So, I've been researching deities a lot lately because who doesn't, right? Anyways, as I was looking into the more Celtic based ones I saw that a lot of them were drawn into the Roman pantheon via epithets in one form another and despite how obvious it is, I realized that the Greek deities were likely drawn in the same way. I mean it makes sense, the Romans conquered a lot so they had to find a way to pull in everything to support their religion and mythology.
And that got me to thinking, how do people feel that worship either Roman or Greek deities towards the others? They clearly aren't the same, and have differences, but let's say as an example, someone worships Poseidon; how do they feel about Neptune and the rest of the Roman pantheon and vice versa?
Looking forward to people's thoughts and opinons on this matter!
I personally worship the Greek pantheon. When I look that the gods of each there are only minor difference, I fell no coral towards the Roman gods. They where just fulfilling the needs of the people and culture of the time. The name may have change but they are the same god in practice. Although these are just my personal beliefs.
Re: Greek & Roman deities? By: shadowdemon / Beginner
Post # 4 May 21, 2017
Thank you Syren! And thanks for the link, I've always enjoyed theoi for mythology information, it's a really good site for it. And sure, if you have more, I wouldn't mind looking through them?
That was kind of what I was thinking too, since the differences were pretty minor. That and getting opinions from practioners of either one of the traditions is really interesting in regards to this.
Although, (and this is off the top of my head) I do think there are a lot of deities that were portrayed differently under Greek and Roman mythology. But, that was likely from culture changes and maybe even rebranding, but over all they kept so many of the same traits that it is kind of obsolete.
But as you say, there are a lot of differences within the Greek mythology itself, and that's probably because of how the Greek culture had city states and each prioritized different deities, so they probably had different views on things and those different views stacked up over time. That's also likely mythology though itself in its nature since in the majority of cases they were likely oral stories that got passed around, but I don't want to get off topic here.