Over the centuries, the movement of large numbers of people meant that gods from a variety of cultures, including Etruscan and Greek, merged together. As a result, Roman gods were a blend of ...

Others were lifted from Greek stories — Gods like Apollo or Hercules. The Romans took these foreign deities and gave them new names and Roman qualities to suit their needs.

The Roman Empire was primarily a polytheistic civilization, which meant that people recognized and worshiped multiple deities. The Romans adopted a lot of the Greek gods into their own religion ...