_Myths

Greek Mythology, Ares

Aestas ( Roman ) Aestas ("summer", or "summer heat") is the Roman personification of summer. She is mentioned by Ovid in his Metamorphoses, and She may be his own invention. He describes Her as standing by the emerald throne of Phoebus (the Sun-god), with the other personifications of Time such as the Day, Month, Year, Century, and the Hours and the other Seasons, Spring, Autumn and Winter. She is naked except for a garland of grain or wheat-sheaves in Her hair. According to Pliny the Elder, the Summer Solstice takes place when the Sun is in the eighth degree of Cancer. What the Romans thought of as the first day of Summer was considered to take place on the forty-eighth day after the vernal equinox, which Pliny states as the day when the Sun enters the 8th degree of Aries. (By modern figuring, the Sun enters the 1st degree of Aries on the vernal equinox). Using the current calendar, that puts the Romans' first day of Summer on the 7th of May. Silvius, thoug...

Adonis Alternative Names (異名): Ἄδωνις, 아도니스, Adonis Categories: Greek mythology Adonis (Greek Ἄδωνις, Adonis, from the Northwest Semitic 'A-D-N) is a figure of West Semitic origin, where he is a central cult figure in various mystery religions, who entered Greek mythology. He is closely related to the Egyptian Osiris, the Semitic Tammuz and Baal Hadad, the Etruscan Atunis and the Phrygian Attis, all of whom are deities of rebirth and vegetation. His cult belonged to women: the cult of dying Adonis was fully-developed in the circle of young girls around Sappho on Lesbos, about 600 BCE, as a fragment of Sappho reveals. Adonis is one of the most complex cult figures in classical times. He has had multiple roles, and there has been much scholarship over the centuries concerning his meaning and purpose in Greek religious beliefs. He is an annually-renewed, ever-youthful vegetation god, a life-death-rebirth deity whose nature is tied to the calendar. His name is often applied in m...

Acca Larentia Alternative Names (異名): Acca Larentia, Acca Larentina Acca Larentia or Acca Larentina was a mythical woman, later goddess, in Roman mythology whose festival, the Larentalia, was celebrated on December 23. Foster mother In one mythological tradition (that of Licinius Macer, et al.), she was the wife of the shepherd Faustulus, and therefore the adoptive mother of Romulus and Remus, whom she is said to have saved after they were thrown into the Tiber on the orders of Amulius. She had twelve sons, and on the death of one of them Romulus took his place, and with the remaining eleven founded the college of the Arval brothers (Fratres Arvales). She is therefore identified with the Dea Dia of that collegium. The flamen Quirinalis acted in the role of Romulus (deified as Quirinus) to perform funerary rites for his foster mother. Benefactor of Rome Another tradition holds that Larentia was a beautiful girl of notorious reputation, roughly the same age as Romulus and Rem...