Vergil, Aeneid -- 1st c. BCE
Ovid, Metamorphoses -- 1st
c BCE
Livy, Ab Urbe Condita -- 1st c. BCE
Let me begin by suggesting that the Romans did not really have a mythology. What we sometimes see as Roman mythology is really Roman legend (stories about Romulus and Remus, for example) or Greek mythology that has been taken and adapted by a Roman author. There are exceptions (e.g. the story of Hercules and Cacus in Vergil's Aeneid does not seem to be a Greek myth the Romans have taken over, but I wonder if the Romans would have had the story, if not for the contact with the Greeks of S. Italy, and all their stories), but few.
Why no mythology? The Romans did not seem to have seen their gods in anthropomorphic terms. The word "animism" is often associated with early Italian belief -- the idea that "spirits" inhabit the world and the people and things in that world. Thus, every river, every city, every tree, every plant might be seen to have some protective spirit. In addition, there were various forces at work in the world -- Fortuna ("Luck"), the genius ("spirit of male procreative power"), the Penates (spirits that protect one's cupboard), to name a few. The Romans did not see these forces in human terms, and without humans, there is no story (for those of you thinking of Native American stories, or Brer Rabbit, or even Jack London stories, those "animal" tales are really tales about the human condition, with animals taking on the characteristics of humans). Where the Greeks looked on humans as the focus, even if that focus was tragic, with human efforts often thwarted by forces beyond human control, the Romans deep down were aware of that uncertain world all around. When they came into contact with the Greeks in the 3rd c. BCE (Rome was founded sometime in the 8th c. BCE), they quickly adapted Greek thought to their situation. It was contact with the Greeks that led to the development of Roman literature. Livius Andronicus' Odyssia, a translation/adaptation of Homer, is seen as the birth of Roman literature in the mid 3rd c. BCE. The earliest Latin author who survives in many complete works, the comic writer Plautus, took Greek comedies and adapted them. So the written accounts we depend on to reconstruct Roman life, were colored from the beginning by Greek literature and thought. I maintain, though, that underneath that was a deep-seated Roman belief in that all-encompassing spirit world (which belief might be seen by some as superstition -- you may recall the reluctance of Caesar to go to the Senate meeting in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, because his wife, Calpurnia, has had a bad dream -- even a rational man, deeply versed in Greek philosophy, like Julius Caesar, could not afford to ignore dreams). Also, as Roman power grew, there was a belief in "Rome" itself as a power fueled by destiny to rule. By the time of the three authors listed above as major sources for the information in this chapter, Rome controlled most of the Mediterranean world, and the destiny of Rome was seen as the driving force behind the world (even though local spirits could thwart Rome from time to time).
Ovid takes his Metamorphoses up to his own day, and the "transformation" of Julius Caesar to a god. [A brief note on deification: the Romans, beginning with Romulus, occasionally "deified" some of their leaders, declaring that such men had been gods among them. This seems strange to us, but we might see the declaration of saints by the Roman Catholic Church as similar -- those saints are not called gods, but a declaration is made that they had a special relationship to God, and that their influence continues, so that people believing in them strongly enough may be rewarded with some miraculous happening]. Vergil's Aeneid is an epic poem written to be the Latin equivalent of Homer. It follows the hero Aeneas from the fall of Troy (he was a Trojan prince who survived the fall) to his founding of a settlement in Italy. From this settlement would later come Alba Longa, from which would come Rome. Though set 500 years before the founding of Rome, Vergil connects Aeneas' heroic actions to Rome by having the hero come to the Underworld where his dead father Anchises points out to him spirits who will become the great Roman heroes of his (Aeneas') future. Later, when he needs armor, Venus convinces Vulcan to forge special armor for her son. The great shield displays on it scenes from Roman history, culminating in the great naval battle at Actium, where Octavian defeated Marc Antony and became the undisputed leader of the Roman world. Aeneas doesn't understand the figures on his shield, but Vergil's audience understood the symbolism. Aeneas, long ago, would carry on his shoulders the history of Rome. Rome becomes a steamroller of a force that will (must) become the Rome of Vergil's day. Livy in his great history (142 books of which over 100 were lost), Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City" -- N.B. Romans used the founding of the city (traditional date, 21 April 753 BCE), so that the Battle of Actium (31 BCE) would be dated DCCXXIII (723) AUC ["from the Founding of the City"]), in telling the story of Rome from its beginnings to his own day, saw Roman history through the lens of inevitable greatness, even though the Rome of 700 BCE could have been nothing more than a small cowtown. He also sees the story in terms of fraternal conflict (Romulus vs. Remus at the founding of Rome, but civil wars at various points in Rome's story) and a conflict between Rome and others, leading to eventual incorporation of "other" into Rome.
