Note 65 — BOOK V. History of Rome, from the Earliest Times to the Fall of the Western Empire, A. D. 476.

At a later period, when the Romans had become familiar with the literature of the Greeks, an attempt was made to unite the mythologies of the two nations. Some deities, like Apollo, were directly borrowed from the Greeks; in other cases, some resemblance of office or character caused the Greek and the Roman divinities to be considered the same. Thus Jupiter was identified with Zeus; Minerva, the thinking goddess—the Etruscan Menerfa—with Athena, etc. By order of the Delphic oracle or of the Sibylline Books, living serpents, sacred to Æsculapius, were brought from Epidaurus to Rome, to avert a pestilence, B. C. 293.