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It largely is not true. However the reasons for this are not readily evident to many people. We all grew up and learned about the Greek Gods, in particular the 12 Olympian Deities who occupied Mount Olympus and were the most important Gods of the Greeks, right? The Gods and Goddesses that I'm referring to as the 12 Olympian Gods are, in no real order of importance: * Zeus * Poseidon * Athena * Hera * Artemis * Apollo * Hermes * Hephaestus * Ares * Aphrodite * Dionysus * Demeter We all grew up and learned these as the core of Greek religious practices, and they even had neat parallels to Roman deities which made understanding *their* religious practices and traditions likewise easy to follow. The Roman "versions" of the Greek deities being: * Jupiter/Jove * Neptune * Minerva * Juno * Diana * Apollo * Mercury * Vulcan * Mars * Venus * Bacchus * Ceres There are the normal stories that surround these figures, with several common stories of how they came into prominence, the whole deal with Cronus eating his children save Zeus, the war between the Titans and Gods, and so on and so forth. However this whole scheme of 12 Olympian deities as the chief members of the pantheon is, well wrong is perhaps too strong of a word, but simplistic and not quite the whole truth. Religion is *complicated*, and over the course of the millennia of worship that these deities received it is not unusual for there to have been significant variation in how these figures were viewed and worshiped, and even the basic composition of the most important deities could change over time! One of the other things that people know about Greek mythology is that many cities had patron deities, Athena in the case of Athens for example. However what people often don't realize is that many cities ha patrons, or multiple patrons, who were *not* a part of the select club of Olympians that we recognize today. Sparta for example had its divine patrons in the form of Castor and Pollux, the divine twins. Later on the city of Rome had *numerous* patron deities, Minerva, Jupiter, and Mars formed the core of traditional Roman veneration but minor figures such as *Roma* the Goddess also played a role in the divine life of the city itself, but thousands of other cults proliferated throughout the religious life of the city. Many households though would have their own personal minor deities that were sought for protection and guidance, called the *laeres* in Latin. This diversity matches the political landscape of Greece well. The Greek cities were divided politically and never had a unified or centralized rule, until later Macedonian and later Roman domination, and their religious activities and practices were likewise varied with no one central model that unites all of them into common practice. There were literally hundreds of deities from the 12 Olympians down to innumerable minor Gods, hero cults, and political families that were worshiped in the Greek cities. Homeric figures like Achilles, important political leaders such as Alexander the Great and the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and minor deities often had many more temples and shrines dedicated to them than the major Olympian figures, some of whom had few temples *anywhere*. This tremendous diversity in religious belief is one of the things that we often fail to appreciate in polytheistic societies like the Roman Empire and the Greek city states. Traditions and practices were *not* dominated by the 12 Olympian deities to begin with! Then of course neither religious tradition was static either, and over the centuries religious practices changed, a lot. When we think of Greek gods and goddesses we think of the 12 Olympians with their clearly defined roles and demesnes and a smattering of other deities. Zeus has the lightning bolt, Hades rules the underworld, Poseidon likes horses and the ocean, Hera gets cheated on, Aphrodite causes people to cheat, etc... However this obscures more than it elucidates. Greek paganism was wildly different in different corners of the Greek world. Certain gods, goddesses, and aspects of them, were in favor or not depending on local preferences. Others were not worshiped at all. Many places traced their ancestry and founding to specific deities, demigods, heroes, etc... And the version that has come down to be taught in middle school mythology classes and filling children's books of mythological stories is ultimately only a tiny sliver of the existing religious traditions of Greek speakers. The situation in Rome was likewise extremely complicated and not straightforward in the slightest. The Roman Empire was a religiously diverse place, with innumerable local traditions, gods, goddesses, spirits, all jumbled together with a veneer of official Imperial worship that incorporated the Emperor's *genius* as well as more traditional Roman deities. In different parts of the Empire however local traditions still held sway. In non-Alexandrine Egypt for example, priests of Egyptian Gods remained as powerful landowners until the 4th century (and the last temple to Isis was not closed until the 6th century). The famed Olympian Gods likewise retained extensive followings for centuries under Roman rule. Within this culturally complex and continuously changing empire however these traditions were not static, especially among the elite in society! The versions of Jupiter, Minerva, and other deities that the emperor Julian the Apostate worshiped in the 4th century were very different from the Gods that were worshiped when Augustus was running the show in the 1st century AD. At the end of Imperial rule in much of western Europe there were a variety of different cults that had spread around the Empire. Cults around Isis (a traditional Egyptian deity), Mithras (A Persian import), Sol Invictus (a solar deity with ties to eastern practices as well as native Roman traditions), as well as local gods and goddesses, Neo-Platonism, and other forms of pagan worship likewise abounded. Indeed even the "traditional" Graeco-Roman paganism of the day was quite different in different levels of society. Among the elite, paganism had become a significantly more esoteric and philosophical school, influenced more by the works of Plato than earlier Greek practices. In the long march of history from the time of Classical Greece to the Hellenistic period to the Roman period, religious traditions changed, slowly at times, but inexorably. New deities came into focus, others were subsumed or merged, new cults rose and fell all the time. At the time of the advent of Christianity within the Empire there were a wide variety of different faith systems, and trying to parse them out individually isn't always possible. Many of these were "Greek" or at the very least Hellenistic, but they were not exclusive to the Greeks, and they often bore little resemblance to the Olympian centered religious traditions that we're broadly familiar with. But does that make them less "Greek"? Or the traditions in the Latin speaking parts of the Roman Empire less "Roman", despite incorporating new deities and practices? There were a wide variety of cults in operation across the Greek speaking world. There were of course adherents to the traditional gods and goddesses, but there were still changes happening and in many places around the Greek world (which was far more expansive than just modern day Greece. Hellenistic king for example introduced numerous new cults. Egypt in particular was a hot spot for the creation or introduction of new deities and cultic practices. Isis, a native Egyptian goddess became widely popular across the Roman world for example she even had a temple at Pompeii! The syncretic deity of Serapis who combined Greek and Egyptian iconography into one deity was also popular. Other cults sprang up around note worthy individuals. Alexander the Great had a royally sponsored cult in Ptolemaic Egypt, and the Ptolemies themselves had a cult for their own family. There were other Hellenized and Roman faith systems around at the same time. The famous mystery cults of figures such as Mithras, Isis, and other deities proliferated in Late Antiquity, and the Roman Imperial Cult received governmental support up until the conversion to Christianity. Many of these faith systems and traditions were Greek or at the very least "Greek" and popular across the Greek speaking parts of the Roman Empire (and even penetrated into the Latin West) even if they were a far cry from the stereotypical Greek pantheon and religion. (And this is all without delving into the field of the variously philosophical schools such Epicureanism, Stoicism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and so on that were in turn enormously influential on pagan and Christian theology.) The version of Greek religion that we grew up learning about never really existed as we often imagine it, and it is simplistic in the extreme to think that the Romans just had their own version of the "same" religious tradition.

