Ripley's Believe It or Not by Ripley’s Believe It or Not! for May 29, 2014

The Penates, however, did have a special connection with storerooms and cupboards. It’s important to remember that, contrary to what you were taught in junior high school, the real Greek and Roman religions were very different. Romans lived in a world of vague little gods fluttering around them like the birds flying aroud Disney’s Snow White. Greeks had gods like that, too, such as fauns and naiads, but they were generally outdoors and in the country, and had as little as possible to do with humans, while the Roman little gods were in the city, and in charge of almost anything. They had a god of doorsteps. If there were Romans today, they’d have a god of TV remotes and a god of eggbeaters. When the Romans met the Greeks, they loved all the cool mythology—Roman gods never had any adventures, they were just sort of there—and decided that the Greek gods were other names for some of the more important Roman gods. (They were actually partly right; the two religions show clear signs of descending from the same stone-age ancestor.) There were some serious mismatches, though. The horrible Kronos, who ate his children, was identified with the King-of-the-Golden-Age Saturn, and Apollo, who was basically the Greek god of grooviness (not the Sun god—that was a later mix-up), had no Roman parallel at all, so he had to be copied as he was. The Romans later also identified the German gods with their own. Tiw was Mars, Odin was Mercury, Thor was Jupiter, and Freya was Venus. (They couldn’t find a German version of Saturn, though.)