Home›Greek Deities›Interpretatio OfBrowse ByInterpretatio OfThis page groups deities by the foreign god that ancient writers equated them with, the old habit of mapping one culture's gods onto another's. Wikipedia describes this practice, known as interpretatio graeca when the Greeks did it, as "a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures using familiar terms." Browsing this way lets a visitor see how, for example, a Roman writer might treat a Gaulish or Egyptian god as another name for one of their own.FactsLearn MoreInterpretatio OfSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsOverviewWhat Defines This GroupingWell-attestedThe gods of ancient Greek religion, among the best documented pantheons of the ancient world. The grouping rests on a literary record from Homer and Hesiod onward together with inscriptions, temple accounts and archaeology. The Olympian family of the poets and the gods actually worshipped in a given city are not the same list, and cult titles vary from place to place. 2AttestationEra of AttestationWell-attestedSeveral of the Olympian names are already present on Linear B tablets of about 1400 to 1200 BCE, and the cult ran continuously until the closing of the temples in the late fourth century CE. 2Veneration TodayWell-attestedThe public cult ended in late antiquity; no continuous worship survives. 2DirectoryCategoryWell-attestedDeities 1Learn MoreThe gods of ancient Greece This group holds the deities of ancient Greek religion, among the best documented pantheons of the ancient world thanks to a rich literary record from Homer and Hesiod onward. At its centre are the twelve Olympians (Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hermes, Demeter and either Hestia or Dionysus), who dwell on Mount Olympus and govern the ordered cosmos. Around them the browser will find the older generation of Titans they overthrew, primordial powers such as Gaia and Chronos, chthonic and underworld figures led by Hades and Persephone, and a wide company of lesser gods, nymphs and personifications.Myth, cult and afterlife Greek religion was practised through local cult, festival and sacrifice for well over a thousand years; the myths preserved in poetry and drama are one part of it, the civic and mystery cults another. The same god could be worshipped under many local titles and take a different character from city to city. The tradition was later absorbed and renamed by Rome, and its gods became the common vocabulary of Western art and letters long after the temples closed. The entries note both the classical Greek figure and its Roman counterpart where the two were identified.Interpretatio OfFilter Results18 entriesAssociated RelicAllBeyond the wheat, torch and poppy that mark her iconography, Ceres received the mundus, a ritual pit at Rome believed to connect the world of the living to the underworld, opened three times a year on days sacred to her and to the chthonic dead. (1)Fortuna is traditionally depicted holding a ship's rudder, symbolizing her steering of human fate, and standing beside her wheel, the rota Fortunae, which turns ceaselessly to raise some up and cast others down without regard for merit, an image the philosopher Boethius made central to his own Consolation of Philosophy while awaiting execution. (1)The inner sanctuary of Vesta's temple was also believed to house the Palladium, an ancient image of Pallas Athena said to have been carried from Troy, among other sacred objects on which Rome's safety was thought to depend, none of which were ever put on public display. (1)The Palladium, a small wooden image of the armed goddess said to have fallen from the sky at Troy and later carried to Rome, was kept hidden in the Temple of Vesta as a guarantee of the city's safety, seen only by the Vestal Virgins and the Pontifex Maximus. (1)The sacred shields called the ancilia and the ceremonial spears kept in the Regia were treated as Mars's ritual relics in Rome, both ritually shaken by the Salian priests each March in a rite that formally opened the annual campaigning season for the Roman army. (1)Attributes and IconographyAllAs Juno Sospita, worshipped at Lanuvium, she is shown in a distinctive goatskin cloak with the head and horns still attached, carrying a spear and a small round shield, an image found on Roman Republican coinage. (1)Crowned and enthroned beside Pluto (1)Diana is conventionally shown as a huntress in a short tunic, bow and quiver at her shoulder, often accompanied by a stag or a hunting dog and, in her lunar aspect, a crescent moon at her brow, an image closely paralleling her Greek counterpart Artemis. (1)Drives a two-horse chariot across the