hello my name is alex isles and welcome back in this episode we're going to be starting to look at the roman gods and how the romans understood their gods as well [Music] so hello and welcome back it's great to have you back after our little christmas break and in today's episode we're going to be looking at the core deities of the roman religion and some core ideas as well which is why we've got the capitoline hill right here behind me so when we've got the capitoline hill right behind me we're going to be talking about jupiter juno and minerva and just the understandings of those as then we'll go into core ideas of the roman religion and moving on from there this is going to be quite a fun series for me to do because this was requested by a subscriber months ago now and i've been working in the background doing a bit of research and now it's all come together as this series we're going to be looking at some of the core deities of the roman empire we're going to be looking at some british native deities we're going to be looking at male deities female deities and alongside that as well some of the germanic and celtic deities as well as some of the british deities too and that will all come together we're also going to be looking specifically at the gods on hadrian's war so i'm going to introduce the empire wide understanding of these deities and then focus in on roman britain up here in the north of britain and how they're depicted on hadrian's wall as well and i think you'll really enjoy that when it comes together because you're going to be able to get an empire wide understanding and then we're going to focus right in on one specific region where i'm going to show off some of the things i know about my region and the depictions of the gods here as well both in a more native style and in a classical style as well so i'm really excited to do that i hope you'll enjoy this rest of the series and what we'll do now is we're going to go straight into it and look at the capitoline triad of jupiter juno and minerva so get ready and we're going to start right now so welcome back now as i mentioned in my saturnalia video part one the first part of it there was a lot of different mixing of ideas and religion in and amongst the italic um or if the area which is now italy so the italian peninsula when you're looking at that you've got different cultures going on so you've got italic tribes so for instance two of those would obviously be the romans and the sabines then you've got the etruscans to the north you've got the greeks to the south you've got influences of the trading empire of the carthaginians who are all around the mediterranean north africa and are connected back to the middle east as well and so there's a lot of different ideas mixing when you read most books especially the school level books when it comes to the roman gods they're just like well they're exactly the same as the greek gods just with a roman gloss through my studies i've seen that that is definitely not the case when you're looking at the roman gods you've got to kind of look a wee bit more in depth because a lot of them are influenced from both the italic tribes and also the etruscans as well and with the etruscans the idea of the capitoline triad comes from them because they had their chief god tina then his wife uni and then minerva who was their daughter the goddess of wisdom you just have to look behind me and you've got minerva right here just directly behind me we've got juno and then just over here we have jupiter jupiter's name actually comes from the italic tribes and the second king of rome actually standardized a worship when he standardized worship it's probably from him that we actually see the the the names coming through more strongly so you'd see jupiter juno and also minerva was adopted from the etruscans so when you've got that you've got the beginnings of what we'd understand as these three deities and how important they would be to the early roman society when you've got them they were worshiped on the capitoline hill but also in other places across the empire and temples dedicated them well called capitalina and so when you have these capitalist temples they are really uh dedicated to these three gods so you could come together and worship the three most important core deities of the roman pantheon and also of the roman religion as a whole now when you've got them they had free cellar and each cellar would be almost like a hall each one would be dedicated to a different god in the center you have jupiter on the right hand side is juno and then on the left hand side is minerva and when you've got those set up inside you would be able to enter the hall and then there would be statues dedicated to each of those gods at the far end now one important thing to realize is that the romans when they had a temple the temples were actually considered to almost be homes of the gods so when their homes are the gods it's not like today when you go inside a religious building today like a church a temple a mosque or something like that where or worshipers gather together to actually worship the deity in that space our understanding of the gods is very different today in many ways to how it was in the past and so when people gather together the idea is the communal worship is the community coming together to actually worship that deity especially in the sort of christianity islam and judaism people come together they worship in one site and they're pointing towards a deity who is in the entire world in the roman mindset these temples are literally their houses so you don't normally just break inside or go inside a temple without it being a special holy day or something like that only the priests really go inside because they're allowed to and they're keeping the place clean and looking after it for the deity so it would be kind of like if i broke into your house and you suddenly found me inside there you're going to be like what is alex doing inside my house that's you know you'd be quite upset well if you're a deity like jupiter or juno or minerva these gods are gonna get quite upset at you you don't want to break into the houses you only enter inside on specific holy days and if there is specific reason to go inside otherwise most of worship is actually done outside of the temple at the front area that's where the sacrifices are conducted those