Mortals raised to cult — the bridge between gods and the Roman state.
Strength, Labours, & Apotheosis
Greek Heracles is a tragic brute whose glory comes at the cost of everyone around him; Roman Hercules is a stoic role model and a patron of merchants. Rome sanded off the tragedy and sold the moral.
Read the comparisonWrath, Honour, & a Glorious Death
Greece experienced Achilles as a dangerous, grief-mad hero deserving of cult; Rome received him as a rhetorical set-piece and invented the invulnerability that Greek myth never mentions. Rome made the tragedy safer.
Read the comparisonCunning, Endurance, & the Long Return
Greece admired Odysseus' cunning as the mark of a survivor; Rome cast the same man as a scheming villain in the Aeneid. The identical set of tricks reads as virtue in Athens and as fraud in Rome.
Read the comparisonDuty, Exile, & the Founding of Rome
The same Trojan prince is a footnote in Greek epic and the protagonist of Rome's national poem. Rome took a minor Greek character and built an entire imperial genealogy on his shoulders.
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