Roman plagiarism of Greek gods

Left: Poseidon (Melos, late 2nd cent. BCE, National Archaeological Museum of Athens). Right: Neptune (Trevi fountain, Rome, 18th cent. CE).

One of the first things a student of classical Greco-Roman mythology learns is that the Greeks and Romans talked about the same gods, but with different names --

Greek	Roman	god of ...
Zeus	Jupiter	sky, lightning, king of gods
Demeter	Ceres	agriculture, grain crops
Ares	Mars	war
Poseidon	Neptune	sea, earthquakes
Aphrodite	Venus	sex, erotic desire

and so on. A very few gods, like Apollo, keep the same name. Every myth course starts with a table like this.

So if stories about Zeus, Hermes, and Herakles are the same thing as stories about Jupiter, Mercury, and Hercules ... and the Greeks came first ... that means the Romans stole their mythology from the Greeks, right?

Well, if it were right we wouldn’t be here talking about it. Plenty of sources out there on the web point out that some of the Roman pantheon were native Roman gods, like Quirinus, Bellona, and Terminus. But even they’re seen as exceptions to the rule. Those few are the genuine Roman gods -- not like those other mainstream gods ...

Now, it is true that many of the resemblances between the Greek and Roman pantheons are no coincidence. But the Romans didn’t replace their own gods, and they didn’t steal Greek religion either.

... except when they did. I have to add a caveat: there are a few cases where the Romans really did appropriate Greek gods or Greek religious cults. But not as many as you think, and not the gods you’re thinking of. Let’s look at some reasons for the resemblances.

1. Indo-European religion

Names of gods, and in some cases maybe other aspects of them, can sometimes be traced back to prehistoric origins. This works the same way that historical linguists reconstruct family-trees of different languages. In this way of looking at things, you could imagine the Greek and Roman gods sort of as cousins.

To an extent, at least. You have to be careful: prehistoric Indo-European links aren’t as pervasive as people sometimes imagine.

For gods with related names, we only have a couple of really good examples. The best known is Zeus-Jupiter. Both of these names can be traced back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European name *dyēus-ph₂tēr, where *ph₂tēr = ‘father’. The name also shows up in India as the Vedic god Dyauṣ Pitā, and in a few other places too. In Zeus’ case, the ‘father’ dropped off (though he’s still regularly called ‘father of gods and men’) and the *dy- metamorphosed into either dz-, sd-, or di-, depending on the dialect and on his grammatical role in a sentence. In Jupiter’s case, the *d- disappeared, and the -ēu/ēw- got assimilated with the following -p-, resulting in -upp- followed by a neutral vowel: Iuppiter. In other grammatical forms, the -pater disappeared too, resulting in the stem Iov- (originally pronounced yōw-). That’s why even in English he can be called either Jupiter or Jove.

Another pair that’s obviously related is Hestia-Vesta. There’s some evidence to suggest a prehistoric Greek goddess called Eleuthera, and one of Jupiter’s cult titles in Latin is Liber: both mean ‘liberator’ in their own languages. [correction:] we know of Latin vegetation gods called Liber and Libera: all of them come from an Indo-European root meaning ‘growth, increase, the people’. [end of correction] And there’s some sort of connection between Greek Eos, Latin Aurora, Vedic Uṣas, and Lithuanian Aušrinė, but in their case it’s questionable whether they derive from an Indo-European goddess or from an Indo-European word meaning ‘east, dawn’: Eos, Uṣas, and Aušrinė don’t have much in common, and we know basically nothing about Aurora.

But for most gods, the name game doesn’t work. ‘Athena’, ‘Demeter’, ‘Dionysus’, ‘Hera’, ‘Hephaistos’, and ‘Hermes’ all appear to have non-Indo-European roots -- mixed with Indo-European elements, in the cases of Demeter and Dionysus (-mētēr ‘mother’, dio- ‘of Zeus’) -- and ‘Apollo’ and ‘Poseidon’ have uncertain origins. On the Roman side, ‘Juno’ and ‘Minerva’ both have ‘Minerva’ has a known Etruscan precursor, which is to say, not Indo-European; ‘Ceres’, ‘Mars’, ‘Venus’, and ‘Vulcan’ come from Indo-European words, but we don’t find any related names among other Indo-European gods of grain, war, sex, and fire.

