Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (37 page)

But a new star was rising in the Mediterranean. A small tribe of Indo-European speakers
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on the Tiber River, living near the future city of Rome, had begun to build an unparalleled empire that would, over the course of the next three hundred years, dominate and control the entire Mediterranean world and well beyond. These warriors first entered Greece in 229 BCE, and, in 146 BCE, sacked Corinth, and soon all of Greece became a Roman province. Instead of forcing their own myths and gods on the people they conquered, the Romans quickly absorbed the ideas and cultures of the conquered, especially the Greeks, whose glorious legends and stories they adopted as their own.

Roman mythology, in fact, largely seems a copy of Greek mythology. As Thomas Cahill put it, “Of the many people of Earth, the Romans may have had the most boring religion of all…. Contact with the impressive stories of Greek mythology and the thrilling art that accompanied them—a contact that began as a result of the Greek colonization of southern Italy—encouraged the Romans to dress up their own religion in Greek fashions.”

From ancient times, the earliest Romans did possess a mythology of their own. In fact, many of the basic similarities between Roman and Greek mythology can be traced to the common Indo-European heritage shared by Rome and Greece. Before the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, they worshipped the gods of their direct ancestors, the Latini, who may have arrived on the Italian peninsula around 1500 BCE and were on the future site of Rome by about 1200 BCE. The native Romans had many of their own gods, including three major deities—Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus—who are known as the “archaic triad.” Jupiter ruled as god of the heavens and came to be identified with Zeus. Mars was god of war and occupied a much more important place in Roman mythology than did Ares, the war god of the Greeks. Quirinus, an agricultural god, eventually faded from prominence, absorbed by the Greek gods.

By the late 500s BCE, the Romans replaced the archaic triad with the “Capitoline triad”—Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva—a name that came from the Capitoline Hill in Rome, where the main temple of Jupiter stood. In this new triad, Jupiter remained the Romans’ chief god. They identified Juno with the Greek Hera, and Minerva with Athena. It was during the 300s BCE, as the Romans came into increasing contact with Greek ideas, that they began to worship Greek gods and goddesses, gave them Roman names, and built temples and shrines in their honor.

Between the 500s and 100s BCE, additional Roman mythological figures appeared, nearly all of them based on Greek divinities. Besides Greek-inspired divinities, the Romans worshipped many native gods and goddesses, including Faunus, a nature spirit later connected to Pan; Pomona, goddess of fruits and trees; Terminus, god of boundaries; and Tiberinus, god of the Tiber River.

The earliest Romans had believed that gods and goddesses had power over agriculture and all aspects of daily life. For example, Ceres was the goddess of the harvest and became associated with the Greek Demeter. Her festival was the Cerealia, a ceremony held in April (and the source of the word “cereal”). Her daughter Persephone became the Roman Proserpina. The goddess Vesta guarded the hearth fire and was associated with Hestia. The god Janus stood watch at doors and gates. As such, Janus looked both ways and controlled beginnings, which is how his name gets connected with the first month in the Roman calendar, January. Jupiter, later the supreme Roman god, was first worshipped as a sky god with power over the weather, which, obviously, connected him with Zeus. (Their names are also connected, according to most linguists, by the same Indo-European root words for “sky.”) Liber, the ancient Roman god of wine, became associated with Dionysus and was also called Bacchus.

Despite the connections to Greek myths and deities, as Rome grew into a republic and then an empire, its religion was very different from that of the Greeks. It is true that, like the Greeks and other ancients, average Romans frequented temples, made sacrifices, embraced superstition, believed in the power of “augury,” or divination, became fixated on astrology, and honored household deities. But the Romans were far less interested in myth or theology than they were in raw power, order, and Roman glory—enforced through military superiority and the rule of law known as Pax Romana. This is what made Rome tick, as the empire came to dominate the European and Mediterranean world. The Romans were far more concerned with building good roads on which their legions could travel than imposing their mythic traditions on the people they conquered. In fact, historian Charles Freeman notes, “Roman tolerance to local cults and even their readiness to join them was one important way in which the empire was cemented.” When Julius Caesar and Augustus were both deified after their deaths, ushering in an era of emperor worship, it was a consolidation of political power, not a new theology. But it was one which the Roman citizen was wise to acknowledge.

Who were Romulus and Remus?

Unlike the Greeks, the Romans considered their divinities historical persons and used the myths to explain the founding and history of their nation. The best example of this historical emphasis is found in the story of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome.

