LogFAQs > #877479401

Lil69Leo posted...

Greek and Roman are basically identical. Romans took Greek and changed names and added to it.

The Romans had their own mythology, but it was a lot more simplistic, and most of it sort of fell by the wayside once they started to absorb the Greek worldview. Most of what we think of as Roman mythology is just Greek with the serial numbers filed off.

That being said, Romans would occasionally interpret the stories in slightly different ways, because their culture inherently valued different things and saw the world in a different light from the original Greeks. In a way, it's very similar to how modern culture tends to interpret those stories in our own way, because we're looking at them through a different lens as well. While the Roman "Mars" is basically just the Greek "Ares", the Romans viewed him a lot differently than the Greeks did. Sometimes the fusion of two pre-existing figures would result in a god very different from how the Greeks would have seen them.

(Incidentally, the same thing happened in reverse with Egyptian myth - a lot of what we know about it today isn't necessarily what the Egyptians themselves would have believed originally, as much as it is a syncretic hybrid of original Egyptian with the mythos of the Greeks... nearly every name we think of when we think Egyptian gods is actually the Greek version of their names)

To throw even more of a monkey wrench into things, though, there's also Etruscan mythology to consider, which was closely related to the original Latin/Roman, but had its own distinctions and variations. As well as the fact that Greek myth occasionally borrowed elements from outside cultures as well, like absorbing Cybele from eastern lands.


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