Roman Deities (God's)
Background Information |
The Romans believed that gods controlled their lives and, as a result, spent a great deal of their time worshipping them. 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.
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Some of the main Deities
http://www.roman-empire.net/children/gods.html
BeliefsAncient Rome Spirits |
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..As Rome expanded and grew, the Romans came in contact with people who worshiped other gods. If those people had fought extremely well, the Romans figured that their gods must be pretty good, so the Romans adopted those gods and made them Roman gods as well. They gave those gods Roman names. The Romans loved the Greek gods so much that they adopted the gods and all the myths and legends about them. They changed some of the personalities of the ancient Greek gods to better fit the Roman way of life.
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Background Information
The Romans had thousands of gods. They believed that there were spirits and guardian gods for everything. Trees, rocks, streams, bridges, everything had its own guardian spirit or god. There were guardians gods for your house and even for the different parts of the house. There was a kitchen god, a door God, a bath god, and of course a sleeping god. The gods had a job - to take care of the people of the house, to watch over and protect them. If you or your family were forgetful about proper worship or the giving of sacrifices to the gods, then bad things would happen to you. The Romans blamed everything that went bad on people forgetting to worship the gods properly.
Spirits
The ghosts of the ancient Romans are referred to as shades of the dead, who were honored or propitiated by means of festivals throughout the year. This isn't very different from our honoring the dead in the festival period from Halloween through the Day of the Dead. There were several types of Roman ghosts, particularly Manes (Di manes), Lares, and Lemures. The ghosts were also known as umbrae (which translates as 'shades', as in "umbrella"), imagines, and species. The behavior of the shades varied, but there isn't a real consensus among the ancient sources on which shade did what. The Manes were generally considered benevolent. Some of the ghosts harassed the souls of the dead in the Underworld, according to the Apocolycyntosis of Seneca and the Natural History of Pliny. These may have been the souls of those who died prematurely or violently, or both. There were official days for propitiating the shades of the dead with beans. One of the holidays for the shades was the Lemuria, which Ovid said came from Remuria, a festival instituted by Romulus to appease the shade of his murdered brother Remus. The shades were physically described as immanes suggesting immensity and shapelessness, much like our representation of ghosts as swirling transparency.
Beliefs
The ancient Romans believed that after death their souls became spirits or shades of the dead. There is some debate about the nature of Roman shades or spirits.
The theologian Augustine Bishop of Hippo (A.D. 354 - 430), who died when Vandals attacked Roman Africa, wrote about the Roman shades a few centuries after most of the literary, pagan Latin references to such spirits.