Out of the ancient beliefs that have been discovered today, the religions we have the most information on are Egyptian, Roman, and Greek religion. Their stories were recorded by ancient poets and storytellers and still exist today to analyze and explore. While Egyptian religion was very different from the other two, Greek and Roman religion share many similarities between gods, myths, and practices. There is evidence to show that some gods in Roman religion are ripped straight from the Greeks, such as Aesculapius, the god of medicine. These occurrences show up more and more the further you go along in Rome’s long history, and they become a common occurrence fairly quickly.
The Romans had their own religion before Greek influence came to play a part in it, but it was much different from what it became. The ancient Latin religion had gods not portrayed as people but rather objects. They believed in Numen, or virtuality. This trait could be had by inanimate objects and common was. To be specific, they worshiped Numina, spirits with specific functions. Otherwise, they worshiped gods without
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In early Roman religion, the gods were typically portrayed as inanimate objects, with no human counterpart. They had no myths of their own, they just existed as reasons for things in the roman world. These gods could be called Numina, spirits performing their duties assigned to them. These spirits were mainly nature gods, as agriculture was very important to early Romans. It wasn’t until later in Roman history were the gods given human forms and myths. Through this development, most of the myths were taken from the Greeks. The Greeks had gods who had human forms and were worshiped as such. They had statues of them and myths and epics written around their stories. Some of Rome’s old gods were associated with Greek gods, and they blended the two together, giving them similar stories and