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Virgil's Aeneid: The Right Relationship With The Gods

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The Right Relationship With the Gods

All ancient religions were about having the right relationship with the gods and not about believing the right things. The Greeks and Romans were very similar in this way. There weren't really any heretical beliefs in this time because religion was often a more personal matter (although state religion certainly existed). Everybody had their own way of relating to the gods. They may have followed some general guidelines, but there weren't any competing religious sects. This is the first major attribute that the Romans borrowed from the Greeks.

The Gods: Different and The Same

It is true that the Romans borrowed many gods from the Greeks but they almost always put their own local or national spin on these gods. An example is the capitoline triad of gods: Jupiter, Minerva and Juno. These gods are similar to Zeus, Athena and Hera. These gods were seen by the Romans as gods of the Capitoline hill and gods of the city of Rome specifically. Jupiter was not the same as the Zeus worshipped in Greece.

The Right Way to Worship

Both Greeks and Romans sacrificed to the gods in the same way. They would make …show more content…

Virgil was a Roman poet who wrote his epic poem during the reign of the emperor Augustus. The writer of the Odyssey, Homer probably wrote around 850 BC; many centuries before. The two works are very similar: they both happen after the Trojan war and they both follow the journey of former soldier in the war. The layout of both poems is similar, but once again the Romans have taken a Greek tradition and made it their own. The Aeneid is about the discovery of the future site of Rome by Aeneas and his interactions with both gods and men along the way. While both Homer and Virgil present stories born from the Greek myth of the Trojan war, Virgil uses this classic setting to tell the story of how Rome was

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