Roman mythology

"Roman mythology" may also refer to the modern study of these representations, and to the subject matter as represented in the literature and art of other cultures in any period.

The stories are often concerned with politics and morality, and how an individual's personal integrity relates to his or her responsibility to the community or Roman state.

Other important sources are the Fasti of Ovid, a six-book poem structured by the Roman religious calendar, and the fourth book of elegies by Propertius.

The Trojan prince Aeneas was cast as husband of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, patronymical ancestor of the Latini, and therefore through a convoluted revisionist genealogy as forebear of Romulus and Remus.

Narratives of divine activity played a more important role in the system of Greek religious belief than among the Romans, for whom ritual and cultus were primary.

Although Roman religion was not based on scriptures and their exegesis, priestly literature was one of the earliest written forms of Latin prose.

[14] Although at least some of this archived material was available for consultation by the Roman senate, it was often occultum genus litterarum,[15] an arcane form of literature to which by definition only priests had access.

Some aspects of archaic Roman religion survived in the lost theological works of the 1st-century BC scholar Varro, known through other classical and Christian authors.

[17] The earliest pantheon included Janus, Vesta, and the so-called Archaic Triad of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, whose three patrician flamens were of the highest order.

What modern scholars call the Aventine Triad – Ceres, Liber, and Libera – developed in association with the rise of plebeians to positions of wealth and influence.

Thus, Janus and Vesta guarded the door and hearth, the Lares protected the field and house, Pales the pasture, Saturn the sowing, Ceres the growth of the grain, Pomona the fruit, and Consus and Ops the harvest.

In addition to Castor and Pollux, the conquered settlements in Italy seem to have contributed to the Roman pantheon Diana, Minerva, Hercules, Venus, and deities of lesser rank, some of whom were Italic divinities, others originally derived from the Greek culture of Magna Graecia.

In 203 BC, Rome imported the cult object embodying Cybele from Pessinus in Phrygia and welcomed its arrival with due ceremony.

Both Lucretius and Catullus, poets contemporary in the mid-1st century BC, offer disapproving glimpses of Cybele's wildly ecstatic cult.