Mars

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Mars is the Roman god of war and one of the chief deities of the Roman state, later lent to the red planet that still carries his name. The Greeks had Ares, a god of battle’s fury whom their own poets distrusted; when Rome matched its gods to theirs, Mars was set against him. But the equation was never exact. Ares is the violence of war stripped of glory, disliked even on Olympus; Mars is something graver and more respectable — a protector of the city ranked among its foremost gods, just below Jupiter in standing, with a priesthood, a feast-calendar, and a month that still bears his name. In the oldest reckoning he stood second only to the sky-father, the middle term of the archaic triad of ancient Roman religion: Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, the three gods who each received a flamen maior, a major priest, when the Roman cult was first ordered. To be the god of the second flamen was to be the god to whom the city’s survival, more than its mere good fortune, was entrusted.

The two faces: field and battlefield

The deepest puzzle about Mars is that the god of war was also a god of the farm. His oldest documented aspect is at least as agricultural as it is martial — a guardian of fields, herds, and boundaries invoked at the turning of the season, before the warlike face came to dominate. The clearest survival of this archaic Mars is the prayer Cato the Elder preserved in his second-century-BCE handbook De Agri Cultura, the lustration of the fields, in which the landowner leads the suovetaurilia — the threefold offering of pig, sheep, and bull — around his land and addresses Mars Pater, Father Mars, asking him to keep off sickness, barren- ness, ruin, storm, and bad weather, and to keep the crops, the herds, and the household whole. Nothing in that prayer is about armies. The god who is begged to guard the grain is the same god who marches with the legions, and Roman scholars themselves were unsure which face was the elder.

Two readings of this duality have run through modern scholarship. One, associated with the comparative mythologist Georges Dumézil, places Mars firmly on the second of his three Indo-European functions — the function of force and warfare — and treats the agricultural prayers as the warrior-god’s protective power turned against the enemies of the field: blight and murrain as foes to be driven off, not crops to be coaxed up. The other tradition, older and now largely set aside, took Mars for a wild numen of the spring and the untilled margin who only later picked up the sword. Either way, the single thread is plain. Mars is the power that stands at the edge — of the plowland, of the city, of the campaigning season — and turns hostile force away. His are the boundary and the threshold; what crosses them in arms, he answers.

That edge is geography as well as theology. The altar of Mars, the Ara Martis, stood not inside the city but on the Campus Martius, the Field of Mars, the low ground in the bend of the Tiber outside the sacred boundary, the pomerium. Roman tradition credited its consecration to Numa Pompilius, the second king and the legendary founder of the city’s cults. The placement was no accident: armed force was kept outside the line a citizen-in-arms could not cross while the city slept. On the Campus the legions mustered, the cavalry drilled, the citizens assembled in their centuries to vote and to be counted, and the censors closed their five-year reckoning of the people with a suovetaurilia of their own. War, the census, and the assembly all belonged to the same ground because all three were the people gathered as a body that could fight — and that body belonged to Mars.

The cult: the leaping priests, the spears, the shields

Mars’s worship clustered in two seasons that frame the campaigning year, and they read like an opening and a closing of the gates of war. His month, Martius — the old beginning of the Roman year, and the source of English March — was thick with his rites. The Salii, the leaping or dancing priests, were colleges of patrician young men who in March took up the ancilia, the sacred figure-eight shields, and processed through the city in archaic armor, beating the shields and performing a war-dance while chanting the Carmen Saliare, a hymn so old that by the late Republic even learned Romans could barely construe its words. One of the shields was held to have fallen from the sky in the reign of Numa as a pledge of Rome’s destiny; the rest were copies made so that no thief could know the true one, and their safekeeping was a charge on the city’s continuance. The month also held the Equirria, the horse-races on the Campus (February 27 and March 14), the feast of March 1, and the Tubilustrium of March 23, the purification of the war-trumpets that would sound the army out to the field.

The same rites recur, inverted, in October as the season closes. On the Ides of October the Equus October, the October Horse, was sacrificed to Mars — the only horse-sacrifice known in Roman religion. After a two-horse chariot race on the Campus, the right-hand horse of the winning team, the strongest in the yoke, was killed; its tail was carried in haste to the Regia, the old royal house in the Forum, so that its blood could be dripped on the sacred hearth, and its head became the prize in a ritual brawl between the men of the Subura and those of the Sacra Via. The antiquarian Festus is the fullest ancient witness, with Polybius, Plutarch, and the Greek historian Timaeus supplying older fragments and a fanciful derivation from the Trojan Horse. Four days later the Armilustrium of October 19 purified the weapons and put them away. The shields came out in March and were laid up in October; the war-trumpets were cleansed at the season’s open and the arms at its close. Mars’s calendar is the year’s military hinge, sanctified at both ends.

