Roman mythology

• 1. Introduction

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  Roman mythology carries questions that never go stale. As the scholar T. P. Wiseman put it, the Roman stories still mattered to Dante in 1300, to Shakespeare in 1600, and to the founding fathers of the United States in 1776. The questions those stories ask are blunt: what does it take to be a free citizen? Can a superpower still be a republic? How does well-meaning authority turn into murderous tyranny? These are not ancient curiosities. They are the load-bearing beams of Roman myth, and they have been pulling at Western imagination ever since. Roman mythology is the body of myths of ancient Rome as preserved in literature and visual art, but it is also something stranger than simple storytelling. The Romans treated their traditional narratives as history, even when gods intervened and destinies were divinely ordained. What made this body of stories distinctive, how it absorbed everything from Trojan princes to Phrygian goddess cults, and why a poem written under the emperor Augustus came to be considered canonical across European culture for more than a thousand years are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. History as Myth

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  Lucretia's death did not simply end one life. Her self-sacrifice, according to Roman tradition, prompted the overthrow of the early Roman monarchy and led to the establishment of the Republic itself. That is the kind of weight Roman myths carry: political consequence dressed as personal drama. The Romans did not typically separate legend from history in their earliest period. History and myth had, as scholars have observed, a mutual and complementary relationship. The stories are often concerned with politics and morality, and with how an individual's personal integrity relates to their responsibility to the community or the Roman state. Heroism threads through almost every tale. Horatius held the bridge alone against an army, standing for individual valor. Mucius Scaevola thrust his right hand into fire to prove his loyalty to Rome. Cloelia was taken hostage by Lars Porsena, escaped, and then voluntarily returned to preserve a peace treaty and save her fellow captives. These were not parables invented to teach children. The Romans understood them as accounts of what had actually happened. The founding myths themselves follow the same logic. The Trojan prince Aeneas was cast as the husband of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, and through a layered genealogy became the forebear of Romulus and Remus, making the Trojans the mythical ancestors of the Roman people entire. The stories of Numa Pompilius, the Sabine second king of Rome who reportedly consorted with the nymph Egeria and built many of Rome's legal and religious institutions, sit at the exact point where divine authority and civic policy meet. The tale of Coriolanus is a story of politics and morality. The Tarpeian Rock carried an explanation of why traitors were executed there. Myth, for Rome, was civic infrastructure.

• 3. The Gods of Practical Life

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  Janus guarded the door. Vesta guarded the hearth. The Lares protected the field and house, Pales the pasture, Saturn the sowing, Ceres the growth of grain, Pomona the fruit, and Consus and Ops the harvest. This is not a pantheon of remote, capricious immortals. It is a roster organized by the needs of the working day. Early Roman divinities included a host of specialist gods whose names were invoked in specific activities. Fragments of old ritual accompanying acts such as plowing or sowing reveal that at every stage of the operation a separate deity was called upon. Each name was regularly derived from the verb for the operation itself. Jupiter, ruler of the gods, was honored for the rains his power might bring to farms and vineyards. His weapon of lightning made him the director of human activity; his widespread domain made him the protector of Roman military ventures beyond the community's borders. Mars was honored in March and October and carried responsibility for both war and agriculture. Quirinus was the patron of the armed community in time of peace, and Mars and Quirinus were often identified with each other. The earliest pantheon also included Janus and Vesta alongside the Archaic Triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, whose three patrician priests held the highest priestly rank. The Etruscan-influenced Capitoline Triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva later became central to official religion, replacing the Archaic Triad. Scholars have noted this as an unusual example within Indo-European religion: a supreme triad formed of two female deities and only one male. The Aventine Triad of Ceres, Liber, and Libera developed in association with the rise of plebeians to positions of wealth and influence, reflecting how even divine groupings tracked social change.

