Gods, Goddesses, and Ancient Legends
Major Gods covers the deities at the institutional center of Roman religion: the Dii Consentes and those important enough to be served by their own priest, or flamen. Membership is a matter of official standing, not raw power or popularity.
These are the gods of the great temples and the state calendar, courted before war, harvest, and election. For all their grandeur, Roman religion bound them tightly to the practical business of keeping the city safe.
Augustus let it be whispered that his mother had conceived him by Apollo, who came to her as a serpent in the god’s own temple. He was not merely Apollo’s favorite — by this telling, he was the god’s son.
The oracle told Croesus that if he attacked, Persia he would destroy a great empire. He attacked — and destroyed his own. Apollo never lied. He simply let confident men hear what they wanted to hear.
The arrows that made Apollo a god of healing were the same arrows that brought the plague. To the Romans, the power to kill and the power to cure were one weapon, pointed either way.
Apollo won his music contest with the satyr Marsyas by playing his lyre upside down. His prize, by the rules of the duel, was the right to flay the loser alive — and he took it.
Augustus built his house so close to Apollo’s temple that god and emperor nearly shared a wall — a way of telling Rome exactly whose power stood behind the throne.
In 186 BCE, the Roman Senate banned the Bacchanalia and executed thousands of its participants. No other god’s worship was treated as a criminal conspiracy.
The word “cereal” comes from her name. So does one of the most politically charged temples in Roman history.
Moments after her own birth, the newborn Diana turned and helped her mother deliver her twin Apollo. The virgin who would never bear a child of her own was a midwife before she was an hour old.
At Diana’s oldest shrine, beside an Italian lake, her priest was a runaway slave who had murdered the priest before him — and who waited, sword in hand, for the man who would one day murder him.
Jupiter could dissolve the Roman Senate with a thunderclap. Not metaphorically — the announcement of unfavorable Jupiter omens was a recognized constitutional procedure that could halt elections, void laws, and force magistrates to resign. That is what it actually meant to be the most powerful god in Rome.
January is named for him. So is the word “janitor.” He had no Greek equivalent. And in Roman religious practice, every prayer to every other god began with him.
She spent seven books of the Aeneid trying to prevent Rome from being founded. She failed. The Romans still made her one of their three supreme gods.
Jupiter was the supreme god of Rome. The Fates answered to no one. Both of these things were true at the same time, and the Romans never fully resolved the tension between them.
Roman law had a divine foundation. Not metaphorically — Jupiter witnessed every serious oath, the fetiales invoked him before every war declaration, and perjury was understood as an offense against the god himself before it was an offense against the other party.
Learn how Jupiter ruled the sky and thunder in Roman mythology, and why his control of storms symbolized supreme divine authority.
Five planets were named for Roman gods. The largest got Jupiter. The Romans would have considered this entirely appropriate.
The Romans had a word for the advance — and a god for it. Mars Gradivus governed the moment between preparation and battle, when discipline either held or broke.
Before a Roman general marched, he shook a set of sacred spears and ordered the war god to wake up. Mars wasn’t prayed to and forgotten — he was built into Rome’s calendar, its priesthoods, and the army’s sense of itself.
Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE. Octavian vowed to Mars that he would have vengeance. The temple he built twenty-seven years later was Rome’s most deliberate piece of political theology.
March is named for him. So is the planet. He was the father of Romulus, the divine patron of Roman armies, and — before any of that — a god of farming.
Caesar wrote that Mercury was the most widely worshipped god among the Gauls. The Romans had barely introduced him to their own religion a few centuries earlier.
She was born fully armed from her father’s skull. The Romans put her at the center of their state religion and made her the patron goddess of nearly every skilled profession in Rome.
Rome built one of the ancient world’s most powerful navies and named their greatest sea battle after him. Neptune himself had almost no myths to speak of.
The Romans had three different gods governing the underworld, and they were careful about which one they were actually addressing. Most people today conflate all three into one.
Rome had three gods who together defined what Rome was. Most people know Jupiter and Mars. The third was Quirinus — and almost no one knows what he governed.