There are more options when we look at religious practice, divine functions, and story-elements. For example, Zeus and Jupiter both have cult titles built out of verbs: Zeus can be ‘Zeus the Gatherer’, ‘Progenitor’, or ‘Saviour’; Jupiter can be ‘Victor’, ‘Helper’, and ‘Adviser’. Zeus is a Greek sky god who was nursed by a goat as a baby, and gets called aigiochos, ‘goat-rider’ or ‘goat-driver’; Thor is a Norse sky god who drives a chariot drawn by goats. When Zeus enters a gathering of the gods in Homer, they all stand up for him; the same happens for Indra in the Indian Mahābhārata, and for Ea in one Hittite text.

For Roman mythological elements, it’s harder to find Indo-European parallels. This is partly because there’s a severe shortage of information about gods in early Rome. The Greeks had myth encyclopaedias, and scholarly investigations of their own mythology: we have a huge amount of information from them. But from the Romans, not so much. There are snippets in writers like Servius and Pliny, but nothing as systematic as the Greek mythographers. Partly it just comes down to the sheer amount of text that survives: we have about eight times as much textual sources from the Greek world as from the Latin world. Varro, one of the greatest scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity, wrote a long treatise on early Roman religion called Antiquities of divine matters, which ought to be a key source for Roman religion ... but, alas, it doesn’t survive.

2. Interpretatio romana

Most ancient cultures had different names and even different stories about the same gods. ... So as the Romans conquered the Greeks they adopted Greek Mythology and replaced the gods’ names with traditional Roman gods’ names. Similar process would occur when the Germanic tribes were Romanized. -- ‘Farhan Elohovitch’, Quora.com, June 2016

Ancient Mediterranean civilisations who were in touch with one another often drew parallels between their pantheons and equated them with each other. When the Greeks looked at Egyptian mythology, they saw some parallels between Egyptian gods and their own gods, so they ended up referring to the Egyptian gods by Greek names: Zeus = Amun, Apollo = Horus, Adonis = Osiris, and so on. Nowadays we call this interpretatio graeca. There was no danger of mixing the gods up, because the resemblances weren’t very deep, and because the different names were linked to different places. Ancient religion was often more about observing local customs than about belief: when in Egypt or Libya, you visit the oracle of Amun; when at Dodona in Greece, you visit the oracle of Zeus.

In the same way, the Romans referred to foreign gods using Roman names. When talking about the Greek Zeus, they’d call him Jupiter; when talking about the Greek Hephaistos, they’d call him Vulcan. And there was an awful lot of Greek myth floating around, so it’s not really surprising to find Romans telling Greek stories with Roman names. Again, this was more a terminological thing than a religious thing.

The Romans did this with other pantheons too. Julius Caesar’s account of Gaulish religion refers to the Gaulish gods by Roman names (Gallic wars 6.17): he says their chief gods were Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva. These could be Lug, Belenus, Teutates, and Sul; but the interpretatio romana of Gaulish gods wasn’t nearly as one-to-one as it was with the Greek pantheon. The equations changed depending on time and place. Teutates could at times be equated with any of Mercury, Mars, and/or Jupiter, and the Gauls had many gods of healing to equate with Apollo.

It is fair to say that in the Roman-Greek case, the resemblances are relatively accentuated by comparison with the Greek-Egyptian or Roman-Celtic cases. Roman religion was unquestionably something very distinct from Greek religion; but elite Roman literature very often took stories about the gods from Greek sources. When Ovid tells stories about gods using Roman names, he’s telling Greek stories (with his own spin on them).. But that has basically nothing to do with Roman religion. Elite poetry and religion have very little overlap.

