Roman Religion and Mythology: Gods, Households, and Empire

For more than a thousand years, every important moment in a Roman’s life was marked by a religious act. The Romans sacrificed animals before every battle, before every harvest, before every meeting of the Senate, before the marriage of a daughter, before the launching of a ship, and before the opening of a new road. They kept household shrines to the gods of the pantry and the hearth. They consulted oracles about whether to go to war. They paid for the upkeep of countless temples in the city of Rome and in every provincial capital from Roman Britain to Roman Egypt. And at the end of the Republic, they began to worship their dead emperors as gods, founding a state religion that would outlast the empire itself. For the social context of all this, see Roman Society and Daily Life. For the part of it that became Christianity, see also Constantine the Great.

Roman religion was not a single thing. It was a layered set of practices: the formal state religion of the College of Pontiffs, the household religion of the Lares and Penates, the imported cults of the Mithras and Cybele, the philosophical religion of the Stoics, and, in the end, the world religion of the Christians. To understand the Romans, you have to understand all of these at once.

The Roman Pantheon

The Roman gods were a large and surprisingly well-defined crowd. The most important of them, the so-called Capitoline Triad, were Jupiter (king of the gods and protector of Rome), Juno (his wife, the goddess of marriage and childbirth), and Minerva (goddess of wisdom and crafts). Their temple on the Capitoline Hill in Rome was the religious center of the state, and a victorious general in triumph would climb the hill to give thanks to Jupiter for his victory.

Below the Capitoline triad came a host of major gods. Mars, the god of war, was the father of Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. Venus, the goddess of love, was the mother of Aeneas, the Trojan ancestor of the Romans. Vulcan was the god of fire and metalwork. Ceres was the goddess of grain and agriculture, and her Eleusinian Mysteries were among the most important of the Greek religious cults that the Romans adopted. Mercury was the messenger of the gods and the patron of commerce. Neptune was the god of the sea. Apollo was the god of healing, of music, and of prophecy, and his temple on the Palatine Hill in Rome was one of the great religious centers of the empire.

Smaller gods abounded. Janus was the god of doorways and beginnings, and the doors of his temple in the Roman Forum were closed in time of peace and open in time of war. Saturn was the god of sowing, and his festival of Saturnalia in late December — a time of gift-giving, role reversal, and general merriment — was the most popular of the Roman holidays. Bacchus (Greek Dionysus) was the god of wine. Hercules was the god of strength. Cupid was the god of erotic love. There were gods for almost every activity: Robigus for the rust on grain, Pomona for fruit trees, Silvanus for forests, Terminus for boundary stones, Fama for fame, Concordia for civic harmony, and Pietas for dutifulness to the gods and the family.

The Greek Influence

By the time Roman literature begins, in the third century BCE, the Roman gods had already been identified with the Greek gods in a complex process called interpretatio graeca. Jupiter was Zeus. Juno was Hera. Mars was Ares, though Mars kept many of his older Roman features. Venus was Aphrodite. Minerva was Athena. Apollo was Apollo in both cultures. The Roman gods of the historical period were, in their mythology, essentially the Greek gods with Latin names.

The Romans also imported many of the Greek myths almost wholesale. The poet Homer, working in the eighth century BCE, told the story of the Trojan War in the Iliad and the Odyssey; the Roman poet Virgil in the first century BCE retold the legend of Aeneas, a Trojan survivor of the war who sailed to Italy and founded the line that led to Romulus. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, written in the reign of Augustus, was a long poem collecting Greek myths of transformation, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar. For a general treatment of the Roman Republic, see the article on the Roman Republic.

Household Religion: Lares, Penates, and Genius

The official state religion was only one layer of Roman religious life. Just as important was the religion of the Roman household, which had its own gods and its own priests.

Every Roman home had a hearth shrine dedicated to Vesta, the goddess of the hearth fire, and a cupboard, the lararium, dedicated to the household gods. The Lares were the protective spirits of the household, usually represented as small bronze figures of dancing youths with a drinking horn and a bowl. The Penates were the spirits of the pantry, the household’s store of food. The Genius of the paterfamilias, the eldest living male, was a kind of divine spirit of the family head, and it was honored on his birthday and at the family meal.

Every morning the paterfamilias would lead the family in a short prayer and a libation of wine at the lararium. The slave who was to be freed that day would be led around the hearth. A girl about to be married would pass through the house, touching the hearth, before being led to her new home. When a child was born, a silver coin was placed in the lararium, and a sacrifice was offered. When a member of the family died, the household cult was briefly suspended. The household religion of Rome was a complete system for marking every significant moment in a family’s life.

Priests and Colleges

The state religion of Rome was managed by a number of priestly colleges, the most important of which was the College of Pontiffs, the collegium pontificum, headed by the Pontifex Maximus. The pontiffs were responsible for the calendar, for the correct observance of religious ritual, and for the keeping of the public religious records. The office of Pontifex Maximus was held by the emperor from the time of Augustus, and it remained the title of the Christian popes long after the empire had fallen.

