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Inventing is hard work. Not for the Romans!
(startrek.website)
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this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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They even stole the Greek gods.
And the Etruscan gods. And the Carthaginian gods. And the Egyptian gods. And the ... you get the idea.
The Romans even had a standardised ritual for stealing gods from a city they were about to conquer: Evocatio. In the ritual, priests would call upon the enemy god(s) to abandon their city and come to Rome, where they would receive a bigger temple and more devoted worship than in the city about to be conquered.
I find it fascinating that, unlike today, where every religion thinks that their own gods exist and others don't, the Romans believed that all other gods existed alongside their own.
When the Romans were conquering Britannia, they were attacking a small river island. There they encountered a group of Druids. As the Romans cut them down they realized that the Druids were actually sacrificing themselves at their hands in some unknown ritual. The Romans saw this as a bad omen since they had just inadvertently participated in some foreign god's ritual. Shortly afterwards, Boudicca started her campaign against the Romans.