Lorendiac
10-06-2005, 09:29 PM
My understanding of the situation with Diana, the Roman goddess of the moon and of the hunt, and Artemis, her Greek equivalent, goes like this:
In "War of the Gods" in the early 1990s, DC established that A) the Greek and Roman pantheons of mythological deities used to be the exact same people, but then they somehow got split into similar but different sets of supernatural entities, a long, long time ago.
Later, in John Byrne's run on "Wonder Woman," he merged most of the matching pairs right back together again: Mars and Ares, Zeus and Jupiter, etc. In most cases, the merged entity habitually used the Greek name for himself or herself, instead of the Roman one.
Years later, Walt Simonson did a run on the "Wonder Woman" title in which one of the villains was the Roman goddess Diana, who hated the idea of being merged with her Greek counterpart, Artemis and had teamed up with something called "The Shattered God" to avoid being doomed to share the same body with Artemis. Unfortunately, I haven't read Simonson's work on the title, and very little of Rucka's.
My questions:
Did Artemis of the Greek gods, and Diana of the Roman gods, ever get merged back together as a result of the stuff in Byrne's run on the title, and then get separated again for Simonson's purposes? Or were they never merged in the first place?
If the answer is that they had never been merged at all, not even a little bit :), then did Simonson's run state or suggest that Artemis, the Greek goddess, never noticed that she hadn't merged with her Roman counterpart the way most of the members of her extended family had done with theirs? (Or did she notice but just shrug it off as not important enough to mention to anybody? Or what?)
I have seen somewhat contradictory comments and suggestions made on these points in other online summaries and discussions, and would appreciate help in clearing it up, as part of my research for another post I'm working on right now :)
In "War of the Gods" in the early 1990s, DC established that A) the Greek and Roman pantheons of mythological deities used to be the exact same people, but then they somehow got split into similar but different sets of supernatural entities, a long, long time ago.
Later, in John Byrne's run on "Wonder Woman," he merged most of the matching pairs right back together again: Mars and Ares, Zeus and Jupiter, etc. In most cases, the merged entity habitually used the Greek name for himself or herself, instead of the Roman one.
Years later, Walt Simonson did a run on the "Wonder Woman" title in which one of the villains was the Roman goddess Diana, who hated the idea of being merged with her Greek counterpart, Artemis and had teamed up with something called "The Shattered God" to avoid being doomed to share the same body with Artemis. Unfortunately, I haven't read Simonson's work on the title, and very little of Rucka's.
My questions:
Did Artemis of the Greek gods, and Diana of the Roman gods, ever get merged back together as a result of the stuff in Byrne's run on the title, and then get separated again for Simonson's purposes? Or were they never merged in the first place?
If the answer is that they had never been merged at all, not even a little bit :), then did Simonson's run state or suggest that Artemis, the Greek goddess, never noticed that she hadn't merged with her Roman counterpart the way most of the members of her extended family had done with theirs? (Or did she notice but just shrug it off as not important enough to mention to anybody? Or what?)
I have seen somewhat contradictory comments and suggestions made on these points in other online summaries and discussions, and would appreciate help in clearing it up, as part of my research for another post I'm working on right now :)