3. Genuine adaptations

We know that the ancient Greeks had a massively entertaining sets of gods and goddesses. So it’s no wonder that when Rome conquered Greece, they replaced their own dull pantheon with renamed versions of Zeus, Athena, and the others. But not all Roman gods were Greek copies ... -- Rob Bricken, io9, Jan. 2015

Some Roman gods genuinely were borrowed, inherited, or copied from the Greeks. Apollo is the most famous case, but there are some other significant ones. The divine twins, Castor and Pollux, were extremely important very early on, in the battle of Lake Regillus at the very beginning of the Roman republic in 495 BCE; and they were definitely not home-grown. They were borrowed from the Greeks, either directly or via the Etruscans. This goes for some important heroes, too, especially Hercules, Aeneas, and Ulysses: Ulysses had a significant role in Roman legend as early as the sixth century BCE, and evidence for Aeneas pops up quickly afterwards (during the reign of king Tarquinius Superbus the Romans founded a colony named after Circe at the supposed location of Circe’s island; one 5th century Greek source, subscription needed, tells us that Aeneas and Ulysses founded Rome together, and a Hellenistic poem has them meeting up near the future site of Rome). Later on, Dionysus-Bacchus became another major import.

But a couple of cautions are warranted. First, it wasn’t a one-way street. Greeks colonised Italy, but Italians visited Greece too: one inscription from ca. 500-470 BCE shows ‘Tyrrhenians’ (Etruscans? native Campanians?) dedicating an offering to Apollo at Delphi. The Latin demigod Faunus shows up in Greek as ‘Agrios’, alongside Latinus, in a passage that got added to the Hesiodic Theogony probably in the late Archaic period.

In Rick Riordan’s third series of demigod novels (The Lost Hero, 2010) the Roman gods are more variations on a theme than a truly distinct pantheon: Ares and Mars have different personalities, but the same face.

And second, the borrowings weren’t just about the Greeks. The cults of Isis, Cybele, Mithras, and Christ were ‘borrowed’ in exactly the same way as Apollo or Bacchus. But you don’t hear people complaining that the Romans ‘stole’ Christianity, or ‘replaced’ their own gods with Christ. With the relationship between Roman and Greek religion, the fashion is to assign agency to the Romans: the Romans stole, or borrowed, or adapted the Greek gods. Yet somehow, when it comes to Christianity, you’ll often find Christianity cast as the agent: Christianity expanded, it rose to prominence, it took over the Roman empire. (Did I say ‘somehow’? Well, actually there’s no real uncertainty: blame Gibbon.)

Saying ‘the Romans stole their gods from the Greeks’ makes about as much sense as saying ‘Peter Jackson stole New Zealand cinema from Hollywood.’ It’s nonsensical to talk about theft or appropriation when you’re talking about cultural hegemony. For 6th-century BCE Italians, the Greeks had that hegemony, in much the same way that Hollywood has it in 21st-century New Zealand.

Later, especially in the Pyrrhic War of the early 3rd century BCE, it looks very much as though the Romans took pains to reject Greek cultural hegemony, or at least western Greek. That appears to be when they came close to erasing Odysseus-Ulysses from Roman legend. Aeneas was left as the only ancestral figure: traces of Odysseus-Ulysses remained only outside Rome. His and Circe’s son Telegonus was the legendary founder of Tusculum, and in some sources Caere and Praeneste; in another source, Odysseus himself was buried at Cortona. These cross-overs between Italian geography and Greek mythical figures aren’t an act of Roman cultural appropriation: they’re a collaboration between Greek writers and Italian legends -- just as The Lord of the Rings trilogy is a collaboration between Hollywood and ‘Wellywood’.

Easter and its supposed pagan links

Note. This is superseded by a two-part piece I wrote in 2018, ‘Easter and paganism’: part 1, part 2.

