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.
Historian Franco Cavazzi dedicated hundreds of hours of his life to creating this website, roman-empire.net as a trove of educational material on this fascinating period of history. His work has been cited in a number of textbooks on the Roman Empire and mentioned on numerous publications such as the New York Times, PBS, The Guardian, and many more.