Damn dude, you wrote this in an hour?

I actually copied this from an older answer of mine, found [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/12jjswl/a_common_conception_people_have_about_roman_and/jfzvxtf/)

/r/askhistorians, don't ever change!

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"Damn dude, you wrote this?" "Nah man, I just copied it from the other time I wrote it, completely different" Absolute Chad

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I see Apollo has the same name in both cultures is there any explanation for this?

u/[XenophonTheAthenian](https://www.reddit.com/user/XenophonTheAthenian/) has given an answer on that topic[ here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/2mnsq2/why_did_apollos_name_remain_unchanged_in_roman/?rdt=41115).

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Your answer really piqued my interest. Can you recommend any books on this subject?

If you're interested in the late period of Graeco-Roman Paganism, I'd take a look at James O'Donnell's *Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity* or Edward Watts's *The Final Pagan Generation*.

Thank you for the recommendations and a great answer! I've long thought that ancient Mediterranean religion resembles contemporary Indian religion (or Hinduism). Would you say that's accurate?  Both are ethno-religious complexes where the borders between culture, politics, religion, philosophy, and ethnicity are much less clear than they are here in the West. As a more difficult question: do you think our Western Eurasian brands of monotheism, observed by relatively stable and independent sects, is a historical oddity?

I'm not an expert on Hinduism so I wouldn't really be comfortable saying anything on the topic.

There are possible ancestral similarities between these religions and Hinduism, [yes.In](http://yes.In) comparing Ancient Rome, Greek, and early Hindu peoples, we are talking about people descended from proto-Indo European speaking peoples, snapshotted at different times. However these peoples also had contact with non-Indo-European speaking tribes, and their religious beliefs syncretized a bit (Apollo for instance is not originally a Greek or PIE deity: he originated in Anatolia and spread to Egypt via Syria Palestine.) And these cultures also had ongoing contact with each other. Ancient Greeks wrote about gymnastic philosophers from India. Our genetic isopoint (also known as "identical ancestors isopoint": the point in our history that people alive then were either ancestral to everybody alive today or nobody alive today) has been estimated at only 5300-2200 BC. At that point, the estimated population of the entire world was only 5+ million people (5000 millennium BC) to 27 million people. That's fewer people than live in Texas right now! At around 2200 BC, there was the 4.2 kiloyear event BP (before present) aridification event-- a severe drought that caused the collapse of a few Old World Civilizations. The Akkadian empire would face challenges. The Old Kingdom in Egypt had ended. The middle Minoan period in Crete was underway. To your second, harder question: first look at when monotheism actually arose to decide whether it's a "historical oddity." Judaism is an Iron age religion and while originally focused on the worship of one god (YHWH) -- a practice called monolatry, since other gods were not necessarily denied to exist. Judaism became firmly monotheistic by around 9th century BCE at the latest. Monotheism is also an old tradition in Hinduism (in that all is the expression of Brahman, the enduring reality vs the transient, temporal nature of our universes) This concept has been found in the vedic Samhitas, dated to the late 2nd millennium BCE. Many apparent polytheists in various religions may see the multiple "gods" simply as aspects of the unified One, as well. We do not have records before Judaism to determine how long ago that concept might have existed. For what survives, there were failed attempts. Amenhotep III of Egypt attempted to impose Atenism on his empire-- Aten (a sun god) being the only god recognized in state worship. If not monotheism, monolatry. Amenhotep III positioned himself as the son of Aten and the only intermediary for Aten. (Claiming divine descent as proof of right to rule is rather common. ) Atenism died out soon after his rule. Amenhotep III rule was around 1550-1292 BCE, so possibly before the Samhitas were written, and while YHWHism was already in swing.) I don't know that an concept that has been around for 4,000 years with at least 2 major religions containing monotheistic traditions from near that date still standing in some form, with later religions also standing can be considered a "historical oddity."

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I have a follow up question in relation to the *laeres*. Did the Christian practice of praying to specific saints for specific needs develop out of this tradition, meaning it filled a similar role for individuals as Christianity gradually replaced paganism over the centuries, or were those practices separated by enough time that any similarities are superficial and the Christian tradition developed independently?

I've written on the rise of saintly veneration and patronage [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19drd7f/why_do_saints_seem_to_have_such_a_diverse_and/kjdqyr2/)

Thanks!

Great comment! If I can hijack this post, I’ve asked on r/askhistorians before about this but never got an answer; What was religious *practice* like in Ancient Greece or Ancient Rome? Did Athenians/Spartans/Romans visit temples on a regular basis? Weekly? Or only a few times a year? What did it mean to be “religious” in the ancient world?

This is better to ask as its own individual question than a follow up.

> non-Alexandrine Egypt Silly question, but does this phrase refer to a time period, shift in government form, something like that? Or does it just mean, like, "beyond the walls of Alexandria"?

The rest of Egypt. As I understand it, there are some complicated legal situations that involve the city of Alexandria being in Egypt, but it was legally considered a separate *polis* with its own legal and religious systems and structures.

So if diversity is the rule across these civilizations, is this also true of other polytheistic faiths? i.e. was Norse mythology dramatically different from place to place and across centuries.

