Mars (mythology)

• 1. Introduction

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  Mars, the Roman god of war, was not simply a deity of battle. He was also a guardian of crops, a father of the Roman people, and a protector whose sacred animals spoke prophecy from the branches of oak trees. His very name gave the world a month, a planet, and the word "martial." How did a single god come to stand at the center of Roman religion, Roman farming, and Roman empire all at once? And what does it mean that the Romans chose this particular figure to father Romulus and Remus, the twins who would one day build their city on seven hills? The answer runs deeper than war.

• 2. Father of Rome

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  Romulus and Remus were not simply the legendary founders of Rome. They were, according to Roman myth, the sons of Mars himself, born after he raped Rhea Silvia. King Amulius ordered the twin boys exposed because he had usurped the throne from their grandfather Numitor and feared them. A she-wolf, one of Mars's sacred animals, suckled the infants. A woodpecker, equally sacred to the god, brought them nourishment as well.

  Mars's fatherhood was not just a story. It was a political fact in Roman religious life. When Augustus wanted to frame the Roman people as a chosen nation with a divine bloodline, the genealogy of Mars provided the architecture. Virgil, writing in the 1st century BCE, positioned Mars as the ancestor of Romulus and Venus as the ancestor of Aeneas, the Trojan hero credited as an earlier founder. Since Venus was associated in legend with the Julii family to which Augustus belonged, the emperor tied himself to both founders through a single divine couple.

  The union of Venus and Mars also carried a philosophical charge. The Renaissance philosopher Marsilio Ficino observed that "only Venus dominates Mars, and he never dominates her." In Roman art, Mars is often shown disarmed and relaxed, or even sleeping beside Venus, a posture that reads as peace won through love rather than through conquest.

• 3. Guardian of the Fields

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  Cato the Elder, writing on farming, invokes Mars Silvanus for a ritual carried out in the woods, asking him to guard cattle from harm. The prescription is precise: three pounds of meal, four and a half pounds of bacon, four and a half pounds of meat, and three pints of wine, consumed on the spot after the ceremony, by the officiant alone. Women were forbidden to witness it.

  This agricultural Mars is not a metaphor borrowed from the god of war. The classicist Andrew Kilgour argues it is perhaps natural that a male deity in Roman culture would take a more combative role even in the realm of farming, warding off threats to the harvest the way a soldier wards off an enemy. The Arval Brothers, a priestly order specifically associated with ensuring high agricultural yields, chanted a hymn to Mars and called on him to drive off "rust," a Latin word that covered both wheat fungus and the red oxides that corrode iron tools and weapons.

  The Salian priests, Mars's own dedicated clergy, performed a ritualistic leaping dance in armor each March. According to Roman tradition, this dance was meant to accelerate the growth of crops. The same ritual calendar that opened the military campaigning season also opened the farming season. Mars stood at both thresholds.

• 4. Virtus and the Roman Soldier

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  The Latin word virtus, meaning "manly virtue," comes from vir, "man," and in its earliest Roman usage it described battlefield courage. Artotrogus, a character in the play The Braggart Soldier by the 3rd-century BCE playwright Plautus, tells the boastful soldier Pyrgopolynices that "Mars wouldn't dare to call himself such a warrior or compare his exploits to yours." The joke works only because Mars was understood as the absolute measure of warrior excellence.

  Over time, virtus expanded. Under the influence of Greek culture and its association between military prowess and intelligence, the concept came to include wisdom. Mars developed alongside it, becoming a god of generalship in addition to raw fighting ability. According to the classicist John Serrati, Mars as the personification of virtus came to exemplify ideal Roman masculinity in its fullest sense.

  By the 3rd century CE, Mars was worshipped primarily by the Roman military legions. The original seasonal rhythm linking his festivals to the spring departure and autumn return of armies had by then become obsolete. Roman soldiers no longer mobilized in March and stood down in October. They remained permanently stationed at forts and military installations across the empire, and the old connection between the military calendar and the farming calendar had lost its meaning.

• 5. Temples and the City

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  Numa Pompilius, the peace-loving second king of Rome and successor of Romulus, was said by Roman tradition to have established the Altar of Mars in the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars lying outside Rome's sacred boundary. For much of Roman history, Mars largely lacked intramural temples. His worship happened beyond the city walls.

