Roman Pantheon

Religion as practice

Roman religion was above all a matter of correct practice: sacrifice, vows, festivals, and the reading of signs, carried out by magistrates and priestly colleges on behalf of the state, and by heads of households for their families. Belief mattered less than keeping faith with the gods (pax deorum) through ritual done properly. The major priesthoods, the pontifices headed by the pontifex maximus, the augurs, the Vestal Virgins, and the flamines of individual gods, were held by members of the governing elite.

Native gods and Greek stories

The earliest Roman gods, Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, Janus, Vesta, and many small powers of house and field, had few myths of their own. From an early date Rome absorbed Etruscan and Greek influence: the Capitoline triad of Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva had an Etruscan-style temple dedicated, by tradition, in 509 BCE, and Greek gods such as Apollo were adopted outright. Roman writers then identified their gods with the Greek Olympians (Jupiter with Zeus, Juno with Hera, Minerva with Athena), so that much of what is called Roman mythology is Greek mythology told in Latin, above all in Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Rome's own myths

The myths the Romans developed most fully were stories about Rome itself: Aeneas's flight from Troy and his arrival in Latium, told in Virgil's Aeneid; Romulus and Remus and the founding of the city, and the early kings, told by Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus; and the origins of festivals and cults, explained in Ovid's Fasti and Varro's lost Antiquities, known through quotations. These are political myths, tying the gods to the city's history and destiny.

Change and end

Under the empire the cult of the deified emperors joined the state religion, and cults from the eastern provinces, such as those of Isis, Cybele, and Mithras, spread widely. After Constantine's conversion Christianity was favoured, and laws under Theodosius I in the 390s banned public sacrifice; the fire of Vesta was put out and the Vestals disbanded. The date 476 used here marks the end of the western empire, not a single moment when the old religion ceased.