Origins of Greco-Roman Mythology Part 2: From Greek Myths to ‘Greco-Roman Mythology’

Origins of Greco-Roman Mythology — A Three-Part Series

• Part 1: The Roots of Greek Mythology
• Part 2: From Greek Myths to ‘Greco-Roman Mythology’ (current article)
• Part 3: The Revival and Spread of Greco-Roman Mythology

In 240 BCE, something unprecedented happened in Rome. At the Ludi Romani festival, a Greek-born slave staged a play he had translated into Latin. His name was Livius Andronicus, a captive from Tarentum in southern Italy.^[1] This moment is recorded as the official starting point of Latin literature. But there is a curious detail: the person who wrote the first page of Roman literature was not a Roman, but a Greek. This paradox was a microcosm of the vast cultural transformation that would unfold over the next several centuries. Rome conquered Greece militarily, but was itself conquered mythologically and culturally by Greece. The result was the hybrid tradition we now call ‘Greco-Roman mythology.’

Rome’s First Encounter with Greece: Magna Graecia and Etruria

The route by which Rome encountered Greek mythology was not singular. The most direct channel was Magna Graecia — the Greek colonial cities of southern Italy and Sicily. From the 8th century BCE, Greeks established poleis in Naples (then Neapolis), Syracuse, Tarentum, Croton, and elsewhere.^[2] These cities built the same temples, held the same festivals, and told the same myths as mainland Greece. A complete Greek world existed barely 200 kilometers south of Rome.

However, Rome’s first contact with Greek culture may have come not from the south but from the north. The Etruscans served as intermediaries. Etruscan civilization had been actively trading with Greece since the 8th–7th centuries BCE, absorbing substantial portions of Greek mythology into their own religious system.^[3] The Greek Heracles became ‘Hercle’ in Etruscan, which was then transformed into the Latin ‘Hercules.’ Artemis passed through the Etruscan ‘Aritimi’ before being linked to the Roman Diana.^[3] The linguistic path of transformation itself reveals the passage through the cultural relay station that was Etruria.

Furthermore, Etruscan temple architecture directly influenced Rome. The Jupiter-Juno-Minerva triad temple (Capitoline Triad) on Rome’s Capitoline Hill closely mirrored the Etruscan Tinia-Uni-Menrva triad system.^[3] Romans did not always adopt the Greek pantheon directly; in many cases, they secondarily absorbed Greek mythology that Etruria had already digested.

What, then, did Rome’s indigenous religion look like before the influx of Greek mythology? Early Roman religion was closer to a faith in invisible divine power. Janus (god of doorways), Vesta (goddess of the hearth), and the Lares (household guardian spirits) were function-centered beings without distinct personalities or narratives.^[4] What mattered was performing rituals correctly, rather than telling stories about the gods. The influx of Greek mythology was the process of giving these abstract beings names, faces, and above all, ‘stories.’

Interpretatio Romana: Not Simply Renaming, but Cultural Reinvention

The Roman imperial-era historian Tacitus, in his Germania, used the term ‘Interpretatio Romana’ to describe the practice of interpreting foreign gods as equivalent to Roman ones when explaining the gods of the Germanic tribes.^[5] Zeus becomes Jupiter, Aphrodite becomes Venus, Ares becomes Mars. But understanding this process as mere ‘name substitution’ misses the essence.

The comparison between Mars and Ares is the most dramatic example. In Greece, Ares was an object of contempt. In Homer’s Iliad, Zeus tells Ares, “You are the most hateful to me of all the gods.”^[6] Ares symbolized the bloodshed and chaos of war — an unsettling figure whom the Greeks rarely worshipped. By contrast, Rome’s Mars held the second-highest position in the pantheon after Jupiter. Mars was not merely a war god but also a guardian of agriculture, and above all, the father of Romulus and Remus — the ancestor of the Roman people themselves.^[7] The Salii priesthood marched every March carrying the sacred shields of Mars in a ritual dance that simultaneously blessed military campaigns and the start of the agricultural season.^[7] Between the Greek Ares, who symbolized ‘the stench of war’s blood,’ and the Roman Mars, ‘father of victory and abundance,’ there was only a nominal correspondence — their cultural meanings were fundamentally different.

A similar difference appears between Aphrodite and Venus. The Greek Aphrodite was the goddess of sexual desire and beauty. Rome’s Venus was originally a modest deity of vegetable gardens and orchards. But around the 3rd century BCE, the Julian clan began claiming Venus as their ancestral goddess, and Venus’s status rose dramatically.^[8] Julius Caesar publicly declared himself a descendant of Aeneas, the son of Venus, and built a temple to ‘Venus Genetrix’ (Mother Venus) in the Forum. The Greek goddess of love and desire had been transformed in Rome into the mother of the nation’s founding.

