CunkPosting

The original Romans weren't too far removed from Greek people, both in geography and ancestry. They're both Indo-European, and as such shared a lot of the religion and had somewhat similar languages. And Greek people had been settling and colonizing the east coast of Italy for some centuries before rome really got rolling. I think it's fairer to say they translated a lot of what Greece had going on than just adopted it.

If you look to early Roman history, you can see they straight up lost their shit when confronted with a culture that was totally foreign to them. See the punic wars and the salting of Carthage.