The gods of ancient Rome typically conformed to the representational and iconographic conventions of the Greek deities. For this reason, Dionysius of Halicarnassus could claim to recognize the twelve Olympian gods leading the rest of the gods in the pompa circensis—the procession that conducted the gods from the Capitoline to the Circus Maximus before each set of races in the arena—as the Roman images of the gods shared the same likenesses, dress, symbols, and gifts as those of the Greeks. After the twelve great gods, other deities shared by Greek and Roman alike followed. Dionysius, however, remained silent about alternative means of imagining the gods. In addition to anthropomorphic statues borne on fercula (litters), tensae (processional chariots) bore the exuviae, symbols or attributes of the gods. So, on the one hand, the statues made the gods presented as fellow-citizens who came to view the games, while, on the other, the exuviae demonstrated divine alterity. This double image of the gods, as familiar and foreign, was supplemented by yet another, more theatrical means of representing the gods. Large wooden effigies—like Manducus, a devil who gnashed his large teeth, Citeria, a silly chatterbox, and Petreia, a drunken old maid—moved, talked, and interacted with the audience in a manner that appears to foreshadow contemporary Carnival puppets. The pompa circensis thus offered three different modes of divine representation, each of which seemingly corresponded to a particular sort of relationship to that god—as a fellow-citizen, a powerful other, or a playful and/or terrifying companion. While written Roman theology may have been rather minimal, nevertheless, in ritual, the image and imagination of the gods of Rome was as rich, complex, and paradoxical as anywhere.