night sky (1)Helmeted, with aegis, spear and shield; the owl and the olive. (1)Holding a rudder and a cornucopia, often with a wheel beside her or standing on a globe. (1)Holding a torch and a sheaf of grain, or the pomegranate (1)Honoured with the theatre, the mask and the wine cup, the emblems of his mysteries and of dramatic performance alike. (1)In full armour with helmet, spear and shield; the wolf and the woodpecker. (1)Mercury is depicted carrying a caduceus, wearing winged sandals called talaria and a broad traveler's hat, the petasus, attributes drawn directly from his Greek counterpart Hermes and marking him visually as a swift messenger and guide of travelers and merchants. (1)Neptune is conventionally shown bearded and holding a trident, often accompanied by dolphins or a hippocamp, a horse tailed sea creature, an iconographic type borrowed directly from Greek depictions of Poseidon once Rome fully assimilated the two gods. (1)No cult statue; uniquely among major Roman deities, Vesta was represented by no anthropomorphic image inside her own temple, only by the perpetual fire itself (1)Nude or half-draped with the mirror, the dove and the myrtle. (1)Roman art gives Caelus a distinctive convention rather than an individual form: a bearded figure holding a great cloak that billows overhead in an arch, the velificatio motif, read as recalling the vault of the sky itself. The device appears on the breastplate of the Augustus of Prima Porta and, in Mithraic settings, Caelus is sometimes rendered allegorically as an eagle bent over a globe marked with the zodiac. (1)Roman art tends to give Pluto a cornucopia rarely seen with his Greek counterpart Hades, a detail that leans into the god's identification with wealth drawn from the earth, alongside the more standard sceptre and the dog Cerberus at his side. (1)Saturn is conventionally shown as an old, bearded man carrying the harpe, the curved sickle or pruning hook that marks his character as a god of sowing and the harvest, and, in the Roman custom reserved for a small number of cults, with his head veiled, capite velato, in the manner of a priest at sacrifice. (1)The thunderbolt, the eagle, the sceptre and the oak; enthroned and bearded. (1)Vulcan is shown as a bearded smith at his forge, holding a hammer and tongs, his craft rather than his Greek counterpart Hephaestus's lameness the feature Roman art most often emphasizes. (1)Wheat, a torch and a poppy are her traditional emblems, linked respectively to the harvest, to her torchlit search for the abducted Proserpina, and to the fertility associated with the poppy. (1)Domain / FunctionAllAgriculture and harvest (4)Beauty (1)Childbirth (2)Commerce and wealth (2)Craft, metalwork and smithing (2)Dance and theatre (1)Death (1)Divine messenger (1)Fate and time (2)Fertility and generation (2)Fire (2)Fortune and luck (1)Guide of the dead (1)Hearth and domestic fire (1)Justice, law and oaths (1)Kingship and sovereignty (2)Love and desire (1)Marriage and the household (1)Moon (2)Motherhood (1)Primordial being (1)Protection and guardianship (1)Rivers, lakes and springs (1)Sea and ocean (1)Seafaring and fishing (1)Sky (2)Spring and renewal (1)Storm and thunder (1)The hunt (1)The underworld (2)Travel, roads and boundaries (1)Vegetation and forests (1)War and battle (2)Wilderness and wild animals (1)Wine and intoxication (1)Wisdom and counsel (1)Domain DetailAllBefore his full identification with the Greek sea god Poseidon, the earlier Roman Neptune is thought by some scholars to have been associated more broadly with fresh water, an older domain the god's later assimilation to a purely marine deity has since largely obscured. (1)Mercury's character was reshaped so completely under Greek influence that Roman writers treat him as functionally identical to Hermes, adopting Hermes's parentage, myths and attributes almost wholesale, making Mercury one of the clearest Roman examples of a native Italic god remade on a borrowed Greek template rather than developed independently. (1)Era of Attestation End YearAll391 (14)400 (1)Era of Attestation Start YearAll753 BCE (1)600 BCE (6)500 BCE (5)493 BCE (1)300 BCE (2)249 BCE (1)200 BCE (1)GenderAllFemale (9)Male (9)Historical NoteAllAlso known as Liber or Liber Pater, an old Italian god of the vine and of freedom in his own right, whose festival the Liberalia fell on the seventeenth of March. (1)Beyond the Matronalia, Roman women also marked the Nonae Caprotinae on the seventh of July in Juno's honor as Juno Caprotina, a rite tradition connected to the flight of Roman women and slave girls during an early crisis with the Latins, celebrated with a sacrifice under a wild fig