Romulus and his brother, Remus, were the twin sons of the war god Mars (Greek Ares) who had raped Rhea Silvia, the first of the vestal virgins, as she was bathing. For breaking her vow of chastity, Rhea Silvia was imprisoned and her babies taken from her, set afloat on the Tiber River in a small boat.
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When the boat came to rest, the infant boys were found and rescued by a woodpecker and a she-wolf—the sacred animals of Mars. The she-wolf cared for the pair until a shepherd discovered the twins and raised them.

The pair became hunters and warriors who were so respected that men agreed to live under their rule in a new city. Romulus and Remus decided to build a city at the spot on the Tiber where the she-wolf had found them. But at the founding, a bitter quarrel erupted between the brothers, and they fought. Romulus killed his brother and wept over his corpse. Recovering from his grief, Romulus built the new city of Rome, supposedly in 753 BCE.

In the city at first settled only by runaway slaves, bandits, and murderers, and with a dangerous shortage of women, the Romans realized that they needed wives. When a nearby group called Sabines came to a religious festival, the Romans rushd through the crowds, seizing the young Sabine women as captive brides, an incident frequently depicted in classical art as
The Rape of the Sabine Women
. This episode was followed by a fight between the Sabine tribes and Rome. At the request of Jupiter, the Sabine women stood between the opposing armies and demanded peace. The Sabines eventually joined Rome.

The Romans believed that Romulus became the city’s first king, and, according to Roman mythology, he ruled for forty years before vanishing in a thundercloud. Romulus was supposedly the first of seven legendary kings who ruled Rome from its founding until the early 500s BCE. There is little evidence that these seven kings actually existed or that any of the events connected with their reigns ever took place. But it made for a good ending to the story of Rome’s epic foundation.

Was Homer on the Romans’ reading list?

Apparently so. Those Romans knew a good thing when they saw it. The national epic of ancient Rome, the
Aeneid
, is largely modeled on the great Greek epics, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
.

A complex poem celebrating Roman virtues and giving the new empire a glorious past, the
Aeneid
was written by the Roman poet Virgil (also sometimes spelled Vergil) between 30 and 19 BCE. Virgil chose the mythical Trojan hero Aeneas, son of the goddess Aphrodite and Anchises, a prince related to the royal house of Troy, as a way of expressing Rome’s ancient moral and religious values. Composed to honor Augustus, the first emperor, who was later believed to be a descendant of Aeneas, the
Aeneid
comprises twelve books. The first six of these books imitate the
Odyssey
by describing Aeneas’s adventures at sea following the capture of Troy by the Greeks.

As the
Aeneid
begins, Aeneas and his Trojan followers have survived a shipwreck and reach Carthage, a city actually founded by the Phoenicians in North Africa about 800 BCE—hundreds of years after the
Iliad
’s Troy might have fallen. Once ashore, Aeneas meets and falls in love with Carthage’s Queen Dido, and recounts for her court the fall of Troy: the well-loved story of the wooden horse, the tales of Sinon and Laocoon; and his own escape. Then, just as Odysseus had regaled the Phaeacians with his tales in the
Odyssey
, Aeneas spins the long history of his adventures.

Dido and Aeneas are soon caught up in a steamy romance, but the gods have Roman destiny to worry about. They order Aeneas—the soul of that destiny—to leave Dido. In despair and anger, Dido commits suicide, cursing Aeneas and his descendants with her dying words. Later, after reaching Italy, Aeneas goes down to the underworld—where he encounters Dido and his dead father—and learns about his future descendants, the Romans. He returns to the upper world and, with his followers, lands at the mouth of the Tiber River in Latium.

Virgil based the last six books of the
Aeneid
on the
Iliad
, and these begin as Aeneas arrives near the future site of Rome. There, the local king, Latinus, offers him land for his people and marriage to his daughter, Lavinia, who had already been promised to a local king. War erupts between the locals and the Trojan survivors. The battle is hotly contested, and finally Aeneas and the rival king agree to settle the conflict by single battle. Aeneas wounds his opponent, and is about to show him mercy when he sees a reminder of a friend he had lost—as Achilles had lost Patroclus. He plunges his sword into the breast of the warrior king.

Aeneas founds a town called Lavium, after his wife, Lavinia, before he dies in battle. Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, later moves the town to Alba Longa, where twelve generations—or 450 years—later the twins Romulus and Remus are born.