Ancient Greece & Rome
Greek and Roman mythology, compared god by god
Legends in Stone is a comparative codex of the classical pantheon. Trace how 44 Greek and Roman deities line up — Zeus and Jupiter, Ares and Mars, Aphrodite and Venus — then follow the history of how Rome adopted, renamed and reshaped Greek religion, who wrote the myths down, and where the gods still live today in film, games and books.
Featured plates
The best-known Greek and Roman gods
Zeus / Jupiter
Sky, Lightning, Law, & Royalty
Athena / Minerva
Wisdom, Strategy, & Craft
Ares / Mars
War, Courage, & Conflict
Aphrodite / Venus
Love, Beauty, & Desire
Hades / Pluto
Underworld, Wealth, & the Dead
Dionysus / Bacchus
Wine, Ecstasy, Theatre, & Rebirth
Roman Greece
How Rome took the Greek gods
Rome did not simply copy Greek myth. From the sixth century BCE it matched foreign gods to its own through interpretatio, imported cults by decree, and later rewrote the stories to serve the state. Greek colonists in southern Italy, Etruscan middlemen and a flood of Greek teachers after the conquest of Corinth in 146 BCE all shaped the result.
- Renaming: Zeus became Jupiter, Ares became Mars, Aphrodite became Venus — but the Latin gods kept their own older characters.
- State religion: the Senate consulted the Sibylline Books and imported Ceres, Liber and Libera in 496 BCE on official terms.
- National myth: Virgil’s Aeneid made Rome descend from Trojan survivors and the gods who favoured them.
Greek → Roman
Twelve of the most familiar equivalents. The full codex holds 44.
Library
The history behind the myths
Poets, philosophers, emperors
The people who recorded the myths
Every myth we can read survives because someone wrote it down. Meet Homer and Hesiod, the historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and the Roman poets and emperors — Virgil, Ovid, Caesar and Augustus — who bent Greek stories to a Latin empire.