• 4. Ritual Over Scripture

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  Roman religion was not based on scriptures and their interpretation, but priestly literature was one of the earliest written forms of Latin prose. The books and commentaries of the College of Pontiffs and of the augurs contained religious procedures, prayers, and rulings on points of religious law. Much of this material was, in the phrase used at the time, occultum genus litterarum: an arcane form of literature to which only priests had access. It was not meant for the public. At critical junctures in Roman history, prophecies would appear, discovered in what ancient sources describe as the nebulous Sibylline books. According to legend, Tarquin the Proud purchased those books in the late 6th century BC from the Cumaean Sibyl. Some aspects of archaic Roman religion survived into later centuries only through the lost theological works of the 1st-century BC scholar Varro, known today through other classical and Christian authors. Traditional Roman religion was conservative in ritual rather than dogmatic in doctrine. The meaning of any given rite, however, could be adapted and expanded through accumulated myths, explanatory stories, commentary, and the influence of other cultures. When the Romans encountered new peoples and ideas, they did not typically lock their theology down. They negotiated it. During the war with Hannibal, any distinction between indigenous gods and immigrant gods began to fade. The Romans embraced diverse deities from various cultures as a sign of strength and evidence of universal divine favor.

• 5. Absorbing Foreign Gods

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  In 203 BC, Rome imported the cult object embodying Cybele, the Great Mother, from Pessinus in Phrygia and welcomed its arrival with full ceremony. The poets Lucretius and Catullus, who were roughly contemporary in the mid-1st century BC, both left disapproving glimpses of Cybele's wildly ecstatic cult, suggesting the goddess's arrival was not without controversy. Yet she was absorbed. The absorption of neighboring local gods was a consistent feature of Roman expansion. As the Roman state conquered new territories, it commonly granted the local gods of those regions the same honors accorded to earlier gods of Roman state religion. Diana, Minerva, Hercules, and Venus appear to have entered the Roman pantheon through conquered settlements in Italy, some as Italic divinities, others derived originally from the Greek culture of Magna Graecia. Castor and Pollux arrived through the same process. In some cases, the Romans used a formal ritual called evocatio, through which the deities of an enemy power were invited to leave their old homes and take up new sanctuaries at Rome. Foreign communities who settled in Rome, including communities of former slaves, continued their own religious practices within the city. In this way, the cult of Mithras reached Rome, and his popularity within the Roman army carried his worship as far as Roman Britain. The important Roman deities were eventually identified with the anthropomorphic Greek gods, and took on many of their attributes and myths. Several planets in the sky still bear the names of those adopted gods: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.

• 6. Greek Myth, Roman Telling

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  Ovid's Metamorphoses, written during the reign of Augustus, came to be regarded as the canonical telling of Greek myths in the Roman world. That is a striking outcome. A Roman poet's retelling of Greek stories became more authoritative in later European culture than the Greek originals. The versions of Greek myths produced by Roman authors often had a greater influence on both narrative and pictorial representations than the Greek sources themselves. The Romans identified their own gods with those of ancient Greece and reinterpreted Greek myths under Roman names. This process likely began as early as Rome's protohistory, accelerating during the Hellenistic period of Greek influence and through the Roman conquest of Greece itself. What resulted is what scholars call classical mythology: the amalgamated tradition of Greek and Roman mythologies, disseminated across Europe primarily through Latin literature. That tradition moved through the Middle Ages, into the Renaissance, and on to present-day uses of myths in fiction and film. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, Roman myths in particular served as a primary inspiration for European painting. The perception common in 19th-century classical scholarship that the Romans had little authentic mythology of their own was a product of Romanticism, which valued Greek civilization as more authentically creative. That perception has since been challenged. The Milky Way itself carries a Roman mythological explanation: Jupiter placed the infant Hercules at the sleeping Juno's breast so the child would drink her divine milk and gain immortality. When Juno woke and pushed the unknown infant away, her spurting milk formed the galaxy. Major sources such as the Fasti of Ovid, a six-book poem structured by the Roman religious calendar, and the fourth book of elegies by Propertius remain primary references for scholars working in the field today.