> >5. Ares (although I got it from Kim Stanley Robinson's 'Red Mars')
> 5. Ares [although I got it from a somewhat less known Greek God which the
> Romans somehow converted to Mars :-P]
Maybe I'm a little bit pedantic but the story is somewhat different.
The Romans did not convert anything. The Romans and the Greeks
were both Indo-Germanic peoples. They languages had similar
features (grammar, syntax, morphology--i.e. declinations,
conjugations etc.--and many word roots); they also had similar
religions. When they begun to know each other, they noticed they
both had a war god (whose name was Mars in Latin and Ares in Greek),
a love goddess (Venus, Aphrodite), a wisdom goddess (Minerva,
Athena), a money god (Saturnus, Pluto), a father of all the gods who
used a lot of lightnings (Iuppiter, Zeus), a smith god (Vulcan,
Hephaestus), a female fertility goddess (Iuno, Era, but here I am
not sure because Latins also had another goddess, Ops, who was
connected with fertility and reproduction), & so on. Some gods were
slightly different; and sometime there were Greek Gods who had no
Latin counterpart (Apollo, Dionysus) and vice versa (Mercurius).
The correspondences between the Greek and the Latin gods were noticed
by both the Greeks and the Latins, but that never led to the idea
that there was a common cultural origin of the two peoples (the
Greeks were such snobs, you know...). There was simply an exchange
of divinities, with the Romans importing Dionysus and the Greeks
importing (perhaps) Mercury.
The some gods remained popular also after the end of paganism because
they had given their name to the planets.
Then I have another question, but does anybody know *when* were the
planets called with those names (I suspect this is one of those
questions which cannot have an answer, but...).
Umberto Rossi
"A commission is appointed
To confer with a Volscian commission
About perpetual peace"--and nobody told me!
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