Methodology & Sources

This page explains where our information comes from, and where that evidence is strong, late, or contested.

Primary ancient sources

Roman mythology and religion survive mainly through a handful of ancient authors. We rely most heavily on:

• Ovid — the Fasti (a poem organized around the Roman religious calendar) and the Metamorphoses.
• Virgil — the Aeneid, Rome's foundational epic about Aeneas.
• Livy — Ab Urbe Condita ("From the Founding of the City"), Rome's own history of its founding and early religion.
• Plutarch — Parallel Lives, including the lives of Romulus and Numa.
• Varro — antiquarian writing on Roman religious and linguistic practice.
• Supporting authors including Cicero, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Macrobius, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny the Elder, cited where directly relevant.

Translations and texts

We use public-domain English translations of these works, primarily via Project Gutenberg and the Perseus Digital Library, rather than modern copyrighted translations.

Images

Photographs on Roman Myth Library come from Pexels, a stock photo service, under the Pexels License (free to use, no attribution legally required); we credit the photographer on every photo anyway, in the caption underneath it. For real, identifiable locations (the Roman Forum, the Pantheon, the Capitoline Hill, and similar sites), captions read "Photo of …" because the image shows that actual place. For gods, heroes, festivals, and abstract topics — where no genuine ancient artifact photo is being used — captions read "Illustrative photo …" instead, to be clear the image is representative, not a depiction of the specific myth, person, or artifact described in the text. We do not yet use museum-licensed artifact photography or Wikimedia Commons images; that remains a possible future addition.

Limitations we want you to know about

• Many surviving accounts of early Roman religion are late — written centuries after the events or practices they describe — and shaped by the literary conventions of their own time.
• By the late Republic and the Empire, Roman literary mythology was heavily influenced by Greek literature. We try to distinguish early, independently-attested Roman civic religion from later literary myth-making, and we flag it when a detail looks like Greek-influenced embellishment rather than old Roman tradition.
• Ancient sources frequently disagree with each other on specifics (a death, a parentage, an origin story). We note this rather than silently picking one version.

What we don't do

We don't invent quotations, passage numbers, or statistics. Where we aren't confident of an exact book or line reference, we cite the author and work only.