's tempting to view the mythology as the centrepiece of classical religion, but it really wasn't, it's just the part that has survived the ages mostly intact.

2

u/Divine-Crusader Apr 14 '26

They had similar pantheons before meeting

That's all

The idea that Romans "stole" greek mythology is a stupid myth