His temple held Rome’s entire state treasury for five hundred years. His festival was the one week a year when Romans suspended every rule of social order. And his name has nothing to do with time.
Venus was born from a wound. A sky god’s severed flesh, cast into the sea, foam gathering around it — and from that foam, the goddess of love.
Rome had one god of war and dozens of names for him. Each name was a different situation, a different need, a different version of the same divine force.
Venus was not one goddess. She was Venus Genetrix, Venus Victrix, Venus Verticordia — each a different face of the same divine power, each with its own temple, its own history, and its own specific claim on Roman life.
Venus and Anchises had a son on a Trojan hillside, and Venus told Anchises to keep it secret. He didn’t. Jupiter struck him lame for the indiscretion. The son — Aeneas — went on to found the civilization from which Julius Caesar would eventually claim divine descent. That is how a goddess’s desire became Rome’s founding myth.
When Venus needed Dido to love Aeneas, she didn’t leave it to chance. She sent Cupid disguised as a child to sit in Dido’s lap at the welcome feast and infect her with desire while she thought she was holding a boy. The love that destroyed Dido was a targeted operation. That is what Venus and Cupid actually were.
Venus was married to Vulcan. Her affair with Mars was the most famous in mythology — and to Rome, the most meaningful. Love and war were not opposites. They were the two forces that made civilization possible.
The gods gave the goddess of beauty to the lame god of the forge. Venus got a husband who could make anything. Vulcan got a wife who wanted someone else.
The night before the Battle of Pharsalus, Caesar vowed a temple to Venus Genetrix if she gave him victory. She did. He built it at the center of his forum, with a cult statue by the Greek sculptor Arcesilaus and a controversial golden statue of Cleopatra beside it.
Pompey classified his theater’s seating as steps leading to a temple of Venus Victrix. The Senate approved. Rome got its first permanent stone theater. Venus got a monument.
Venus was the Roman goddess of love. She was also the divine ancestress of Julius Caesar, the theological engine behind the Aeneid, and the reason Rome understood its own empire as the fulfillment of a goddess’s maternal plan. That is a very different thing from being the Greek Aphrodite with a Latin name.
She was the only major Roman goddess never depicted in human form. Her presence was the fire itself. And the women who tended it were the most powerful priestesses in Rome.
His festival was held in August, at the height of summer’s fire risk, and the main ritual involved throwing live fish into a bonfire. The fish died so that people did not have to.
Major Gods covers the deities at the institutional center of Roman religion: the Dii Consentes and those important enough to be served by their own priest, or flamen. Membership is a matter of official standing, not raw power or popularity.
These are the gods of the great temples and the state calendar, courted before war, harvest, and election. For all their grandeur, Roman religion bound them tightly to the practical business of keeping the city safe.
At Diana’s oldest shrine, beside an Italian lake, her priest was a runaway slave who had murdered the priest before him — and who waited, sword in hand, for the man who would one day murder him.
Caesar wrote that Mercury was the most widely worshipped god among the Gauls. The Romans had barely introduced him to their own religion a few centuries earlier.
She was born fully armed from her father’s skull. The Romans put her at the center of their state religion and made her the patron goddess of nearly every skilled profession in Rome.
March is named for him. So is the planet. He was the father of Romulus, the divine patron of Roman armies, and — before any of that — a god of farming.
Rome built one of the ancient world’s most powerful navies and named their greatest sea battle after him. Neptune himself had almost no myths to speak of.
She spent seven books of the Aeneid trying to prevent Rome from being founded. She failed. The Romans still made her one of their three supreme gods.
Five planets were named for Roman gods. The largest got Jupiter. The Romans would have considered this entirely appropriate.
Augustus built his house so close to Apollo’s temple that god and emperor nearly shared a wall — a way of telling Rome exactly whose power stood behind the throne.
Venus was the Roman goddess of love. She was also the divine ancestress of Julius Caesar, the theological engine behind the Aeneid, and the reason Rome understood its own empire as the fulfillment of a goddess’s maternal plan. That is a very different thing from being the Greek Aphrodite with a Latin name.