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Below is the article summary. For the full article, see Roman religion.
Roman religion, Religious beliefs of the Romans from ancient times until official acceptance of Christianity in the 4th century ad. The Romans believed that everything was subordinate to the rule of the gods, and the object of their religion was to secure divine cooperation and benevolence. Prayer and sacrifice were used to propitiate the gods and were often carried out at temples dedicated to particular divinities and presided over by priests (see flamen). The chief Roman priest, head of the state religion, was known as the pontifex maximus; notable among the other groups of priests were the augurs, who practiced divination to determine whether the gods approved of an action. The earliest Roman gods were the sky god Jupiter, the war god Mars, and Quirinus; other important early gods were Janus and Vesta. Many other deities were borrowed from Greek religion or associated with Greek gods, and the stories woven into Roman mythology were often taken directly from Greek mythology. Domestic shrines were devoted to divine ancestors or protectors, the Lares and Penates. Dead Roman emperors were also raised to the status of divinities and were regarded with veneration and gratitude.
Ascanius, in Roman legend, son of the hero Aeneas and the traditional founder of Alba Longa, probably the site of the modern Castel Gandolfo, near Rome. In different versions, Ascanius is placed variously in time. The usual account, found in Virgil’s Aeneid, makes the Trojan Creusa his mother.
Ara Pacis, shrine consisting of a marble altar in a walled enclosure erected in Rome’s Campus Martius (Field of Mars) in honour of the emperor Augustus and dedicated on Jan. 30, 9 bce. The dedication was recorded in Ovid’s Fasti as well as by Augustus himself in his “Res Gestae Divi Augusti”
Jupiter, the chief ancient Roman and Italian god. Like Zeus, the Greek god with whom he is etymologically identical (root diu, “bright”), Jupiter was a sky god. One of his most ancient epithets is Lucetius (“Light-Bringer”); and later literature has preserved the same idea in such phrases as sub
Muse, in Greco-Roman religion and mythology, any of a group of sister goddesses of obscure but ancient origin, the chief center of whose cult was Mount Helicon in Boeotia, Greece. They were born in Pieria, at the foot of Mount Olympus. Very little is known of their cult, but they had a festival
