If we look at the temples which were built in the years following the Second Punic War, we shall have no difficulty in finding examples of the introduction of Greek gods under Roman names.  During the war itself in the year B.C. 207 a Roman general had vowed a temple to Juventas on the occasion of a battle near Siena.  Juventas was an old Roman goddess, one of those abstract deities which had been produced by the breaking off and becoming independent of a cult-title.  She was intimately associated with Juppiter, and had a special shrine in the Capitoline temple.  Juventas was the divine representative of the putting away of childish things and the assumption of the responsibilities and privileges of young manhood.  This act was symbolised by the Romans in the beautiful ceremony of putting on the toga of manhood (toga virilis), when the lad was led by his father to the Capitoline temple to make sacrifices to Juppiter, and at the same time a contribution was made to the treasury of Juventas.  But this was not the goddess in whose honour the temple vowed at Siena was built at the Circus Maximus and dedicated B.C. 191.  This Juventas was nothing more or less than the Greek Hebe, the female counterpart of Ganymedes, as cupbearer to the gods.  Similarly in B.C. 179 a temple was dedicated to Diana at the Circus Flaminius, but this was not the old goddess of Aricia, whose cult Rome had adopted for the sake of increasing her influence in the Latin league.  It was the Greek Artemis, who at her first coming into Rome had been associated with Apollo in the temple built in B.C. 431, and was now given a temple of her own.  Perhaps the strangest of all is the temple which was erected to Mars in the Campus Martius in B.C. 138.  It might well be supposed that the Romans would keep holy the reputed father of their race, the god to whom, under Juppiter, their success was due.  On the contrary in B.C. 217, when they were carrying out a Greek ceremony of offering a banquet to a set of gods, arranged in pairs, they showed no hesitation in grouping together Mars and Venus to represent the Greek pair Ares and Aphrodite, thus doing violence to Mars by bringing him into a relationship with Venus which was entirely foreign to old Roman thought, and identifying him with Ares, with whom he had nothing to do.  Now in B.C. 138 a temple is built to Ares under the name of Mars, close beside the venerable old altar of Mars, one of the oldest and most sacred of Roman shrines.

But this passion for identifying Greek gods with Roman ones did not confine itself to finding a parallel for the greater gods of Greece; and less known deities were introduced into Rome in the same way.  The old Roman god, Faunus, in whose honour the ancient festival of the Lupercalia was yearly celebrated, had as his associate a goddess, Fauna, who was better known as the “good goddess” (Bona Dea).  Eventually this new title Bona Dea crowded out the old title Fauna, so that it was almost entirely forgotten.