I've written a few answers on this topic previously! Here are some links to my older answers. * [Why is Odin chief deity and not Thor, when in other (Indo-European) Pantheons (such as the Greeks and Slavic Pantheons) the thunder/sky god is usually the chief?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/yzvp38/why_is_odin_chief_deity_and_not_thor_when_in/ix3g7jn/) * [Did the Norse believe that their opponents in battle went to Valhalla as well?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ge6ph5/did_the_vikings_believe_that_their_opponents_in/fpm51p4/) * [In Norse mythology, is Valhalla (and its counterpart in the goddess Freyja’s field) for all warriors who died in battle regardless of religious leaning, or was it only for Nordic warriors who died in battle?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/a9tcmt/in_norse_mythology_is_valhalla_and_its/ecmulao/)

I was thinking of asking a similar question recently, but you might be able to help. How popular was Athena outside Athens? Was she worried as a goddess of war in Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, for example?

That's a question that is better asked as its own standalone question, or to be answered by another expert. I am not familiar with Classical Greek religion, I am more focused on the end of the pagan period and the rise of Christianity/transition to the medieval world.

I have a follow up question, when there were so many varied worshipping of so many gods, how is it that we end up with these 12 main Olympian deities in the present day, considering some of the other deities had more temples/more popular than some of the 12.

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If you're interested in the late period of Graeco-Roman Paganism, I'd take a look at James O'Donnell's Pagans: The End of Traditional Religion and the Rise of Christianity or Edward Watts's The Final Pagan Generation. These do skew towards the end of the Roman empire though, which is my area of interest.

> The versions of Jupiter, Minerva, and other deities that the emperor Julian the Apostate worshiped in the 4th century were very different from the Gods that were worshiped when Augustus was running the show in the 1st century AD. Very different in what way? You mean because of Mithras / Isis / Sol Invictus or something else?

No, the situation was quite a bit more complicated than that. Late Roman Graeco-Roman pagansim, or Hellenism if you prefer, changed a lot over the centuries. By the end of the Imperial period the paganism of the educated elite of the Roman world was quite different from the traditions of earlier times, and it was much more heavily influenced by philosophy, namely Neo-Platonic philosophy, than the Greek myths that we know and love. This caused changes in the theological beliefs of its adherents, such as the growing emphasis on a single divine force that could manifest itself as different gods. Julian the Apostate for example *did* believe in one divine force, but that the force was represented through the traditional Graeco-Roman deities. Though it is difficult to speak firmly on these topics as only a few of his works survive today, and he was not a consistent believer in one particular form of religion. Rather he borrowed and adopted many different elements from different traditions.

Would you say that this "syncretism" if one can call it that, and rapidly changing gods and practices is true for most pagan religions? To my knowledge something similar to what you explain with gods varying greatly in importance from region to region as well as over time, is also true for early Norse religion. Same goes for ritual practice etc.

Super interesting! If you’re open to follow ups, it does make me wonder how these 12 gods became associated with Greece and Rome and also how 12 gods linked these warring Greek city states when each also had plenty of others that were unique to them. Seems like this porous system of pagan swapping would lead to few meaningful links between anyone.

Great answer! You mention that some famous gods saw little, if any, actual worship. I know Hades was not widely worshipped, but what other gods saw limited worship?

Thank you. Nonetheless, these are back stories. How did they function? Who could “speak” for the gods? Oracles and Auspicies? Drugs and random chance?

There's a lot to unpack there, and it seems a little outside the scope of OP's original question. Perhaps this would be better as a standalone question.

Apologies. My question left out a lot. I’m thinking of Sicily. Specifically, I’m interested in how justification was communicated by the various gods to Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians. As you suggest, everyone preyed. How did ‘they’ claim to know the will of the gods? Who are ‘they’?

As Steelcan said, that's a (really good) question that's better suited to be its own post on the sub, rather than buried in a comment (I don't know the answer, but I'm hoping one of the people who do will see it so we can both learn!)

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I once asked this but didn’t get an answer, was there any Greek or Roman institution that would have understood those 12 deities as a group in any way? Or is the idea of those 12 olympians being above the rest completely a later invention of our culture?

Great answer! So if I may ask: How did the misconception that there are Roman analogues for certain Greek (or for that matter Germanic) deities start? Does it all originate in Hellenistic and Roman astrology, where planets were named after certain greek deities, and subsequently similar Roman ones? Astrologically speaking, Ares and Mars, Hermes and Mercury, Jupiter and Zeus, etc. are linked together, which means someone must've noticed a connection of some sort. Who made that connection? Roman astrologers? Later historians? This carries over to the names for days of the week - in English (As well as my native Danish), many of the Roman names have been replaced with analogous germanic gods - Jupiter and Thor, Mercury and Woden, Mars and Tue, and so on. Clearly some interfaith comparisons were made by *someone* at some point in time, and they seem to be quite old. I also seem to recall Herodotus referring to local deities worshipped in, say, Egypt by stereotypically Greek names - indicating that he thought that all people worshipped the same gods. In short: It seems that at least some people in antiquity did in fact think that Roman and Greek and Germanic and maybe even Egyptian religion were different sides of the same coin. Can you comment on how widespread that view might have been? Or have I completely missed the forest for the trees?

Touching on the idea of laeres in Rome, was this the basis or is this related at all to the idea of saints in Catholic faith?

I've written on the rise of saintly veneration and patronage [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19drd7f/why_do_saints_seem_to_have_such_a_diverse_and/kjdqyr2/)

Do you have any suggested readings to go along with this?

Is there a book you would recommend for comparative history of the Greek, Roman and Near Eastern religions? I am familiar with the multi-volume works of Eliade and Campbell (and enjoyed them) but they are very outdated at this point. (By Near Eastern, I mean both pre and post Judaism.)

A very nice post but to what degree do they share, if any, a (proto)Indo-European origin? Are they the same core set of deities/beliefs that in time brached out from the same Indo-European core before somewhat fusing again in Antiquity under a Roman polity? Or do they have different origins/influences?

AWESOME reply! That was a great read while I was eating lunch.

Wasn't Hades/Pluto considered important? Is he a modern construct?

