this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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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.
Another fascinating facet is that the Romans took a certain aspect of Greek theology and ran with it full speed. Under the Interpretatio Graeca, all gods were actually the same gods - more or less. The Greek god of war was the German god of war - just worshipped under different names, seen in different clothes, with some different stories passed down. They were still, ultimately, the same god; and thus, all the world shared in a common faith.
The Interpretatio Romana is the exact same thing, just as applied to Roman religion instead of Greek religion. As the Romans came into contact with Greek culture, and shamelessly stole the bits they liked, they applied this theology to the world they conquered. Everyone's gods are everyone's gods.
While occasionally the Romans would import a foreign cult, even then they often equated that foreign cult with an established god in addition (something which later Graeco-Roman Platonism would use to espouse the view that all gods are emanations of the same, singular divinity). You get a lot of Roman religious epithets from this - the Romans liked addressing their gods with specific relevant titles or sub-names, like Mars Silvanus, Mars of the Woods, or Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, when calling upon gods. This becomes relevant in Interpretatio - Romans and provincials would worship the same god under the same name, by using these dual-names - such as Mars Lenus - 'Mars who is also Lenus (a Celtic god of war)'.
Goes a long way towards defusing concerns that the foreign conquerors are godless heathens - or that the conquered provincials are dirty superstitious savages. Whatever the mutual recriminations leveled between each other, they could at least be assured that the outsiders weren't risking the wrath of the gods with their strange, foreign ways - after all, they're paying respect to our gods!
So good at stealing things, they even stole the idea that stolen things weren't stolen!
"See? You stole it from those guys!"
"Steal? We would never! It's simply been incorporated into our society."