tree. (1)Ceres' temple on the Aventine Hill, dedicated in 493 BC alongside Liber and Libera, was administered by the plebeian aediles and became closely bound up with the plebeian order during the early Republic's conflict with the patrician class. (1)Her festival, the Quinquatrus, was later extended in the imperial calendar to five days, with the final four given over largely to gladiatorial contests, a martial turn appended to a holiday that began as one for craftsmen and schoolchildren. (1)Her priest at the Nemi sanctuary, the rex Nemorensis, held the office only until he was slain and replaced by his own successor, a violent rule of succession unlike any other Roman priesthood. (1)His mystery rites, the Bacchanalia, spread so widely through Italy that the Roman Senate moved to curb them by the formal decree de Bacchanalibus in 186 BC, treating the cult as a threat to public order rather than an ordinary form of worship. (1)His oldest altar, the Volcanal, stood at the foot of the Capitol in the Roman Forum, and because the Romans sought to keep fire at bay his shrines were often set outside the city walls. (1)His temple in the Circus Flaminius at Rome held a celebrated sculptural group by the Greek artist Scopas showing the marine retinue of the sea god, a work later brought to Rome and much admired by Pliny the Elder. (1)Julius Caesar and, after him, Augustus promoted Venus Genetrix as ancestral mother of the Julian family and funded major temple building in her honor, tying the goddess's cult directly to the political legitimacy of the emerging imperial dynasty in a way distinct from her earlier republican era worship. (1)Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico records that the Gauls venerated a god they called Mercury above all others, a Roman label modern scholars generally read as describing the Celtic god Lugus rather than reporting genuine Roman cult reaching Gaul; the passage is one of the few surviving Roman accounts of pre-Roman Gallic religion. (1)More a theological and poetic figure than the object of an active cult; the neuter form Caelum also appears in Roman sources as a distinct divine personification of the heavens. (1)Ovid's Fasti records that the sacred fire of Vesta's temple in the Roman Forum was tended continuously by the Vestal Virgins and that its accidental extinction was treated as a grave portent for the state, to be ritually rekindled by friction from a fire drill rather than from any ordinary flame. (1)Pluto was increasingly conflated in Roman thought with the older native god Dis Pater, and by the late Republic the two names functioned as near interchangeable titles for the ruler of the dead in Latin literature. (1)Roman antiquarian tradition holds that Mars began as a guardian of fields and flocks, invoked to protect agriculture from blight and disease, with his standing as a god of war only later coming to dominate his public cult as Rome itself grew into a militarized state. (1)Rome founded a temple to Fortuna Muliebris on the spot where Coriolanus's mother and wife persuaded him to turn his invading army back, and by decree only women married just once, univirae, were permitted to conduct its rites. (1)The Roman state treasury, the aerarium Saturni, was housed within Saturn's own temple in the Forum, a location tradition explained by his mythic identity as god of a lost golden age of shared plenty before private wealth existed. (1)The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on Rome's Capitoline Hill, traditionally dedicated in 509 BCE at the start of the Republic, stood as the central shrine of Roman state religion for nearly a thousand years, the site where consuls took office and triumphant generals ended their processions. (1)HistoricityAllNot a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being (18)Key TextAllBoethius's Consolation of Philosophy personifies Fortuna as a figure who spins her wheel without regard for merit, raising some and casting down others by pure chance, an image that became one of the most enduring representations of the goddess in later medieval European thought. (1)Julius Caesar and the Julian family claimed direct descent from Venus through her mortal son Aeneas and his son Iulus, a genealogy Caesar used to justify building a temple to Venus Genetrix, mother Venus, in his new forum at Rome, folding personal and imperial legitimacy directly into the goddess's own mythology. (1)Juno bore the epithet Juno Moneta at her temple on the Capitoline Hill, a title ancient writers connected to a warning she gave the Romans, and the Roman mint's location beside that temple in the third century BC gave rise to the English word money