Roman gods are not just Greek gods with new names. Rome had its own gods long before it met Greek myth, and over several centuries it matched them to Greek gods with similar jobs: Jupiter to Zeus, Juno to Hera, Neptune to Poseidon, Minerva to Athena. Most stories came from Greece; the temples, festivals, priesthoods and much of each god's character stayed Roman. Apollo is the one major Olympian who kept his Greek name.
Greek and Roman gods: the full name map
| Greek name | Roman name | Domain | What changed in Rome |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zeus | Jupiter (Jove) | Sky, thunder, kingship | Jupiter Optimus Maximus, best and greatest, was the god of the Roman state, worshipped on the Capitol with Juno and Minerva. |
| Hera | Juno | Marriage, wives, childbirth | One of the Capitoline Triad. Rome's mint worked at the temple of Juno Moneta, which gave us the word money. |
| Poseidon | Neptune | Sea, earthquakes, horses | A minor Roman god with almost no myths of his own; nearly every story told of Neptune is Poseidon's. |
| Demeter | Ceres | Grain, harvest | Shared an Aventine temple with Liber and Libera and became a goddess of the plebeians. Cereal comes from her name. |
| Athena | Minerva | Wisdom, crafts, strategy | Reached Rome partly through the Etruscan Menrva. Honoured above all as patron of craftsmen. |
| Apollo | Apollo | Prophecy, music, healing | Same name. Rome first worshipped him as a healer; Augustus made him a personal patron. |
| Artemis | Diana | Hunt, wild animals | An old Latin goddess with a famous grove at Aricia, beside Lake Nemi. |
| Ares | Mars | War | Far more honoured than Ares: father of Romulus, guardian of the state and protector of fields. March is named after him. |
| Aphrodite | Venus | Love, beauty, desire | Through her son Aeneas, mother of the Roman people. Julius Caesar claimed descent from her. |
| Hephaestus | Vulcan | Fire, the forge | First of all the power of fire, asked to keep fire away from the city. The craftsman stories came from Greece. |
| Hermes | Mercury | Messengers, travel, trade | Above all a god of merchants, with a temple near the Circus Maximus from the early Republic. |
| Dionysus | Bacchus (Liber) | Wine, ecstasy | Bacchus is a Greek title; the native god was Liber Pater. In 186 BC the Senate harshly restricted Bacchic rites, as Livy records. |
| Hades | Pluto, Dis Pater | The dead | Pluto is the Greek Plouton, the wealthy one; Dis means rich. Orcus was an older Latin name for death. |
| Hestia | Vesta | The hearth | A central state cult: an undying fire in the Forum, tended by the Vestal Virgins. |
| Persephone | Proserpina | Queen of the dead | Ovid tells her abduction twice, in Metamorphoses Book 5 and Fasti Book 4, set in Sicily. |
| Eros | Cupid (Amor) | Desire | The winged boy archer of Hellenistic art. Apuleius gave him the tale of Cupid and Psyche. |
| Cronus | Saturn | Harvest, the Golden Age | In Virgil he flees Jupiter to Latium and rules a golden age there. His temple held the state treasury. |
| Gaia | Terra (Tellus) | The earth | Received pregnant cows at the Fordicidia, described in Ovid's Fasti. |
| Helios | Sol | The sun | In AD 274 the emperor Aurelian built a temple to Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun. |
| Selene | Luna | The moon | Poets often merged her with Diana. |
| Eos | Aurora | The dawn | Mostly poetic; Ovid tells her grief for Memnon. |
| Heracles | Hercules | Hero, later a god | One of Rome's oldest altars, the Ara Maxima. Virgil and Livy tell how he killed the monster Cacus there. |
| Asclepius | Aesculapius | Healing | Brought from Epidaurus during a plague in the 290s BC. |
| Pan | Faunus (loose match) | Wild places, flocks | A loose match. Faunus was a Latin god of woods and prophecy; Ovid links the Lupercalia to both him and Pan. |
| Nike | Victoria | Victory | Her altar in the Senate house was removed by Christian emperors in the late 4th century AD. |
For their powers in myth, see Greek gods and their powers.
Are Greek and Roman gods the same?
Partly. Romans and Greeks alike treated the pairs above as one god under two names, so Ovid can tell how Minerva and Neptune competed for Athens without any sense of changing the myth. But in Rome each god had a cult that was older than the match and kept going after it.