One Roman god that needs especial mention is the god Janus (the god of doorways). His name is connected to the word ianua ("door") [we also get "janitor" from this word -- a "janitor" was originally the slave whose job was to open the door for guests, the "doorman"]. It may seem strange to us that the Romans saw the door as having a spirit (even though one British historian claimed the Romans, if they had bicycles, would have had a goddess, "Punctura") for doors, which seem so pedestrian, so every day. But the door is that item that completes the protective barrier around our space, without which the distinction between inside and outside would be blurred. To sense what that must have meant at a deep level for the Romans -- think of all those horror movies, where the hero(ine) is directed not to open the door, or where the door won't close. The final scene of Alien comes to mind, where Ripley is in the escape pod, and she thinks she's avoided the creature. The door closes, and she thinks she's safe, but the monster is still there, and is only gone when she opens the airlock (another door). Once the monster is floating in space, she is finally safe. I think the Romans felt that way about doors. As Rome expanded from a settlement on the Tiber to a world power, they were often at war, and the boundaries were unclear -- the distinction between "us" and "them" was not sharp, and only when an enemy had been subdued, and their territory became part of "Rome," did the Romans feel safe again. Whenever Rome was at war, the doors of the Temple of Janus were left open -- a symbol that "them" could get at "us" to all who lived in the city, far from the fighting. When war was over, the doors were closed -- a symbol that the magic barrier protecting "Rome" from "non-Rome" was once again working. This way of looking at the world around them led the Romans to welcome their former enemies into the Roman orbit, and for Romans to adopt and adapt the beliefs of those places ("syncretism"). By incorporating former enemies into the Roman world, the Romans saw themselves as increasing the "inside" while decreasing the "outside" or diminishing its effect.
A brief word about the Roman pomerium -- when a Roman town was being laid out, the main streets would be marked and a trench would be made where the city's walls would go. This trench was the pomerium and it represented a magic barrier. While the pomerium was being dug, care was taken that no one step over the part that had already been dug, (also, the dirt was carefully distributed on either side of the trench), for it would break the protective aura the pomerium was supposed to provide. This is the idea behind the fatal feud between Romulus and Remus, for Remus taunted his brother and jumped over a low section of the city wall being built. This broke the magic, and Romulus, in anger, slew his brother.
Another brief word, on Roman arches. You have probably seen pictures of the Arch of Titus, or the Arch of Hadrian, or of Constantine, in Rome, or the Arc de Triomphe in Paris (or the Rosedale Arch here in KCK). This has got to be one of the strangest monuments one might build. Think of it -- a monument that is basically a doorway, where there is no building. But keeping in mind the symbolism of the door, and the importance of Janus, you can see why the Romans adopted an architectural element as a symbol to be used to represent triumphs (as if they were doorways to transport you (mentally at least) to those great battles of the past.
Another god to be considered in this light is Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. She has an exact equivalent in the Greek goddess, Hestia, and the names of the two goddesses are cognate (they come from a common Indo-European root). For a people like the Romans who valued "us" over "them," Vesta represented the family fireplace, from which the family got its warmth and togetherness. The Temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum, where the eternal flame was tended by the Vestal Virgins, was seen as the family fireplace of the city and all its territories, the central hearth of all Romans everywhere.
Every home had its own personal gods. There would be a little shrine called the lararium at which honor would be made daily to the genius (the male reproductive power -- the link of generation to generation), the Juno (female equivalent to the genius), the Lares and the Penates (gods that protect the cupboard and the house). In addition, worship of the god or gods seen by the family as its special protector. Greek cities has their patron gods, but the whole Roman system was based on patronage (every person, except the Emperor, had a more powerful person to whom he looked -- this person was his patronus -- to understand how this might work, see The Godfather, where people come to Don Corleone on his daughter's wedding day to pay homage and ask favors -- they call him padrone, the Italian of patronus). The idea was that the gods were busy, and not every god could look after every person. You had to have a special god you turned to in a time of crisis. The Catholic Church has continued this idea with patron saints. The Emperor Augustus, for example, looked to Apollo as his patron; the Emperor Commodus (the sick young emperor in Gladiator) was Hercules.
