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Roman Gods

The Romans believed that religion ensured the cooperation and goodwill of the gods, allowing Rome to prosper. Roman religion emphasized precise rituals and ceremonies over moral or theological concepts. It differed from Greek religion, which explored more sophisticated ideas about divinity and mythology. Roman religion lacked creeds or personal accounts of the gods, instead focusing on proper performance of rituals to appease the gods. Reconstructing the early history of Roman religion is difficult due to later Greek influences and the lack of records from Rome's earliest periods.

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Wendy Holt
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94 views1 page

Roman Gods

The Romans believed that religion ensured the cooperation and goodwill of the gods, allowing Rome to prosper. Roman religion emphasized precise rituals and ceremonies over moral or theological concepts. It differed from Greek religion, which explored more sophisticated ideas about divinity and mythology. Roman religion lacked creeds or personal accounts of the gods, instead focusing on proper performance of rituals to appease the gods. Reconstructing the early history of Roman religion is difficult due to later Greek influences and the lack of records from Rome's earliest periods.

Uploaded by

Wendy Holt
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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The Romans, according to the orator and politician Cicero, excelled all other peoples in the

unique wisdom that made them realize that everything is subordinate to the rule and
direction of the gods. Yet Roman religion was based not on divine grace but instead on
mutual trust (fides) between god and man. The object of Roman religion was to secure the
cooperation, benevolence, and “peace” of the gods (pax deorum). The Romans believed that
this divine help would make it possible for them to master the unknown forces around them
that inspired awe and anxiety (religio), and thus they would be able to live successfully.
Consequently, there arose a body of rules, the jus divinum (“divine law”), ordaining what had
to be done or avoided.

These precepts for many centuries contained scarcely any moral element; they consisted of
directions for the correct performance of ritual. Roman religion laid almost exclusive
emphasis on cult acts, endowing them with all the sanctity of patriotic tradition. Roman
ceremonial was so obsessively meticulous and conservative that, if the various partisan
accretions that grew upon it throughout the years can be eliminated, remnants of very early
thought can be detected near the surface.

This demonstrates one of the many differences between Roman religion and Greek religion,
in which such remnants tend to be deeply concealed. The Greeks, when they first began to
document themselves, had already gone quite a long way toward sophisticated, abstract,
and sometimes daring conceptions of divinity and its relation to man. But the orderly,
legalistic, and relatively inarticulate Romans never quite gave up their old practices.
Moreover, until the vivid pictorial imagination of the Greeks began to influence them, they
lacked the Greek taste for seeing their deities in personalized human form and endowing
them with mythology. In a sense, there is no Roman mythology, or scarcely any. Although
discoveries in the 20th century, notably in the ancient region of Etruria (between the Tiber
and Arno rivers, west and south of the Apennines), confirm that Italians were not entirely
unmythological, their mythology is sparse. What is found at Rome is chiefly only a
pseudomythology (which, in due course, clothed their own nationalistic or family legends in
mythical dress borrowed from the Greeks). Nor did Roman religion have a creed; provided
that a Roman performed the right religious actions, he was free to think what he liked about
the gods. And, having no creed, he usually deprecated emotion as out of place in acts of
worship.
In spite, however, of the antique features not far from the surface, it is difficult to reconstruct
the history and evolution of Roman religion. The principal literary sources, antiquarians such
as the 1st-century-BC Roman scholars Varro and Verrius Flaccus, and the poets who were
their contemporaries (under the late Republic and Augustus), wrote 700 and 800 years after
the beginnings of Rome. They wrote at a time when the introduction of Greek methods and
myths had made erroneous (and flattering) interpretations of the distant Roman past
unavoidable. In order to supplement such conjectures or facts as they may provide, scholars
rely on surviving copies of the religious calendar and on other inscriptions. There is also a
rich, though frequently cryptic, treasure-house of material in coins and medallions and in
works of art.

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