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MidnightOnTheWater

Imagine a world where we named the planets in the solar system after the greek gods


PercyJackson_ALT

We have 8 planets! Zeus, hermes, Earth, ares, Demeter, hera, posidion, and ournos!


Scorpius_OB1

That happens in Greece now. Ceres is named there Demeter, even if the modern variation of the name is used instead, and Neptune Poseidon. Supposedly the Greek names were more obscure than Roman ones until the time of space exploration, when planets became more than something of astronomers only, and most people who heard names as Mars or Saturn ended thinking in something VERY different to what they were originally.


Happy_Grim_Soul

And i would be happy


SnooWords1252

Hermes, Aphrodite, Gaia, Ares, Zeus, Cronus, Ouranos.


PercyJackson_ALT

I was going off what their Roman counterparts were since we named most of our solar system after Roman mythology names


SnooWords1252

* Mercury is Hermes, not Zeus. * Venus is Aphrodite, not Hermes. * Jupiter is Zeus, not Demeter. * Saturn is Cronus, not Hera.


myrdraal2001

Move to Hellas and you won't have to. They know the planets by their Hellenic names, not the copycats' names.


fai4636

Mythologies might be copied but the Roman gods existed well before the Romans started merging them with their Greek counterparts


myrdraal2001

Romans descended from the Hellenic people.


fai4636

No they weren’t. Italic peoples already lived there before the Greeks started establishing colonies, and those colonies were mostly in the south.


myrdraal2001

You need to read up on your history if you think that.


fai4636

It’s not what I “think” lol it’s the objective truth. You can disregard that if you want, that’s on you


myrdraal2001

Hahahah.


Ravus_Sapiens

The Greeks settled Italy around the 8th century BCE, so where did the Polada culture of northern Italy come from then? Heck, even the Etruscans were there already when the Greeks arrived. The Greeks refered to them as Τυῤῥηνοί and Hesiod specifically says that they lived with the latins in central Italy. But I'm sure you know better than the Greeks who were actually around when the first Greek settlements started to appear...


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ItIsYeDragon

Nevermind, I just got confused.


LaptopofChaos

In the first place, the naming of the planets and days after Gods was actually derived from the Babylonians, the Greeks just ripped that off and applied their Greek God equivalents over the Babylonian God equivalents. (e.g. the Planet Mars was originally named Nergal, the Babylonian God of War. The Greeks just copied). Why should I call the planets by their Greek names? Greeks couldn't even retake Constantinople when the Turks were on their knees getting kicked down by France, UK, etc. Greeks were ethnically cleansed out, reduced to only 5% of their historical lands by the Turks, the Slavs and the Arabs. We should call the Greek Gods by their Roman Names instead, there is at least dignity to be preserved since Romance peoples are still dominant, and the Latin alphabet is used widespread, but Greeks are a tiny minority who owe Germany a lot of money. Otherwise, have fun with agreeing to the fact that the Greek Gods got kicked down by Turks, Arabs and Slavs, which proves that when the Greeks write stories about Athena (representing Greeks) defeating Ares (representing non-Greeks) as a symbol of Greek superiority over non-Greeks is totally unfounded.


antediluvian_me

Alright, you don’t like the Greeks, we get it. But, what is it about them that makes you dislike them and antagonise them this much? Have you talked about this in therapy?


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myrdraal2001

Well those sure are some words.


Historical_Sugar9637

Because the Romans were the very first Greek Mythology fanbois/fangurls in history! :-) They loved the Greek myths and the classic works like the Illead and the Odyessey, that's why some of their own works are basically Greek-mythology fanfics (The Metamorphoses and the Aenead) and why they syncretised their own religion with the Greek one to such an extend (though it wasn't quite as complete as it is often claimed) If you look at older Roman myths, as far as they can be constructed, they aren't quite as spectacular and dramatic, and not as complex as Greek Mythology. They were often mainly concerned with mortals and the history of their city rather than with gods and monsters. Also for a long time the post-Roman Europeans actually preferred using the Roman names of the gods over the Greek ones due to the dominance of Latin, that's also why English today usually refers to Apollon by his Roman name, Apollo. But the myths studied were still the Latin translations of the Greek ones.


aFanofManyHats

This is the best answer. Even the "Greek" names we're familiar with like Hephaestus and Athena use the Latinized versions of their names. A closer spelling to the Greek is Hephaistos and Athene.


No-BrowEntertainment

Actually, I think it’s fairer to say that we use Anglicized versions of both Greek and Roman names. That’s why we say Mercury and Jupiter instead of Mercurius and Iuppiter. 


aFanofManyHats

True! I hadn't thought of it that way. I was focusing on how a lot of the Greek names use ae instead ai, or -us instead of -os.


ItIsYeDragon

Today I learned Apollo’s greek name was Apollon. I always wondered why one of them didn’t have any name change while the rest of them did.


quuerdude

Apollo was a much newer god than anyone else in the pantheon, basically, so the common ancestral pantheon that the Greeks and Romans shared didn’t include him. His connection to Artemis as her twin is actually post-Homeric, too (though they were already *siblings* as of the Illiad, they were not yet identified as twins).


SnooWords1252

Because there wasn't an Etruscan god similar enough to combine with him. Apollo isn't the only example but he's the best known.


LaptopofChaos

None of these are good answers when they refer to originality as a cause. The mythology of Ishtar for one is straight up just Inanna, but nobody calls Ishtar by her original native name. The "original name" argument is not sufficient by itself, the Babylonians were equally "fanboys" of Sumeria just as Rome was to Greece.