Other major priestly colleges included the Augurs, who interpreted the will of the gods by watching the flight of birds, the behavior of sacred chickens, and the patterns of lightning; the Quindecemviri sacris faciundis, the “Fifteen for the performance of sacred rites,” who guarded the Sibylline Books and consulted them in times of crisis; the Fetials, the priestly diplomats who declared war and ratified peace treaties; and the Vestal Virgins, the six priestesses of Vesta who kept the sacred fire burning in the Temple of Vesta on the Roman Forum. For more on the Vestals, see the article Who Were the Vestal Virgins?.

A Roman priest was not a full-time religious professional. Most priesthoods were held by senators and other senior officials, and the religious duties were performed alongside a political career. The Vestals were the major exception: they were chosen as children, served for thirty years, and lived in a residence on the Forum. Breaking their vow of chastity was punishable by being buried alive, and the priestesses who served out their term were given an honorable pension and the right to marry.

Mystery Religions

Alongside the state and household cults, the Roman world was home to a number of mystery religions, secretive initiatory cults that promised their members a better fate after death. The most important of them were the Mithraic Mysteries, the cult of the Magna Mater (Cybele), the cult of Isis from Egypt, and the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Persephone in Greece.

Mithras was a Persian god of light and contracts, whose cult spread across the Roman world in the first through third centuries CE. Initiates progressed through seven grades of initiation, gathered in underground temples for ritual meals, and swore oaths of secrecy. Mithraism was almost exclusively a religion of soldiers, and it is often claimed (though the evidence is thin) that it was the chief rival of Christianity in the third century.

The cult of Cybele, the Great Mother of the Gods, was officially brought to Rome in 204 BCE, in the middle of the Second Punic War, when a black meteorite was brought from Pessinus in Asia Minor. The cult involved ecstatic rites, music, and self-castration, and it was always considered foreign and slightly disreputable by Roman standards.

Isis, the Egyptian goddess of the moon and of magic, came to Rome with the conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, and her cult was widely popular across the empire. Isis promised her initiates rebirth after death, and her cult emphasized the role of women and the importance of ethical living. The temple of Isis at Pompeii has been one of the best-preserved examples of an Egyptian-style sanctuary in Italy. For the world in which these cults spread, see Roman Society and Daily Life.

The Rise of Christianity

In the midst of all this, in the reign of Tiberius, an obscure Jewish preacher in a backwater of the empire was crucified by the Roman governor Pontius Pilatus. Within three centuries, the cult of Jesus of Nazareth would replace the cult of Jupiter Optimus Maximus as the official religion of the Roman state. The story of how this happened is one of the most extraordinary in human history, and it belongs as much to the history of Roman religion as to the history of Christianity.

The early Christians were Jews, and Christianity was, in its first decades, a Jewish sect. The decisive break came when the apostle Paul of Tarsus argued that the new religion should be opened to gentiles, and when the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE — an event of the Flavian dynasty — removed the central institution of Jewish worship. The new religion spread along the roads of the Roman Empire, through the Greek-speaking cities of the eastern Mediterranean, and into the major urban centers of the west.

The Roman state’s first response to Christianity was sporadic persecution. Nero blamed the Christians for the great fire of Rome in 64 CE, and executed some in his gardens. The emperor Trajan and his correspondent Pliny the Younger established the policy of toleration with administrative caution that governed Roman religious policy until 250 CE: Christians were not to be sought out, but if they were formally denounced and refused to recant, they were to be punished. Persecutions under Marcus Aurelius, Septimius Severus, and Decius were severe but local, and the number of martyrs in the first two and a half centuries was probably small.

The first empire-wide persecution was the Great Persecution launched by Diocletian in 303 CE. For the politics of this, see Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Within a decade, the emperor Constantine had legalized Christianity with the Edict of Milan in 313 CE, and within a century the old gods were gone from the official cult of the empire. In 380 CE, the emperor Theodosius I declared Christianity to be the only legal religion of the state, and the ancient temples were closed or destroyed.

The Survival of the Old Gods

Paganism did not die suddenly. The philosophical religion of the Neoplatonists, headed by Plotinus and Porphyry in the third century and Proclus in the fifth, kept the old gods alive in educated circles for centuries. The emperor Julian the Apostate (361 – 363 CE) tried to revive the traditional religion and failed. In the countryside, the old gods survived in folk practice for centuries after Theodosius; the Christian missionary Boniface was still chopping down the sacred oak of the Germanic god Donar in the eighth century.

What replaced the old gods was not, in fact, a new set of gods. It was a new kind of religion altogether: a religion based on scripture, on a single personal God, on ethical living, and on membership in a universal community. The Roman gods had been local, official, and tied to the city of Rome. Christianity was universal, exclusive, and tied to no single place. The transformation of the Roman religious world was the deepest change of the imperial period, deeper than the political crises of the third century, deeper than the division of the empire, and deeper than the fall of Rome itself.