Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.
A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.
And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.
But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.
Kind of. They’re like bananas and plantains - they look similar, they have a similar origin, but once you bite into them they taste completely different.
A lot of the similarities are shared since the beginning, as they backtrack to the ancient Indo-European polytheism; you often see those similarities popping up in Norse mythology and Hinduism, for the same reason.
And beyond that, the Romans went out of their way to interpret foreign gods as variations of their own native gods, or outright copy them; not just the Greek ones, even stuff like Isis and Yahweh. So those similarities between Roman and Greek mythologies got actively reinforced once the Romans conquered Greece, and you got gods like Apollo and Bacchus being borrowed.
But the Romans still had their own specific gods, without Greek equivalents; like Janus Bifrons, who governs transitions and gates. And I feel like there’s some “humanity” in the Greek myths absent from the Roman myths, almost like one saw the gods as powerful but flawed individuals and another as aspects of nature. For example you can cheat a Greek god and get away with it, but not a Roman one.
[Sorry for the info dump. I love this stuff.]