Reading a foreign god as one of your own is called interpretatio. The phrase comes from Tacitus, who says in his Germania that twin gods of a Germanic tribe were, by Roman interpretation, Castor and Pollux. Herodotus had already matched Egyptian gods to Greek ones.
The match was never exact, and three Roman gods show why:
- Mars is the clearest case. Homer's Ares is a god even Zeus finds hateful. Mars was the father of Romulus and Remus, a state guardian who stood with Jupiter and Quirinus in Rome's oldest triad, and a farm god too: in Cato's On Agriculture, a farmer purifying his land prays to Father Mars to keep away disease and bad weather and let crops and herds thrive.
- Vesta mattered far more than Hestia, who had a share of every sacrifice but almost no stories. Vesta's state hearth was never meant to go out, kept by six Vestal Virgins who served for thirty years. A Vestal who broke her vow of chastity was buried alive.
- Saturn was a kindly farming god whose December Saturnalia turned the social order upside down. The Greek Cronus is mainly the father who swallowed his children.
Why do the Romans have different names for the Greek gods?
Because they were not Greek gods to begin with. Jupiter, Juno, Mars, Vesta, Ceres and Diana are old Latin and Italian gods with Latin names. Jupiter even shares a root with Zeus: both names go back to an ancient word for the bright sky, and the Latin Iu-piter is literally sky-father.
Meeting Greek poetry, art and religion, Romans paired each of their gods with the Greek god whose role looked closest, and the Greek myths attached themselves to the Roman name. Where Rome had no native god for a role, it borrowed the Greek one with its name, which is why Apollo stayed Apollo.
The Etruscans, Rome's northern neighbours, made the same kind of matches early on: their Tinia corresponds to Zeus, Uni to Hera, Menrva to Athena, Turms to Hermes and Fufluns to Dionysus.
Which Roman gods have no Greek equivalent?
Several of the most important ones:
- Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings. January is named after him, and the doors of his shrine in the Forum stood closed only when Rome was at peace. In Ovid's Fasti, the poet asks Janus what he is, since Greece has no god to match him.
- Quirinus, an old god of the Roman people, later identified with the deified Romulus. With Jupiter and Mars he formed an archaic triad, each with his own senior priest, the flamen.
- Bellona, a Roman war goddess with a temple vowed in battle in 296 BC. Greek writers paired her with the minor goddess Enyo, but her cult was Roman.
- The Lares and Penates, the household gods: the Lares watched over house and family, the Penates over the storeroom. In Virgil's Aeneid, Hector's ghost entrusts the Penates of Troy to Aeneas, who brings them out of the burning city to Italy.
Rome also worshipped deified qualities such as Concordia, Fides and Pietas, and many small gods with one narrow job each, lists Augustine mocks in his City of God, drawing on Varro.
When did Rome adopt the Greek gods?
Gradually, over centuries, with no single moment of adoption. Rome learned Greek religion through the Etruscans and the Greek colonies of southern Italy, such as Cumae and Naples. In crises, the Sibylline Books, Greek oracles kept by the Roman state, repeatedly told Rome to bring in Greek gods and rites.
Some milestones Livy records:
- The 430s BC. A temple to Apollo the healer, vowed during a plague.
- 399 BC. The first lectisternium, a banquet at which images of the gods were laid on couches and offered food.
- The 290s BC. Aesculapius brought from Epidaurus to end another plague. Ovid tells the story near the end of his Metamorphoses: the god travels as a great serpent and slips ashore on the Tiber Island.
- 217 BC. After the disaster at Lake Trasimene against Hannibal, Livy describes a lectisternium for twelve gods on six couches, each Roman god paired as a couple: Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Vulcan and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres. That is the Roman twelve, matching the Greek Twelve Gods.
By the age of Augustus the fusion was complete in literature, though Roman cult practice never fully became Greek.
Is Apollo the same in Greek and Roman mythology?
Yes, and he is the only major Olympian to keep his name. Rome had no native god of prophecy, music and healing to match him with, so it took him as he was, first as a healer, Apollo Medicus. Augustus, who credited Apollo with his victory at Actium, built him a temple beside his own house on the Palatine and placed the Sibylline Books there.
Roman poets also call him Phoebus, a Greek epithet meaning bright. The myths are the Greek ones: the Python, Daphne, the laurel.
Which planets are named after Roman gods?
All the planets except Earth carry the names of classical gods, and all but one are Roman names. The five naked-eye planets were already linked to gods in Babylonian astronomy. The Greeks called them after their own gods, such as the star of Zeus, and the Romans translated those names into Latin.