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Oops! I suddenly remember Easter is approaching. I actually had a couple of posts ready to fire off on misconceptions about Socrates, but they’ll just have to wait. This topic takes me out of my usual stomping grounds: but we did take a look at Christmas’ supposed pagan links back in December, so it only makes sense to take a squizz at Easter too.

Plus it’s hard to resist when the red rag of misinformation is being waved in your face. This billboard has been making the rounds on social media:

Image of billboard (unknown location and date)

Some commentators have claimed that it was erected by a group of conservative Christians offended at the supposed paganisation of Easter; I haven’t been able to verify that, though it seems likely enough. But the same material crops up in New Atheist propaganda too. Here’s a sample from Richard Dawkins’ Facebook page three years ago --

Posted to ‘The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science (Official)’ Facebook page, 28 March 2013

This is the same kind of logic as equating Jesus with the Egyptian sky god Horus because ‘son of God’ happens to sound kinda like ‘the Sun’ in Modern English. (Yes, some people do genuinely think that: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

When conservative Christians join forces with supposed rationalists in propagating such complete nonsense you have to pause and think. Sure, you can snidely remark that ‘The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science’ isn’t actually interested in evidence and logic -- and by all means, please do -- but that’s just a verdict, not an explanation.

On the Christian side, the motivation is about keeping Christian festivals pure and uncontaminated by any non-Christian elements. On the New Atheist side, the agenda boils down to arguing that

Christianity, like most modern religions, is a combination of older religions. There are no real new ideas, just recycled dogma used to control those who require a supernatural belief system

(as summarised by one of the commenters on the 2013 Facebook post). Now, motivations are not things that can be factually ‘right’ or ‘wrong’: it isn’t anybody’s business to dictate how people should want a religious festival to be conducted. What we can do, though, is look at the evidence that they draw on to inspire their preferences.

Briefly: there is none. There is no evidence to suggest any link of any kind whatsoever between Easter and Ishtar. Ishtar was a god whose heyday was in 3rd-2nd millennia BCE Mesopotamia. The earliest association of Jesus’ death and resurrection with the name ‘Easter’ is in an 8th century CE text by a monk in northern England (Bede, De temporum ratione §15). Similarly, there is no basis for Dawkins’ claim that ‘eggs and bunnies’ were ever part of Ishtar’s iconography.

More fundamentally, the English name ‘Easter’ is an idiosyncratic title for the festival. Most languages name the festival after the Hebrew Passover, or Pesach: that’s the case in both ancient and modern Greek (Πάσχα), Latin (Pascha) and the Romance languages (Pâques, Pascua, Pasqua, etc.), most Germanic languages (Pasen, Påske, páskar, etc.), and many others like Albanian (Pashkë), Finnish (pääsiäinen), Irish (Cáisc), Russian (Пасха), Turkish (Paskalya), and Welsh (Pasg). Most languages in the Slavic cultural zone instead call it one of several variations on ‘Great Day’ or ‘Great Night’ (Czech Velikonoce, Lithuanian Velykos, Polish Wielkanoc, Latvian Lieldienas). And then there are a few outliers, like Serbo-Croat (Uskrs, from an Old Slavonic word for ‘resurrection’) and Hungarian (Húsvét, from hús ‘meat’, marking the breaking of fast at the end of Lent).

But ‘Easter’? We find that, or a cognate of that, in only two languages: English (Easter) and German (Ostern). It is not derived from a phonetic variant of Ishtar, as both the Christian billboard and Dawkins seem to think, but from an Indo-European root *h₂eusṓs meaning ‘dawn, sunrise’. This is the same root that gives us ancient Greek ἠώς/ἕως, Latin aurora, Lithuanian aušrà, and Sanskrit uṣas (all = ‘dawn’); in German and English it also gave us Ost/east ‘east’. (And in case it needs pointing out: Ishtar started out as a Sumerian goddess, not Indo-European, and her name has no connection to this Indo-European root.)