by way of Moneta. (1)Minerva's chief festival, the Quinquatrus, was celebrated over five days in March and became especially associated with craftsmen, schoolteachers and artisans, who treated the holiday as their patronal feast under her protection. (1)Neptune's festival, the Neptunalia, fell in the heat of high summer in late July, when Romans built small shelters of branches and foliage called umbrae, a practice scholars read either as seeking his protection of the water supply during the driest season or simply as welcome shade from the summer sun. (1)Ovid's Metamorphoses gives the fullest Latin account of Proserpina's abduction by Dis Pater, framing the story as an explanation for the seasons that closely parallels but is not identical to the Greek Homeric Hymn to Demeter, with the Roman version emphasizing Ceres's search across Sicily specifically. (1)Ovid's Metamorphoses places Pluto's abduction of Proserpina at a meadow near Enna in Sicily, where the earth opens beneath her as she gathers flowers with her companions, a Sicilian setting that became closely tied to local cult and to poetic tradition surrounding the myth in the Roman world. (1)Ovid's Metamorphoses recounts Ceres searching the world for her abducted daughter Proserpina, a Roman retelling that parallels the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, with Ceres's grief bringing the earth's crops to a halt until Jupiter arranges her daughter's partial return. (1)Roman tradition held that her sanctuary at Lake Nemi, the Diana Nemorensis, was tended by a priest known as the Rex Nemorensis, who held the office only so long as he could defend it against challengers in ritual combat, a custom later made famous as the starting image of Frazer's The Golden Bough. (1)Saturn's festival, the Saturnalia, held in mid December, was marked by a temporary reversal of social roles in which masters served their slaves at table, an inversion later scholars have linked to Saturn's own mythic reign as a lost golden age of equality before Jupiter's rule. (1)The Carmen Saliare, an archaic hymn sung by the Salian priests in Mars's honor, survives only in fragments quoted by later grammarians; its language was already so antiquated by the late Republic that even native Latin speakers such as Quintilian confessed they could barely understand it, making it one of the oldest surviving specimens of the Latin language. (1)The Roman Senate's decree of 186 BCE, the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, severely restricted Bacchic worship across Italy after a scandal involving secret nocturnal rites, and the bronze tablet recording it survives today as one of the oldest preserved Roman legal texts and a rare instance of the state moving directly against a popular cult by name. (1)The Vestal Virgins who tended Vesta's sacred flame in Rome served a mandatory thirty year term and were bound to strict chastity, and Roman law treated a Vestal who let the flame go out or broke her vow of celibacy as having endangered the safety of the entire state, punishable in the case of unchastity by being buried alive. (1)LineageAllAs identified with the Greek Dionysus, Roman tradition gave him Jupiter as father and the mortal woman Semele as mother, making him one of the few major Roman gods understood to have been born of a human parent. (1)Once assimilated to the Greek Poseidon, Roman myth placed Neptune among the three sons of Saturn, alongside Jupiter and Pluto, who were said to have divided the cosmos by lot, with Neptune receiving dominion over the sea. (1)Proserpina's father is named as Jupiter in the standard Roman genealogy, mirroring the Greek Persephone's parentage by Zeus and Demeter; ancient sources are consistent on this point even where they differ on other details of her story. (1)Roman genealogy makes Juno the daughter of Saturn and Ops and both sister and wife to Jupiter, the divine sibling marriage at the head of the Capitoline Triad, mirroring the parallel Greek pairing of Hera as sister-wife to Zeus. (1)Roman genealogy makes Jupiter a son of Saturn and Ops, brother to Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, Juno and Vesta, a family structure adapted directly from the Greek genealogy of Zeus and his Titan parents Cronus and Rhea. (1)Roman mythographers, following Greek tradition, name Pluto son of Saturn and Ops, and brother to Jupiter and Neptune, the three sons receiving by lot the sky, sea and underworld respectively once their father's reign ended. (1)Roman tradition counted Ceres a daughter of Saturn and Ops, sister to Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Pluto and Vesta, and mother by Jupiter to Proserpina, whose