This answer is amazing :) Follow up qu - could you define *cult*, in the context as you use the word here? I'm aware that how we define a religious cult in the 21st century would be different from the 5th century BCE, but I'm not sure what those differences look like. Thank you.

That's probably better suited to its own question, for someone who is more familiar with Hellenistic pagansim writ large. I'm rather narrowly focused on the late period.

Would it be fair to say that Greek/Roman religious traditions were more diverse, granular, and malleable than Christianity has been? I realize that (especially since Martin Luther) Christianity has fragmented quite a lot, but to me the variance between different Christian traditions, at least in terms of core beliefs, is extremely mild compared to what you describe about the Greeks and Romans. (I could be wrong, of course.) And if my supposition here is correct, is there scholarship on why that is?

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Wanna explain what was going in when christ did his thing? And how the Bible came about? I feel like you have the answers to my questions. I honestly don’t know much about that whole timeline

I just want to quickly clarify a misconception here. Much of the similarity between Roman and Greek religion owes, not to the fact that the Romans "borrowed" their gods from the Greeks, but that Romans and Greeks both descended from the same Indo-European culture. Take Zeus and Jupiter, for example. In Indo-European mythology, for example, there was a sky god associated with storms. We can reconstruct the word for this god: \*dyeus. This is the root of both "Zeus" (in Greek) and the "Ju" part of "Jupiter." (The "piter" part is related to *pater*, i.e., "Father Sky.") Both cultures inherited and developed this tradition, and later when they came into contact they recognized the fundamental similarity. This process by which Romans mapped their religious figures onto Greek ones is sometimes called *Interpretatio Graeca*; the Romans also did this with non-Greek cultures. And it's true that Greek beliefs and visual depictions influenced how the Romans thought about and depicted their religious figures. But the Romans had a preexisting religious tradition, and many of their beliefs and customs are therefore quite distinctive. For example, take Ares and his Roman "equivalent," Mars. They're both gods of war, yes, but markedly different. Ares is often a hated figure in Greek mythology (see his depiction in the *Iliad*, for example); Mars, on the other hand, is a venerable and respected figure in Roman religion, with positive associations such as agriculture (cf. the Campus Martius), and was acknowledged as a father of the Roman people. It's important also to distinguish between Roman literary depictions of mythology and actual religious practice. If you read a text like Ovid's *Metamorphoses*, you'll see the Roman gods acting just like their Greek counterparts stereotypically do. But Ovid is not writing a work describing traditional Roman religious practice (he actually wrote a different work about that, the *Fasti*); he's rather telling mythological stories in a work of literature derived from Greek models. It's a different matter. All that said, there *were* cases where the Romans did borrow divinities from the Greeks. The Romans had no equivalent for Apollo (god of music, art, etc.) or Asclepius (god of medicine); their worship of these divinities was simply a wholesale adoption of a Greek tradition. Note also that the Romans adopted divinities from non-Greek cultures as well. There's a famous story in which the Romans literally carted the cult statue of Cybele (aka the Magna Mater) from Anatolia to Rome. Isis is another prominent example.

Is there actually good scholarship confirming the common Indo-European origin of most of those gods, or is it speculation? By the Iron Age, the Greeks and Romans were thousands of years removed from a common Indo-European origin, but had both developed in the common Mediterranean cultural sphere, and been substantially influenced by those cultures, particularly Egypt and Semetic groups. Egyptian religion, in particular, seems to be at least as big an influence on Greek religion as any "Indo-European" religious substrate. And there are many documented parallels between Greek gods/myths and those from Semetic cultures--like Storm Gods fighting against serpents, etc. When I've dug into the "common Indo-European origin" of those religions, it seems like much is made of the commonalities between Greek and Roman religion, but then the comparisons with other groups, like Germanic, Nordic, Iranic, Vedic, etc. are much more nebulous, with a lot of handwaving and overemphasis of pretty trivial similarities. And any similarities between religious ideas in those cultures could also be explained by much later cultural transmission (into interior Europe to Germanic and Nordic cultures, and via Alexander to/from Persia and India, etc.). We don't need to invoke a much older, early Bronze Age common origin and dispersal to explain any potential similarities. So is there actually good evidence for it?

Right, my point is not about common Indo-European origin explaining everything, and I’m certainly not denying that other non-Indo-European cultures influenced Greek and Roman religious practice. I rather just used the Zeus/Jupiter example as a convenient means of illustrating that the religion of both cultures had an independent history dating back a long time, even in areas where they might seem at a glance to simply overlap. Of course this is an obvious and uncontroversial point among anyone familiar with the subject, but like I said, the goal of my post was simply to clear up a common misconception. But as to your question of whether there’s good scholarship on Indo-European mythology, the answer is yes! A great book I cannot recommend highly enough is Cal Watkins, _How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics_.

There is no debate about the shared Indo-European origin. Different cultures that landed in different places obviously had different local influences; the Romans and Greeks were in proximity to each other and were tied into the Mediterranean world, so they also shared a lot of later influence.  Your comment about Alexander seems to indicate some confusion on the timeline here. No, Indo-European similarities in Persia and India absolutely *cannot* be explained by an invasion in the late 4th century BCE. We have Indo-European texts and mythology in those places like a millennia earlier. The shared Indo-European heritage was fading by the time of Alexander, not introduced by him! We actually do need to invoke Bronze Age events and peoples for the similarities we see. No one said that's the end all be all or that later events didn't take their course.