  The main Temple of Mars built during the Republican period was also outside that boundary. It was constructed to fulfill a vow made by a Titus Quinctius in 388 BCE during the Gallic siege of Rome. Its founding day was commemorated on June 1. Soldiers assembled there before departing for war, and on July 15 each year a major parade of Roman cavalry set out from its steps.

  Augustus changed this fundamentally. He built the Temple of Mars Ultor inside his new forum, dedicating it in 2 BCE. He created the cult of "Mars the Avenger" to mark two events: his defeat of Caesar's assassins at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BCE, and the negotiated recovery of the Roman battle standards lost to the Parthians at Carrhae in 53 BCE. Those recovered standards were housed in the new temple. The Senate was required to meet there when deliberating questions of war and peace. Young men took the toga virilis, the garment marking adulthood at around age 14, through a sacrifice at the same temple.

• 6. Mars Across the Empire

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  In Celtic regions of Gaul, Roman Spain, and Britain, Mars merged with local deities and took on roles that would have been unfamiliar in the city of Rome. In Celtic settings, he was frequently invoked as a healer. Inscriptions suggest that his battlefield capacity to repel an enemy was transferred directly to the sick person's fight against illness.

  Mars Lenus, or Lenus Mars, maintained a major healing cult at the capital of the Treveri, the city now known as Trier, where votive offerings included images of children presenting doves. Mars Cocidius was worshipped in northwest Cumbria and along Hadrian's Wall; two votive plaques show him as a warrior bearing a shield and spear, while an altar depicts him as a huntsman with a dog and stag. Mars Vorocius was invoked at a curative spring shrine at Vichy as a curer of eye afflictions.

  Far to the south on Majorca, small bronze warrior figures found inside talayotic sanctuaries are interpreted by modern scholars as a local Mars cult, sometimes called "Mars Balearicus." These precincts contained extensive evidence of burnt offerings and appear to have been astronomically oriented toward the rising or setting of the constellation Centaurus. They were still in active use when Roman occupation of the island began in 123 BCE.

• 7. The Sacred Animals

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  Plutarch records that the woodpecker is sacred to Mars because "it is a courageous and spirited bird and has a beak so strong that it can overturn oaks by pecking them until it has reached the inmost part of the tree." The beak of the picus Martius was carried as a charm against bee stings and leech bites. The bird also guarded a woodland herb used to treat the digestive or female reproductive systems, and those who sought to harvest it were advised to do so at night, lest the woodpecker jab out their eyes.

  The Italic Picenes, a people of ancient Italy, were said to have derived their tribal name from the woodpecker who served as their guide animal during a ritual migration known as a ver sacrum, or sacred spring, undertaken as a rite of Mars. Among the Aequi, another Italic people, Mars had an oracle of great antiquity where prophecies were delivered by a woodpecker perched on a wooden column.

  At the Battle of Sentinum in 295 BCE, the appearance of the wolf of Mars was read as a sign that Roman victory was coming. In Roman Gaul, the goose was associated with Celtic forms of Mars; archaeologists have found geese buried alongside warriors in graves. The goose was considered bellicose because it is easily provoked to aggression. A sculpture from Housesteads Roman Fort at Hadrian's Wall shows Mars Thincsus flanked by goddesses, with a goose as his companion.

• 8. Legacy in Language and Time

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  Mars gave his name to March, the third month in the Roman calendar and once its very first. In the oldest Roman calendar, Martius opened the year, which is why the word "March" carries the god inside it to this day.

  The planet Mars was named for him, and philosophical writers treated the planet and the god as sharing characteristics. In many languages, Tuesday is named after Mars or his equivalent. The Latin martis dies, "Mars's Day," survives in Portuguese as marte, in Spanish as martes, in French as mardi, in Italian as martedì. The English Tuesday descends from the Old English Tiwesdæg, meaning the day of Tiw, the Old English form of the Proto-Germanic war god *Tîwaz, cognate with the Norse Týr.

  From the name of Mars come the Latin adjectives Martius and mārtiālis, which gave English the word "martial," as in martial arts and martial law. Personal names including Marcus, Mark, and Martin all carry the same root. An inscription found in the Alps records a slave who dedicated a statue to Mars Augustus as the preserver of his own body, vowed, the text says, "by the order of the numen himself" - a private act of gratitude from an individual at the far edge of the empire, tying his survival to the god whose name now runs through the days of the week and the months of the year.