The Rome Index
Roman mythology & the city's founding stories
The gods, heroes and legends behind what you're actually looking at.
Romulus and Remus
The founding myth of Rome: twin brothers, sons of Mars (god of war) and a Vestal Virgin, abandoned in the Tiber and suckled by a she-wolf. Romulus killed Remus in a dispute over where to build the city, and named it after himself. The Capitoline Wolf sculpture in the Capitoline Museums depicts the she-wolf — the twins were added in the Renaissance.
The gods in the buildings
The Pantheon was a temple to all the gods — pan (all) theon (gods). Saturn's temple in the Forum held the Roman treasury. Every major god had a counterpart in the existing Greek pantheon: Jupiter = Zeus, Mars = Ares, Venus = Aphrodite, Mercury = Hermes.
Why mythology matters for visitors
Roman art and architecture refers constantly to mythological stories — Bernini's Apollo and Daphne (Apollo chasing a nymph who turns into a tree) and the Four Rivers Fountain (allegorical gods representing the world's great rivers) both make more sense with the stories behind them.
Distinguishing Roman deities from their Greek counterparts
While often presented as simple renamings of Greek gods (Jupiter for Zeus, Venus for Aphrodite), Roman deities frequently carried genuinely distinct characteristics, associations and cult practices rooted in older indigenous Italian religious traditions before later Greek influence reshaped and merged them — the equivalence is real but not always as complete as popular summaries suggest.
Household gods and everyday practice
Beyond the major pantheon, ordinary Roman households maintained shrines to lares and penates (household and ancestral spirits) as part of genuine daily religious practice — a more intimate, domestic layer of Roman religion that operated alongside, and arguably mattered more day-to-day than, the grand state cults of Jupiter or Mars.
