How big did it go and how small did iit get?
This includes such high profile gods and goddesses as Devera, who blessed the brooms used to sweep temples, Laverna, goddess of charlatans and theives, Lua, who specifically existed to have weapons captured in war sacrificed to her, *Picus, an Italian god of woodpeckers, or Salus, goddess of specifically the welfare of people living in the city of Rome.
How much more specific and unknown do you want to get? There are plenty of surviving deities from the Roman era who have no surviving function that we know of.
kata1yst@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
You have to understand that in the pre-classical era, Roman people had minor god cults throughout their small villages, and the Greeks did the same thing. The cults beliefs did some traveling over time, and reasonable people slowly began piecing together a shared mythos.
Over time, as the Greeks pulled together their culture into a power structure of loosely associated city-states, their religious cults from dozens and dozens of villages all were glued together into a more cohesive pantheon.
Romans then adopted and ‘latinized’ the Greek pantheon, mixing in several of their own superstitions and cults.
This means you will have a God of creation and a God of that pond over there, which might have later been rationalized into a nymph.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
OP, this is the most correct answer. Then the gods from the goat herders and gods of the sailors and gods of the farmers ended up sort of getting glued together into responsibility groups, and then get names, so sure, there was a god of vines and grapes and wine, which was likely just the general “please god bless my vines” god for the area where lots of people grew vines and made wine.
There are similar practices among animist peoples in Sun-Saharan Africa, where local cults are just how people still do things, with their local gods for the village or the cluster of villages.
Also worth knowing is that when Greeks and Romans traveled, they didn’t say “we have a god of war, and it’s Aries, and your gods are false and that’s the end of the conversation.” They would show up and say “What do you call the god of war? We call him Aries.”