Ask Lemmy

Because the Roman's are the ones who conquered Europe so their standards and customs got passed along.

As medieval and renaissance scholars regained interest in the pagan past, they wrote about it in latin. That's why we still largely use the latinized names.

These scholars used latin partly because it was the lingua franca of their elite audience, but also that way the only people who could read it would have had a proper church education. And thus less likely to be lead from the path of righteousness by these pagans and all their wicked thinkin'.

This practice of using latin for religiously risque material continues well into the modern period, where the sexy parts of native american myths were marked by an abrupt shift into latin. I believe the first scientific account of penguin necrophilia was written in latin as well.

The classical Romanization was more accurate in its time—the issue is that the common pronunciation of classical Latin changed after the classical era (for instance, the “c” became soft in many contexts, instead of always being pronounced as “k” as it was in classical Latin).

If you use the original classical pronunciation for Latin, you’ll also pronounce the classical romanized Greek names correctly—and if you spell them the classical way you’ll recognize them more easily in Latin sources. The modernized romanization is most useful if you’re only interested in Greece and not in the classical world as an integrated whole.

Presumably for the same reason we say Rome and Florence instead of Roma and Firenze. Just as England has been heavily influenced by French culture, all of Europe has seen things through the prism of the Roman Empire.

One reason might be that the Greek versions were made more for the Greek alphabet.

Update: I confused name variants with names in the final part🤦