Similarities Of Roman And Greek Gods In Ancient Rome

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Roman Mythology At the height of Rome’s power, there were about one million people who lived in Rome and over fifty million in the entire empire.1 All these people spoke different languages, and worshipped different gods. For a long time the Romans had gods who were shapeless and closely associated with the earth. It was not until the Romans began to contact the Greeks that their gods began to look human. Rome started off as a city in Italy and it took Rome many centuries just to dominate the Italian peninsula. Even before Rome had become such a large empire, everyone had their own gods and myths. Some of these gods were very similar to the Roman gods, but others were not so similar. Although most people in Italy at the time shared a basic…show more content…
Before the Romans took some of the Greek gods, their own gods were very vague and hardly more than a “those that are above.”3 It was not until after the introduction of Greek literature and art that the Romans thought their gods needed to be beautiful and poetic. The Romans did not care about their gods being well-dressed and good-looking and inspiring others to write songs, but instead wanted their gods to be…show more content…
These rituals in the Roman religion served as a way to ensure the city's luck, good weather, fertility of the crops, or even the military success. The rituals performed by the religious officials had to be done perfectly or it would bring bad luck to the city and its inhabitants. The people who performed these rituals were priests, and there were fifteen major priests in Rome called flamines, plural for flamen, who were selected by other priests from a list of certain aristocratic families.5 Rome offers no native creation myth and little to explain the characters of their deities, but they did acknowledge that immortal gods ruled all the realms of heaven and earth. At different times and different places the character of a divine being could overlap with that of others and be redefined as Roman. Since Rome was such a vast empire, it was influenced by the many different people in its realm. During the Republican period, Greece was the last word in culture and sophistication, so the Romans imported many of their deities and made them their own.6 A lot of these Greek gods arrive from the Roman version of the Odyssey which was essentially the same, but the

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