Such were the abodes of the gods as the Greeks conceived them.
The Romans, before they knew the Greek poetry, seem to have had
no definite imagination of such an assembly of gods. But the
Roman and Etruscan races were by no means irreligious. They
venerated their departed ancestors, and in each family the
worship of these ancestors was an important duty. The images of
the ancestors were kept in a sacred place, each family
observed, at fixed times, memorial rites in their honor, and
for these and other religious observances the family hearth was
consecrated. The earliest rites of Roman worship are supposed to
be connected with such family devotions.

As the Greeks and Romans became acquainted with other nations,
they imported their habits of worship, even in early times. It
will be remembered that as late as St. Paul's time, he found an
altar at Athens "to an unknown god." Greeks and Romans alike
were willing to receive from other nations the legends regarding
their gods, and to incorporate them as well as they could with
their own. It is thus that in the poetical mythology of those
nations, which we are now to study, we frequently find a Latin
and a Greek name for one imagined divinity. Thus Zeus, of the
Greeks, becomes in Latin with the addition of the word pater (a
father) [The reader will observe that father is one of the words
derived from an Ayan root. Let p and t become rough, as the
grammarians say, let p become ph, and t th, and you have
phather or father], Jupiter Kronos of the Greeks appears as
"Vulcanus" of the Latins, "Ares" of the Greeks is "Mars" or
Mavors of the Latins, "Poseidon" of the Greeks is "Neptunus" of
the Latins, "Aphrodite" of the Greeks is "Venus" of the Latins.
This variation is not to be confounded with a mere translation,