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Roman Assimilation of Greek Myths and Botany
Just as Greece had earlier absorbed many of the cultural traditions of its more advanced
neighbors, so, too, did Rome assimilate much of Greek culture. However, the influence of
Greece is more apparent in the art, architecture, and religion of Rome than in its philosophy
or science. Rome, like Greece, was an agricultural society, and, not surprisingly, some of its
best minds— including Cato the Elder, Varro, Virgil, and Columella— wrote about agricul-
ture. An ample supply of agricultural deities was regarded as essential to the prosperity of
the empire, and they were regularly celebrated in art, poetry, and festivals. Not surprisingly,
given their antecedents, Roman myths reinforce the prevailing gender bias in which plants,
particularly flowers, were associated with women. The study of theoretical botany, includ-
ing the role of sex in plants, was largely abandoned, and, in the absence of any countervail-
ing scientific evidence, the one- sex model of plants, implicit in Aristotelian botany, became
even more firmly entrenched during the Roman period.Roman Agricultural Deities
By 900 bce, Rome, the future seat of one of the largest and longest lasting empires the
world has ever known, consisted of a sprinkling of small, agricultural, ethnically diverse
villages. Greek colonies began to crop up in Sicily and southern Italy by the middle of the
eighth century bce, and Roman assimilation of Greek and Phoenician customs and tradi-
tions, a process already underway as the result of earlier trade contacts, intensified during
this period. The indigenous religion of early Rome, like most ancient religions, was polythe-
istic. However, the Romans never developed a complex set of myths surrounding their own
deities as did the Greeks and Near Eastern societies. Exposed early in their history to the