loss to the underworld is the goddess's best known myth. (1)Roman tradition holds Mercury to be the son of Jupiter and the Pleiad Maia, born on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, adapting the Greek myth of Hermes's birth. (1)Roman tradition, as recorded by Ovid, holds that Mars was conceived by Juno alone, without Jupiter, using a magical flower given to her by Flora. (1)Roman tradition, echoing the Greek pattern, counts Saturn father of Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, Juno, Ceres and Vesta by his consort Ops, though unlike his Greek counterpart Cronus, Saturn's own overthrow by his son receives comparatively little emphasis in Roman sources, which favor his golden age reign instead. (1)Mythic AssociationAllCaelus is the Roman counterpart of the Greek Uranos and the Roman equivalent of the sky-father, and the neuter form Caelum also appears as a separate divine personification of the heavens. (1)During the Vulcanalia, fish and small animals were cast into bonfires in his honour so that the harvest and the city might be spared a real conflagration. (1)Gathering flowers near Enna in Sicily, Proserpina was seized by Pluto and carried into the underworld; because she ate pomegranate seeds there she was bound to return each year, and her mother Ceres's search and grief for her, and the compromise that divides her year between the upper world and the realm of the dead, is the founding myth behind the Cerealia and behind the seasonal cycle of sowing and harvest. (1)His festival, the Saturnalia in December, was among the most popular in Rome, marked by role reversal, gift giving and a temporary suspension of ordinary social rank. (1)His mystery rites, the Bacchanalia, spread through Italy until curbed by the Roman Senate's decree de Bacchanalibus of 186 BC, and his mysteries promised initiates a blessed life beyond death. (1)In the myth best known through Ovid, the hunter Actaeon stumbles upon her bathing in a woodland pool; she transforms him into a stag in punishment, and his own hounds tear him apart without recognizing their master. (1)Juno is identified in Roman tradition as counterpart to the Greek Hera, sharing her role as consort of the supreme sky god and patroness of marriage, though Roman writers also credited her with a distinctly Italic function as guardian of the state treasury under the epithet Moneta. (1)Ovid's Fasti records Roman tradition that Saturn once ruled Italy during a lost golden age of abundance and equality before being displaced, a memory kept alive each December in the licensed reversal of social roles during Saturnalia. (1)Ovid's Fasti tells of the rustic god Priapus attempting to violate Vesta as she slept unguarded at an outdoor feast of the gods, foiled only when Silenus's donkey brayed and woke her, an incident Ovid gives as the reason a donkey was crowned with a garland of loaves at the Vestalia each year. It is one of the very few narrative myths ever attached to a goddess whose worship was otherwise built around the absence of narrative, an unchanging flame rather than a story. (1)Ovid's Metamorphoses recounts that Pluto abducted Proserpina while she gathered flowers in a Sicilian meadow, an act that led her mother Ceres to negotiate a partial yearly return explaining the changing seasons. (1)Roman myth, following the Greek pattern it absorbed, held that Jupiter overthrew his own father Saturn to become king of the gods, a succession later softened in Roman memory into the idea that Saturn withdrew peacefully to rule a lost golden age in Italy rather than being violently deposed. (1)Roman tradition adapted the Greek account of Minerva's birth, holding that she sprang fully armed from the head of Jupiter after he swallowed her mother Metis. (1)Roman tradition credited Mercury with escorting the souls of the dead to the underworld, a psychopomp function drawn from close identification with the Greek Hermes and distinct from his more prominent Roman portfolio as patron of merchants, travelers and commerce. (1)Roman tradition equated Neptune with the Greek Poseidon, adopting the trident and the horse as his attributes along with the myth of his rivalry with Minerva over patronage of Athens. (1)Roman tradition held that Mars fathered Romulus and Remus with the priestess Rhea Silvia, making him ancestor of the Roman people and founder, through his sons, of the city of Rome itself, a genealogical claim that elevated Mars from an earlier standing as a lesser agricultural deity into one of Rome's most important gods. (1)Sometimes counted as one aspect of a triple moon goddess together with Proserpina and Hecate, and identified with Diana and Juno