Explanation: Romans (and the Greeks they stole the practice from) viewed world religions through the lens of Interpretatio Romana. In this view, all the world worshipped the same gods, just by different names and with different ways of thinking about them. There’s a certain universality and pluralism to this logic: “Foreign folks aren’t so different from us, we’re all under the same heaven.” For that reason, Romans generally found it easy to engage with local religions and integrate with their faith, without insisting on anything resembling conversion. “You love Lenus, the god of war? We also love Mars, the god of war! Let’s make a sacrifice to the god of war, for security and victory.”

Sometimes this was intuitive - such as equating the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, with the Greek goddess of agriculture, Demeter. Other times, it was a bit more of a stretch - Wodan, the grim one-eyed king of the gods in the Germanic pantheon, is equated with… Mercury, the swift god of trade. Why?

Because they both travel.

Hm.

Generally, this interpretatio was intuitive to local faiths as well. After all, the gods MY forefathers worshipped are MIGHTY. It’s only natural that even foreigners bow to the great Ra, even if they worship Him with a silly Latin name like ‘Sol’!

However, there were cases when this could cause tension rather than relieve it - notably with the Jews. While the Romans made some limited attempts to accommodate Jewish monotheists (such as exempting them from the duty to make sacrifice to the gods for the security of the Res Publica, instead accepting the word of the priesthood that they prayed to YHWH for the health of the Res Publica; and later, after the first Iudean rebellion, a tax instead of that), a mixture of Roman arrogance and a lack of understanding of the theology of Judaism caused repeated missteps and offense. Certainly, the Jews of the period were not particularly amused at the equation of YHWH with Jupiter, nor the Roman insistence on that bizarre and blasphemous notion!

neat