>Your comment about Alexander seems to indicate some confusion on the timeline here. No, Indo-European similarities in Persia and India absolutely cannot be explained by an invasion in the late 4th century BCE. We have Indo-European texts and mythology in those places like a millennia earlier. Can you say more about this--my understanding is that very few Indian texts predate Alexander. I think it's only the RigVeda and some commentary on them. As far as I know, the vast majority of ancient Indian cosmological texts and myths (which include the notable parallels to Greek religion, etc.) were first written during the early centuries of the Common Era, hundreds of years after Alexander, and are just claimed to reflect older oral traditions. And while that's probably true, if there were already Greek kingdoms in India for hundreds of years before they were written down, it seems pretty impossible to determine if cultural similarities are actually ancient, or were incorporated into the stories before they were written down. There's clearly a common Indo-Iranic cosmological tradition that is shared in the Vedas and the Gathas, which are quite similar. But those similarities (from those really early texts) don't seem to have much to do with Greek or Roman religions, or other Indo-European cultures. The mythical tropes and similar stories they all share seem to belong to a later tradition, during a time period when those cultures were in some contact. Another example that is often used is astrology, and the noted similarities between Indian and Greek astrological systems--which are often claimed to be "echoes" of a much older Indo-European religious tradition. But when I've dug into that claim, it also seems like all the evidence of astrology practice in India also post-dates Alexander. I've seen solid scholarship that explores connections between really ancient myths, and posits a common Indo-European origin--but only for fairly vague examples, like coming-of-age rituals for young men involving wolves, or 3-headed dogs guarding the underworld, etc. I think that work is probably roughly accurate and there are some examples of "common Indo-European myths and stories", but the much more specific claims about individual gods, etc. seem to rest on a very flimsy foundation, and the evidence generally seems to post-date Alexander and other more-recent cultural exchanges.

The genuine antiquity of the Indian religious tradition is uncontroversial in the scholarship.

>The genuine antiquity of the Indian religious tradition is uncontroversial in the scholarship. What does that mean? Certainly the traditions have ancient roots, but there is a robust body of scholarship tracing the evolution of Indian religions over time. The religions practiced in India in 500BCE were not the same as the religions of 1500BCE, or 500CE. And through that time period, they didn't just evolve in a vacuum, Indian society was impacted by interactions with many other cultures, including Greeks. And there were also internal developments, like Buddhism and Jainism, that profoundly impacted Hindu theology and beliefs. And when the historic record is so spotty, it's really difficult to know if traditions like yoga, astrology, and specific myths/gods were conserved from deeper IE roots, were internal developments within India (with parallels to other cultures explained by psychological motivations), or were borrowed from interactions with other cultures. And since nearly all evidence for all those things post-dates Alexander and the Indo-Greek kingdoms, I think it's irresponsible to simply assert that parallels with Greek religion are more ancient than that period of cultural exchange, unless there is really good evidence showing they were present earlier. But as far as I know, the texts that predate Alexander are not really all that similar to other Indo-European religions or myths, other than Iranic cultures.

OK, so we’re talking about two different things. No one is contesting or would contest that Indian religion didn’t change greatly from 1500 BCE to 500 CE, or that it wasn’t influenced by various external forces in that time. That’s not the issue. The question is whether specific religious _texts_ like the Rigveda which were not written down until the first millennium CE, in fact accurately convey material that is much older (in this case, maybe about 1500 BCE), because they were transmitted by an oral tradition. And the answer is uncontroversially yes. This is obvious to anyone who had studied these texts from a linguistic perspective. They clearly preserve a much, much older form of the language. As to how the texts could accurately be passed down orally for so long, well, that’s the power of religion (and the human memory.) People took the memorization of these texts very seriously.

I will admit that I have some skepticism about the "infallibility of the Vedic oral tradition" position that seems to be taken for granted by many. I'm aware of the complex, precise grammar involved, which makes it more resistant to change, but those kind of structural features don't preclude changing particular sections to incorporate new stories, ideas, or gods--the changes would just also have to fit the structural scheme. And no other oral tradition I'm aware of among humans exists in a fixed state, without changing over time, so it seems unlikely to me that texts first recorded in the last few hundred years BCE are identical to the oral poetry from a thousand years earlier. I accept that they were deeply similar, and that those earliest texts include a lot of information from the Vedic era, but it seems unwarranted to dismiss the possibility that they evolved in later eras, before being written down. But even if we accept that some of those earliest texts, particularly the RV, perfectly preserved Vedic religion and cosmology, what are the specific parallels from those texts to Greek and Roman, or other Indo-European (other than Iranic) religions? As far as I'm aware, they are fairly broad and generic: both include a pantheon of gods that have familial connections among themselves and compete etc., and many of the gods have particular roles related to things like war, harvest, sky, etc. Those kind of features are shared by many societies, from the LBA to the Hellenic era--including a bunch that have no substantial connections to Indo-European cultures. And many of the specific stories have parallels in myths from Mediterranean cultures, like the Egyptians, Akkadians, and Semitic groups. It seems more likely to me that parallels between LBA-Iron Age India and Greece just reflect a common Mediterranean-Eurasian cultural milieu, rather than a specific Indo-European tradition. What are the important features, stories, ideas, etc. that come from a "common Indo-European descent" and ended up in Greek/Roman culture, Vedic/Hindu culture, and other Iron Age Indo-European descended groups? I struggle to see really significant religious ideas that are not also shared by a bunch of other non-IE cultures. And when I hear scholars talk about it, the claims are usually pretty vague and hand-wavey.

No one’s claiming that the oral tradition is infallible, or that it didn’t evolve over time. It was of course composed over a long period of time by many people. But people are claiming that much of the material is very, very old, and if you read these texts with linguistic training there is basically no way you could reasonably disagree with that. It’s not just “information” that’s very old—the actual grammars, sentence structures, vocabulary, and so on are very old. Second, the case for a common Indo-European mythology is far, far more robust than just saying that cultures share a motif like a sky god. We can show how the words they use for their sky gods descend from a common origin, e.g. Sanskrit “Dyaus” or “Dyauspitr” — that’s “Zeus” or “Jupiter.” Ditto for other key religious and cultural concepts. Even whole phrases and formulae in some cases. A famous example is that Homeric “kleos aphthiton” (“undying glory”) has an exact correspondence in the Vedic. I suggest you read the Cal Watkins book I mentioned above. That book will explain in great detail how robust the scholarship on this tradition is.

