this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2024
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Rough Roman Memes
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Explanation: Roman and Greek religion are commonly confused, or else Roman religion accused of 'stealing' the gods wholesale from the Greeks. The truth is much more complex - while the Romans saw Greek gods, like any other nation's gods, as their own gods under a different name (Mercury is Hermes, just like Mercury is Odin), and there was a great deal of cultural exchange between the Greeks and Romans, Roman religion was Italic in origin and had significant qualities that set it apart from the Greek worship of the gods.
There is only a little native Roman mythology about the gods, however - in very typical Roman fashion, it seems that that the gods existed and that it was important to keep contracts with the gods was enough for them - why bother with pretty little details with that practical concept settled? In that, the Romans took a great deal of Greek mythology about the great deeds and histories of the gods and accepted it without further questioning.
Love the idea of Greece telling all these stories and Rome just like "damn that's crazy" the whole time
Greeks: "We MUST understand the esoteric details and histories of the gods if we are to appease them!"
Romans, using a stock phrase after listing a god's known names: "Quocumque nomine (by whichever name [you are called])"
Literally just "Mars, or whoever it is we're sacrificing to..."
I count thirty-three "faces" of Mars that made the wikipedia cut. Mars only knows how many more there are.
Meanwhile, the Romans to the Jews and Christians: "FFS, what is the big deal? Just pick one that sounds like your guy, and maybe throw a chicken to the emperor while you're at it. Why are you making this so hard?"
One of my 'favorite' stories of Christian persecutions in the Roman Empire is an account of a Roman magistrate pleading with a Christian defendant to just make the damn sacrifice. Goes and says "Please make it, you don't have to believe in it, if not for your life, to spare your family the grief of you dying" to "I am forcing you. This is coercion. Therefore, this isn't on your soul. Please, just make the sacrifice" and finally "I will literally move your hands for you. None of this has to be on you. You will not be making this ritual in the eyes of any god, just fulfilling the law's need. Just let me do that, and you can go free", and every time the Christian refuses.
When insistent ritualism meets unyielding belief.
Another 'favorite' is of a man who was executed for 'obstinacy' (the usual charge towards non-citizen Christians who refused to make the proper sacrifices), only for the magistrate to have a whole bunch of Christians show up at his house a few days later proclaiming themselves and begging to be martyred as well. Frustrated, the magistrate tells them that if they want to die so badly, they can go home and kill themselves instead, and stop bothering him.
They also trace their myth of origin byck to the heros Aeneas, son of Aphrodite (Venus) and a Trojan prince. So it's somehow inherent that the Greek and Roman gods are identical.
To be fair, that was a very late innovation. The entire era of the Republic had no such myth; it comes from a wholesale invention in an epic poem commissioned by Emperor Augustus. By the time that bit of mythology came about, Roman religion was already very established in its own right.
How the hell is Mercury both Hermes and Odin ? I'm no theologist and I don't know that much about the specificities of the Roman pantheon, but I thought that Hermes would be much closer to Loki than Odin
It's recorded by Tacitus, himself somewhat pro-Germanic, that the Germanics worshipped Mercury as their chief god, who, he said, they called Wodan (itself the Low German word for Odin).
The Romans were not known for their cultural sensitivity, lmao.
The thinking is probably either "Mercury is a traveling god, Odin is a traveling god - obviously they are the same" or that both Odin and Mercury are the gods associated with leading souls to the afterlife.