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The One Olympian the Romans Did Not Rename

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The One Olympian the Romans Did Not Rename

Most Greek gods were matched to a Roman equivalent under a different name, Zeus to Jupiter, Hera to Juno, Aphrodite to Venus. Apollo is the conspicuous exception: the Romans took the god and the name, and this atlas files him under the Roman type accordingly. Rome imported his cult early, reputedly against plague, and it reached its height under Augustus, who claimed Apollo's special favour after the battle of Actium and built the god a temple on the Palatine beside his own house.

That choice was political theology. Where earlier Roman leaders leaned on Mars or Hercules, Augustus cast his new order under a god of order, light and the disciplined arts, Apollo the bringer of harmony rather than Apollo the sender of plague. The emphasis was selective, but it was drawn from the god's own repertoire.

His reach did not stop at the empire's edge. As the patron of music, prophecy and rational form he became, for later European culture, the presiding image of the arts themselves, the leader of the Muses on Parnassus. As with several Olympians, that afterlife preserves one face of the god, the luminous and ordering one, and quietly sets aside the archer whose arrows brought sickness.

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