Editing Greek Mythology (section)

==The Roman Connection==
{{topquote|The Greeks shape bronze statues so real they seem to breathe,<br>And carve cold marble until it almost comes to life.<br>The Greeks compose great orations, and measure<br>The heavens so well they can predict the rising of the stars.<br>But you, Romans, remember your great arts;<br>To govern the peoples with authority,<br>To establish peace under the rule of law,<br>To conquer the mighty, and show them mercy once they are conquered.|Virgil, Aeneid VI, 847-853}}
The civilization of [[Rome]] had its own original native mythology. However, they also hugely admired the Greeks, their neighbors and also the guys who kind of beat them to the civilization game. With both civilizations being polytheists, the result was that the Romans did a '''lot''' of mythological cross-pollination, adopting many of the Greek gods as their own, just giving them different names and sometimes putting different spins on them. For example, we draw the current names of the planets in Earth's solar system - Mercury, Mars, Venus, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, Pluto - from the Roman names for Greek gods, such as Hermes, Ares, Aphrodites, Poseidon, Zeus and Hades. Greeks viewed Ares with disdain, denouncing him as the embodiment of bloodlust, savagery and the ugly brutalities of War, whilst the Roman Mars was a revered god of honor, courage, strength and leadership, closer more to the Greek Athena. A similar thing happened across the post-Alexander Hellenistic world, in which local dieties that loosely matched the Greek pantheon might be referred to by Greek names; one such example being "Zeus Olympios" to refer to the Greek Zeus as the leader of the gods, who would resemble various sun gods such as "Zeus Helioupolites" (Ba'al of Canaan), "Zeus Labrandos" (Teshub of Mesopotamia), etc, so this was a very common practice in the classical world.