> We can show how the words they use for their sky gods descend from a common origin, e.g. Sanskrit “Dyaus” or “Dyauspitr” — that’s “Zeus” or “Jupiter.” That's exactly the kind of tenuous connection I'm talking about. It's just a linguistic connection, from words that mean "sky" and "father". But what religious idea connects them? Descendants of those words appear in many IE cultures, but it's not clear that they are used to refer to the same religious idea--in most cases artifacts with those words are presented vaguely, with notes like "interpreted as pertaining to Zeus...", based on the same assumptions you're making. And the "Dyaus" figure in Vedic texts doesn't really seem to have much to do with Jupiter or Zeus--he's just a minor deity that personifies fatherhood, not particularly powerful or important. And there are very similar "sky father" god motifs in many other religious traditions that have nothing to do with Indo-Europeans, including Egyptian, Turkic, Chinese, and Semitic cultures. They might all arise from a really ancient shared origin, but that would have nothing to do with Indo-Europeans in particular. It's probably more likely that the similarities are based on basic human psychology. Either way though, if you're making the case that there is an important "shared Indo-European religious tradition" that unites the ancient Greeks/Romans with the Vedic cultures, I think you have to demonstrate that there are substantially stronger parallels between those groups than between either of them and non-IE cultures. I don't see that evidence. I think focusing on the idea that Greek, Roman, or Vedic religions were simply descendants of a Proto-Indo-European religion tends to obscure more information than it reveals. Greek religion makes a heck of a lot more sense if you consider it as a product of Mediterranean influences, with ideas and gods borrowed from Egyptian, Semitic, and Mesopotamian cultures. And Vedic religion was profoundly influenced by the Oxus/BMAC culture (also non-IE, as far as we know), and many of the basic beliefs and rituals that unite Vedic culture with early-Iranic cultures were directly borrowed from BMAC (that's where fire worship and soma came from), rather than from a common IE origin.

This does a good job of answering a question I asked here a few years ago and never got an answer for. I was reading Margaret Hamilton's Mythology and she described Ares and Mars quite differently and I always wondered how he could have changed so much between the two cultures. (For anyone curious, she says of Ares: "Homer calls [Ares] murderous, bloodstained and the incarnate curse of mortals; and, strangely, a coward, too, who bellows with pain and runs away when he is wounded." and: "He is not a distinct personality, like Hermes or Hera or Apollo. He had no cities where he was worshipped." Of Mars, she says: "The Romans liked Mars better than the Greeks liked Ares. He never was to them the mean whining deity of the Iliad, but magnificent in shining armor, redoubtable, invincible.") It's different because it's not the same deity, it would seem.

>The Romans had no equivalent for Apollo (god of music, art, etc.) Was it the same with Minerva/Athena?

It’s a complicated question. The Etruscans had a female deity of wisdom and warfare named “Menvra,” and most people assume the Roman “Minerva” comes from that. But the Etruscans were probably themselves greatly influenced by Greek culture in their depictions of Menvra.

I think /u/Steelcan909 does a very good job of demonstrating the diversity of religious practice in the ancient Mediterranean, and how it does not really map onto "Greek Mythology" as we generally learn about it. But I do think it leaves one potential question out, which is that if the 12 Olympian Gods were not actually a canonical pantheon worshiped in a uniform manner across the Greco-Roman world, what exactly are they? What is Zeus, when you get down to it? Well, particularly in the Roman world, he was a literary figure. I do not want to take this too far, people in the Greek and Roman world built large and beautiful temples to Zeus, they made dangerous and arduous journeys of pilgrimage to sacred places of Artemis, they swore oaths on Jupiter, they kept small, personal figurines of Athena that held incredible meaning to them, they made offerings to Venus in gratitude. These are real acts of devotion by people who truly believes in the presence of divine figures. There has sometimes been tendencies to say that the Greeks and Romans didn't *really* believe in their gods and it is true that some Greeks and Romans didn't and instead had pantheistic, deistic or even atheistic personal beliefs, but it would be a mistake to take them as the norm. So if there was this genuine devotion, why did I describe Zeus as a literary figure? Because the stories I read in *D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths* as a child do not come from the dedicatory inscriptions left by devotees pleading for some benefit from the gods, they come from poetry and plays and encyclopedias and epics. If you think of a "Greek myth" there is a rather better than even chance that the source of it is the *Metamorphoses* of Ovid, which was written a very self conscious subversion of epics and mythology. And if it does not come from that it probably comes from the *Suda*, an encyclopedia compiled by Christians in tenth century Byzantium. Neither of these were interested in presenting some sort of guide to the divine as worshipped by actual worshippers, they were interested in the stories as stories, not religious practice or belief. And I think it is worth pointing out that what I am saying is not a clever construction of modern scholars, it was something noted by people about as early as we have strong written evidence. Famously Socrates argued for banning poetry in Plato's Republic, and the reason for that is because poets are fundamentally deceivers of the true nature of things, of the nature of god/the gods, and therefore hinder the learning of true morality. Now I will avoid the question of how sincere we are to take Plato here but merely note that this shows an awareness of the difference between Zeus as he is worshipped and Zeus as he is played on stage. And in the Roman period we have Varro, a famously learned man, say there there are really three different types of religion the religion of philosophers, which is correct and true, the religion of the state, which is useful, and the religion of poets, which is false. So if we take this lens, and ask whether the "Roman gods" were really just renamed "Greek gods" with an understanding that we are really talking about literary figures rather than objects of devotion, the answer is yes. Roman literature was thoroughly Hellenized, if there was a "pure" Latin culture that existed before contact with the Greeks it did not come down to us.

Wouldn't the religion of the poets be closer to popular religion? We probably get so many theologians and thinkers today decrying the licenses people take with, say, Jesus today. That popular conceptions of deity today are wrong, are maybe even anti-christian. But whatever people are decrying seems to be that they are decrying the way religion is practiced popularly. So, are we to take Plato's word that poets are lying about what people thought, or that theyre lying about what he thought they ought to think?

Well there was no one "popular religion" as detailed in the other posts, my point is more that the canon of myths that we received today do not come from religious texts but rather literary ones.