in their lunar roles; her Greek counterpart is Selene. (1)The Julian family claimed descent from Venus through her son Aeneas, a lineage that Virgil uses in the Aeneid to link the goddess to the founding of Rome. (1)The Romans understood Fortuna as their own name for the same power the Greeks called Tyche, so ordinary Roman religious thought treated the two as one goddess under two languages rather than as separate deities requiring reconciliation. (1)When her daughter Proserpina was carried off to the underworld, Ceres wandered the earth in grief and let it grow barren, and it was from that wound that the yearly cycle of the seasons and the promise of rebirth taught in her mysteries were both said to arise. (1)Origin AccountAllOvid's Fasti describes Vesta as worshipped without a cult image for centuries, her presence represented instead by the eternal flame tended by the Vestal Virgins in her round temple in the Forum, a fire whose extinguishing was treated as so grave a portent that Rome required a fresh flame kindled by friction rather than relit from an ordinary source. (1)Origin of the NameAllCeres' name derives from an old Italic root meaning to grow or to cause to grow, the same root that later gave English the word cereal, reflecting her identity from the earliest period of Roman religion as a goddess of the growing grain crop. (1)Diana's name is generally derived from an Italic root related to Latin dius and divus, meaning shining or divine, a derivation consistent with her long association with the moon and the sky rather than with the wilderness alone. (1)Fortuna's own name comes from the Latin fors, chance or a random happening, the same root that gives forsan and forsitan, perhaps, so the goddess's name and the ordinary Latin word for luck are one and the same rather than a separate title layered onto an unrelated figure. (1)From the Latin caelum, sky or heaven, the direct source of the English word celestial. (1)From the Latin luna, moon, itself from an earlier Italic root meaning to shine, and the direct source of the English word lunar. (1)Minerva's name is generally traced to an Italic root related to the Latin mens, mind, reflecting her long standing association with wisdom, craft and strategic warfare, though Roman antiquarians themselves offered competing etymologies for it. (1)Neptune's name is of uncertain Italic origin, though ancient and modern scholars alike have proposed links to a root meaning moist or damp, fitting a god of water whose identity long predates his later identification with the Greek Poseidon. (1)Proserpina is most likely a Latinization of Persephone carried into Rome by way of Etruscan intermediaries, and Roman writers themselves reshaped the name by folk etymology toward proserpere, to creep forth or emerge, connecting it to the growth of the grain shoot rather than to any Greek root. (1)Roman antiquarian tradition connected Juno's name to iuvenis, the Latin root for youthful vitality, reflecting her attested guardianship of women through every stage of life from birth to marriage to childbirth, though modern philologists regard the derivation as folk etymology rather than a settled linguistic conclusion. (1)Saturn's name is connected to the Latin sero, to sow, reflecting his character as a god of agriculture and the harvest. (1)The name Jupiter descends from the Proto Italic Iovis pater, sky father, the same root that gives the Greek Zeus pater, making the two names etymological cousins rather than unrelated words. (1)The name Mars derives from the older Italic form Mavors, and he ranked second only to Jupiter in the Roman state cult. (1)The name Mercury is usually derived from the Latin merx and mercari, to trade, reflecting his character as a god of commerce and merchants. (1)The name Pluto derives from the Greek Plouton, the wealthy one, reflecting the god's association with the precious metals and fertile crops understood to come from beneath the earth. (1)The origin of the name Venus is debated. One view derives it from an Indo-European root meaning desire or longing, cognate with words for winning favor, which would make her name transparently mean the goddess of charm. Another holds that Venus began as an obscure garden and vegetable deity whose name was only later reinterpreted to carry an erotic sense once she was identified with the Greek Aphrodite; the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes the second reading is favored by several Latinists. (1)The Roman and later Greek name for Dionysus, adopted from the god's own cult title Bakkhos, under which his ecstatic rites, the Bacchanalia, were later restricted by the Roman Senate in 186 