sort of things there so you have to get your head around that to understand the difference between how we view our religious sites today and how the romans viewed their religious sites back then so if you were going to time travel back to ancient rome just don't walk inside the temple you're actually breaking an entry into someone's house and in the roman mindset these are the deities who have the power to actually really influence your fortune your luck everything about you your health so you do not want to upset them in any way shape or form you are going to honor them and that's why they constructed so many amazing temples like they did so the deities behind me why not we just start off by talking about jupiter right over here so when we've got jupiter right over here quite an interesting deity jupiter we're going to talk about later in his own separate episode but he was probably started off as an indo-european sky deity when he starts off as this indo-european sky deity we can see this by the symbols he's associated with he is associated with his holy animal being eagle he has the weapons of the thunderbolts and he is seen as this father this overarching deity who is the father of all of the people and we can see similarities between jupiter and the etruscan deity tina and also the italic deity as well so when you've got those coming together you can see how the romans created or mixed together these ideas from the surrounding cultures that they were trading or fighting with and eventually conquered to create their jupiter so when jupiter comes out of this mixture he's quite different to the greek god zeus who he's are normally compared with zeus a bit more tumultuous he's very much a more sexualized deity he goes around the place creating offspring almost all over the place whereas jupiter does still have that because the romans adopted a lot of the greek myths but it's almost like it's seen as a sideline when you look at jupiter yes there are these other children but a lot more is seen as the father the leo he is seen as this uh this important head of society head of the gods much more how roman society viewed themselves with the important structuring of you know the petitions at the top than the plebs underneath them and the strict societal boundaries that roman society had and so with that jupiter is seen as the head of that and is the example of that fathership and that headship over all others then we have juno juno is the mother deity and when she's the mother deity she is the one who is responsible for marriage for fidelity in marriage she is responsible for mothers and women and so she is also very important so as jupiter is to represent the father of the household the uh the leader of society all of that sort of thing juno also represents this for women and it gives an example to women as to how to lead and all of those sort of combining things as well so when you've got that together you've got these two strong deities this mother deity who is the head of their what femininity is supposed to be like with a respectful mother the head of her household who was supposed to maintain and look after that household combined with the father deity who is jupiter who is the sky god who is represented as a king of all of the other gods and a leader of the gods those two come together to show the father and mother figure for roman society and that respectful nature that they were so strong about within roman society then you have their daughter minerva now when you have minerva she is a bit of an interesting one and we'll come to her again as i said we're doing episodes on both jupiter and also on minerva in other episodes as well but minerva is quite an interesting one because unlike other deities she's not born from other gods in the normal conventional sense from a woman instead she much like the greek athena is born from jupiter so there is a conflation of myths that jupiter was afraid of being replaced and so because of that he eats minerva's mother when he eats minerva's mother she is trapped inside of him and she then starts she gives birth to minerva and when she gives birth to minerva she then creates and forges minerva's spear and armor and shield and helmet inside jupiter's head and jupiter's got this absolutely horrendous cracking headache when he's got this horrendous cracking headache he gets vulcan to come along and vulcan is then uses his hammer to crack open jupiter's head and out of jupiter's head minerva jumps out fully formed as this goddess and she's a very interesting goddess because she's a goddess of trade she's a goddess of diplomacy she's a goddess of strategy and she's also the goddess of wisdom so with all of these things together she brings another element into roman society and when you've got this goddess of wisdom she is seen as an advisor and other than mars who was seen as sort of like aggressive warfare she has seen as defensive warf where she has seen a strategy planning tactics and all of those things together so quite a different sort of deity not a war deity as such but one who is much more protective wise and advisory within the pantheon and so those are the core deities we have here a king god a father god and also a father deity a leader of the roman state all of those things together then we have the mother deity right here juno who is the mother of the whole gods and respectable for women and responsible for both marriage and women and all of those together and then finally we have minerva who is seen as the strategy the wisdom the knowledge and all of those things packaged together and then those three gods then set up the roman concept of their deities as the core free most important deities who the romans worshipped obviously coming back again from the original triad from the etruscans influenced by the italic worship and creating the roman gods together who will be the core part of the pantheon for the romans why don't we move on now and look at the next most important group of gods the di contentis so the next thing we're going to look at when we're looking at the roman religion is the next most important group of gods of which the capital and triad are actually a part of and these are the di contentis now um obviously latin is not my first language it's a dead language so if i mispronounce anything it's not meant as an offense or anything like that and sometimes in the