The book does a good job of comparing and contrasting Roman deities with the Greek gods with whom they came to be associated. Keep in mind that the Romans did not see these figures in human terms until quite some time after the city's settlement. For example, the god Vulcan represented the destructive power of fire (as in a volcano); only after contact with the Greeks did he come to be seen as a smith and weaponer like Hephaestus. The god Mercury was the god of commerce (the root of his name merc- appears in the word commerce and the word merchant; that root basically means "stuff," so Mercury is the god of stuff), but later takes on additional characteristics in connection with Hermes.
The stories that Ovid tells (e.g. that of Diana and Actaeon, or of Orpheus and Eurydice) are basically Greek stories told in Latin. Some of the Roman sensibility may work its way into the story, but they are not Roman myths. And a poet like Ovid was schooled, so that he knew a lot about Greek language, literature, philosophy and art, and would bring that schooling to bear on his poetic endeavors. Just as an English poet like Shelley may compose a work, Prometheus Unbound, and use a Greek myth but infuse it with some of the ideas of the Romantic poets. The closest that the Romans have to a Roman myth is the story of Aeneas told by Vergil in his Aeneid. Vergil, though, is trying to create in Latin a work to rival that of Homer's great epics. And his work gets a lot of ideas and scenes from Homer. Besides, Vergil is very much a literary poet; he worked on the Aeneid for ten years, and the work is still unfinished (only in polishing). He supposedly would produce ten or so lines a day, so there is nothing of the "oral" teller in his work; it's a great epic, but one written by someone who had a lot of schooling.
In Book VI, Vergil has a scene which seems rather like the passing of baton between Greece and Rome. In that book, Aeneas visits his father, Anchises, in the Underworld (clearly an homage to Odysseus' trip in Odyssey xi). The strong connection between father and son, and the desire of the father to show to his son a glimpse of future generations of the family, is very Roman. When prominent Romans would die, members of his family would carry death masks of the ancestors in the funeral procession. Romans had a strong sense of bonding between themselves and their ancestors, and between themselves and their descendants. One might see Aeneid VI it as mythology in the service of history (at least the romantic image of history Romans had).
What the Romans had in place of mythology was legend and a sense of Roman destiny. Where Greek stories were about fabled heroes who represented values the Greeks wanted to emulate (or avoid), the Roman legends were about characters in the service of Rome. And Romans saw the destiny of their city even in the years leading up to its sack by Attila. So important was "Rome" in the minds of the people of the Roman Empire, that St. Augustine, a bishop in N. Africa, was moved to write The City of God during what must have seemed like the "end-times" for him, when the Huns and Vandals were overrunning the "eternal city." One of his points was that the "city of God" was everlasting, unlike the city of man (i.e. Rome). That conceit works especially because for "Romans," and Augustine would have considered himself a Roman, the city had always been there, had always been in the ascendant, and would always be there. This sense of Roman destiny was so strong that we see it even in the early legends of Rome (admittedly, by the time some of these legends about the first years of Rome were composed, Rome was a growing city and the chief town in central Italy, and the sense of inevitable power and majesty for the city was backdated). Historically, during the monarchy (753 BCE - 509 BCE), Rome must have been little more than a cowtown, but in the legends that Livy and other collected, we have a sense that Romans always knew their city would be # 1, which place on the charts they held for a record 500 or more years, even longer if you see the city as the HQ for the Catholic church.
Gods do not generally appear directly in Roman legends (though there were rumors of appearances of figures like Castor in early Roman battles); they work in the background, while Roman heroes and heroines do their work. There is a sense, though, of Rome's fate and the divine blessings on Rome in all these legends. It may be that the gods don't figure directly as characters because of the original nature of Roman beliefs, something which continued at some deep level, I maintain, of every Roman.
To view the powerpoint presentation of the class on this chapter, click here.