BC. (1)Vesta's name is widely held to be cognate with Greek Hestia, both plausibly descending from an Indo-European root tied to burning or to the hearth as a dwelling place, though the exact line of derivation is not settled among philologists and the atlas does not overstate the certainty here. (1)Vulcan, Latin Volcanus, gives English its word volcano. (1)Place of ActivityAllDiana's most famous Italian sanctuary stood at Nemi beside a volcanic lake known in antiquity as Diana's Mirror, where the priesthood, held by the so called Rex Nemorensis, traditionally passed to a runaway slave who won the position by killing his predecessor in single combat, a violent custom the anthropologist James Frazer made central to his study The Golden Bough. (1)Principal Cult CentreAllAs Liber Pater he was worshipped at Rome in the Aventine temple shared with Ceres and Libera, a plebeian cult centre older and more publicly sanctioned than the private Bacchanalia the Senate moved to restrict, the god's Roman and Greek-derived identities occupying two different places in civic religious life at once. (1)Neptune's oldest attested Roman temple stood near the Circus Flaminius on the Campus Martius, a site associated with horse racing that reflects his early identity, alongside his dominion over the sea, as a Roman god connected with horses and stock breeding. (1)The Aventine temple at Rome (1)The Aventine temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera at Rome (1)The Aventine temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera at Rome, and the altar of Dis Pater and Proserpina in the Tarentum on the Campus Martius (1)The Campus Martius, and the temple of Mars Ultor in the Forum of Augustus (1)The Capitoline temple at Rome, and the Aventine temple (1)The Capitoline temple at Rome, and the sanctuary of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium (1)The grove of Diana Nemorensis at Lake Nemi near Aricia (1)The round temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, and the adjoining Atrium Vestae, the house of the Vestal Virgins (1)The sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia at Praeneste, whose oracle was consulted by drawing lots (1)The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill at Rome (1)The temple of Saturn in the Roman Forum (1)The temple of Venus Erycina at Eryx in Sicily (1)The temple of Venus Genetrix at Rome (1)Status Within the TraditionAllNot formally addressed by this tradition (1)Textual NoteAllEuripides' tragedy the Bacchae, composed for the Greek Dionysus rather than under the Roman name, is the fullest surviving ancient account of the god's arrival among mortals and of the violence that follows those who refuse to recognize his divinity, a text later Roman writers on Bacchus drew on directly. (1)Ovid's Fasti records that March, the month named for Mars, once opened the Roman calendar year, so that the god of war stood at the very start of Roman civic and religious time before a later calendar reform moved the year's beginning to January. (1)Ovid's Fasti, describing the Saturnalia festival held each December, notes that during the celebration masters and slaves temporarily reversed their usual roles and dined together, a social inversion later Roman writers cited as evidence of the festival's link to the legendary Golden Age Saturn was believed once to have ruled over. (1)Ovid's Metamorphoses recounts Venus's grief over the death of her mortal lover Adonis, gored by a boar, and her transformation of his spilled blood into the anemone flower, a story Roman poets used repeatedly to explore the vulnerability that even a goddess of love and desire could not escape. (1)Roman writers frequently connected Pluto's name to the Greek word for wealth, ploutos, reading the god of the dead as also a god of the riches, metals and fertile seed hidden within the earth, a double identity distinct from the harsher Roman underworld god Dis Pater with whom he was nonetheless often merged. (1)The emperor Domitian, an especially devoted worshipper of Minerva, built her a temple within what later became known as the Forum of Nerva or Forum Transitorium in Rome, one of the clearest examples of a Roman emperor attaching his own building program directly to her cult. (1)TheologyAllPolytheistic: many gods (18)Veneration TodayAllHistorically attested; no continuous cult (18)Worship and PracticeAllDiana's festival at her grove sanctuary on Lake Nemi, the Nemorensis, involved a priesthood held by the Rex Nemorensis, a title won and kept only by killing the previous holder in single combat after first breaking a bough from a sacred tree, a practice ancient writers themselves treated as