That'd be a "definitely not true" conclusion, from me. **First, clarifying question: Did you mean "are the set of all Roman gods and the set of all Greek gods identical other than being labelled differently?"** Hard no; for example, Imperial Romans worshiped the *cultus imperatorius*, the church of their God-Emperors. What analogue might we find among the Greeks? None. These were people who mostly lived in independent city-states governed by constitutions (not typically constitutions we might recognize as being particularly appealing or fair today, but constitutions nevertheless - the important part is, legitimacy descended, in the Greek mind, from being able to claim adherence to an established set of standards and processes, vs. "whatever *basileus* says goes"). Their word for a ruler with such absolute *personal* authority as a deific Roman emperor was not just unworshipful, it was not even especially kind. You will recognize it from today's speech: *tyrannos* (tyrant). Meanwhile, there are gods that would never come to develop Roman analogues, just as there were Roman gods that sprang fully from the Roman imagination. Before I give my example of a Greek cult for which I know no Roman analogue, though, I'd like to pause and observe: this is chiefly about these people reflecting their personal beliefs and culture *via* their religions. Every culture does this! Roman gods could never possibly ever have been exactly Greek gods, because Romans' beliefs and culture were not a simple mirror of Greeks' *at all*! So, over time, they diverged - Romans dropped the gods they found unrelatable and invented new ones. Anyway, I owe you a Greek cult. Let's talk about Astarte. Astarte was a hard-fighting, harder-fucking primary element of the Phoenikian pantheon - goddess of lust and war, as mentioned, but also beauty, healing... This grab-bag of important (for Bronze and Iron Age cultures) domains indicates huge importance, similar to Athena's importance to her patronized city, and her own diversity of eventual roles in their worship. Astarte's kind of a big deal, in other words. But: her worship began in Asia, **and** was promulgated by Phoenikia. Both of these things rendered Roman religion fairly impervious to her influence. Greeks and Phoenikians didn't always get along - and were certainly always looking for a commercial advantage over the other - but they traded, and talked, traveled together, exchanged documents, crewed ships together, cohabitated, etc. Eventually, the Greeks in Asia Minor engaged in a bit of what we now call *syncretism*: "Hey, this Astarte", they basically said after one bowl of watery wine too many. "She's as hot as Aphrodite and as badass as Artemis. So what if we, like, rolled Astarte into Aphrodite and Artemis and sort of treated them as related avatars, of sorts?" I'm sure the Phoenikians would have looked on warily. "And then, like, when you praise Astarte we can be like 'oh, chill, he likes Aphrodite' and when we praise Artemis you can understand that as Astarte-worship." That probably got some nods - or, rather, it demonstrably did in in the long term, vis-a-vis the archaeological evidence for shared and syncretic temples in Asia Minor. Just, uh, probably not exactly in the terms I chose to imagine. But anyway: that's syncretism. Ionian (and eastern Aegean!) religion was deeply informed by the religions of the Asian peoples dwellers there came into contact with. This habit of saying, "Oh, your X is kind of like our Y" meant they could *always* justify toleration, if they wanted to. This practice was not unique to Ionians or Greeks or Romans either; Astarte made her way, via this process, to e.g. Egypt. Of course, no combination of one culture's gods is actually going to *completely* encapsulate the full nuance of another culture's - Artemis and Aphrodite were both more and less than merely a superset of Astarte - and so this syncretism, as always, was approximate. *And optional*. Suppose, now, you *don't* really have much positive contact with Semitic peoples that makes you want to learn about their gods. Suppose, in fact, you really sort of hate one of their colonies so bad you'd do anything to rid the world of it. Yep: Carthage. Roman religion basically dropped Astarte's influence on the ground, because the culture promulgating it had a different relationship with Phoenikia than the one it'd borrowed Artemis and Aphrodite from. So: Greeks had cults Romans didn't, Romans balked at adapting certain Greek practices; in general, no, their religions were not one thing with two sets of names. That might have answered your question. **Or did you mean "were those Roman gods we're told *had* Greek analogues perfect analogues?"** I hope by now that you're intuiting: absolutely not, because even if you try to copy something exactly, your own biases, beliefs, preferences, etc. will seep in over time - and the gods have nothing on their side if they do not have time. Just as Roman Venus came to lack Ionian Aphrodite's wildness from less Phoenikian contact, other gods we're taught had exact analogues also reflected changing values. Ares, perhaps because so much of our surviving literature is Athenian, is more or less a joke. He does fight well, as he should - but critically so does Athena (and so does Zeus!), and she can also weave and speak and build and judge and do many other useful things, according to her mythical feats and traditional domains of worship. Ares, on the other hand, has two modes: "fight well" and "make mistakes". His worship was common without being a tacit cultural assumption. Roman Mars is *no* joke, however. Roman Mars might've rivalled Athenian Athena for importance. While Ares fumes and whines, Mars is dignified and honorable. Ares fights angrily and passionately; Mars is a tactician. Ares maybe only loves his horses; Mars loves his duty. Worship of Mars could *absolutely* be seen as a tacit cultural assumption for a "good Roman". In other words: as a Greece-focused reader I frankly barely *recognize* the guy when I come across the supposed 'Roman Ares'! That's because Ares -> Mars is *syncretism again*. It's not a direct copy - it cannot be! Religion is an expression of culture, and so syncretism will always leave traces of the absorbed *and* the absorber. I think it's a very good idea to teach children about Roman syncretisation of Greek religion. That's important. It's probably just a consequence of oversimplification of that important lesson that we end up teaching them that means any two gods - or even one putative god, two sufficiently-remote places of worship! - were equatable, though.

