  Another possibly Euhemerizing tendency, one that is an unsurprising feature of Latin poetry and, if only for that reason, to be found in the pages of Lucretius, is the use of gods’ names to designate items of special significance for human life, such as ‘Venus’ for love or sex, and ‘Bacchus’ for wine. At 2.598–660 Lucretius discusses the religious portrayal of Earth as divine mother, and concludes that if one is going to call sea ‘Neptune’, corn ‘Ceres’, wine ‘Bacchus’, etc.—as he himself indeed often enough does—one might reasonably also personify the earth as their mother, hence as ‘mother of the gods’. But, he adds in an important codicil, this usage is permissible only if one avoids the pernicious religious beliefs that such locutions imply.