The two planets found by telescope were named later to fit the pattern:
| Planet | Roman god | Greek god | How it got the name |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mercury | Mercury | Hermes | Ancient |
| Venus | Venus | Aphrodite | Ancient |
| Mars | Mars | Ares | Ancient |
| Jupiter | Jupiter | Zeus | Ancient |
| Saturn | Saturn | Cronus | Ancient |
| Uranus | None (the Roman sky god was Caelus) | Ouranos, the sky | Found by William Herschel in 1781. He wanted to name it after King George III; the astronomer Johann Bode proposed Uranus, the father of Saturn. |
| Neptune | Neptune | Poseidon | Found in 1846 after its position was predicted mathematically. |
Uranus is the only planet with a Greek rather than a Roman name. Saturday is still Saturn's day.
In the sources
The Roman side comes from Latin writers. Livy's history of Rome records the temples, the lectisternia and the legend of Mars and Romulus. Ovid's Fasti, a poem on the Roman calendar, explains festival by festival which god is honoured and why, while his Metamorphoses retells Greek myths under Roman names. Virgil's Aeneid gives Rome its divine origins through Venus and Aeneas. Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods has Roman speakers debate what the gods are, and Cato's On Agriculture preserves farmers' prayers to Mars.
Varro, the great Roman antiquarian of the 1st century BC, wrote the fullest study of Roman religion, but it is lost. We know it mainly through the late antique bishop Augustine, who quotes and attacks it in City of God. According to Augustine, Varro said the Romans worshipped their gods without images for more than 170 years, and divided theology into the myths of the poets, the theories of the philosophers and the cult of the state. Augustine was writing to refute Varro, so his selection is not neutral.
The sources often disagree:
- Who named June? Ovid opens Book 6 of the Fasti with three goddesses each claiming the month: Juno, Juventas (the Roman Hebe) and Concordia. He refuses to judge between them. Book 5 does the same for May, offering three explanations of its name.
- Was Mars really the father of Romulus? Livy reports that the Vestal Rhea Silvia named Mars as the father of her twins, but adds that she may have believed it or may simply have thought a god a more respectable partner to blame.
- How many Jupiters? In Book 3 of Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods, the sceptic Cotta lists several different Jupiters, Mercuries, Vulcans and Venuses with different parents, to show how tangled the inherited genealogies were.
In popular culture
- The Heroes of Olympus. Rick Riordan's sequel to Percy Jackson adds Camp Jupiter for the children of Roman gods, and gives each god a Greek and a Roman side with different personalities. That split is Riordan's invention; ancient writers treated Jupiter and Zeus as one god.
- Hercules (Disney, 1997). The hero has his Roman name, but his parents are Zeus and Hera under their Greek names. In the Greek myths Hera is Heracles' enemy, not his mother.
Frequently asked questions
Are Roman gods the same as Greek gods?
Not exactly. Rome matched its own gods to Greek ones and took over Greek myths, but kept its own temples, festivals and character. Mars and Vesta mattered far more in Rome than Ares and Hestia in Greece.
What is the Roman name for Zeus?
Jupiter, also called Jove. Both names go back to an ancient word for the bright sky, and Jupiter means roughly sky-father.
Which god has the same name in Greek and Roman mythology?
Apollo. Rome had no native god to match him, so it adopted him with his Greek name.
What is the Roman name for Hades?
Pluto, from the Greek Plouton, the wealthy one, or Dis Pater, the rich father. Orcus was an older Latin name for the underworld and death.
Which Roman god has no Greek equivalent?
Janus, the two-faced god of doorways and beginnings. In Ovid's Fasti the poet tells Janus that Greece has no god like him. Quirinus and the household Lares and Penates are also native Roman.
Why did the Romans copy the Greek gods?
They did not simply copy them. Through the Etruscans and the Greek cities of southern Italy, Rome paired its own gods with Greek gods of similar roles, and the Greek myths attached to the Roman names.
Is Cupid Greek or Roman?
Cupid is the Roman name for the Greek Eros, the god of desire. Roman art kept the image of a winged boy with a bow, and Apuleius told the story of Cupid and Psyche.
Keep exploring
Start with the king in Who Was Zeus?, the hearth goddess Rome turned into a state cult in Hestia in Greek mythology, and the full set in Greek gods and their powers. Compare another pantheon in Norse vs Greek gods, trace the family on the Greek gods family tree, or find your match with Which Greek god are you?