Mars kept his own major priest, the flamen Martialis, second in dignity among the fifteen flamens, ranking after the priest of Jupiter and ahead of the priest of Quirinus, and he wore a thick crowd of cult-titles, each a different angle on the same hard power. As Mars Gradivus, the Strider or he who marches out, he was the god invoked by departing generals at his temple beyond the Porta Capena, where a commander setting off for war would shake the sacred spears kept in the Regia and call on the god to wake. As Mars Quirinus he shaded toward the pacified, civic Quirinus, guardian of the citizens — the Quirites — gathered in peace rather than arms; the two were close enough that Roman thinkers sometimes treated them as one god in two moods, war and the settled commonwealth that war defends. His associates were fierce: Nerio, an old goddess whose name means something like valor or strength, was named as his consort in early Latin, and Bellona, the goddess of war proper, stood beside him. His sacred creatures were the wolf — the she-wolf that suckled his sons is the city’s own emblem — and the picus, the woodpecker, a spirited bird that Roman lore made into a prophetic ally and even an old Italic king turned into the bird by a goddess’s spell.

Father of the city

The Romans traced their own descent through him. Mars lay with Rhea Silvia, the Vestal daughter of the deposed king of Alba Longa, and she bore the twins Romulus and Remus; set adrift and exposed, they were nursed by the wolf and fed by the woodpecker — both creatures of their father — until a herdsman found them. Romulus founded Rome and gave it his name. The god of war was therefore also the god of the founding, and the Roman who fought for the city fought, in a strict genealogical sense, for the house of his own divine ancestor. This is the gulf between Mars and Ares in a single image: the Greeks would not have made the city-destroyer their forefather, but Rome did, because at Rome the destroying power and the founding power were one. When the poet Ovid set the legend in verse in the Fasti, his calendar-poem on the Roman festivals, and when Virgil bent the whole Aeneid toward the meeting of Trojan and Latin blood, they were working a theology already old: that Rome was born of Mars and would be guarded by him.

It was this paternal Mars that the first emperor took up and rebuilt. Avenging the murder of his adoptive father, Caesar, and the lost legionary standards of Crassus, Augustus vowed and then raised the temple of Mars Ultor, Mars the Avenger, the dominating shrine of his new Forum of Augustus, dedicated in 2 BCE. There the Senate now declared wars and triumphs, and there the standards recovered from Parthia were lodged. Mars Ultor folded the god of the ancestral founding into the ideology of the principate: the avenger of the dynasty’s wrongs, the guarantor of its arms, the divine sponsor of a peace imposed by victory.

Ares, the sharper edge

The identification with the Greek Ares was old and thorough, but it always sat uneasily, because the two gods carried opposite reputations. Ares in Greek poetry is war’s raw appetite — Homer in the Iliad makes Zeus call him the most hateful of the gods, and in the same poem the mortal Diomedes, urged on by Athena and Hera, drives a spear into him and sends him howling back to Olympus. Athena, the goddess of disciplined strategic war, is honored where Ares is feared; he is the bloodlust that strategy must master. The Greeks pushed him to the margins, calling him a Thracian, a barbarian outsider, and gave him few temples of note. His most famous myth is not a victory but a humiliation: caught in the bed of Aphrodite by her husband Hephaestus and held up, trapped in an unbreakable net, to the laughter of the assembled gods, a scene the Odyssey tells with relish.

Rome inherited the stories — Mars and Venus became lovers, and Roman poets even read their union as the reconciliation of the war-god’s line with the line of Aeneas, Venus’s son, in the blood of the Roman people — but Rome did not inherit the contempt. The Roman Mars is not the god strategy must restrain but the god strategy serves: respectable, civic, paternal, second in the state. Where Ares is war’s disorder, Mars is war’s order, the disciplined force that guards the field and the boundary and the city. The same myths attach to both names; the moral weight on the name reverses as it crosses from Greek into Latin.

