The tradition of Roman mythology

What the Roman tradition has is: a very well developed ritual, priests and a group of interrelated gods.

A rich set of legends about the birth and development of Rome, in which humans played a major role and the gods sometimes intervened.

This suggests that the Romans had a different understanding of the gods than the Greeks. If one were to ask an ancient Greek who Demeter was, he would say that Demeter had a very beautiful daughter who was taken from her by Hades, and therefore Demeter was sad, and so on.

If an ancient Roman were asked who Celsus was, he would say that Celsus had a priest, whose position was lower than that of the priests of Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, but higher than that of Flora and Pumna. He would say that Celsus was in a group with the other two gods in charge of agriculture, Lepore and Libera, and he could probably name the lesser gods who helped Celsus.

So Roman "myths" were not stories, but intricate relationships between gods and goddesses and between gods and men.

The early Roman religion was later supplemented with many new and sometimes contradictory elements, notably the absorption of many parts of Greek mythology. Our knowledge of Roman mythology today comes not from the accounts of the time, but from the accounts of later scholars who tried to keep those ancient traditions alive. For example, Marcus Tyrontius Varro, who lived in the first century. Some other Roman writers, such as Ovid, were so y influenced by Greece in their writing that they often quoted Greek myths to fill in gaps in Roman mythology.