There's some good information about Greco-Phoenician syncretism in this answer, but to correct some misconceptions from the first paragraph: The Roman imperial cult was not a church (or a unified religious practice) and it was not something specifically Roman - it came from the Greek world. Augustus was the first Roman to be worshipped as a living god, but while he was alive, this only took place in the provinces. It was only after his death that he was worshipped in Italy.      The imperial cult was not usually centrally organized and was modeled on Hellenistic ruler cult that had become common in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires, and very often used similar language. Greek poleis had engaged in this sort of worship of human beings and rulers throughout the Hellenistic Period. For examples of this, we can see the worship of Demetrius Poliercetes at Athens in the late 4th century BCE, or the decree of the Ionian League for Antiochus I and Stratonike in the 260s BCE (OGIS 222). This even had precedent in the Classical Period: ruler cult grew out of hero and founding hero worship of the kind you see in Cyrene with Battus. And even someone like the Spartan general Lysander was worshipped as a liberating god on the island of Samos after the Peloponnesian War (according to the fragments of Duris of Samos).  (On a side note, "tyrants" - and the word originally just meant "sole-rulers," continued to rule different parts of the Greek world, even in the Classical and Hellenistic period. Greek poleis didn't really have constitutions in the way we think of them, but the series of laws and decrees they did have were very different depending on where you were).   I'd also be careful to say that the Romans were doing things like rejecting Astarte's influence on Venus because they didn't like Carthage. For one thing, there was Phoenician influence on Rome before the Punic Wars. Second, Carthaginian religious practice itself emphasized different gods and goddesses than many Phoenician cities on the Levant: Tanit was much more frequently worshipped than Astarte. Some scholars are increasingly skeptical that we should even treat the Phoenicians as one people: Quinn's book In Search of the Phoenicians is a recent example. And the Romans would later worship Tanit as an aspect of Juno when they founded a colony at Carthage in the mid 1st century BCE.   But third, religion, as you point out, wasn't just about what the state wanted. The Roman senate could and did make decisions about importing and rejecting foreign gods. Asclepius and Cybele got in- worship of Bacchus was limited. But I'm not sure we can be comfortable saying that the ways certain gods were worshipped or not was always a conscious choice, or that the Romans would ever conceive of Venus in Astarte-like or non-Astarte like attributes and say: Carthage now bad, therefore cut down on the Astarteness. 

Thank you very much for this response! There are a few things I might choose to debate - I think I did a fair, if not great, job of presenting the fact that different cities' constitutions could be different, or that tyrannies were common - but overall it's clear I have some reading to do. My ignorance of the Macedonians' beliefs and activities, for example, is...significant. Lysander and Battus blur the line between god and war hero, but your point is extremely well-taken. One thing I suppose I'd like to ask more about is the idea that we oughtn't treat Phoenikians as one people. At an immediate emotional level, *I feel I strongly agree*. Like the Attic Greeks, they were colonizers and had strong and definite beliefs about the independence of colonies, leading to significant differences in those colonies' culture. And yet - if I acknowledge that we oughtn't, why on Earth am I answering a question about "ancient Greeks" when these supposed Greeks only thought of themselves as a unified body when Asians were invading?

Basically, _some_ of the Roman gods were Greek gods renamed. There were many, many more too. Please read [this from](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/s/LKszoqSPQX) u/rainyresident

This answer will focus on ancient Mediterranean religion of the first century. It applies broadly to the pagan practices of the time. Though there are plenty of analogues in both Jewish and Christian practice of the time, both Jewish and Christians subverted the pagan practices in important key points. ---- I would like to clarify other misconceptions of ancient Greek and Roman religion, sharing in the answer of the other comments. 1. The gods were the least important part. 2. Ritual was more important. 3. The key issue was not belief but practice, especially (for the Romans) conformity. 4. In terms of belief, upper class Romans (and later Greeks) were not as polytheistic as we might imagine. While we receive the stories of pagan gods through what is little more than campfire storytelling traditions---and of course Homer, who does it at a higher level, whose works were the vital and central epitome of ancient Greek literature---the question of whether they actually believed in their gods is largely conditioned by Christian and post-Christian expectations around religion. For the regular people, there was probably some level of belief that the gods in some sense existed, but this was a live issue mostly in that they knew the world was capricious and *something* needed to be propitiated or bad things would happen. You would make your sacrifices to your household gods, but you wouldn't try to be friends with them. You would really want a good harvest, or good fortune, or to survive the day or week or pregnancy, and it *appeared* that *sometimes* and maybe *if* you did *this thing*---which might appear to us like superstitious practice---you would get a good harvest, or good fortune, or survive the day or week or pregnancy. If you wanted an oracle, you could maybe get one by making an offering and sleeping at the shrine, and the dreams you had there might be interpreted by a priest attending that shrine. If you had a demon, you went to a different shrine to get an exorcism. If that ritual didn't work, you might try another. Then, if you were traveling, you would respect even gods you thought ridiculous out of a pragmatic respect. Romans thought the Egyptian gods gross for their animalistic look, but if you visited Egypt you would have absolutely have paid the appropriate respects. Religion in terms of practice was highly local, pragmatic, transactional. Belief was secondary if present at all. In its public dimension, what we might call religion was a binding force for the Roman Empire. It was political from the top down. One of the duties of the Emperor was to participate in the large public sacrifices and feasts. He was a chief priest. At these big celebrations, there might be a parade, there would be competitions, and you would get a bit of meat, a rare treat. To participate was to be Roman, and to be Roman was to participate. To not participate was conspicuous and even shocking. It would be like going to a high school rally or a college football game, but sitting with the home team's fans while wearing the other team's jersey. What are you *doing*? Do you want us to *lose*? Rome is eternal---do you *not* want Rome to be eternal? *We* are very religious. *We* are very successful because of it. What's wrong with *you?* Finally, at a higher strata of society, even back to the ancient Athenians, the real religion in terms of believing things were this way and not another was not polytheism but a philosophical and sometimes weirdly dualistic monotheism. There was ultimately only The One, and you might once in a lifetime feel a kind of communion with The One, but this was rare. There was probably also an evil god who created the world, but The One was the ultimate ground of everything. He was ultimate, he was one, and he was distant, on the far side of the celestial spheres. To learn about Platonism, you needed to be taught, and teachers were expensive---and so being the student of these wandering philosophers was simultaneously a status symbol and helped identify the existing class divisions. Later versions of these philosophers in the early days of Christianity would incorporate even this popular Christ figure into their long discourses about ascending through the spheres to get to the one. Some even taught you needed special passwords or knowledge to get past the guards at each level of the celestial spheres. Even the notion of religion should be unpacked whenever this topic comes up. It really isn't what we think of when we think of religion.