The planet and its character

The planet entered the picture through the long Mesopotamian and Greek work of naming the wandering stars after gods. In Babylonia the red planet had belonged to Nergal, the lord of war, plague, and the underworld — a god of inflicted death whose star was read as a bringer of disease and disaster — and that inheritance of ill omen traveled west with the rest of the celestial science. Its red color fixed the association with blood and war, and in the astrology that Rome absorbed from the Hellenistic East, Mars became one of the seven classical planets — read, with Saturn, as one of the two malefics, the makers of harm. Mars was the “lesser malefic” to Saturn’s greater: where Saturn killed by cold, slow privation, Mars killed by heat, edge, and sudden violence. The planet was held to be hot and dry in the extreme, and was assigned the rule of Aries and, in the older scheme, of Scorpio, with its exaltation in Capricorn. Its domains were war and strife, courage and contest, iron and the sword, fevers and inflammations, wounds and the surgeon’s knife — the breaking and the cutting of the body, for ill and for cure alike. Manilius, in his first-century verse cosmology the Astronomica, already called the planet ardent.

Medieval astrology bound this hot, dry, quick force to the choleric temperament, the yellow-bile humor of the body’s fourfold scheme: the angry, combative, impatient disposition, hot-tempered as the planet was hot. Alchemy carried the scheme further, assigning each of the seven planets one of the seven metals known to antiquity — gold to the Sun, silver to the Moon, tin to Jupiter, lead to Saturn, copper to Venus, quicksilver to Mercury — and to Mars it gave iron, the metal of weapons, hard, rusting red, and answering to the planet’s fire. So complete was the equation that the alchemical sign for iron and the astrological sign for the planet became one and the same mark: a circle with an arrow rising from it, the spear and shield of the war-god reduced to a glyph. In 1751 the botanist Carl Linnaeus borrowed that same sign, with Venus’s, to label the sexes of his flowers, and from his usage it passed into biology as the symbol of the male — so that the war-god’s mark still stands, in genetics and in graffiti, for the masculine.

The textual record

What the tradition holds and what the documentary record can attest pull apart here, and the two run on different evidence. The cult of Mars at Rome is recoverable fact — from the surviving festival calendars, from inscriptions, from the antiquarian and poetic sources that recorded the old rites, and from the standard modern reconstructions of the religion. The fullest scholarly synthesis is the two-volume Religions of Rome by Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price (Cambridge University Press, 1998), with its companion sourcebook of translated texts; John Scheid’s An Introduction to Roman Religion (Edinburgh University Press / Indiana University Press, 2003) gives the working model of sacrifice and priesthood within which Mars’s rites make sense. Georges Dumézil’s Archaic Roman Religion (University of Chicago Press, 1970; French original 1966) sets out the trifunctional reading that places Mars on the warrior function and treats the agricultural prayers as the war-power turned defensive — the interpretation that has framed debate ever since, whether to extend or to resist it.

The ancient primary witnesses are themselves still in print and largely in the public domain in their older translations. Cato the Elder’s De Agri Cultura preserves the lustral prayer to Mars Pater; Ovid’s Fasti narrates the god’s fatherhood of the twins and walks the festivals of his month; the antiquarian Festus, epitomizing the earlier Verrius Flaccus, is the chief source for the October Horse and the obscure cult-vocabulary. For the planet, the second-century handbook of Ptolemy, the Tetrabiblos, fixed Mars’s hot, dry, destructive nature within a causal natural philosophy, and the verse Astronomica of Manilius gave the same doctrine poetic form; both stand behind the later medieval and Renaissance elaboration of the malefic and the choleric. The Mesopotamian background of the planet — its identification with Nergal and the ill omen that came with it — is laid out in F. A. M. Wiggermann’s study of the god in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie (1998), the standard reference treatment.

What persists

The thread that runs through all of it is a single image of hard, hot, edged force: the god who guards by destroying, the planet that burns red, the iron that arms the hand, the humor that flares into anger, the sign that still marks the male. Across the long inheritance the name held while its meaning was recast at each handing-on — from the Italic guardian of the field, to the paternal war-god of the state, to the avenger of an emperor’s house, to a malefic light in a horoscope, to a red metal in a furnace, to a mark on a chromosome chart. But the figure at the root of it all is stranger than any of its descendants, and stranger than Ares ever was: a god who guarded the grain and led the legions with the same hand, who took the strongest horse of the year by the throat at the closing of the campaigning season, and who fathered the twins from whom Rome claimed its blood. The Romans made the destroying power their own forefather, and built a city in his month, on his field, under his protection. That is the Mars beneath the metal and the horoscope — the war-god the people of Rome called Father.

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