The fundamental reason for this difference lay in the nature of Roman religion. For Romans, religion was not a matter of personal inner experience but a public system ensuring the well-being of the state and community. Maintaining a peaceful relationship with the gods was the central purpose of religion, and following exact ritual procedures mattered more than inner belief.^[4] When adopting Greek gods, Romans reinterpreted them within this pragmatic framework. The gods’ characters were adjusted to serve Rome’s national needs.

Ovid and Virgil: The ‘Standard Edition’ of Mythology Created by Roman Literature

It was the power of literature that gave Greek mythology entirely new life within a Roman context. Two poets of the Augustan age (27 BCE–14 CE) — Virgil and Ovid — played decisive roles.

Virgil’s Aeneid: Greek Mythology Turned into Roman Foundation Narrative

Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) composed the Aeneid between approximately 29 and 19 BCE. This epic tells the story of Aeneas, a survivor of the Trojan War, who escapes the burning city of Troy, reaches Italy, and whose descendants go on to found Rome.^[9] On the surface, it combines the structures of Homer’s Odyssey (a tale of wandering) and Iliad (a tale of war), but its purpose was entirely different.

Virgil’s stroke of genius was recasting the most famous episode of Greek mythology — the Trojan War — as the origin of Rome. Aeneas already appears in Homer’s Iliad, but as a minor figure. Virgil elevated this secondary Trojan hero to protagonist, layering the prestige of the Greek epic tradition onto Rome’s founding myth.^[9] Aeneas’s son Ascanius (Iulus) was designated as the ancestor of the Julian clan, through which Augustus’s rule was legitimized as a historical inevitability ordained by the gods.^[10]

However, reading the Aeneid as mere political propaganda is an oversimplification. Classical scholars at Harvard have developed what is known as the ‘pessimistic reading,’ focusing on the weight of destiny that Aeneas bears and the tragedies of individuals sacrificed along the way — Dido’s suicide, Turnus’s death.^[11] Virgil sang of the empire’s glory while simultaneously refusing to conceal the cost of that glory. This ambivalence is precisely what elevates the Aeneid beyond a simple foundation myth into genuine literature.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses: 250 Myths Woven into a Single Narrative

Ovid’s (Publius Ovidius Naso) Metamorphoses is the text that has exerted greater influence on the transmission of Greco-Roman mythology than any other single work. This 15-book epic of approximately 12,000 lines weaves roughly 250 transformation myths into a single continuous narrative, from the creation of the world to the deification of Julius Caesar.^[12]

The originality of the Metamorphoses operates on several levels. First, Ovid arranged myths that had previously been transmitted individually into a single grand chronological structure. Thanks to this framework — spanning from Chaos to the historical age — later readers could perceive Greco-Roman mythology as a coherent ‘system.’ Second, Ovid thoroughly reinterpreted mythology through the lens of human emotions — love, jealousy, anger, grief.^[13] In the story of Apollo and Daphne, the reader’s sympathy goes not to the great god but to the fleeing woman. The tale of Narcissus explores the tragedy of self-love, and the story of Philomela depicts violence by power and female resistance.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, Ovid treated mythology with a secular and sometimes mocking gaze. His gods are not objects of pious worship but beings as flawed as any human. Stripping religious solemnity from mythology paradoxically extended its lifespan — because it freed myth to establish itself as pure narrative art, no longer bound to religion.^[14] The Encyclopaedia Britannica notes that “no single work of classical antiquity exerted so lasting and decisive an influence on European literature and art as Ovid’s Metamorphoses.”^[12]

Roman State Religion and Mythology: An Empire of Ritual

In Rome, mythology was not merely literary material — it also underpinned the state religion (religio publica). But an important distinction is needed here. The role of ‘mythology’ in Roman religion was considerably different from that in Greece.

In Greece, the epics of Homer and Hesiod functioned virtually as scripture. Stories about the gods’ characters and deeds were central to religious understanding. In Rome, by contrast, the heart of religion was not narrative but ritual. Romans were more concerned with following precise sacrificial procedures, reading omens, and maintaining the orderly hierarchy of priesthoods than with tales of divine adventures.^[4] The chief priest was not an interpreter of mythology but an administrator of religious law.^[15]

This difference paradoxically facilitated the absorption of Greek mythology. Because Roman religion was practice-centered rather than doctrine-centered, it could flexibly layer Greek mythology’s narrative elements onto its own ritual system. The Cumaean Sibyl is a representative case. This prophetess, who resided in the Magna Graecia city of Cumae, was rooted in Greek tradition, but the Roman state adopted her prophecy books (the Libri Sibyllini) as a core document of national religion.^[16] When the Senate consulted these books during crises, the recommendations often included introducing new Greek gods or implementing Greek-style rites. Through this mechanism, Roman religion gradually became Hellenized.

