Visiting Rome, the Eternal City, is always a wonderful experience as it links the present with the past. Looking around at the historical sites of Rome recalled how closely linked the Roman Empire and its culture was with ancient Greece.
The link between the two cultures stretches further back than some may realize as we tend to forget the series of city states in the south of Italy that had been established there from the 8th century BC. The ancient Greeks established colonies along the coasts of Sicily and southern Italy from the Bay of Naples to the Bay of Tarentum in the Ionian Sea, to the coasts of Gaul, present-day France. The Etruscans and the Carthaginians impeded the Greeks from expanding further to the west and north. The term ‘Magna Graecia’ was used and is still used to refer to the Greek-speaking areas of Southern Italy of Calabria, Apulia, Basilicata, Campania and eastern Sicily. The settlements in this region were founded by their mother cities from ancient Greece and the settlers brought with them their Hellenic civilization, but also developed their own civilization due to the distance from the motherland and the influence of the indigenous peoples.
In the 6th and 5th centuries BC, these colonies flourished because of the extensive trade with the Etruscans. This can be seen with the amount of Greek pottery in Etruscan tombs and the presence of the Greek mythic and legendary themes found on Roman and Etruscan art works. Through the Etruscans, the Romans received Greek architecture, social practices, religious cults, science, philosophy and the art of writing. In 272 BC the Romans conquered Magna Graecia, and Syracuse in Sicily in 212 BC. Magna Graecia encompassed, amongst others, the city-states of Cyme (Cumae) and Posidonia, which were centres of Greek culture and although conquered, continued their influence over the Romans and the rest of the Italian peninsula.
The decline of ancient Greece also gave way to the steady control of Rome over mainland Greece with the definitive occupation of the Greek world after the Battle of Actium (Greek: Άκτιον) at the entrance of the Ambraciot Gulf (Greek: Αμβρακικός κόλπος) in 31 BC. The towns of Preveza, Amphilochia and Vonitsa lie on its shores. In this battle, the emperor Augustus defeated Cleopatra VII, the Greek Ptolemaic queen of Egypt, and the Roman general Mark Antony. Augustus went on to conquer Alexandria in 30 BC, the last great city of Hellenistic Egypt. Although ancient Greece had been conquered by Rome, as Horace, the leading Roman lyric poet said: Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit (“Captive Greece captured her rude conqueror”). Virgil, another Roman poet wrote the epic ‘Aeneid’, inspired by Homer (Greek: Ὅμηρος), the ancient Greek poet, who was born around 8th century BC and wrote the two epic poems of the ‘Iliad’ and the ‘Odyssey’.
Ancient Rome was also influenced by the twelve Olympian gods and the minor gods, incorporating them into their religious order as well as into their myths under the names of their Roman counterparts. Therefore, the Greek gods had the following Roman equivalent:
* Zeus, king of the Olympian gods, of the sky and thunder became Jupiter.
* Hera, the wife of Zeus became Juno, the marriage goddess and the wife of Jupiter.
* Aphrodite, the goddess of love became Venus.
* Apollo, the brother of the goddess Artemis was shared by both Greeks and Romans alike.
* Ares, the god of war, became Mars.
* Artemis, Apollo’s sister, the goddess of the hunt was named Diana.
* Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom and crafts and associated with the strategic planning of warfare became Minerva.
* Demeter, a fertility and mother goddess associated with cultivation of grain as well as the important religious cult of the Eleusinian mysteries became Ceres.
* Hades, Zeus’ brother and the king of of the Underworld became Pluto. He married Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, leading to the bareness of the earth as Demeter stopped helping in the cultivation of the land. It was only when Hades agreed to allow Persephone to leave the Underworld for six months of the year did the the earth begin to again produce.
* Hephaistos, the god of geological phenomenon, of fire and blacksmiths was known as Vulcan.
* Hermes , the many-talented and crafty messenger of the gods as well as commerce was named Mercury.
* Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, of the home became Vesta, vital also to the fortunes of Rome.
* Persephone, the daughter of Demeter and wife of Hades, was Proserpina.
* Poseidon, the god of the sea and fresh water springs and brother of Zeus and Hades, was named Neptune.
Zeus, Hades and Poseidon shared the world after the Titanomarchy against their father Kronos, who had swallowed all his children except Zeus. Zeus forced his father to regurgitate his brothers and sisters and after the ten-year war between the new generation of Greek gods and the older gods known as the Titans, in which they were defeated and imprisoned, the new gods made their home on Mt Olympus, assuming power over the cosmos. Kronos was referred to as Saturn.
Temples and statues can be seen in both Greece and Italy in honour of the ancient gods and the religion of the period.