The Roman Pantheon of Gods

The Romans believed in many different gods and goddesses. For everything imaginable they had a god or goddess in charge. Mars for example was the god of war. This meant he was good at fighting and it meant that he had most of all the soldiers at heart. A Roman soldier would hence most likely pray to Mars for strength in battle.

But Minerva was the goddess of wisdom, intelligence and learning. Not many soldiers would ask her for help. But perhaps a schoolboy would ask her to help him learn his grammar or understand his maths better ! Or the emperor would ask her to give him wisdom so that he might rule the country wisely. And so, the Romans indeed had hundreds of different gods. This entire collection of all their gods was called the Pantheon.

The Romans gods were from a strange mixture of influences. Before Rome became a big city, the area around it, called Latium, was settled my superstitious villagers, the Latins, who believed in many gods and spirits. As Rome grew into a city and began to become more powerful it came into contact with the Greeks, who had a complex Pantheon of their own. It seems that the Roman gods were a mix of those two main influences; Latin and Greek. In many cases the Romans found there was a Latin and a Greek god for one and the same thing. They tended to take the two and make them one. So for example, Vulcan, was the old Latin god of fire. But the Greeks had a god called Hephaistos, who was very similar. And so the Romans just mixed the two together and made them one. Paintings or statues of Vulcan generally showed him as a blacksmith, like the Greek Hephaistos, but his name still was the Latin Vulcan.

NAME	ORIGIN	CHARACTERISTICS
Annona		Mythical personification of the annual food supply
Apollo	Greek	Good of healing and prophecy
Asclepius	Greek	God of healing
Attis	Phrygian	Beloved of Cybele
Bacchus	Greek as Dionysos	God of wine
Bellona		Goddess of War
Bona Dea		The ‘Good Goddess’; unnamed spirit whose rites were attended only by women
Cardea		Household goddess of door hinges
Castor & Pollux (Dioscuri)	Greek	Two legendary heroes
Ceres	Greek as Demeter	Goddess of agriculture
Consus		God of the granary
Cybele	Phrygian	See ‘Magna Mater’
Diana	Greek as Artemis	Goddess of light, also unity of peoples
Dis	Greek as Pluto	God of the underworld
Faunus	Greek as Pan	God of fertility
Flora		Goddess of fertility and flowers
Forculus		Household god of doors
Fortuna (also Fors, Fors Fortuna)		Goddess of good luck
Genius		Male spirit of the Roman family
Glaucus		A sea God
Hercules	Greek as Herakles	God of victory and commercial enterprise
Hermes		See Mercury
Isis	Egyptian	Goddess of the earth
Janus		God of doorways
Juno	Greek as Hera	Goddess of women
Jupiter (English Jove)	Greek as Zeus	God of the heavens
Juturna		Goddess of fountains
Lar (plural Lares)		a Spirit of the household
Larvae (or Lemures)		mischievous spirits of the dead
Liber		God of fertility and vine growing
Libitina		Goddess of the dead
Limentinus		Household god of the threshold
Magna Mater	Phrygian as Cybele	The ‘Great Mother’, goddess of nature
Magnes		Spirits of the dead
Mars		God of war
Mercury	Greek as Hermes	God of merchants
Minerva	Greek as Athena	Goddess of crafts and industry
Mithras	Persian as Mithra	God of the sun
Neptune	Greek as Poseidon	God of the sea
Nundina		Presiding Goddess at the purification and naming of children
Ops		God of of the wealth of the harvest
Osiris	Egyptian	Consort of Isis
Pales		God/Goddess of shepherd
Penates		Household spirits of the store cupboard
Picumnus & Pilumnus		Agricultural gods associated with childbirth
Pomona		Goddess of fruit
Portunus		God of harbours
Priapus		God of fertility in gardens and flocks
Quirinus		State god under whose name Romulus was worshipped
Robigus		God of mildew
Roma		Goddess of Rome
Sabazius	Phrygian	God of vegetation
Salus		God of health
Serapis	Egyptian	God of the sky
Saturn	Greek as Chronos	God of sowing
Silvanus		God of woods and fields
Sol	Helios	God of the sun
Tellus		Goddess of earth
Terminus		God of property boundaries
Venus	Greek as Aphrodite	Goddess of love
Vertumnus (also Vortumnus)		God of orchards
Vesta	Greek as Hestia	Goddess of the hearth
Volturnus		God of the Tiber river
Vulcan	Greek as Hephaistos	God of fire

With the vast size of the empire, there was of course many new gods from distant civilizations which the Romans learnt about. Romans didn’t tend to think that only their gods were the right ones. If they heard of other peoples’ gods (such as Isis, Pan, or Mithras) they would think that these were real gods who watched over other parts of the world and whom they had simply not yet heard about. And so as they learned about these new gods, new temples were built to these new arrivals in the Roman pantheon.

In the year AD 312 something very important happened, something which should change Roman religion forever. The emperor Constantine the Great said he had had a sign from the god of the Christians in a dream in the night before he had an important battle. Emperor Constantine won this battle and thereafter showed his gratitude to the Christian god by turning his entire empire over to this new religion.
So, successful was emperor Constantine at this conversion that the Roman empire remained Christian forever. If the countries of the western world are largely Christian today, then it is because of emperor Constantine’s decision.