A representative case came in 217 BCE, after the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Lake Trasimene during the Second Punic War, when the Sibylline books were consulted. The result was a Greek-style ritual: divine statues were laid on couches and food was set before them, with twelve deities paired in six couples — Jupiter and Juno, Neptune and Minerva, Mars and Venus, Apollo and Diana, Vulcan and Vesta, Mercury and Ceres.^[17] This list was effectively a translation of the Greek Twelve Olympians into Roman names, and it became the standard Roman pantheon thereafter.

Survival in the Christian Era: From Pagan Mythology to Moral Allegory

In the 4th century CE, when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion, Greco-Roman mythology faced an existential crisis. Stories of pagan gods could now be condemned as falsehoods and sources of idolatry. Yet something paradoxical occurred: mythology did not vanish — it was preserved in new forms by Christian intellectuals.

The key to this survival was allegory — allegorical interpretation. This method actually predated Christianity. Stoic philosophers had already developed, from the 3rd century BCE onward, a tradition of interpreting Homeric myths as symbols of natural phenomena or moral principles.^[18] Christian scholars inherited this tradition and undertook the task of reinterpreting pagan mythology as the outer garment of moral and spiritual truths.

A pivotal figure in this process was Fulgentius, active in the late 5th to early 6th century. This Latin author from North Africa wrote a book reinterpreting 75 classical myths one by one as allegories.^[19] His method was to analyze the etymology of mythological names — sometimes very arbitrarily — to extract ethical lessons. For example, he interpreted the name Perseus as deriving from a Greek word meaning ‘to destroy’ and read the myth of slaying Medusa as an allegory of virtue overcoming fear.^[19] Academically, most of Fulgentius’s etymological analyses are incorrect, but his allegorical methodology exerted immense influence throughout the entire Middle Ages — because it provided a framework for reading mythology within a Christian moral system.

Boethius, in the early 6th century, transmitted classical mythology through another route. In his Consolation of Philosophy, written in 523 in a prison of the Ostrogothic kingdom, Boethius cited Homer’s Odyssey and the myth of Hercules while developing philosophical arguments.^[20] This work became one of the most widely read texts of the entire Middle Ages — approximately 400 surviving manuscripts attest to this — and served as a conduit for transmitting classical mythology to medieval readers.^[20]

Isidore of Seville (Isidorus Hispalensis), in the 7th century, preserved classical knowledge in an even more systematic way. His twenty-volume encyclopedia Etymologiae was a comprehensive compilation of ancient world knowledge, including descriptions of mythological beings.^[21] Although Isidore’s direct knowledge of Greek scholarship was limited, by transmitting mythological information through Latin sources he ensured that medieval Western Europe did not entirely lose its connection to the classical tradition.

A noteworthy paradox emerges in this process. The motivation of Christian scholars in ‘rescuing’ pagan mythology was not affection for the myths themselves, but practical need for rhetoric and education. In medieval monastery schools, Latin education was conducted through the texts of Cicero, Virgil, and Ovid — texts saturated with mythology.^[22] Completely purging mythology would have made Latin literary education itself impossible — a genuine dilemma. Allegorical interpretation was the compromise that resolved it. The story of Orpheus descending to the underworld to find his wife Eurydice was read as a typological prefiguration of Christ descending into hell to save humanity,^[22] and through such reinterpretations, pagan mythology was legitimized as an auxiliary tool of Christian education.

What the Transformation of Mythology Left Behind

Horace wrote: “Conquered Greece took captive her fierce conqueror and brought the arts to rustic Latium (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artis intulit agresti Latio).”^[23] This single line precisely summarizes the formation of Greco-Roman mythology. Rome absorbed Greek mythology, but it was no passive recipient. Mars became what Ares could never have been — the father of the nation — and Venus was given a role Aphrodite never held — the mother of the founding lineage. Virgil inverted the narrative of Trojan defeat into a narrative of Roman triumph, and Ovid wove 250 scattered myths into a single vast literary cosmos.

And when the Christian era arrived, this mythology was transformed once again — from religion to allegory, from an object of belief to a tool of education, from the language of temples to the language of monastery classrooms. Whether through Fulgentius’s arbitrary etymological analyses, Boethius’s philosophical citations, or Isidore’s encyclopedic compilations, all these efforts carried classical mythology beyond the bottleneck of the Middle Ages.

Where, then, did these myths go after passing through the bottleneck? When Petrarch began pulling ancient Latin manuscripts off the shelves again in 14th-century Italy, what he discovered was neither Greek mythology nor Roman mythology, but a hybrid — layer upon layer of translation and reinterpretation accumulated over more than a thousand years. How that hybrid ignited the explosive revival of the Renaissance is the subject of Part 3.