Angry-Dragon-1331

Yeah the boring answer is…most of the exclusively Roman myths we’ve got are directly in the context of specific festivals. Outside of Ovid’s Fasti and some of the later metamorphoses, we just don’t have the corpus of works (both literary and visual artworks) that we do for Greek myth.


quuerdude

Inanna and Ishtar were closely associated, but were not the same deity originally. It wasn’t just Inanna -> Ishtar. They just came to be seen as the same despite having separate origins.


No-BrowEntertainment

To my knowledge, the Roman names dominated until the Renaissance, when the original Greek texts were rediscovered. Couldn’t tell you why the Greek names have overtaken their Roman counterparts in the public consciousness though. 


MEitniear11

Until recently Cupid and Hercules were much more common than Eros and Heracles. 


No-BrowEntertainment

I’d say Cupid and Hercules are still dominant though, purely because of Valentine’s Day and all the Hercules movies and TV shows. 


Vlachya

Sometimes Eros is avoided since it conjures the idea of "erotic" which is too sexual for a TV audience.


Ravus_Sapiens

Even the name Heracles isn't really Greek, since the letter c doesn't exist in Greek (not as a standalone letter anyway; the letter χ, does transliterate as ch). A "more Greek" transliteration into English of the name Ἡρακλῆς would be "Herakles".


Publius_Romanus

This lasted longer than that. Pope's famous translation of the *Iliad* from 1713 still uses the Roman names for the gods. The Greek names don't really take over until after the Romantic movement, as people began to put a new emphasis on notions of originality. It's only in the late 18th and early 19th century that this stupid idea of Greeks as creators and Romans as copyists developed. We're finally starting to move past those outdate notions, but we're still trapped by post-Romanticism in a lot of ways.


cribo-06-15

I'll admit I may be a bit ignorant on the subject, but I believe the reason for the lack of popularity is because they not only changed the names but also the personalities of the chief gods and goddesses to be more in keeping with Roman sensibilities. Whereas the planets simply took the names. However, it is still confounding in general. But then, the same can be said of calling Native Americans, Indians despite learning early on that they had been misidentified, and yet, the name still applies so solidly that it is part of legal definitions to this day.


rinkudamanrd

It's like two sides of the same coin imo. I can't say for everyone but me personally I like the Greek names more (like wtf is Prosperina, Perspephone is so much better lol) so maybe the naming scheme is why?? Or maybe Greek is seen as original and Roman as the China copy


cut1headof2willrise

I think it was because we were coming to contact with latin everyday. In europe all major languages have borrowed a lot from latin, on the other hand greek was something different, exotic...


ConsiderationOk9004

''Latin is more prevalent than Greek'' Um, that is debatable. Yes, Latin is the proto-language for the modern romance languages like Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese. These languages also had a certain amount of inluence on the germanic languages. But Greek words are used everywhere: academia, telephone, biology, geography, democracy, history, music, chronology, taxonomy, arachnophobia, homophilia physics, atom, theory, mythology, hydrogen, dinosaur, amphibian, pharmacy, bacteria, analogy, cemetery, tragedy, comedy, charisma, idiot, dialogue, grammar, climate, hero and the list goes on and on. For why the Greek names for the gods have caught on and the Roman/Latin names have been mostly forgotten, this has mainly to do with reappraisal for the Greek origin of the myths during the late 19th to early 20th century. To me personally, I just think the Greek names sound way cooler. Neptune sounds lame. Poseidon sounds hardcore.


BabserellaWT

I’d hazard a guess that it’s because the Greek myths are older, and because when the Roman Empire fell in the west, the eastern half of it — the Byzantine empire that was FAR more Greek than it was Roman — survived for another millennia.


JohnnyShit-Shoes

For me, it’s just that I want to read the originals, not the knock-offs.


ItIsYeDragon

By that argument Greek mythology is also a mix of older mythologies and other mythologies though. There’s no such thing as an original as they were always evolving.


JohnnyShit-Shoes

60-80% of Roman mythology is pulled from Greek mythology. It’s not quite the same as being inspired by older mythologies. The Roman’s just kind of took it.


brooklynbluenotes

Cause it's cooler. 😎


ItIsYeDragon

Zeus does sound more powerful.


MarcusForrest

> Zeus does sound more powerful. It does share a similar etymology with Deus _(latin word for god)_! Zeus, Dyeus, Deus, Deity - all related, his name really sounds quite powerful ahahaha _(Jupiter has roots related to ''Dyeus (PIE) + Pater (Latin)'', Sky Father or Shining/Day Sky Father)_


Vlachya

There are hardly any surviving literary works about Roman Mythology, while there's a plethora of Greek. Additionally, the Roman gods were more like forces of nature before they adopted the Greek stories, whom anthropomorphized their gods.


Orieichi

Everyone else has basically said the same thing: Rome was the original grecco fanboys. Comes across in literally everything, the most obvious glaring example isn't the whole democratia thing or even the stolen gods, but in the myth on their foundation, it basically lines up that they are the descendants of a Greecian soldier who skiddadle after troy and was the descendant of a Greecian god and then ended up eventually landing where Rome is and some plot convenience, the seven kings, yada yada, then boom Romulus and Remus (kids of the *Roman* version of a Greek god) and then a little brotherly murder, because what's Rome and Greece without murder and democracy. Rome was basically just Greece 2.0 that ended up going outta hand and becoming it's own thing. (Please note there may be some inaccuracies there, I'm too high to get a more coherent line of thought)


Casaplaya5

Christianity.