comment section i get hey anglo or stuff like that from people who have italian as a first language so i do apologize if i mispronounce anything i'm trying to do the best i can please just give me pointers in the comment section below and that always helps but yes the di contentis when you've got these deities these are the 12 most important gods after the capitoline triad of the roman pantheon and they are jupiter and juno then we have neptune and minerva we have mars and venus apollo and diana vulcan investor and mercury in cyrus when you've got these deities they are often paired either romantically or within their power section so when you're thinking about it you've got for instance mars and venus now you've got the god of war and the god of love but also one of venus's areas is victory to represent romantic conquest or romantic success or coming together um with you know love and all of those sort of things there which then overlaps with mars victory in war success honor bravery all of those things as well so you've got nice little mixing you know ma jupiter is obviously the father god and then juno is the mother deity so there you've got another one of family fatherhood motherhood king queen of the gods coming together which then later on would be mirrored within the emperor empress who would often set up you know statues to jupiter the greatest and the best or to juno regina who would be the deity representing the spirit of the empress so you've got those coming together right there and so each one of these is mixed together so you've got apollo who is the god of travel and all of those aspects with diana who is also goddess of wilderness in the wild spaces so you can see sort of overlaps between these gods now originally this started happening with just six pairs initially around about the 6th century bc when you have that going on those were started off then and then it continued onwards until around about the second punic war when all 12 gods were sat together to bring the gods favor in wars against carthage and so from there you can see them really solidifying and there's also a lot more greek influence around about the third second century bc as well so when you get the more greek influences you can see gods like diana taking a lot from artemis her greek counterpart as well you've got um other deities as well who are more and more inspired by their greek versions but many of them keep their italic or etruscan flavor as well and that slowly builds up the roman pantheons too god's and the roman pantheon also could be combined with lesser deities too you've got the di contentis you've got alongside that as well the capitoline triad these are the most important gods within the roman pantheon but there are other lesser gods as well and much like modern day hinduism where there are gods almost everywhere within the world the romans saw gods within the world as well and these were from low level deities which were nymphs or um also genus loci which we'll talk about in another episode which would be a spirit of location right the way up to uh tribal gods of other peoples or foreign gods and then you'd have their chief gods which also sometimes referred to as the olympians because they reflected the olympiads olympian deities from greece so you've got those sort of mixing of ideas together but one good example of one of the major gods being combined with a lesser god create another aspect of that god was venus who is obviously the goddess of love beauty desire sex fertility prosperity and victory being combined with colonica and colonica is the goddess of cleanliness she was the deity associated with the main sewer system in rome so when you've got colonica she's combined with venus and you get venus colonica and the interesting aspect of this was that this was then a goddess of purity and so when you've got a goddess of purity she was to represent sexual purity within the roman society so when you've got this there was to emphasize and it was after a sex scandal where a number of leading men of rome and a number of leading women as well as some vestal virgins had all been exposed for sexual indecency within the roman system now when you've got that sexual indecency they created venus colonica to represent the purity of sexual relations within marriage the importance of being faithful to one in one another and also calling out for rome's men to actually be more responsible for their sexual actions so when we've got this a brand new deity has been created who is an aspect of venus by comparing two gods together and they wouldn't just do this with roman deities they also did it with foreign deities as well so in roman britain you can actually see when they've taken a native british deity and combined it with a roman deity to create a subcult that would then bring local people in which is what we'll talk about in a bit but just a good example of this would be sulis minerva sulis was the local deity of the water springs in bath in britain which you'll see a little image on the map right now of and so when you've got soulless she's combined with minerva who is obviously goddess of wisdom and when you bring those two together you get a healing deity a goddess of wisdom and an important cult center within roman britain so that's a good example there of a native deity being combined with one of the major deities to bring the roman british into the roman world as well so what we're going to do next is we're going to now talk about another idea of synchronity so the next idea we're going to talk about is synchronism and synchronism is a really interesting part of roman religion and this actually helped the romans no end and was one of the reasons why they were so successful alongside their military conquests because this is what in today's warfare and in today's um sort of area of politics and nation building we almost call hearts and minds so it's finding the local people and finding a way of connecting them in to a new system of government and basically helping them to take on new ideas so that there is a new way forwards for that and the romans did this as well because obviously you're taking people from different cultures different understandings of the world all of those sort of things and you're bringing them together and what i've done is i've put up an image of saturn right here now saturn obviously we know quite well from