Another place where the two diverge is in the role that myth played for the two cultures. In Rome, the role of Mythology seems to be primarily one of charting history and the lineage of rulers, while in Greece, Mythology is displaced from modern life by becoming collected narratives of the adventures of gods, goddesses and heroes of all shades. It almost seems that the more I read about the two cultures, the more I start to think that the comparison between the Greeks and Romans in general can be boiled down to idealistic v.s. realistic, as if the Romans were all about logic and complex, interlocking relationships, the real and the visceral, while the focus of the Greeks was on things artistic, philosophical and cerebral, more concerned with the mind than the body, and that comes through in the differences between their mythologies.



In all, we can see that even though the Romans were able to easily incorporate the mythology of the Greeks into their own pantheon and make the works of their predecessors their own, there were some significant differences between Greek and Roman conceptions of divinity and spiritual practice.

