How Romans Thought Of Gods....

The city goddess for Pergamon was the Great Mother.
I think where ever the Romans went they accepted the local culture and adopted the deities into their own.
Hence many of the dieties are rrlated to places and were retained to make the Roman presence more pallettable... I guess back in Rome these would have been half heartedly accepted and were more a form of appeasement.

Correct me if this impression is incorrect but thats what I always thoughg.

David;

I am not saying there were not religious cultures. I am talking about Rome and how they used the Gods in language more then preyed to them. Go to Syria and see Tyche. Not that was a Goddess people were totally enthralled with and could not live without. Check out the Eastern Orthodox church, the Virgin Mary took on all the look of Tyche. The people always needed her there. They always preyed to her. It took Islam to finally put an end to Christianity in most of the the region with the much much stricter rules on what you can keep from old religions. Like to see the church make it there but lately they are on thin ground sadly.

as Finn said , the heritage of the Western culture from the Ancients is enormous, even in our dayly live : day of 24 houres , one houre=60 minutes etc , even the representtation of Britannia on British coins goes back to a Roman denarius just as the statue of Liberty is inspired by the Ancients . We have also to differentiate between gods and personifications . Every town and river and mountain had his personification , but was not treatd as a godd/goddess.So important organisms had a personification : the Senate with your draped bust , even gods had personificationssymbols : Zeus/Jupiter an eagle , Athene an owl...
The policy of Romans was tp assimilate as much as possible the local gods and institutions in their system . For the gods ,it was easy , Jupiter=Zeus=Baal=Amon ...For the politics , there was a difference between the East and the West : in the West , the Romans implanted immediately their system , because there was no system , only different tribes . In the East ,things were different , there was a vere developped political sense they respected , so we find there the pseudo-autonomous cities and kingdoms .
For the religious idea , I think we have a wrong idea , due to our catholic education and society .In our idea , we have one God and the Antiquity lots of gods/goddesses , but we forgot that the Christian God is in fact three persons and in the Catholicism , the other gods are replaced by the Saints , the Virgin Mary existed also in another form .So there is ,for me , on difference between Catholicism and paganism . In ancient Egypt , in the 15th century BC , Echnaton had his only God : Aton , the same idea existed in Ancien Greece . With the Hellenism of Alexander the Great , there has been a kind of mundialisation in the Eastern world , just as now .Once this mundialisation was accepted , the Roman Empire was created and brought this mentality to Rome and the West . The emperor Claudius imposed Gallians as senator in Rome .
Just as there was a political unification , there was also an idealogical unification ,in Rome , there lived no more only Roman or Latin people , but people from over all the world : Asia , Greece , Egypt , Spain , Gallia .All this people had their own gods and customs , so ,inevitably, you had a melange .
In the second century , there is a succession , let s say , by heritage . So the new emperor was no 'barbarian designed by the army , but a man with origin and education , what was the case of Aurelius , the emperor-philosoher, who , I think , represents the mentality of his time and who had the possibility to express his opinion for the whole world ( litterally) .Aurelius is the successor of Hadrian , who had the same mentality. albert

One thing I might add: The Romans were incredibly superstitious by our standards, and viewed the gods as behind anything negative.
So if the Tiber flooded or Hannibal beat their armies, they had lost favor of the gods and needed to make them happy again through rituals, particularly animal sacrifices.
They believed that the gods made their will known through omens, which is why augury played so much of a role in the maintenance of their daily lives.
For example, generals would refuse to go to battle unless the auspices were favorable, and losses and reversals were often blamed on a leader's ignoring the omens instead of bad generalship.

jskirwin;

When you say the Romans were superstitious and viewed gods as behind negative things so they sacrificed animals to appease gods.

Well hate to suggest it but the Roman leaders, I don't think they thought the animal sacrifices would help. Many cultures did and probably very seriously did from the top down, but Rome might have just been again manipulating the masses with such sacrifices.

For example, Jews were very very well integrated in Germany. No one could imagine of all places Jews would meet such a fate 30 years before. But the government took a ton of science from the Americans of our sociologist master race stuff and ran with it with Eugenics to deal with the war loss. The German people turned out to be extremely superstitious and telling them the Jews were carrying all the diseases allowed the people to justify getting rid of all the Jews.

If Rome was running Germany after World War One and looked at their superstitious people and gave them animal sacrifices to some gods that were angry with Germany I think you could argue that would have been preferably to today's way of appeasing superstitious people with human scapegoats.

And that is not just ancient history. Putin sacrificed the gays legally for a while recently, the head of the Philipines sacrifices the drug users. At least after 911 and the modern wars we only sacrificed French Fries for a while but we still were playing on the need of a superstitious public to have a scapegoat.

So hate to say it but I question if the Romans believed half of what they were doing when they sacrificed animals for bad events and just had that as an established tool to let the lower public have a release valve for frustration.