With every aspect of Roman life having a specific deity to call upon, it can be tricky to make sense of the ancient pantheon ...

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 ...

These gods had made their home in the Roman world at an early time, along with Greek art and literature. Some of these Greek gods shared Roman names and acquired some Roman characteristics.