the saturnalia videos that i did over christmas and so we've got saturn so i'm going to be talking about how they use synchronism to bring the gods together now you've got three different images up here we've got in the far corner you've got saturn then so in the far corner we've got saturn then we've got hamon and then right here this is kronos these three gods had synchronicity within the roman system because they were seen as one and the same now the romans when they went out into the world they started going up to these local people and they said so who is your king god who is your god of war who is your god of wisdom who is this deity within your pantheon and then the people would sit down and they would explain their gods to them and as they explained their gods to them they would say well do you know what your god your chief god he sounds a lot like jupiter so what we'll do is we'll say we'll do jupiter hyphen name of that god and you take some aspects of your god we'll mix it with jupiter and then we'll have a temple here but we'll worship them in the roman fashion so in the same way as i mentioned in the episodes about saturn when we look at him we've got saturn right here during this second punic war it was believed that the romans were suffering defeats because they needed to get the gods on the side so they said well we're going to take some of the aspects of the greek worship of kronos and because chronos is very similar to baal haman we'll take those aspects of worship on board and we're going to please saturn's aspect as baal haman and he'll turn his favor away from the carthaginians and instead he's going to turn it to us and so when he turns it to us this will bring them on side he'll then give his favor to us and we'll win this war and so in the way like that they saw the synchronity of the different deities and they said right okay this is how we're going to win because the romans believed that their gods were the only real gods the only true ones and all the other gods were either little regional deities or little regional spirits or they were their gods wearing a different hat and so if you can imagine that they believe that jupiter had given them the entire world it was down to them they had this sort of divine right to win the entire world they were going to conquer outwards and be unstoppable and so because of that that combination of believing that they were entirely undefeatable because the fact that the gods had blessed them combined with the fact that they believed that the other chief gods or the main penalty and of other peoples were actually just their gods wearing other hats but they didn't love those peoples as much as they loved them means the roman suddenly becomes the roman mindset towards religion becomes really interesting because suddenly they are then able to expand out in any direction and as long as they find a similar concept within another pantheon they can then say well that deity is this deity within our pantheon and so because the fact the roman pantheon is so diverse you know you've got you know neptune god of the seas and the rivers well if you find any other river deity you go well you know that is an aspect of neptune you find a goddess of love or fertility you go that's venus you find a crafting or creative deity you can go well that's vulcan again there is an aspect of all of their gods that then could be placed onto these other gods or they could sort of like jig it about a little bit or jury fix it in a way that would suggest that this god is this god pair them together and then go from there and it's really interesting to see how they did that with a number of other deities so wherever they went they would find the local people they'd say to them what is your god like what is this like what is that like and then they would compare it together to create these new deities uh very similar to like how they created uh venus colonica or those sort of things there and then when these local people were worshiping these joint deities together they would then maybe go well what in this particular in this specific instance what i'll do is i'll worship just jupiter or just mars and then slowly romanization would occur and so that combination of believing that no matter what the gods were on their side the romans then would be able to expand outwards be successful and then conquer and win and at the same time they would be able to adopt romanize and bring other cultures into their empire by saying of the synchronicity of their deities so it's a really interesting one to look about when we're studying the roman gods and we're understanding how the roman mindset was so successful to expand across not only showing their military strength but also saying well actually in the spiritual role we're going to conquer you as well because our gods are for us and they're actually well and alongside this as well not only are they for us but they've already been showing themselves to you but not in their purest forms so a really interesting one to look at that when we understand the roman spiritual system as well so in conclusion you've seen how the romans had their core gods who were inspired by both the italic tribes the etruscans and greek elements as well how then they combined that with the larger pantheon of the olympiad or the dias those 12 gods who were really important to the core roman belief system of their world and then how they had the lesser gods and how these gods could be combined together to actually create a new deity with a new aspect that would help the roman religious system when you've got this combining of the deities together this then combined with synchronicity meant the roman gods could go throughout the whole of the world and then continue to expand be successful and culturally take over other civilizations much more quickly much more successfully and with much greater power than many other empires had done before i really hope you'll join me for the next episode where we're going to look at another deity and we're going to expand out this study and look at more gods and how they were created and then depicted especially in regards to northern britain as well as always i'd ask you to like and subscribe share the video with your friends and i really hope you'll join me for another video shortly until then though stay safe and well and thank you so much [Music] you