The religious aspects of *h₂eusṓs are much harder to pin down than those of Ishtar or Pascha. In several parts of the Indo-European world *h₂eusṓs provided the name of a dawn goddess, such as Eos (Greek), Aurora (Roman), Aušra (Lithuanian), Ushas (Vedic), and Eostre (Saxon English). These deities probably do have a degree of commonality in their origins, but it is very difficult to gauge how far their roots extend: Ushas is important in the Vedic hymns, but the others are relatively obscure. In particular, we know basically nothing at all about the Roman Aurora (before she got conflated with Eos) or the English Eostre, other than their names.

The Greek dawn goddess, Eos, snatches the mortal object of her desire, Tithonus
Mus. Fine Arts Boston 95.28, Attic kylix, ca. 470-460 BCE
(source: Theoi.org)

The following snippet, from the 8th century English writer Bede, is the source of everything that we know about Eostre:

...Eostur-monath, qui nunc paschalis mensis interpretetur, quondam a dea illorum quae Eostre vocabatur, et cui in illo festa celebrabant, nomen habuit, a cuius nomine nunc paschale tempus cognominant; consueto antiquae observationis vocabulo gaudia novae solemnitatis vocantes.

...and ‘Easter-month’, which is now understood as the Paschal month, since it had the name from a goddess of theirs who was called Eostre, and they celebrated her festival in that (month); they now give the Paschal season a nickname after her name, referring to the joys of the new solemnity with a word customary for the old observance.

-- Bede, De temporum ratione §15

That is literally all the testimony that exists about Eostre. You’ll notice that there’s nothing about ‘eggs and bunnies’ here either. And there’s nothing like the amount of information that you’ll find if you read the Wikipedia article on Eostre. The sum total of everything in the world that is known about Eostre is

• her name
• she was a goddess in northern England some time before Bede’s lifetime
• she had a festival in the same month as (the Christian festival now known as) Easter

Everything else that you may ever hear about her is surmise and speculation. This includes Jacob Grimm’s derivation of Easter from ‘Ostara’: Ostara is Grimm’s conjectural reconstruction of an Old High German form corresponding to Eostre; but since there’s no evidence to put Eostre anywhere except Northumbria, it’s not a necessary conjecture.

[Addendum, 28 March: in fairness to Grimm I should add that his conjecture was motivated by the parallelism between Bede’s ‘Eostur-monath’ and the German name for April instituted by Charlemagne, ‘Ostarmanoth’, as recorded in the Vita Caroli Magni. However, Charlemagne was no pagan, and the Vita doesn’t mention any pagan goddess: ‘Ostarmanoth’ already refers to the Christian festival. The hypothetical goddess is Grimm’s doing.]

We can try to find out a bit more by comparing the paraphernalia and linguistic formulas associated with the various Indo-European dawn goddesses. But not much turns up. In the Vedic hymns Ushas once gets called ‘daughter of Dyaus’, and it’s possible that there’s a parallel in a reference to the Lithuanian sun goddess as Diēvo dukrýtė. In a few places Ushas is called ‘immortal’ (ámartiyā) or ‘ageless and immortal’ (ajárā amṛ́tā); in Greek, Eos is twice called ‘immortal’ in 5th century BCE poetry, and ‘immortal and ageless’ is a common formula in early Greek epic (ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρ[α]ος, especially in the longer phrase ‘immortal and ageless for all days’, the latter part of which is a very early formula; in one place, Iliad 8.538-9, ‘immortal and ageless’ appears in close connection with a reference to sunrise; in the Catalogue of Women both formulas get used in connection with Herakles’ wife Hēbē ‘Youth’, ‘he [became] immortal and ageless and possessed lovely Youth, / daughter of Zeus’).

See further M. L. West, Indo-European poetry and myth (Oxford, 2007) pp. 217-227, but with the caveat that West’s suggestions, however learned, are still pretty insubstantial. But even though they’re largely conjectural, there’s still nothing about ‘eggs and bunnies’!

