Roman Mythology.
Publié le 10/05/2013
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Her temple on the Aventine Hill in Rome was a center for organizations of skilled craftspeople.
According to tradition, in 509 BC the dynasty of Etruscan kings ended and the Roman Republic was founded.
The republic was ruled by two chief magistrates, called consuls, who were elected by the people to one-year terms.
During the time of the republic, the Capitoline temple became the most important public shrine of theRoman people and the focus of public worship.
Each January, the new consuls offered sacrifices to open the new year, and provincial governors took their vows beforedeparting for their provinces.
At other times, victorious generals led triumphal processions up to the Capitoline temple, where they offered sacrifices and gave thanksfor their victories.
As Rome’s sphere of influence expanded, the Romans encountered the older and richer religious and mythological beliefs of the Greek civilization, and the beliefs ofother cultures of the eastern Mediterranean Sea region.
Major innovations in Roman religious life occurred as a result of this contact, most notably the Romans’acceptance of gods from these other cultures.
New gods and heroes were traditionally given temples outside the pomerium, the ritual boundary of the city, rather than in the city center.
Among the earliest of the Greek gods to be accepted by the Romans were Castor and Polydeuces, divine twins who were believed to have intervened in the Romans’favor at the battle of Lake Regillus in 484 BC.
This battle marked an early victory for the young Roman Republic against a force of surrounding Latin peoples.
Later in the 5th century BC, on the advice of an oracle, the worship of the Greek god Apollo was introduced in Rome to avert a terrible plague.
Apollo later became a symbol of Roman virtue and austerity.
Other Roman gods that took on characteristics of Greek divinities were Diana (Artemis), Mercury (Hermes), Neptune (Poseidon), Pluto(Hades), Venus (Aphrodite), and Vulcan (Hephaestus).
The Romans also adopted Greek heroes into their mythology.
Perhaps the best-known figure was the Greek hero Heracles, who became known in Rome as Hercules.According to Roman historian Livy, Hercules once stopped at the site of Rome before Rome’s founding, and there killed a monster that had terrorized the local people.
Rome also imported gods from other regions of the Mediterranean world, sometimes to fill particular roles.
In 204 BC, armies from the rival city-state of Carthage, led by the Carthaginian general Hannibal, threatened to invade Rome.
In this emergency, Roman priests consulted the Sibylline Books, which contained collections of oracles orprophecies, and recommended that the Romans begin to worship the goddess Cybele from the city of Pessinus in Asia Minor.
To worship Cybele, the Romans dedicateda spot to her on the Palatine Hill in the heart of Rome.
The Romans eventually defeated Hannibal.
As Rome expanded and became a hub of international commerce, more and more foreign gods found their way into the culture.
Especially popular were the so-calledsavior-gods of religious orders known as mystery religions.
Savior-gods such as Mithra, the ancient Persian god of light and wisdom, offered the promise of individualsalvation through the belief in the immortality of the soul.
Mystery religions such as Mithraism were open only to the initiated.
As a result, many people saw them asoffering a greater sense of community than traditional Roman religion.
Scholars have noted similarities between mystery religions and the early Christian church, whichtook root in the Roman world when mystery religions were popular and widespread.
A later development in Roman religion was the worshiping of emperors as gods.
As the Romans expanded their holdings to the east, they encountered the phenomenonof divine kingship.
At first they rejected the idea that a human ruler should be worshiped as a god.
But in 44 BC, Roman ruler Julius Caesar permitted a statue to be erected to himself bearing the inscription deo invicto (“to the unvanquished god”), and declared himself dictator for life.
That same year Caesar was assassinated by citizens who were unhappy with his dictatorial regime and wanted to see a return to Rome’s earlier republican ideals.
While Caesar’s heir, Octavian, took the nameAugustus and made himself the first emperor of Rome, he also avoided any claim to divinity.
In the first century of the Roman Empire, the idea of the divinization ofemperors was often ridiculed.
The philosopher and playwright Seneca mocked the imperial divinization of Claudius I as the “Pumpkinification of Claudius.”
As the government of the Roman Empire became more and more autocratic, giving rulers almost unlimited power, emperors eventually accepted divine honors, andsacrifice to the emperor came to be required as a token of loyalty.