strange and archaic. (1)Fortuna's oracle at Praeneste, the Fortuna Primigenia sanctuary, offered divination by lot, wooden tokens known as sortes drawn by a child, a practice that made her cult site one of the most consulted oracular shrines in ancient Italy outside of Delphi's Greek sphere. (1)Her April festival, the Cerealia, included chariot races at the Circus Maximus and a peculiar ceremony in which foxes were released with burning torches tied to their tails, a practice ancient sources connect to an old story of a farmer punishing a crop raiding fox, and which later commentators have read as ritualized protection of the grain fields from pests and fire alike. (1)Her festival the Matronalia, on 1 March, was kept by married women in her honour as Juno Lucina, protector of childbirth. (1)His festival, the Neptunalia, was celebrated on 23 July with makeshift shelters of branches, called umbrae, built against the summer heat. (1)Minerva was honored each March at the five day festival of the Quinquatria, a holiday particularly observed by craftsmen, students and schoolteachers, who traditionally suspended their normal work and received gifts from their pupils in her honor. (1)On the Veneralia, held April 1, Roman women bathed publicly at the shrine of Fortuna Virilis before ritually washing and redecorating Venus's own cult statue, a rite of purification undertaken ahead of the goddess's own festival day. (1)Proserpina's Roman cult drew directly on the Greek mysteries of Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, and the Ludi Tarentini, later folded into the Ludi Saeculares, invoked her jointly with Dis Pater as underworld deities whose favor was sought at moments of civic crisis. (1)Roman merchants marked the Mercuralia, held on May 15, by drawing water from Mercury's sacred spring near the Porta Capena and sprinkling it over themselves and their wares, a purification rite meant to wash away the dishonesty that trade was thought to invite. (1)Roman religious practice generally avoided naming Pluto directly in public ritual, addressing him instead through euphemism or through the associated underworld rites of the Ludi Saeculares, reflecting a broader Roman reluctance to invoke chthonic deities by name in ordinary religious life. (1)Roman worship of Bacchus centered on the Bacchanalia, ecstatic nocturnal festivals that the Roman state moved to restrict by formal decree in 186 BCE after alleging the rites had become a cover for criminal conspiracy, one of the few instances of the Roman government actively suppressing a religious cult rather than merely regulating it. (1)Saturn's festival, the Saturnalia, held in mid December, was marked by a temporary suspension of ordinary social order in which masters were said to wait on their own slaves at table, along with gift giving and public feasting that ancient writers linked to a nostalgic memory of Saturn's own mythical golden age of equality. (1)The Ludi Romani, held each September, honored Jupiter Optimus Maximus at his temple on the Capitoline Hill with games and a formal procession, and every incoming Roman consul opened their year of office with a public vow made at that same temple, tying the highest civic office directly to Jupiter's own cult. (1)The month of March, named for Mars, opened the Roman festival calendar with the Feriae Marti and the ritual dance of the Salii priests, who processed through the city bearing the sacred shields called ancilia while singing archaic hymns whose language even Roman antiquarians found difficult to understand. (1)The six Vestal Virgins tended Vesta's sacred hearth fire in the Roman Forum without interruption, since the fire's extinguishing was regarded as a grave omen for the state, and a Vestal who let it go out was formally beaten by the Pontifex Maximus. (1)BrowseCompareBacchusInterpretatio Of1 entryCaelusInterpretatio Of1 entryCeresInterpretatio Of1 entryDianaInterpretatio Of1 entryFortunaInterpretatio Of1 entryJunoInterpretatio Of1 entryJupiterInterpretatio Of1 entryLunaInterpretatio Of1 entryMarsInterpretatio Of1 entryMercuryInterpretatio Of1 entryMinervaInterpretatio Of1 entryNeptuneInterpretatio Of1 entryPlutoInterpretatio Of1 entryProserpinaInterpretatio Of1 entrySaturnInterpretatio Of1 entryVenusInterpretatio Of1 entryVestaInterpretatio Of1 entryVulcanInterpretatio Of1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Treetier 12. Greek Religiontier 1Walter Burkert, Harvard University Press, 1985chs. 2-4View the SourceDivinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptionstier 1Comments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? 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