Interpretatio romana
The Roman practice of calling a foreign god by the name of the Roman god taken to be the same — above all the wholesale renaming of the Greek pantheon that lets Ovid write "the Son of Saturn" for Zeus and Virgil "Jupiter" for the god who promises Rome empire without end; the counterpart of the Greek interpretatio graeca.
Why this wins its question: Defines the term by the sentences that perform it — Ovid's "Son of Saturn", Livy's "son of Jupiter" — rather than by a dictionary entry, and pairs it with the Greek practice it mirrors.
Key takeaways
- Interpretatio romana is what every Latin page in this corpus does: it tells a Greek story with a Roman name in it.
- It runs one way — Greek texts never say Jupiter; Latin texts never say Zeus.
- The name-swap carries Roman freight — Feretrius, Stator, "empire without end" — that the Greek original lacks, which is why each Greek–Roman comparison here separates myth from cult.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The clearest case is the Latin poets' retelling of Greek myth under Latin names: Ovid's council of the gods is convened by "the Son of Saturn", who calls himself "your sovereign lord, the Thunder-bolt Controller" and is addressed as Jupiter and Jove (Met. 1.163–252); Virgil's Jupiter, answering Venus, foretells Romulus and "empire without end" (Aen. 1.254–296). The god is Hesiod's Zeus, "father of gods and men" (Theog. 453–458), the name and the politics are Roman.
Livy applies the Latin names to Greek figures as a matter of course: Aeneas is "the son of Anchises and Venus" (Livy 1.1.8), Hercules is hailed at the Tiber as "Hercules, son of Jupiter" (Livy 1.7.10), and Romulus vows a temple to "Jove the Stayer" while praying to the "Father of gods and men" (Livy 1.12.4–7) — Homer's title for Zeus (Il. 4.67) attached to Jupiter.
The practice is one-directional: Greek texts in this corpus never use a Latin name, while Ovid's translator keeps every Latin name — Juno, Minerva, Mars, Venus, Pluto, Diana, Mercury, Neptune, Vulcan, Ceres, Bacchus, Vesta, Saturn — so that the Greek story and the Roman name sit in the same line (Met. 3.251–315; 4.167–189; 5.341–437).
The modern term names the Roman counterpart of interpretatio graeca: where Herodotus reads Egyptian gods as Greek ones (Hdt. 2.42.5), the Romans read Greek and other foreign gods as Roman ones; the phrase interpretatio romana itself comes from Tacitus's Germania 43, and the practice extends beyond Greece to the gods of Gaul and Germany.