The requirement of sacrifice became a significant source of conflict between early Christians, whoresisted the practice, and the Roman political authorities who enforced it.
The period of emperors being considered gods ended in the 4th century AD, when Emperor Constantine the Great became the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
By the end of the 4th century, Emperor Theodosius I, who was a supporter oforthodox Christianity, officially banned the practice of the old Roman pagan religion.
IV HOW THE ROMANS WORSHIPED THEIR GODS
Because many of the early religious practices of the Romans originated in a period when Rome was a small, agricultural community, these customs reflected the needsand concerns of the farming community.
Long after Rome had become a busy commercial center, the religious calendar of Rome continued to reflect the cycle of theagricultural year.
Romans worshiped their gods on both individual and communal levels.
Each part of a Roman house had a god associated with it.
The hearth was sacred to Vesta, andduring the main meal of the day people would throw a small cake into the fire as an offering to her.
Roman houses had a penus, or storeroom for grain, over which gods called the Penates presided.
They also received daily offerings.
Closely connected with the Penates were the household gods known as Lares, to whom familieswould pray and perhaps offer a small gift of wine or incense.
The god Janus presided over the main door to the house.
Janus was envisioned as a human figure whofaced both directions at once and was thus suited to watch over the doorway.
The Romans believed that if they paid due respect to these gods each day, they could beconfident of enjoying divine blessing for their daily activities.
Romans also paid respect to the gods of the fields.
For example, the Terminalia was an annual festival at which farmers with adjoining property decorated boundarystones with garlands.
Each family’s property was purified once a year in one of the oldest Roman festivals, called the Ambarvalia, in which families took part in aprocession around their fields and sacrificed a pig, sheep, and bull and offered prayers to the god Mars for the health and prosperity of the fields, flocks, and family.After the sacrifice they feasted and celebrated.
Each stage of life was also marked by religious observances.
At the birth of a child, men would strike the threshold of the house with agricultural implements to ward offthe wilder spirits of the fields.
At puberty, a boy set aside the bulla, or protective amulet of childhood, and exchanged his boyhood toga for the toga of manhood.
The modern tradition of the bridal veil goes back to the Roman practice of veiling a young woman who was leaving the protection of her father’s home for that of her newhusband, and who was therefore in a temporary state of religious vulnerability.
Similarly, she would be carried over the threshold of her new home to avoid the badomen that would result if the newest member of the household were to stumble upon her first entry into the house.
When someone died in a house, the corpse wasremoved feet-first to discourage the ghost from returning.
At the festival of the Parentalia, in February, the living family members would make offerings of flowers, cornmeal, and wine on the graves of their family’s dead.
An important communal Roman religious celebration was the Lupercalia, held annually on February 15.
The ceremony took place at the Lupercal, a small cave on theslopes of Rome’s Palatine Hill, where the Romans believed that Romulus and Remus had been suckled by the she-wolf.
During the ceremony, two groups of young mensacrificed goats and a dog and then cut the goatskins into strips.
Clothed only in these strips, the young men then ran a race along a specified course, tapping femalebystanders with the strips of their goatskin garments as they passed.
This rowdy festival was so popular that it was not abandoned until AD 494, well into the Christian era, when Pope Gelasius I replaced it with the Christian Feast of the Purification of the Virgin.
The same pope also made the day before the celebration (February 14)the feast day of two 3rd century Roman martyrs named Saint Valentine, creating the basis for Saint Valentine’s Day.
The modern holiday retains some of the fertility.
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Liens utiles
- pantheon Greek and Roman In mythology, pantheon refers to all the gods of a people, particularly those considered to be the most prominent or most powerful.
- Parcae Roman The origins of the Parcae in Roman mythology are unclear.
- Creusa (2) Roman Wife of Aeneas, a hero of the Trojan War who went on to become a founding figure in Roman mythology, and mother of his son, Ascanius.
- Dioscuri (Sons of Zeus) Greek A title used in Greek and Roman mythology for the twin brothers Castor and Polydeuces, whose Roman name was Pollux.
- Roman Mythology I INTRODUCTION Roman Mythology, the religious beliefs and practices of the people of ancient Rome.