The plain fact is that we don’t have any good evidence of where the Easter Rabbit, hot cross buns, and Easter eggs come from.

The Easter Rabbit. Grimm speculated that the rabbit was sacred to his conjectural goddess ‘Ostara’. Others have since suggested something similar for Eostre. But since everything we know about Eostre is contained in two sentences by Bede, this is all just speculation. No one has any real idea where the Easter Rabbit comes from. Speculating about pagan influences is perfectly legitimate, but taking those speculations for granted would be tendentious.

[Addendum, 27 March: like the eggs discussed below, rabbits and hares are a very ancient symbol in various religious iconographies. The problem is how to link the pre-Christian iconography to the Easter iconography. J. B. Lehner, writing in the 1930-1938 edition of the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, believed the ‘Osterhase’ dated to the 18th century; C. J. Billson, writing in 1892 about the tradition of hunting and eating a hare at Easter, found evidence of the custom in southern and central England (Kent, Hertfordshire, Surrey, and Leicester) going back to at least 1620 and perhaps to 1574. In 1957 J. B. Bauer tried (subscription needed) to draw a line between evidence of that period and testimony from Christian symbols and writers dating back to the 3rd century, but the links look tenuous to my eye, and the earliest evidence cannot be tied to Germany/England.]

[Addendum 2, 28 March: the Rabbit appears earlier in Germany too: a 1682 essay by G. Franck von Franckenau mentions that in central Germany Easter eggs were called di Hasen-Eier (hare-eggs) from a folktale that der Oster-Hase hid the eggs in the grass and bushes to be found by children. That still doesn’t antedate Billson’s English hare-hunting customs, but it shows that the Rabbit/Hare wasn’t a late import into Germany. On the other hand, the tradition that Franck von Franckenau describes is associated with other animals in other parts of Germany, notably the Osterfuchs (‘Easter fox’).]

Cross buns. It’s hard to find any reputable discussion of the history of this yummy foodstuff. The Wikipedia article is atrocious. ‘The ancient Greeks may have marked cakes with a cross’, we are told: well they may also have enjoyed standing on their heads whistling The Star-Spangled Banner, but let’s stick to evidence, shall we? By the way, the word ‘bun’ most certainly does not come from Greek boun (which is a form of the word for ‘ox’); the OED isn’t confident in the etymology of ‘bun’, but suspects that it may come from Old French.

According to the OED the earliest occurrence of the term ‘cross bun’ is

Good Friday comes this month, the old woman runs
With one or two a penny hot cross buns.

-- attributed to a Poor Robin’s almanack of 1733

The Almanack cited doesn’t seem to be extant, but it doesn’t matter, because I’ve found a still earlier reference in Henry Bourne’s Antiquitates vulgares, or The antiquities of the common people (Newcastle, 1725), p. 312. Prior to that date, the only serious contender for cross buns is the ‘St Alban’s bun’, with an incised cross, reputedly invented by Thomas Rocliffe and given as alms to the poor starting in 1361. It’s hard to find documentation even for that, other than in recent news media. But I’m prepared to believe it could be true.

[Corrigendum, 30 March: the reference in Bourne’s book is actually part of an appendix written for a 1777 reprint. So the lost 1733 Poor Robin’s almanack remains the earliest known reference to cross buns.]

Anyway, as with the Easter Rabbit, the upshot is that there is no unbroken tradition of cross buns going back to antiquity. Unlike the Rabbit, even if earlier references did turn up there doesn’t seem to be any room to imagine pagan input into the tradition.

