What are the Roman names of the Greek gods?

The list

• Zeus, Jupiter. King of the gods, lord of sky and thunder. The largest planet.
• Hera, Juno. Queen of the gods, wife and sister of Zeus. An asteroid, found in 1804.
• Poseidon, Neptune. The sea and earthquakes. The eighth planet.
• Hades, Pluto. The dead and the world below. Pluto comes from Plouton, the rich one, a Greek title of Hades. A dwarf planet.
• Kronos, Saturn. The Titan father of Zeus. The ringed planet, and Saturday.
• Aphrodite, Venus. Love and beauty. The brightest planet in the night sky.
• Athena, Minerva. Wisdom, crafts and the strategy of war.
• Hermes, Mercury. The messenger. The planet closest to the Sun, and the fastest.
• Ares, Mars. War. The red planet.
• Artemis, Diana. The hunt and wild places.
• Hephaestus, Vulcan. Fire and the forge, hence the word volcano.
• Demeter, Ceres. Grain and harvest, hence cereal.
• Hestia, Vesta. The hearth, tended in Rome by the Vestal Virgins.
• Dionysus, Bacchus. Wine and theater.
• Apollo, Apollo. Rome took him over with his Greek name.

Same gods, new names

Rome had gods of its own before it met Greek myth. Jupiter is even the same old word as Zeus: both go back to a name for the sky-father, Zeus patēr in Greek, Iuppiter in Latin. Others were Italian powers that the Romans matched to the nearest Greek god: Mars, father of Romulus; Saturn, a god of sowing; Ceres of the grain. Over the centuries the pairings hardened, and Greek stories reached Roman readers with Roman names attached. Ovid tells the Greek tale of Arachne but calls the goddess Minerva (read it here), and Virgil makes Aeneas, ancestor of Rome’s founders, the son of Venus. A few Roman gods had no Greek partner at all, like Janus, the two-faced god of doorways who gave January its name.

Why English used Latin names for so long

For centuries, Europe read the Greek myths through Latin. English writers said Jove for Zeus and Ulysses for Odysseus (same hero, two names). Even Samuel Butler’s prose Iliad of 1898 has Poseidon, whom he calls Neptune, speak of the “three brothers whom Rhea bore to Saturn” (Iliad 15.187–188). Most books today use the Greek names for Greek myths. Herald does too, and gives the Roman name once where it matters.

Why the planets carry Roman names

The five planets visible to the naked eye were named for gods long before telescopes. Greek astronomers called them the stars of Hermes, Aphrodite, Ares, Zeus and Kronos. The Romans translated those into Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, and Latin stayed the language of European science for more than a thousand years. The fit is neat: the giant planet bears the king’s name, and the next one out bears his father’s. Astronomers kept the habit for new discoveries: Neptune in 1846, and Pluto in 1930, a name suggested by an eleven-year-old English schoolgirl, Venetia Burney.

Uranus, the Greek exception

One planet breaks the pattern. William Herschel found it in 1781 and wanted to name it after King George III. The German astronomer Johann Elert Bode proposed Uranus instead: the Greek Ouranos, Sky, father of Kronos, rather than his Latin counterpart, Caelus. The logic climbs the family tree, from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus: son, father, grandfather. Uranus is the only planet named for a Greek god, and in 1789 it lent its name to a newly found element, uranium.