Mars

Before a Roman general left for a war he went into a small room on the west side of the Regia, where the shields and the spears of Mars were kept. He shook the shields first, then the spear of the statue, and said two words: *Mars vigila*. Mars, wake up. That is the god at the centre of the most militarised state in the ancient Mediterranean, and he is asleep until somebody goes and rattles his equipment.

The spears in that room moved on their own occasionally, and when they did it was a public emergency. A senatorial decree of 99 BC survives, quoted verbatim by Aulus Gellius: since Gaius Julius the pontiff has reported that the spears of Mars have moved in the sanctuary in the Regia, the consul is to make expiation to Jupiter and Mars with full-grown victims. They moved again on the night of the fourteenth of March, 44 BC. Caesar, who was pontifex maximus and lived on the premises, went out anyway.

Almost everything about him is a surprise if you have arrived from the Greek side. Start with the oldest document. Cato the Elder’s farm manual, written in the second century BC as working instruction rather than literature, tells a landowner how to purify his land: drive a pig, a sheep and a bull round the boundary, offer wine to Janus and Jupiter first, and then make the main prayer, which is to Father Mars. What the farmer asks for is that Mars prohibit, defend and avert diseases seen and unseen, barrenness, devastation, calamity and bad weather; that he let the crops, the grain, the vines and the young plantations grow tall and come out well; and that he keep the shepherds and the flocks safe. There is not a word about war anywhere in it. The same three animals, scaled up, were driven round the Roman people themselves when the censors closed a census on the Campus Martius.

Cato is not an outlier. The Arval Brethren, a priesthood of twelve whose entire business was the fertility of the fields and whose goddess was Dea Dia, chanted a hymn so archaic that by the imperial period they had to read it off a written text because nobody could understand it any more. It was inscribed on stone in AD 218 and dug up in 1778. Between an appeal to the Lares and a burst of *triumpe* shouted five times, it says: let not plague and ruin, Marmar, fall on the many. Be sated, fierce Mars. Leap the threshold. A farm manual and a priestly protocol, separated by centuries and by genre, ask him for exactly the same thing.

Scholars have argued for a century about whether that makes him an agricultural god who was later militarised or a war god who was invoked to fight off crop diseases. The evidence itself is not in dispute, and the argument dissolves if you look at where he is put. His altar and his field are outside the city’s sacred boundary. His farm rite is a circuit of the perimeter. Cato’s other Mars, the one called Silvanus, is worshipped in the woods, in daylight, and no woman may watch. He is the god of the line and of whatever is trying to cross it.

His priests danced. Numa was said to have chosen twelve Salii, young patricians in embroidered tunics, bronze breastplates, broad bronze belts and conical caps, to carry the twelve shields called *ancilia* through the city in March, beating them and moving in a three-beat step. The first shield fell out of the sky during a plague; Numa had eleven copies made by a smith called Veturius Mamurius, so exact that Numa himself could not pick out the original, and Mamurius asked as his fee only that his name be sung at the end of the hymn. The hymn survives in fragments that Varro quotes and admits are unintelligible, noting drily that the Salii did not know what they were singing either. The shields came out on the first of March, went round the city, and were put away again at the Armilustrium on the nineteenth of October, when the arms were purified for the winter. His month opened the old Roman year, the sacred fire of Vesta was renewed on the same day, and the war trumpets were cleansed on the twenty-third.

On the Ides of October a two-horse chariot race was run on the Campus, and the right-hand horse of the winning team was killed with a spear for Mars. Its head was cut off and wreathed with loaves, and the men of the Subura and the men of the Sacra Via fought each other for it; the winners nailed it up on their own landmark. The tail was carried at a run to the Regia, fast enough that blood from it still fell on the hearth. Plutarch, guessing three hundred years later, thought it might be revenge on the horse for Troy. Polybius had already dismissed that reading as Greek wishful thinking. The Roman antiquarians said something much plainer, and Festus preserves it: the head was decked with loaves because the sacrifice was made on account of the outcome of the crops.

Rome’s own claim on him is the foundation. A Vestal named Rhea Silvia or Ilia bore twins and said Mars was the father, and Livy, telling the story, adds at once that she may have believed it or may have wanted the offence to look less bad with a god’s name attached. His animals took the boys in: the wolf that suckled them and the woodpecker, the *picus Martius*, that brought them food. Both creatures ran a long way beyond that story. Sabine communities dedicated an entire year’s births to Mars in a *ver sacrum*, sent the grown children out to found colonies, and followed an animal to the site; a wolf led the Hirpini, a woodpecker led the Picentes, a bull led the party that became the Samnites and was killed to Mars where it lay down. A later group cast lots for a god’s name, drew Mamers, which Festus notes is Oscan for Mars, and called themselves Mamertines. They ended up in Messana, and their appeal to Rome started the First Punic War.