Easter eggs. The eggs are much more complicated, because egg-decorating has been a custom in many different cultures for many millennia. But there’s very little to indicate when, where, and why eggs became associated with Easter. Some people have suspected a connection with ‘cosmic eggs’ in Indian, Egyptian, and Greek Orphic mystic thought, but there’s nothing to support a link. One very early Christian text cites the phoenix as an example of a natural wonder (First Clement §25, probably late 1st cent. CE); but Clement’s phoenix isn’t reborn in an egg, it instead builds a tomb for itself. Even if there is a real link there, there’s no later evidence to corroborate it. Wikipedia alleges that Easter eggs were decorated by ‘early Christians of Mesopotamia’, but provides no traceable evidence: this looks like it must be inspired by the Persian festival of Nowruz on the March equinox, since egg decoration is one of the customs associated with Nowruz, but it’s not easy to verify how far back the custom goes or whether there’s any reason to link the custom with ‘early Christians of Mesopotamia’.

The most useful treatment, it seems, is a discussion of -- you’ll love this -- mediaeval egg blessings, in Adolph Franz’s book Die kirchlichen Benediktionen im Mittelalter (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1909), vol. 1, around pp. 589-594. I haven’t been able to get access to Franz’s book -- alas! who wouldn’t want to read a discussion of mediaeval egg blessings? -- so I have to rely on a 1925 second-hand report by the Breton scholar Dom Louis Gougaud (subscription required). Gougaud’s executive summary is that Easter eggs are a much later development than either the conservative Christians or the New Atheists would have you believe:

The true origin of Easter eggs is ... the prohibited use of eggs during Lent. Indeed, Adolph Franz, the learned historian in ecclesiastical blessings of the Middle Ages, says that he has never discovered, in the sacramentaries or rituals anterior to the 10th Century, any special form for blessing the eggs.

A modern egg blessing in Poland (source: Polish.Study-time.org)

Even after the 10th century, eggs and Easter do not get associated with one another strictly. There are plenty of mentions of various kinds of food at Easter which happen to include eggs, but that isn’t compelling evidence for ‘Easter eggs’ as a thing.

But one of Gougaud’s references sticks out: a French letter dating to 1399 treats ‘Easter eggs’ as something more-or-less proverbial --

Lesquelz alerent demander leur potage, que en appelle Eufs de Pasques.

... people who would go and ask for their (allotment of) food, which is called ‘Easter eggs’.

-- reported by Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae Latinitatis (orig. publ. 1678) s.v. ‘Ovum’

(Du Cange’s source for this snippet is ‘Lit. remiss. ann. 1399 in Reg. 154. Chartoph. reg. ch. 459’: if anyone can expand this cryptic abbreviation, please do!) This gives pretty strong support to a link in one of Gougaud’s other references, a mediaeval discussion of Easter customs at the Abbaye de Fleury, St. Benoît-sur-Loire -- regrettably undated, though Gougaud seems confident that it is earlier -- where we find mention of a custom of giving alms to a hundred poor people, which at Easter (and only at Easter) included two eggs.

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So a link with Ishtar is a product of the modern imagination; Eostre is for real, but we know essentially nothing about her. Eostre probably has something to do with other Indo-European dawn goddesses but we have no evidence at all about what the parallels might be. The Easter Rabbit and Easter eggs might have some pagan origin, but there’s no actual reason to think so, and no verifiable link to any pre-Christian customs. The idea of putting designs on buns is surely not a Christian invention, but the association of hot cross buns with Good Friday surely is.

What have we missed? Oh right, the date of Easter. For that I’ll link to my older post on Christmas: the date of Christmas follows from the date of the first Easter anyway. The traditional date of the Resurrection was probably chosen to coincide with the March equinox. Even that doesn’t represent a borrowing from pagan customs, though: contrary to popular belief, ancient pagans weren’t really into solstices and equinoxes as a religious thing. The Greco-Romans, at least, tended to be interested in solstices and equinoxes for calendrical and astronomical purposes. If religious purposes came into it at all, it was very much secondary, like how some Greeks celebrated the summer solstice as the start of the calendar year. It looks very much as though calendrical and astronomical purposes are the impulse for early Christian interest in the equinox too. However, other than the reference in Malachi 4:2 to ‘the sun of righteousness’, and the likelihood that the Quartodeciman movement of the 2nd century was involved in some way, the exact nature of the theological rationale is likely to remain mysterious.