Home›Roman Deities›Child OfBrowse ByChild OfThis page groups deities by their divine parent, the genealogical link myths use to connect one god to another. The Greek poet Hesiod's Theogony is the clearest ancient example of this kind of divine family tree, its very title glossed by Wikipedia as meaning "the genealogy or birth of the gods". Browsing by parentage lets a visitor trace how a mythology builds its gods into generations rather than treating each one in isolation.FactsLearn MoreChild OfSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsOverviewWhat Defines This GroupingWell-attestedThe gods of Roman public and household religion, a tradition defined more by correct performance of rite and by divine function than by narrative. Rome's major gods were progressively identified with Greek ones and much of the myth attached to them is Greek; the archaic priesthoods, the festival calendar and figures such as Janus and Vesta are where the native religion is clearest. 2AttestationEra of AttestationWell-attestedAttested from the sixth century BCE in inscriptions and in the archaic festival calendar; the public cult ended with the imperial legislation of 391 to 392 CE. 2Veneration TodayWell-attestedThe public cult was ended by law in late antiquity; no continuous worship survives. 2DirectoryCategoryWell-attestedDeities 1Learn MoreThe gods of Rome This group holds the deities of ancient Roman religion. Roman worship began with native Italic and household gods and a strong sense of divine functions and rites, and over time identified its major gods with those of Greece, adopting much of Greek myth in the process. The browser will find the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva, along with Mars, Venus, Neptune, Mercury and the rest of the Olympian equivalents, as well as distinctively Roman figures such as Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings, and Vesta of the hearth. The entries note the Greek counterpart of each syncretised god.Child OfFilter Results6 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)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)Bearded, enthroned king with the thunderbolt, sceptre, eagle and aegis (1)No independently attested cult image of Maia survives. What Roman sources record is the rite, the flamen Volcanalis sacrificing a pregnant sow to her on the Kalends of May, rather than any physical likeness, and ancient writers themselves could not settle which Maia the rite honored: Macrobius records the dispute between the earth goddess paired with Vulcan and the Greek Pleiad imported as Mercury's mother without resolving it, leaving no single visual tradition to describe. (1)Rarely shown alone in ancient art, typically depicted fleeing Hera's persecution or standing beside her twin children Apollo and Artemis soon after their birth on Delos. (1)The oak is his tree (1)The thunderbolt, the eagle, the sceptre and the oak; enthroned and bearded. (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 (1)Childbirth (1)Earth (1)Fertility and generation (2)Justice, law and oaths (2)Kingship and sovereignty (3)Marriage and the household (1)Motherhood (2)Protection and guardianship (1)Sky (2)Storm and thunder (2)Era of Attestation End YearAll391 (4)400 (1)Era of Attestation Start YearAll1400 BCE (1)700 BCE (1)600 BCE (2)500 BCE (1)300 BCE (1)GenderAllFemale (4)Male (2)Historical NoteAllBeyond 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)She took a fearful revenge on Niobe, whose children Apollo and Artemis slew for her boasting, and turned insolent Lycian peasants into frogs; the Romans called her Latona. (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)HistoricityAllLegendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record (1)Not a historical person: a divine or other-than-human being (5)Key TextAllJuno 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)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)The Roman month Maius, May, was popularly believed in antiquity to take its name from Maia, though ancient writers themselves offered competing derivations, some tracing it instead to maiores, the elders, a dispute reference works on Roman religion still note as unresolved. (1)LineageAllDaughter of the Titans Coeus and Phoebe, and by Zeus the mother of the twin Olympians Apollo and Artemis. (1)Hesiod's Theogony makes Zeus the youngest child of Cronus and Rhea, swallowed and later disgorged by his father before leading his siblings in the Titanomachy that won him the kingship of the cosmos. (1)Maia is named in Greek tradition as eldest of the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione, and as mother by Zeus of the god Hermes, conceived in a secluded cave on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia where she lived apart from the other gods. (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 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)Mythic AssociationAllIn the Greek reading identified with Mercury's mother, Maia bore him on Mount Cyllene in Arcadia, and the infant god is said to have stolen Apollo's cattle and hidden the theft on the very day of his birth, a tale carried into Latin literature along with her name. (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)Leto, pursued by the jealous Hera during her pregnancy by Zeus, was refused shelter everywhere until she found refuge on the floating island of Delos, where she gave birth to the twins Apollo and Artemis. (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)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)Zeus deposed his father Cronus and the Titans in the war called the Titanomachy, then divided the cosmos with his brothers Poseidon and Hades, taking the sky as his own domain. (1)Observance NoteAllRoman tradition held it unlucky to marry during the month of May, the month bearing Maia's name; ancient writers connected the taboo to the otherworldly, propitiatory character of the month's festivals, including the Lemuria for the restless dead, setting May apart from months considered auspicious for a wedding. (1)Origin AccountAllThe Roman Maia was worshipped alongside Vulcan at the start of May, and later identification of this Italic goddess of growth and increase with the Greek Pleiad Maia, mother of Hermes, is generally read as a later syncretism; the month of May is traditionally derived from her name. (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)Leto's name has no secure Greek etymology and has been connected to Lycian and other Anatolian sources, though the derivation is debated. (1)Maia's name is generally connected by ancient and modern etymologists alike to a root meaning great or elder, cognate with the Greek megas, fitting her standing as the eldest of the seven Pleiades and, by Zeus, mother of Hermes. (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)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 Zeus continues an inherited Indo-European word for the daytime sky, cognate with the Latin Iuppiter and the Sanskrit Dyaus. (1)Principal Cult CentreAllDelos (1)Olympia in Elis, and the oracle at Dodona in Epirus (1)The Aventine temple of Ceres, Liber and Libera at Rome (1)The Capitoline temple at Rome, and the sanctuary of Juno Sospita at Lanuvium (1)The temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline Hill at Rome (1)The Volcanal at Rome, where the flamen Volcanalis sacrificed a pregnant sow to her every year on the Kalends of May (1)Scholarly Standing DetailAllRoman antiquarians themselves disagreed about which Maia this is. Macrobius reports Cincius's view that Vulcan's sacrificial consort and the Greek Pleiad who mothered Mercury are one goddess, justified by the flamen Volcanalis's own May Day sacrifice; other ancient writers treated the earth goddess of the Volcanal and the Greek Pleiad as two figures merged only by a shared name and a shared month. No married-to edge to Vulcan is recorded here for that reason; the child-of edge to Mercury follows the reading his own entity record already carries. (1)Standing as a Comparative CategoryAllDebated (1)Status Within the TraditionAllNot formally addressed by this tradition (2)TheologyAllPolytheistic: many gods (6)Veneration TodayAllHistorically attested; no continuous cult (6)Worship and PracticeAllHer 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)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)Zeus received burnt sacrifice at open air altars, most famously at Olympia and at Dodona, where his will was read from the rustling of a sacred oak. (1)BrowseCompareCeresChild Of1 entryJunoChild Of1 entryJupiterChild Of3 entriesLetoChild Of1 entryMaiaChild Of1 entryZeusChild Of1 entrySources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Treetier 12. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th editiontier 1Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.), Oxford University Press, 2012s.v. religion, RomanView the SourceDivinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptionstier 1Comments (0)No comments yet. 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