He had a consort, and she is not Venus. Gellius collects the evidence: the pontiffs’ prayer books list Nerio of Mars, Plautus has Mars come home and greet his wife Nerio, an early annalist puts *Neria of Mars, I beseech you, give us peace* into Hersilia’s mouth, and Ennius names her too. *Nerio* is a Sabine word for strength or valour. Mars’s Roman wife is his own force, personified. He also once stood in the top rank of Roman religion in a different arrangement, the older triad of Jupiter, Mars and Quirinus served by the three senior flamens, which the Capitoline three eventually displaced. Umbrian Iguvium invokes the same shape independently, a Jupiter, a Mars and a third god all bearing the epithet Grabovius, each stationed at a different city gate.

The Greek Mars is thin, and that is the point. In 217 BC, on Sibylline advice after Trasimene, six couches were laid in public for twelve gods in pairs, and Mars was put next to Venus. That afternoon is more or less the whole of it: unlike Jupiter or Juno, Mars never acquired a substantial Latin myth cycle borrowed from his Greek counterpart, and the adultery with Venus that everyone remembers is a Greek story about Ares that Roman poets repeated without it ever touching Roman cult. What did change him was domestic politics. Octavian vowed a temple to Mars the Avenger at Philippi in 42 BC and dedicated it in his new Forum in 2 BC, and put in the inner shrine the legionary standards the Parthians had returned. The cult statue stood between Venus and the deified Julius Caesar, which made Mars the ancestor of one family rather than of the Roman people. The Senate afterwards met in that temple to declare war and to vote triumphs, and boys came there to put on the adult toga.

His powers are protective before they are destructive. He repels: sickness, ruin, weather, invasion, whatever is at the edge. He grants the ground on which an army can be raised at all, since the muster happens on his field. He gives Rome its ancestry and its first month. His limits are stranger. He sleeps, and has to be woken by hand. He is kept outside the sacred boundary, and the first temple to him inside Roman territory stood beyond the Porta Capena, on the road out. He warns by moving a spear and cannot say more than that, and the one time the warning is famous the man it was meant for ignored it and went to the theatre of Pompey.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Mars in Roman mythology?

Mars was the Roman god of war, of boundaries and of the protection of fields and herds, and the father of Romulus and Remus. His month, March, opened the old Roman year, and his priests the Salii carried twelve sacred shields through the city in his festivals. He was worshipped both by the army on the Campus Martius and by ordinary farmers purifying their land.

Is Mars the same as Ares?

They were formally identified in 217 BC, when the Sibylline Books paired Mars with Venus at a public banquet of the twelve gods, but the two are very different. Ares is a war god with an extensive Greek myth cycle; Mars is an Italic god of the boundary who is asked in Roman prayers for healthy crops, good weather and safe flocks. Mars is also Rome’s own ancestor, which Ares never was.

Why did Roman farmers pray to Mars?

Cato the Elder’s farm manual preserves the actual script: the farmer drives a pig, a sheep and a bull around his land and prays to Father Mars to avert diseases, barrenness, devastation and bad weather, to make the crops and vines grow well, and to keep the shepherds and flocks safe. The ancient hymn of the Arval Brethren, a fertility priesthood, asks Mars the same thing. Both texts are about protecting the farm, not about fighting.

What was the October Horse?

The October Horse was a sacrifice held on 15 October on the Campus Martius, in which the right-hand horse of the winning chariot team was killed with a spear for Mars. Its head was wreathed with loaves and fought over by the men of the Subura and the Sacra Via, while its tail was carried to the Regia so that its blood could fall on the hearth. The Roman antiquarian Festus states plainly that the rite was performed on account of the outcome of the crops.

Who was Mars’s wife in Roman religion?

In Roman cult Mars’s consort is Nerio, whose name comes from a Sabine word for strength or valour. Aulus Gellius records her in the pontiffs’ prayer formulas, in Plautus, in an early annalist and in Ennius. The famous affair with Venus belongs to Greek stories about Ares and never formed part of Roman worship.

Related Entries

Ares, Quirinus, Romulus, Remus, Capitoline Wolf, Laran, Tinia, Janus, Vesta, Saturn, Faunus, Aeneas, Venus, Jupiter, Vulcan